The Hunter From the Woods (43 page)

This was why he was a hunter tonight. This was why he was ready to die, if he could kill at least one of them.

He loped onward at an easy pace, tasting the air for humans. These killers were careful. They were using an odor mask, which could be as simple as pine soap or as complex as a homeopathic drug. The Family of the Silver Thread was famous for its creation of exotic pharmaceuticals useful to the criminal underworld, as well as for its international trade in weapons and military secrets. It was said that the Silver Thread was woven through thousands of tapestries in dozens of countries, and trying to remove such a global intertwining of interests based on money and power was impossible and for the most part fatal. Last year Michael had succeeded in small part, by crippling a faction of the Silver Thread in Hong Kong. One of their weapons warehouses had gone up with an ear-splitting bang, a courier with a large suitcase full of money had found himself staring at a set of fangs just before they seized his throat, and the floating mansion of the jet-setting newspaper mogul and Silver Thread leader Anthony Tong had been sunk to the bottom of the bay with Tong’s body along as fishfood.

Something jumped in the brush as he approached. A rabbit, running for its life. It didn’t get very far before one of the other wolves emerged from the night to pounce on it, tear it to pieces and eat.

Michael went on, slinking close to the earth. There were many other wolves here. Real wolves, not questionable miracles such as himself. They came, stayed as long as they pleased, and then drifted away again. A few ran with him on a regular basis and seemed to see themselves as his ‘pack’ and he the alpha. Two days ago a new wolf had appeared in an area Michael thought of as the Four Brothers, which was a sloping meadow that held four huge granite boulders. The new wolf, coal black and smelling of maleness, had been lying up on one of the stones basking in the bright sunshine. When it saw him it sat upright, perhaps also recognizing the large black wolf with gray sides as the ruler of this domain. Michael noted that this new male had the rarity of ice-blue eyes, and the commanding way it held itself made him wonder if he wasn’t going to have to put up a fight to keep his kingdom.

Getting old was a bitch.

Michael suddenly stopped on his prowl through the woods. He had sensed something: a slow movement, a gliding from one patch of pure dark to another, a tensing of muscle before an action. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it was there. An owl hooted distantly and another answered. The noise of the night’s insects was a low susurrus.

He waited, all his senses on high alert.

When Valentine Vivian had retired six years ago to his estate in Wessex and begun writing paperback spy novels that no reader on earth could take seriously, a new hale and hearty boy had taken the reins of Special Operations. This one was straight out of Oxford, he wore natty tweeds and a regimental tie of the Royal Green Jackets, and he smoked a meerschaum pipe like a whorehouse chimney burning buggy bedsheets.

This new boy, by the name of Cordwainer, greeted Michael Gallatin one day in his office with the brusque statement
I understand you’re quite the hero
. Only at that early point Cordwainer had understood nothing. After a summoning to Valentine Vivian’s estate where the master of suspense interrupted his latest epic to inform Cordwainer of things that Cordwainer needed to know, from that point on Cordwainer had declined to have Michael anywhere near his office and peered around corners to make sure the hero wasn’t lurking in the shadow of the potted ficus tree.

Michael began moving again through the Welsh woods. Slowly…slowly…inch by inch. His left shoulder protested this movement, and his right hind leg felt on the verge of a cramp. His eyes ticked back and forth, measuring space and darkness and distance. His nose sniffed, searching the air. His ears were up, twitching.

After the scene in Hong Kong, Mallory had come to visit Michael in Wales. It seemed to Michael that Mallory had always looked like an elderly man, but maybe part of it had been stagecraft because Mallory in his dark blue suit and with his white hair combed and parted looked not much older to him than the day they’d sat drinking Guinness at a North African airstrip sixteen years before. Mallory had to be in his late seventies by now, yet perhaps he had against all odds retained the soul and spirit of a hale and hearty boy.

Valentine Vivian had been the head of Special Operations. Cordwainer What’sHisName was currently the head of Special Operations.

But Michael knew that this man sitting in his den, smoking a black briar pipe,
was
Special Operations, and it was a lifelong position.

The word, Mallory confided, was that the Silver Thread had taken photographs with a long-lensed Leica. That Michael had been trailed by their professionals and the pictures snapped at an unfortunate moment.

Michael had known what he meant. The Family of the Silver Thread had photographic proof of him changing from man to wolf, or back again.

Be very, very careful
, Mallory had told him.
They may want your skin, or your
heart, or your head. Or they may want all of you. So be very, very careful
. But not more than a month later, it was Mallory who had not been careful enough. Missing for more than a week, he was found in the trunk of an abandoned taxi in an East London junkyard with his throat cut and his eyes gouged out. Valentine Vivian hired a small army of bodyguards and went on an author’s tour of America, his author’s name being Evelyn Tedford, and Cordwainer the new boy bought an attack dog to patrol his recently-acquired electric fence.

Had something moved, or not?

Michael got still. He heard the owl hooting again, and another answering. It came to him that just possibly they were not owls after all.

The night hung on the edge of violence.

There was this
hero
thing, Michael had often thought in less troubled times. This concept of the man of action. After all this time, he realized Rolfe Gantt had been right.

Everyone loved the hero, but the hero walked alone. It was the nature of the hero, to be solitary. To live life on his own terms, and in his own time. To be neither rushed nor to rush toward oblivion, yet oblivion would claim the hero just as it claimed every ordinary man. And love? Ah,
that.
Love. What woman was it who could truly love the hero? Oh, they might wish to brush against the heroic flesh, or to have some fling in the heroic bed and make for themselves some memory of a heroic night, but
love
? No. When the chips were down and the night was cold, it was the ordinary man who won the heart. The man of meat-and-potatoes, the man who stayed fixed in place, the man who saw his destiny and future in a family, the man to whom wife and daughter or son transformed life into a hero’s dream.

But such was not to be, for a hunter from the woods.

The death of a hunter loomed large in Michael’s mind on this night, as it did on many nights. He was old and he was tired. He was hurting and he was slow. What was ahead for this hunter, who had already given everything? There was only one thing left to give: his life, in exchange for transfiguration from what was to what will be, as the lark ascends into the heavens and the last soft note fades slowly out.

But it was not a soft note he suddenly heard, that made his wolf-bones jump and his green eyes widen.

It was an explosion that cracked across the forest and echoed from every rock in the meadow of Four Brothers.

It was, he realized, the sound of his house being destroyed.

Several explosions followed the first. He saw the leap of fire through the trees and smelled the bitter tang of gunpowder in the concussive wind. They had blown his church to pieces so he might not find sanctuary there. They wanted him out in the open. They wanted him to know fear, because they moved as silently and swiftly as any wolves in the dark.

And then a shadow shifted before him, very near, and the black arrow from the black bow fired by the ninja in black came at him with a serpent’s hiss.

Even as he twisted his body to escape, Michael Gallatin knew the arrow would find its mark.

It did. It hit him on the right side. Its soft plastic tip, about the size of a ripe fig, burst open on contact. It splashed and streaked his gray hair with the bright green glow of chemical phosphorescence. He was well and truly marked.

The ninja moved again, in a blur. A gloved hand opened and closed.

A net of some fine and pliable metal caught moonlight as it bloomed in the air. It sailed toward the lycanthrope, expanding as it came.

Michael saw the fallen tree to his left and the narrow space between it and the earth. He flung himself into the opening, his claws digging into the ground for traction.

The net hit the tree above him, snagged on its stubs of dead branches, and the wolf pulled in his breath to flatten his ribcage and scrabbled under the trunk. Then he quickly turned to face his attacker. With a running start he took a powerful leap, pushed off with his hind legs against the treetrunk and fell upon the ninja.

It was not to be so simple. The ninja retreated. With incredible speed that turned the wolf’s leap into a slow-motion exercise, the assassin threw up a roundhouse kick that got Michael in the belly. As the wolf’s body twisted again, this time in pain, the ninja got his balance and drove a rock-knuckled fist into the center of the chest. He was gone as Michael crashed into the underbrush.

Michael drew a wounded breath and righted himself. He saw the ninja moving through the foliage on his left. With an instant’s pause to calculate distance and speed he took off in pursuit.

The ninja was fast and he was nimble, but this was the wolf’s world.

Michael caught the killer’s right ankle between his teeth and crushed it. The ninja suffered in silence, but would not go down; he gave a one-legged leap toward the nearest tree and began to climb it, using what Michael thought must be small metal pitons embedded in his bootsoles. Michael leaped up, caught the man’s left ankle and dragged him down. The ninja whirled around and like a cornered animal fought with everything he had: fists to the skull, a knee to the muzzle, stiffened fingers thrusting toward the eyes and the edge of the hand chopping for the throat. They did their deadly dance in silence, as flames crackled from the werewolf’s church and red sparks whirled to heaven.

Michael took a blow to the side of the head that made him
whuff
with pain. He dodged a strike meant to blind him. Then in a split-second calculation his animal instinct determined where the fist would be next and his jaws were there waiting for it. He crunched the fingers and torn human flesh to shreds. Blood sprayed into the air. The ninja gave a quiet noise not unlike a sigh of resignation. His remaining hand came at Michael with a slim-bladed knife in it and plunged the blade into the wolf’s left shoulder.

But Michael had his bloodlust at full charge now and the sharp bite of Japanese steel would not turn him aside. When the ninja withdrew the knife to strike again, the wolf gripped his arm at the elbow and with a ferocious thrash broke the bones and nearly tore the limb from its socket. The knife flew away from dead fingers. Michael seized the throat and ripped it open from ear-to-ear. A glistening black flood washed over his muzzle. Then something gave a small
pop
on the ground next to him and smoke welled up into his face. His eyes stung. He smelled an odor of bitter almonds. His lungs hitched and his heart was racing. He held his breath, even as the second gas grenade exploded behind him. A second ninja had joined the battle.

Michael let the first one slither to the earth and then he turned and ran. At full speed, or whatever speed he could manage. A third grenade popped to his right, spewing a noxious cloud. He squeezed his eyes shut and ran blindly. Even a half-breath of the stuff was strong enough to nearly knock him senseless. He thought this was how they must have subdued his companion, then slashed the throat and taken the eyes. Maybe the gas had worked its will on Mallory, too. He began to feel his usually innate sense of direction betraying him; where was he, and where was he going? He crashed through a thicket and fell through thorns and down an embankment into a hollow where a pool of water smelled green. He plunged his head into the pool and opened his eyes to wash them out. Then he shook his head to clear it as best he could and lapped up water with a tongue that felt burned.

He stood breathing hard through swollen lungs, his heart pounding. He saw the woods through a drugged mist. When he tried to move, he staggered.
Wait
, he told himself. He kept breathing, deeply and slowly. Maybe he could get his heartbeat regulated. He listened to the night and for the things that stalked in the night. How many ninjas there were, he had no way of knowing. He was going to have to get out of this hollow before they found him here, dazed and confused. And go where? he asked himself.

There was only one answer.

Go back to what had taken him to Octavius Zloy’s trailer in the dead of night. Go back to what had brought him out of the ruined church in the Russian village, when he’d seen Valentine Vivian being carried away by men with guns. Go back to what had made him ask Paul Wesshauser if he could make a torpedo. Go back to facing Rolfe Gantt’s pistol and saying he would let no man tell him what to do on the last day of his life. Go back to telling the Gestapo’s Ice Man to take his hand off Franziska Luxe’s arm.

Go back to being a man, even if he wore a wolf’s clothing. Go back to the fight.

Always, always…go back to the fight.

 Michael Gallatin climbed up the embankment, pushed through the thorns and the thicket, and he was very much aware that his phosphorescent glow would bring them coming now, at any minute.

He was ready to kill, and he was ready to die. But he would go out as he had lived, and no fear would cripple his cause.

A wind moved through the trees. It stirred the new leaves on the old branches.

It was the zenith of summer, and looking up at the scythe of the moon Michael opened his mouth and howled for what life had meant to him. For the joy of it, and yes for the sorrows too. All were important, in the grand scheme of things. He had not chosen this path. It had chosen him. But he thought—he hoped—he had walked it well and with honor, as both wolf and man.