Stay Alive (21 page)

But she wasn’t going to go down without a fight and she kept up her struggle with the dog, trying to gouge at its eyes, even as she saw a man approaching her at a run in the periphery of her vision, a gun with silencer attached in his hand, the weapon outstretched in front of him.

It was over. She’d tried everything to survive but – when it had come down to it – she’d failed.

Taking a deep breath, she clenched her teeth against the impact as the shot rang out.

SCOPE TOOK IN
the whole scene in the space of a couple of seconds. The girl – pretty, mixed race, no more than eighteen, tops – fitted the description of the older of the two kids on the canoeing trip. She was sitting on the ground staring up at him, her mouth open in shock, the confusion written all over her face as she tried to work out who on earth he was. Her left forearm was bleeding and she was clutching hold of it with her free hand. Two dead Dobermans lay next to her – one she must have killed herself; the other he just had.

Thirty yards away, just visible inside the tree line, were shadowy figures some distance apart. Scope had counted three of them and they’d stopped, clearly having heard Scope’s shot, and were crouching down.

Panting from the exertion of running the last half-mile in the direction of the gunfire, Scope leaned down beside the girl, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on the shadowy figures. ‘How many of them are there?’ he whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered back, her voice surprisingly calm given the fact that she’d been bitten quite badly. ‘But they’ve got guns, and they’re trying to kill me.’

Scope had three shots left. If they were going to make a dash for it, he was going to have to use those shots to hold off the girl’s pursuers and give them a few seconds’ head start, which might be enough now that it sounded as if there were no more dogs with them. But as he took aim at the nearest figure, one of the men called out excitedly to the others. ‘There’s the young one!’ he bellowed in a rumbling Eastern European accent.

‘Grab her, and keep her alive!’ someone else called back, his voice carrying through the darkness. This time the accent was English.

‘No! My sister!’ the girl next to Scope screamed.

The next second, the powerful beam of a torch swung round towards them, temporarily blinding Scope. This time he didn’t hesitate, aiming his pistol towards the light and pulling the trigger twice in quick succession, before grabbing the girl and yanking her to her feet. ‘Move!’ he hissed, cracking off his third and final shot from the hip, and hearing the tinkle of glass as the torch shattered, plunging them back into welcome darkness.

‘My sister!’ the girl screamed again, resisting Scope’s efforts, but her voice was drowned out by a succession of shotgun blasts. Scope remembered giving the girl a shove and her taking off into the gloom, holding onto the kitchen knife she’d killed the first dog with, and then he felt a sudden, very hard, impact in his side and his legs went from under him. ‘Run!’ he managed to yell, and then he hit the ground with a hard thud that tore the wind right out of him.

Everything was happening extremely fast for Keogh. First he heard the shot ring out from somewhere inside the woods – only twenty, thirty yards away. Even though he was half deafened from all the shooting he’d been doing, he knew straight away that the shot had come from a pistol, and one with a suppressor attached. He could no longer hear the barking of the dogs either.

For a split second he wondered if the shooter was Mehdi. After all, guns with suppressors were unheard of in a remote place like this, but there was no way Mehdi could have found them back here. Not wanting to take any chances, Keogh crouched down at the edge of the tree line, motioning for Sayenko and MacLean to do the same, but Sayenko appeared to be looking at something further up the hill on the other side of the road.

Keogh was just about to tell him to pay attention when Sayenko pointed towards whatever he was looking at. ‘There’s the young one!’ he shouted.

Knowing the usefulness of having one of the fugitives as a hostage, particularly a kid, Keogh yelled to Sayenko to get hold of her alive, hoping like hell he had the energy to catch her.

Almost immediately, a female voice called out in alarm from inside the trees. Keogh didn’t catch her exact words, but he distinctly heard the word ‘sister’. Holding his rifle in the crook of his arm, his finger still poised on the trigger, he switched on the Maglite torch and shone it into the undergrowth, trying to catch sight of whoever was in there.

He caught movement twenty yards in, but then two shots rang out in rapid succession, passing between him and MacLean, who was crouched down with his shotgun next to the abandoned car, five yards away. As Keogh dodged behind a tree, swinging round the rifle as he hunted for a target, a third shot hissed through the trees, and the torch bucked in his hand as the light shattered, plunging the world back into a heavy, impenetrable gloom.

That was when MacLean opened up with the shotgun, its retorts cracking across the night air. Dropping the torch, Keogh put the rifle to his shoulder and leaned out from behind the tree. He saw movement – shadowy figures partially screened by bushes, running further into the woodland – and opened fire until he’d run out of bullets.

He thought he saw one of them fall and hoped it wasn’t the target, Amanda Rowan, because if she was dead, he was dead too. But there was little time to worry about that now.

Motioning for MacLean to follow, Keogh started into the darkness.

Casey sprinted for her life through the big dark wood because she knew the horrible bony man with the bald head like a skull, and the big gun, was after her.

He’d seen her in the bushes beside the road, where Jess had told her to wait for them to pick her up. She’d seen the car crash, heard the shots, and didn’t even know whether or not Jess was still alive. She was thinking that she couldn’t lose her sister, not after everyone else. It was like God was trying to do everything he could to hurt her, even though she’d never done anything wrong before.

Then the man had shouted something and started coming up the road after her, waving the gun, a horrible look on his face like one of the zombies in Jess’s Call of Duty 3 game she’d got last Christmas, and then just after that she was sure she heard Jess shout something, but she couldn’t be sure what, and then she was running, because she really didn’t know what else to do.

And she was continuing to run, even though her shoes were hurting, and the brambles kept scratching her face, and she was more scared than she’d ever been in her life. This was worse than the worst nightmare. It was worse than being attacked by the faceless monster with the werewolf claws that she’d always been convinced lurked beneath her bed ready to tear her to pieces and eat her head the moment she shut her eyes and fell asleep. Because the people doing this were grown-ups. Grown-ups were meant to look after children. Her mum had always told her that you had to be careful of strangers. That strangers might want to hurt you. But Casey had never believed it. The grown-ups she knew, even Lily’s mum back home in London who didn’t say much and never looked very happy, were always really nice.

But these men . . . These men wanted to kill her.

She sneaked a look over her shoulder for a moment, but couldn’t see the bony man with the bald head. If she could keep going a bit longer, then she could hide somewhere and he wouldn’t be able to find her. She’d always been good at hiding, and now she could no longer hear the dogs, they wouldn’t be able to sniff her out and hurt her. But her legs were tired, and her tummy ached, and she didn’t know how much longer she could keep going. She needed Jess here to help her. Jess would know what to do.

Casey turned back round so she could see where she was going and spotted the branch hanging out in front of her one second before she ran straight into it with an angry smack.

She cried out – she couldn’t stop herself in time – and fell backwards onto the ground. Her whole face was agony, but her nose especially. It was like someone had smacked it with a hammer. She tried to sit back up, trying desperately not to cry, but her vision suddenly went all blurry and she had to swallow to stop herself being sick.

That was when she heard it. The sound of heavy, rasping breathing.

And it was getting closer.

SCOPE WAS HURT
but he could still move.

He could hear the sound of movement in the foliage behind him as the men who’d opened fire approached and, on the other side of him, no more than ten yards away, he could see the silhouette of the girl he’d rescued from the dog, partly concealed by a tree. But she wasn’t running, even though she’d be coming into the sights of the gunmen any moment now. She was looking back towards the road. From what Scope could gather, she’d been split up from her little sister, and wasn’t going to leave without her which, though a pretty laudable thing, was also the equivalent of committing suicide.

She was dead if she stayed where she was. And so, he knew, was he. His left side ached where he’d been hit but, when he ran his hand down there, there was no blood. Instead, he felt the satellite phone he’d taken from the dead gunman back at Jock’s place. It was still in his jacket pocket, but its casing was now badly cracked, where it had clearly taken the force of the shot and somehow deflected it. He took it out and, seeing that it was cleaved pretty much down the middle, left it on the ground.

He didn’t dwell on his good fortune. There was no time. Lifting himself as silently as possible to his feet, and using a thick bramble bush as cover, he took off at a sprint further into the woods, conscious of the sound of the leaves crunching beneath his feet as he ran in a crouching zigzag to put off the shooters, motioning angrily for the girl to follow him.

A shot rang out, then another. Then a third. All of them were close by but Scope was eating up the ground quickly, and out of the corner of his eye he could see the girl running alongside him, a few yards away, also trying to keep low as the shooting continued.

But it was sounding further away now.

‘I can’t leave my sister!’ cried the girl as she ran, her face contorted with emotion.

‘Where was she?’ Scope called across without looking at her.

‘We left her when we tried to get to the car. We were going to pick her up.’ She began to slow her pace as she talked.

‘Keep running,’ snapped Scope. ‘They’re still only just behind us.’ The shooting had stopped now, but he knew their pursuers wouldn’t be giving up that easily.

‘I’m tired,’ complained the girl. ‘And we’re running away from where we left Casey. She’s my sister, and she’s only ten years old.’

Scope suddenly saw a picture of Mary Ann as a ten year old in his mind. He and Jennifer had had a photo of her at that age on the mantelpiece in the lounge in her school uniform, her long dark hair in matching pigtails, a big grin on her face. His daughter.

His dead daughter.

‘I’ll find your sister,’ he said, without breaking pace. ‘But we need to put some space between you and them. Has she got a phone?’

‘No,’ said the girl breathlessly. ‘None of us have. We lost them in the river when the boats were overturned.’

‘What’s she look like?’

‘Blonde, pretty. No, she’s beautiful. She’s so damn beautiful.’ The girl looked as if she was going to break down.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jess.’

There was a narrow gap in the trees up ahead as they met a path and, as the two of them emerged onto it, they paused briefly. Scope turned to her, feeling in his pocket for his own mobile phone. He knew he needed to part with it because it implicated him in what had happened here, and therefore the killing of the gunman back at Jock’s place, but he had no choice if he was going to help these kids get out of here.

He checked it, but there was no signal. ‘Okay, Jess, follow this path upwards until you get to the road,’ he whispered, handing her the phone. ‘Keep to the edge so you can get out of sight if you need to, and keep moving, whatever you do. As soon as you get a signal, dial 999. Understood? Now go. I’ll try and distract them.’

They could both hear the sound of movement coming up from behind them. It would only be a matter of seconds until they were back in the sights of the gunmen. Jess nodded. ‘Find her,’ she said, then turned and started running up the gentle incline, until seconds later she rounded a corner and was swallowed up by the forest.

The sound of pursuit was coming closer now. Scope could hear their footfalls in the trees, some distance apart as the men fanned out, and he moved across the path and into the thick wall of pine trees that bordered it on the far side, weaving between them until he found a spot from which he could no longer be seen. Grabbing a thick branch from the deep carpet of pine needles on the ground, he waited a few seconds until a big shadowy figure appeared on the other side of the path, stepping onto it carefully as he slowly looked round. Scope didn’t have a very good view of him, but he could see he was well over six foot tall, and was holding a shotgun.

Scope dropped the branch onto the ground. Not too hard, because he didn’t want to make what he was planning too obvious, but not too softly either, because he wanted to be heard.

And he was heard all right. The gunman immediately cocked his head, then motioned to someone else out of sight. He was already pointing the shotgun in the direction where the noise had come from when Scope took off, making as much noise as possible, running roughly parallel to the path in the opposite direction to the one the girl had taken. He heard shouting behind him and then a shot rang out, passing a good few yards behind him.

Keeping low, he continued his sprint, knowing he could outrun them, but knowing too that it was unlikely Jess could. He had to buy her time. A second shot rang out. This time it ricocheted off a tree, only a couple of yards to his left. Stealing a rapid glance, he saw that he’d strayed too close to the path, and the gunman was running down it, not quite keeping pace but not needing to, suddenly only about fifteen yards away.