Winter wasn’t alone. There was at least one more guy in the cabin, then there’d been the flash on the hillside when he was running, so there might be two more. The fag group? Was Winter working with Barber’s guys? No time to think: had to move. Couldn’t let them pin him down.
He slid one hand down his injured leg, probing for the wound, came away with a wet red-stained hand. No first-aid kit. Still, he had to do something about the bleeding, soon.
If he could get to the top of the ridge, he could make a call, hunker down, wait. If they came for him, he could make them pay.
He pushed off from the depression, nearly groaned with the pain, and using his arms as much as his legs, began moving as quietly as he could toward the west side of the bluffs south of the cabin.
Jake heard him, but at first couldn’t see him. The second man was probably no more than a hundred yards away, but the woods were so thick that he simply couldn’t see more than a few yards into it. A good thing: the other man couldn’t move quietly.
So Jake tracked him by the sound of his movement, and after two or three minutes, realized that the other man didn’t seem to be getting closer. He seemed, instead, to be working toward a neighboring bean field, though that was five or six hundred yards away to the southwest, not far from where Jake had set up during the turkey season. Away from the car park, from the direction he’d come in from.
Why would he go there?
The walkie-talkie vibrated in his pocket, and he slipped it out, gave her a single beep of acknowledgment. “The first one is gone. There’s blood on the ground where the second one jumped.”
Jake muttered, “Okay,” then, as quietly as he could, “You’re out? Go back in.”
“I’m okay here, I just came out to check. The runner was hurt.”
“Get back in. I’m tracking him, he’s well south of you.”
And getting farther south, Jake decided a minute later. Then: high ground. The other man was looking for a place to make a cell-phone call.
He had to move. He slipped out of the makeshift blind, risked walking on the grass on the edge of the food plot, exposed, but too far from the second man to be seen, he thought. Still, the hair rose on the back of his neck, and some danger gland in his brain was shouting at him to get out of sight.
He paused inside the tree line. Listened, heard just a bit of movement, still heading up. Found a game trail, worn leaves and slightly thinner brush where deer had cut across the slope. Passed an old buck-rub, made a mental note. Moved slowly, slowly, still-hunting.
Stopped every six feet. Listened. When he heard nothing, he froze. When he heard movement, he moved. Five minutes into the stalk, he saw a tree limb shake; a little jiggle of new bright-green leaves, like a squirrel might make, but too low. Sixty yards out, two-thirds of the way to the top of the bluff.
From experience, he knew that the other man would have to get nearly to the top before the cell phone would work. Jake watched until he saw another leaf-jiggle, and then moved, sideways, across the hill, until he found a seam in the trees. Not a trail, not a gully, but simply a seam, the result of random seeding . . .
But it gave him a shooting lane.
He eased down, put the scope on the last spot he’d seen movement, and glassed the area.
He saw the first hard movement a minute later. Watched, watched . . . green, brown, black: camo.
He fixed the scope on it, pulled the trigger.
Goodman heard him coming. Couldn’t see him, but thought the footfalls were a man’s—the sky was too bright, and the sound wasn’t explosive enough to be a large animal. He was being stalked. He couldn’t pick out an exact direction; but there was only one. Had he been wrong about another man in the woods, in addition to whoever was in the cabin?
He could feel that he was still losing blood, he was weakening. He had to do something.
Moving slowly, he slipped the weapon off his shoulder, cocked it, clicked it onto full-auto. There was a downed branch a few feet away. He edged over to it, pulled off his camo hood, snagged it over the tip of the branch, and slowly pushed the branch out in front of him. Before moving again, he dug into the damp earth around him, rubbed it over his face to kill the face-shine. Then he moved along for ten feet, the branch out in front, pushing the camo mask, another ten, another ten, climbing higher and higher. He might possibly be able to make a phone call from where he was, but couldn’t risk turning the cell phone back on. If it rang, he was dead.
He pushed the stick ahead a fourth time. A sudden crack, a slug plucked at the hood, the gunshot from the trees no more than thirty or forty yards to his right. He snapped his gun over, pulled the trigger, and hosed the trees with thirty rounds of nine-millimeter, shredding leaves and vines and bark and twigs and dirt.
He flipped the mag out and slammed in another as he rolled away from his shooting position; another shot plucked at the ground behind him. Damnit, he’d missed. He fired three quick bursts and this time let himself roll back down the hill, scrambling, falling, turning, trying to control it as he let himself go, his gun pointed up the hill. He saw a flash of movement and fired another squirt, and then was scrambling right back to where he started.
He was fucked, he thought. They had him.
One last chance . . . He fired the last few rounds in a single burst into the trees where he’d seen the stalker, slammed his last magazine into the weapon, and burst out of the trees. He was weak, his eyes were going dark, but he only had to make it thirty yards to the shelter of the porch.
If he kicked in the door he’d be face-on with the guy inside, maybe, maybe the guy would be surprised enough, after the fight up the hill, that he wouldn’t be ready. If he could get inside the cabin, if he could just get a break from the hunter, if he could barricade himself, if he could do something about his leg, if there was a hardwired phone inside that hadn’t been disabled.
If . . .
He ran.
The burst of full-auto didn’t hit Jake, but it knocked him down. The slugs were shredding the landscape six feet away from him, uphill, then swung toward him, tearing up the tree branches overhead, and he was on his face, jacking a round into the rifle.
Another burst behind him, not loud, more of a chattering sound: the weapon was silenced, it had looked like one of the Israeli commando jobs, meant for killing terrorists in a quiet way . . .
Two more bursts, and then he registered the guy moving, snapped a shot at the movement, got another burst in reply, jacked another round, lay flat listening, realized that the movement was fast now, and farther away. He lifted his head just in time for another burst, thought, He’s heading for the cabin, pulled out the walkie-talkie and shouted, “He’s coming right at you, I think. He’s coming right at you . . .”
Jake was on his feet now, listened for one second, heard the continuing thrashing below, and started running. Blood on the ground: the other man had been hit. He must be desperate, he was going for the cabin. Jake had to get clear of enough brush to take the shot, he’d have just one, if the man could still run, but getting clear would be a struggle . . .
With the woods all around him, it would be possible to see the other man, but impossible to get a decent shot. He’d see him as flashes between trees, but as he swung the rifle barrel to track the target, he’d be as likely to hit a tree as anything else. He needed a shooting lane.