A second grenade came over, landing short of their boat but hitting the motorboat full on. There was an explosion, wood and metal rising into the sky above a pall of black smoke.
Creech let out a shriek. Reeve thought he was panicking, until he saw the jagged point of wood protruding from his shoulder. Reeve went to help him, but the boat started circling. He had to get them out of range. He pulled the splinter out of Creech’s shoulder with no ceremony, then pushed Creech aside and gripped the wheel tight, setting them back on course.
Another grenade just reached the boat, hitting it aft and blowing a hole in the wooden structure. Water started pouring in.
“Can you swim?” Reeve asked Creech, who nodded, his teeth gritted against the pain. “Even with one arm?”
“I’ll be all right. How far are we from land?”
Reeve looked up. The answer was less than half a mile. He took his boots off again and put them in his backpack, zipping it tight. It was waterproof, and didn’t weigh very much. As a last resort, he would ditch it and trust to his dagger, which was in its scabbard attached to his leg.
“Come on then,” he told Creech, “let’s go for a swim.”
They swam away from the sinking boat. Creech couldn’t help but look back at it, watching the hull tip, seeing barnacles and wood that was in dire need of repainting.
They swam together. Reeve couldn’t see, but he guessed Jay would be setting out in the dinghies by now, bringing his two remaining men with him. Reeve had taken seven men out of the game.
But at a price.
They were swimming across the current, which made half a mile seem like three times that. Creech grew quickly exhausted, and Reeve had to help him. This is great, he thought, just what I need. Lying in a foxhole all night, and now a half-mile swim pulling an injured man with me.
Meantime, Jay would be paddling, not straining himself. The odds were turning against Reeve all the time.
He eventually pulled Creech ashore. Creech wanted to lie down and rest, but Reeve hauled him to his feet and slapped his face a couple of times.
“You’ve got to get out of here!” he yelled. Creech’s leg wound, the slice the Chicano had given him, had opened up again. They were six or seven miles shy of the nearest village, but Reeve knew there was a croft to the south, maybe three miles distant. “Keep to the coast,” he told Creech. “Don’t try crossing the hills. Okay?”
He waited till Creech had nodded. The man made to stumble away, but Reeve grabbed his arm. “Kenneth, I’m sorry I got you into this.”
Creech shrugged free and started to walk. Reeve watched him go, trying to feel something for him. But the soldier had taken over. Creech was a casualty; that didn’t mean you had time for flowers and sympathy. It was sink or swim. Really, Reeve shouldn’t even have helped him ashore. He should have conserved his own energy, which was what he did now. He took off his wet clothes and wrung them out, then lay them out to dry. They wouldn’t have time to get really dry, but the wind might help. The things in his backpack were almost completely dry, which was good fortune. He trained the binoculars on the din-ghies. There were two men in the front one, only one in the second. The man with Jay looked grim with a large black beard, the man paddling alone looked American Indian. Reeve scanned the boats for armaments: pistols and submachine guns; no rocket launchers that he could see. Nothing heavy. But there was something on Jay’s lap… He’d thought at first it was a transmitter, but saw now that it was a cassette player.
“What the hell is that for?” he asked himself.
He examined his surroundings. He knew this area fairly well, which was to his advantage. The hill range had two peaks, Hecla to the north and Beinn Mhor to the south, each at about two thousand feet. Reeve had managed to go unnoticed for whole weekends when tracked by up to a dozen men, and he’d only had part of this wilderness to play with. But now he had to assume he was up against professionals.
This time, he really was playing for his life.
Creech was out of sight. Reeve knew Jay wouldn’t bother with him anyway: he couldn’t afford to lose one-third of his force. But just in case, Reeve bided his time until Jay and his men could see him clearly. He pulled on trousers, socks, and boots, and tied the arms of his shirt around his neck, so it flapped like a cape. It would dry quicker that way. Then he picked up his backpack and pistol and headed into the hills, making sure his pursuers could see the direction he was taking.
He heard the bullet crack behind him but didn’t slow down. His pursuers were carrying MP5s; Reeve knew the things were as accurate as rifles up to about a hundred yards, but he was well out of that range. They were just wasting ammo, and soon realized it. Reeve came to the top of the first rise and turned his head to watch. They were close to the shore now. He had maybe four or five minutes on them.
He started running.
TWENTY-FIVE
JAY WAITED TILL THE LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT before leaping out of the dinghy onto land. He was still fairly dry, and wanted to stay that way. The others didn’t mind splashing into the knee-deep water, clambering over the rocks onto land. They brought the inflatables with them, and weighed them down with rocks so they wouldn’t be blown back to sea.
“Do we split up?” Choa asked.
“Let’s stick together,” Jay said. “If it becomes necessary later, we can split up.” He had torn a page out of their map book-the one showing the Western Isles-but it was a driver’s map, not a walker’s. It didn’t tell him much about the terrain except that they were a long way from civilization.
“Let’s go,” he said, folding the map back into his pocket. “Choa, check your ammo clip.”
Choa had been the one who had blasted away at Reeve, on the principle that if you could see your target, you were as well to have a go at hitting it. Choa had never used the MP5 before. He’d liked firing it so much he was itching to fire it again. He held it ready, safety catch off.
“Space out,” Jay told his men. “Let’s not make any easy targets. Choa, you watch our backs, in case he comes around us.”
“You don’t think he’ll just run?” Hestler asked.
“It would make sense,” Jay admitted. “He’s wet and most probably tired. He knows the odds. But I don’t think he’ll run. He wants this over as badly as I do.”
“No matter who wins?”
Jay looked at Hestler. “No matter who wins,” he said. “It’s playing the game that counts.”
They marched in silence after that, Jay using hand signals to show when he thought they were bunching up too much. They didn’t march in a line, but spread themselves out, making a more random pattern which would be harder for an enemy to hit. Jay wondered if Reeve had a plan. Reeve’s house was only five or so miles distant; it made sense that, running an adventure center, he’d know these hills better than they did. He might know them very well indeed.
Jay knew it was three against one, but taking everything else into account, those weren’t ideal odds. He wished he had an Ordnance Survey map of the area, something that would give him a better idea of what they were up against. But all he had were his eyes and his instincts.
And the knowledge that Gordon Reeve had almost got them both killed.
The rain started again, like mischievous needles jabbing the skin. They walked into it face-on. Jay knew Reeve wouldn’t keep moving in a straight line; that direction would take him to civilization too quickly. He’d be circling around at some point, either towards Hecla or Beinn Mhor. If there had been three men with him, Jay would have split the group in half, a two-man patrol in either direction, but he only had two men left. He didn’t regret killing the Chicano, not for an instant, but another man would have been useful. He had Benny and Carl’s word for it that their brother Hector, plus Watts and Schlecht, were lying dead back at the scene of the explosion. Jay had promised to come back for the two injured men. He wasn’t sure if it was a promise he would fulfill.