Blood Hunt (39 page)

There was someone over to his right, about seventy or eighty yards away. It looked like Jay’s silhouette.

“Jay!” Reeve called.

Jay caught his breath. “Keep going!” he said.

So Reeve kept going. And the sky above him turned brilliant white. He couldn’t believe it. Jay had let off a WP grenade. White phos made a good smoke screen, but you didn’t use the stuff when you were already on your way out of a situation. Then Reeve realized what Jay had done, and his stomach did a flip. Jay had tossed the phos in Reeve’s direction, and had headed off the other way. He was using Reeve as his decoy, bringing the Ar-gentine troops over in Reeve’s direction while he made his own escape.

Bastard!

And now Reeve could hear whistling, a human whistle. A tune he recognized.

Row, row, row your boat,

Gently down the stream…

And then silence. Jay was gone. Reeve could have followed him, but that would mean running straight through the smoke into God knew what. Instead, he picked up his pace and kept running the direction he’d been going. He wondered how Jay could have set off one way yet come back around to meet up with Reeve. It was crazy, Jay’s sense of direction wasn’t that bad…

Unless… unless he’d come back on purpose. The enemy had heard only one yelled voice, come under fire from just one rifle, one grenade launcher.

They didn’t know there were two men out here!

Reeve saw it all. The safest way out of this was to lie low and let the enemy catch your partner. But that only worked if your partner was caught. Jay was just making sure. Back at Hereford, it would be one man’s word against the other’s… always supposing they both made it home.

Over the rise the ground seemed to level out, which meant he could move faster, but also that he could be spotted more easily. He thought he could hear rotors behind him: a chopper, maybe more than one, probably with searchlights attached. He had to reach cover. No, he had to keep moving, had to put some distance between himself and his pursuers. Relieved of his rucksack and most of his kit, he felt as though weights had been taken off his ankles. That thought made him think of shackles, and the image of shackles gave him fresh impetus. His ears still seemed blocked; there was still a hissing sound there. He couldn’t hear any vehicles, any commands or gunfire. Just rotors… coming closer.

Much closer.

Reeve flung himself to the ground as the helicopter passed overhead. It was over to his right and moving too quickly to pick him out. This was a general sweep. They’d carry on until they were sure they were at a distance he couldn’t have reached, then they’d come back, moving more slowly, hovering so the searchlight could play over the ground.

He needed cover right now.

But there was no cover. He loaded a grenade into the launcher, got up, and started running again. The rifle was no longer in both hands and held low in front of him: now it was in his right hand, the safety off. It would take him a second to swing the barrel into his other hand, aim, and fire.

He could see the beam of light ahead of him, waving in an arc which would pick him out when the chopper was closer. Reeve dropped to one knee and wiped sweat from his eyes. His knees hurt, they were stiff. The chopper was moving steadily now, marking out a grid pattern. They weren’t rushing things. They were being methodical, the way Reeve would have done in their situation.

When the helicopter was seventy-five yards in front of him Reeve took aim, resting one elbow on his knee to steady himself. As soon as the helicopter went into a hover, Reeve let go with the grenade. He watched the bomb, like an engorged bullet, leave the launcher and head into the sky, but he didn’t wait to see the result. He was running again, dipping to a protective crouch as the sky overhead exploded in a ball of flame, rotor blades crumpling and falling to the ground. Something hot fell onto Reeve’s arm. He checked it wasn’t phos. It wasn’t—just hot metal. It stuck to his arm, and he had to scrape it off against the ground, taking burning flesh with it.

“Jesus Christ!” he gasped. The helicopter had hit the ground behind him. There was another explosion, which almost toppled him. More flying metal and glass hit him. Maybe bits of bodies were hitting him, too. He didn’t bother looking.

His arm wasn’t sore; the adrenaline and fear were taking care of that for the moment, the best anesthetics on the planet.

He’d been scared for a second, though, and what had scared him most was the fear that the heat on his arm had been white phos. The stuff was lethal—it would have burned straight through him, eating as it went.

Well, he thought, if Jay’s smoke screen had hinted I was here, the helicopter was an open fucking invitation.

He heard a motor, revving hard: a Jeep, probably on the track he’d crossed a few minutes back. If it unloaded men, then those men would be that few minutes behind no more. No time to stop, no time to slow. He didn’t have time to pace himself, the way he knew he should so he’d have some idea how far he’d traveled when he got a chance to stop and recce. You did it by counting the number of strides you took and multiplying by length of stride. It was fine in training, fine when they told you about it in a classroom…

But out here, it was just another piece of kit to be discarded.

He had no idea where Jay was. The last he’d seen of him was vanishing behind all that thick white smoke, like a magician doing a disappearing trick. Magicians always had trapdoors, and that’s what Reeve was looking for now—a door he could disappear through. There was a small explosion at his back. Maybe it was the helicopter, maybe Jay launching another grenade, or the enemy redoubling its bombardment.

Whatever it was, it was far enough behind him to be of little concern. He couldn’t hear the Jeep anymore. He wondered if it had stopped. He thought he could hear other vehicles in the distance. Their engine drones were just the right timbre to penetrate his blocked ears. Heavy engines… surely not tanks? Personnel carriers? He couldn’t see any other searchlights. There had been only the one chopper. They might be ordering another from the airfield, but if the crew was sensible they would take their time getting here, knowing the fate of their comrades.

Reeve was thinking about a lot of things, trying to form some structure to the chaos in his mind. Above all he was trying to think of anything but his own running. On a grueling route march you had to transcend the reality. That was the very word his first instructor had used: transcend. Someone had asked if he meant it as in transcendental meditation, expecting to raise a smile.

“In a manner of speaking,” the instructor had said in all seriousness.

That was the first time Reeve got an inkling that being a good soldier was more a state of mind, a matter of attitude, than anything else. You could be fit, strong, have fast reflexes and know all the drills, but those didn’t complete the picture; there was a mental part of the equation, too. It had to do with spirit, which was maybe what the instructor had been getting at.

He came suddenly to the main road which ran from Rio Grande on the east coast all the way into Chilean territory. He lay low, watching army trucks roar past, and when the route was finally clear scuttled across the road like any other nocturnal creature.

His next obstacle was not far away, and it gave him a choice: he could swim across the Rio Grande—which meant ditching more equipment, including maybe even his rifle—or he could cross it by bridge. There was a bridge half a mile downriver, according to his map. Reeve headed straight towards it, unsure whether it would be guarded or not. The Argentines had known for some time now that there were enemy forces around, so maybe the bridge would be manned. Then again, would they have been expecting Reeve and Jay to make it this far?

Reeve’s question was answered soon enough: a two-man foot patrol guarded the two-lane crossing. They were standing in the middle of the bridge, illuminated by the headlights of their Jeep. At this time of night there was no traffic for them to stop and check, so they were talking and smoking cigarettes. Their eyes were on the distance, the direction Reeve had just come. They’d heard the explosions, seen the smoke and flame. They were glad to be at this safe distance from it all.

Reeve took a look at the dark, wide river, the cold-looking water. Then he peered at the underside of the bridge, and made up his mind. He clambered down to the water’s edge and made his way underneath the bridge. It was an iron construction, its struts a crisscrossed series of spars forming an arch over the water. Reeve slung his rifle over his shoulder and gripped the first two spars, pulling himself up. He climbed slowly, quietly, hidden from land but all too visible from the river, should any boat with a spotlight come chugging along. Where he could, he used his feet and knees for purchase, but as he climbed higher, he found himself hanging over the water below by his hands, moving one hand at a time, his legs swinging uselessly in space. He thought of training courses where he’d had to swing this way across an expanse of water or mud—but never this distance, never under these conditions. His upper chest ached, and the rusty metal tore into his finger joints. He thought his arms would pop out of their sockets. Sweat was stinging his eyes. Above him he could hear the soldiers laughing. He could pull himself up onto the bridge and open fire on them, then steal their Jeep or cross the rest of the bridge on foot. But he knew if he opted for this kind of action, he’d leave traces, and he didn’t want that, he didn’t want the enemy to know which way he’d come. So he kept swinging, concentrating on one hand, then the other, squeezing shut his eyes and gritting his teeth. Blood was trickling down past his wrists. He didn’t think he was going to make it. He started to fantasize about letting go, falling into the water, about letting the river wash him all the way to the coast. He shook his head clear. The splash would be heard; even if it wasn’t, what were his chances? He had to keep on moving.

Finally, he found purchase with his feet. He was at the far side of the span, where the struts started curving downwards towards the riverbank. He mouthed a silent “Jesus” as he took his weight on his feet and legs, easing the pressure on his shredded palms. He felt exhausted as he started his descent, and dropped when he reached solid ground, gasping and panting on all fours, his head touching the dank earth. He gave himself thirty precious seconds to get his breath back. He pressed some strands of grass against his palms and fingers, as much of a compress as he could manage.

Then he got to his feet and moved away from the water, heading northeast. He couldn’t follow the river: for one thing, it led back towards the airfield; for another, he was more likely to encounter civilians close to a water source. Stumbling across a fisherman was not high on his Christmas-present list.

Reeve was running the way he’d been taught: not a sprint, because a sprint used up too many resources too quickly—this running was measured, paced, steady, more a jog than anything else. The secret was not to stop, not to falter—and that was the most difficult part of all. It had been difficult on the Brecon Beacons during those arduous training runs. Reeve had jogged past men he regarded as fitter and stronger than him. They’d be standing bent over, hands on knees, spewing onto the ground. They daren’t sit down—with the amount of kit they were carrying they’d never get back up. And if they stopped too long they’d begin to seize up. It was something joggers knew. You saw them at traffic lights or pausing to cross the road, and they jogged on the spot.

Never stop, never falter.

Reeve kept running.

The terrain became much as it had been the other side of the river, steep ridges of loose shale with shallow valleys between. He didn’t bother counting his steps, just kept moving, putting miles between himself and the river. He knew he couldn’t outrun vehicles, but this terrain, inhospitable to a human, would be downright lethal for any vehicle other than the hardiest. No Jeep could take these slopes, and a motorcycle would slew on the loose stones. A helicopter was the enemy’s best bet, and he’d probably wiped that option out for the meantime. He took strength from that fact.

He was climbing again, trying not to think about the pain in his hands, crossing the ridge, then sliding. At the bottom of the slide, he picked himself up and ran forward four paces.

Then he stopped dead.

He couldn’t really see anything, but some sixth sense had told him to stop. He knew why: it was the nothingness itself that had warned him. He couldn’t see the ground ahead, not even ten feet in front of him. He shuffled forwards, toeing the ground, until one foot stepped off into space.

“Christ!”

He took two steps back and got down on his hands and knees, peering into the darkness. He was on the edge of a gully. No… more than a gully: sheer sides dropped he didn’t know how far. A ravine, a deep chasm. Even supposing he could climb down into it, he’d no idea whether he could scale the other side. He might be trapped. He’d have to go around it, but that might take hours. Damn it to hell. He tried to see something, anything down there, something that might tell him what was waiting for him. He unclipped the night scope from his belt and put it to his eye. Its range was limited, but he thought he could make out shapes at the bottom of the hole, rocks or boulders probably. The drop was pretty sheer, tapering off towards the bottom. In daylight, if he wasn’t rushed, he could probably find enough hand- and footholds to climb out the other side. But in darkness with the enemy behind him…

He took the night scope away from his eyes and was confronted by the ravine’s blackness again. It was taunting him. Everybody, no matter how good, needs luck, it was telling him. And yours just ran out.

“Fuck that,” he said, clipping the scope back onto his belt and standing up. His leg muscles complained. He had to make a decision soon, for all sorts of reasons. Turn left or right? Right, and he’d be heading vaguely in Jay’s direction; left, and he might hit the coast. Was that correct? He screwed shut his eyes and concentrated. No: if he turned right he might hit the coast. He had to turn right.