He jumped up, ran, weaving between the trees, veering right and east in a wide curve taking him back up the hill, the muscles in his legs burning as they powered him forward. Bullets followed him, blasting off bark and chopping down thin branches, but the trees and undergrowth were great concealment and cover, and he was a fast target.
When he was at the same elevation as his attacker, Victor dived to the ground behind a thick tree. He then shuffled backwards and then sideways through the undergrowth, moving two yards further up the hill. The gunman wasn’t going to stay in the same place for long and if he moved, he would ascend, not descend.
Victor inched forward, crawling with his knees and elbows. The ground was rocky. The woods were quiet. He heard the gentle rustle of leaves, his own breathing and nothing else. So low to the ground, the dense vegetation concealed him completely but also impeded his view. He positioned himself so he could peer through the tangle of plants and branches to see the shooter’s last known location. Victor set his gaze along the sights of the MP7 and waited.
Ten seconds later, he saw movement. He couldn’t see the guy in the ghillie suit but he saw a healthy leaf float to the ground. Victor squeezed the MP7’s trigger, unleashing three bursts of 4.6 mm rounds into the thicket. He watched twigs and leaves shred but couldn’t see if he’d hit his target.
Rounds whizzing over his head gave him the answer. From Victor’s position, the shooter was impossible to see. He couldn’t see any undergrowth damaged by the bullets’ paths either. Foliage exploded next to Victor’s head. He fired again, fanning bullets across the thicket, aiming low, knowing the gunman would be close to the ground like he was. The return fire stopped. At the very least, he’d forced his enemy to keep his head down too.
He strained to see where the firing had come from, but this guy was too good and too well hidden. He was keeping still and low, not relying on the ghillie suit to keep him unseen but making the best of the terrain as well. Professional, former military, experienced. Highly trained.
Against such an opponent, if nothing changed, there was only one possible result. Victor crawled backwards again until he was in the cover of a shallow depression. Thick roots protruded from the earth around him. He wiped sweat from his eyes and reloaded the MP7. The magazine wasn’t empty, but there were only maybe six or seven rounds left. It was hard to keep an exact count on automatic. He had three magazines in total and slid the mostly empty mag back into his harness in case those six or seven rounds turned out to be the difference between life and death.
The shooter had shot seven identical bursts in a short time frame. MP5s had a three-round burst setting, so twenty-one rounds had been fired so far. Nine left, if he hadn’t reloaded by now, which he probably hadn’t as nine was almost a third of a mag. Three bursts remaining. Not as few as Victor would like, but it would have to do. If the shooter had in fact reloaded this was going to be a short run.
Victor turned around, got up into a crouch, and sprinted out from cover, moving north along the hillside, weaving as much as he could. He heard the rapid clicks of the SMG firing behind him and bullets tearing through vegetation.
He kept running north. Branches snagged his clothes and scratched his face. More rounds flew his way, ripping through leaves, slamming into tree trunks. Fragments of bark bounced off the back of his neck.
Then the firing stopped suddenly and Victor knew the guy was out of ammo. He powered on. The trees were less densely set but the undergrowth was thicker, slowing him down. A knee-high layer utterly covered the ground. Shrubs and saplings taller than Victor emerged from the carpet of plant life.
His getaway vehicle was two miles away. The gunman couldn’t reload and run at the same pace as Victor, but he wouldn’t chase with an empty weapon. That few seconds’ lead would be enough for Victor to get out of his enemy’s range and safely to the car. He wanted to get hold of his attacker to interrogate him for information, but playing hide and seek with a skilled operator dressed in a ghillie suit and armed with a suppressed weapon was a game Victor couldn’t hope to win.
The shooter would have reloaded by now and had another thirty rounds to play with, but he was forty or fifty yards away. In range of the MP5SD, but Victor was out of sight with too much vegetation in the way to make a shot at that distance. He was home free.
Movement caught Victor’s eye — the sway of branches not caused by the breeze.
The third gunman appeared, twenty yards ahead, weapon raised, turning Victor’s way.
CHAPTER 53
Spotting the swaying branches gave Victor enough warning to throw himself to the ground before the shooting started. Virtually silent again. Blasted leaves and chunks of shrubbery dropped down over his back and head. He rolled to his left, down the hillside for the quickest way to get out of the line of fire.
The new arrival had covered the distance fast, coordinating his movements with the other shooter through headsets so he could cut Victor off. But sprinting seven hundred yards through a forest and up a hill, with a ten-foot-high wall to scale in between, would have taken something out of the gunman, regardless of his fitness levels. His heart rate would be sky high, and his aim comparatively poor. Not that he needed to be a good shot to keep Victor pinned while the other shooter closed in.
With one twenty yards ahead, another maybe forty yards behind but closing fast, Victor had only two directions left to go. Going left meant giving his attackers the higher ground, and five hundred yards away was a wall he couldn’t climb before taking bullets in the back, and beyond it five armed bodyguards. Right meant running against elevation up the hill, and a slow target became a dead one fast. But he couldn’t stay where he was either. Not when every passing second gave the other gunman time to catch up and get into killing range.
Victor chose right, ran, keeping low. Rounds from the newly arrived attacker ripped through the undergrowth as he moved, but far enough away to tell him the shooter was either less adept than his partner or his accuracy was greatly suffering from a thumping heart and too much adrenalin. Victor pumped his legs as hard as he could, fighting gravity as he scrambled up the hill, knowing that if he tripped or slowed, his enemy wouldn’t keep missing. Victor almost slipped on a mossy stretch of rock, but kept sprinting until he reached a tree big enough to take cover behind. He stood side-on to maximise its protection while he took huge gulps of air. He’d out-manoeuvred one attacker, but couldn’t out-manoeuvre two capable of communicating with each other.
The tree had a trunk that split into two, protruding from the earth at a forty-five-degree angle. The twin trunks twisted over and under each other. Victor positioned himself behind the thickest part of the trunks and peered through the gap between them. A lizard scurried away.
He glimpsed the second gunman hurrying his way, closing while his target was cowering behind cover. The gunman was about thirty yards out, half-buried in the underbrush, weapon up and ready, pointing in Victor’s direction. He was camouflaged in a ghillie suit and had an MP5SD just like the other two. With his left shoulder against the tree trunks, Victor quickly leaned out of cover and squeezed off a burst. The guy dived from sight.
Victor turned around, knowing the first shooter would take the opportunity to close the distance. It took a second to spot him, moving from tree to tree, low but fast, rushing but composed. Victor fired just as the gunman went out of sight behind a mass of low-hanging branches. Armour-piercing rounds blasted through the foliage. Victor hadn’t expected to hit either man — hitting fast-moving targets in a heavy-cover environment was never going to be easy — but he knew they’d try and get nearer while they thought he was focused on hiding, and moving men in ghillie suits weren’t as hard to see as stationary ones.