The hillside was relatively steep with jutting protrusions of rock and jagged steps covered in a thick layer of soil and detritus. Thin-trunked trees rose into the sky all around him. Between them shrubs and other plant life competed for the light filtering through the canopy. Moss spread across tree trunks, fallen branches and rocky areas. Victor sprinted as fast as he could without stumbling, dodging trees, ducking branches, jumping rocks.
He spotted a fallen tree up ahead – saw it was perfect – and manoeuvred towards where it lay. He leaped up and over it, dropped down on the other side, spun around and into a firing position.
As he expected, a shape was running through the trees behind him, sixteen yards out, following Victor’s path, hard to see at first, half-hidden by trees, blending well into the surrounding vegetation due to a ghillie suit, but unmistakably a man with an MP5SD.
The sudden turn took Victor’s pursuer completely by surprise.
Automatic gunfire echoed through the forest.
The man in the ghillie suit danced momentarily as he was struck by a burst of 4.7 mm high-velocity rounds, then fell out of sight, leaving a mist of blood hanging in the air.
Victor’s gaze swept from left to right, knowing there would be more of them. He saw another blur of movement through the undergrowth. Another man in a ghillie suit, twenty yards away at Victor’s ten o’clock. The underbrush was thick and tall around him. Like the first man, the fact he was running gave Victor the chance to distinguish him from the surrounding vegetation. The second man had a half-second extra to react over the other guy and was dropping low as Victor fired, 4.6 mm bullets missing and blowing bark from a nearby tree.
The man shot back. There was virtually no noise or muzzle flash due to the fat integrated suppressor of the MP5SD. Bullets zipped over Victor’s head. He crouched lower, maximising the cover of the fallen
tree. He shot back, again missing, but this time hitting close enough to convince the shooter to back off into harder cover.
Victor had his left forearm resting on the horizontal tree trunk, gaze fixed along the MP7’s sights at the area in which the gunman had disappeared. If he backtracked up the hill, Victor would see him, but if he moved laterally, the gunman could stay hidden in the mass of shrubs and tall plants. The trees there were thin but plentiful. Victor’s eyes flicked towards any swaying limb or falling leaf.
He knew he was fortunate to still be alive. If the guy Victor had shot hadn’t disturbed the birds in the trees above the highpoint and stopped them singing, Victor would have put a .338 Lapua Magnum through Kasakov’s skull as planned, and in return would have been shot where he lay. After noticing the sudden quiet Victor understood he was no longer alone and that he still breathed was a clear sign whoever disturbed the birds was waiting for Kasakov to die before acting.
One down. Another close by. Victor didn’t know how many there were in total, but there had to be at least one more he hadn’t encountered keeping a visual on Kasakov to confirm when he was dead. Which meant that one was now behind Victor, but maybe almost seven hundred yards away. He could forget about him for the moment.
Three bullets plugged holes in the fallen tree just beneath his arm. He didn’t see the muzzle flash – the MP5SD’s suppressor substantially reduced it. He couldn’t see the shooter either. The ghillie suit guy was so well camouflaged he was almost invisible. Victor shot a burst back, ejected shell cases ricocheting off the tree trunk, and got his head down behind it. He pushed a hand through the plant life and scooped up some damp soil. He rubbed it over his face and neck, closing his eyes to make sure his eyelids weren’t missed out.
He knew his attackers weren’t Mossad. Kidon assassins would have just grabbed him while he slept and taken him someplace dark and quiet to slice every last shred of information from him. They obviously weren’t Kasakov’s men either. Any other enemies Victor had wouldn’t have been waiting for him to kill Kasakov first. There was only one person who would want both Kasakov and Victor dead.
He emptied his mind of the thought. He had to concentrate. Adrenalin was flooding Victor’s veins and he breathed slow and steady
to control its effects. He needed his pulse lower than his body wanted it. A rapid heart rate would help him run faster, but it wasn’t going to keep his aim steady.
More bullets slammed into the tree trunk shielding him. Splinters of wood and pieces of bark were blasted into the air and rained down over him. He stayed where he was, knowing subsonic 9 mm rounds had no chance of penetrating through the thick trunk. Even his supersonic armour-piercing rounds wouldn’t, but the MP7 easily out-ranged an MP5SD. The problem was that contacts in this kind of terrain were almost exclusively from very close range. With the trees and undergrowth restricting line of sight to sub thirty yards, Victor couldn’t make his fire superiority pay off. The virtually silent weapon of his attacker, with its almost eliminated muzzle flash, was far better suited to the fight than Victor’s own gun.
He shuffled to his left until he was close enough to the stump of the fallen tree to pop his head and gun around the side and out of cover. His gaze scanned the area where he’d last seen his enemy, but before he could spot the shooter, rounds were coming his way, slicing through foliage, thudding into the ground. He rolled back into cover.
The gunman was firing from an elevated position, twenty-five yards out, and was perfectly camouflaged. Any time Victor emerged out of cover he would take longer to acquire his target than his enemy would. And in Victor’s experience, whoever shot second in a firefight died first. If he was going to make it out of this, he needed to take away at least one of his attacker’s advantages before the third shooter got involved.
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.
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.
Having gained a few extra seconds while they were taking cover, Victor used it to again sprint up the hill, once more getting behind a tree as soon as one big enough presented itself. He felt himself tiring, his chest heaving, the lactic acid in his muscles building. All it would take to get a bullet in the back was being in the open for a second too long.
Victor breathed heavily, tasting the dirt and sweat on his lips. He fought the instinct to entrench himself and fight back, knowing they were still too far apart to engage at the same time, and if he stayed in
the one place for too long he would be outflanked. He had to keep moving, otherwise he’d never make it out of the woods alive. His only chance was to find a small cliff, some boulders or a crevasse – any terrain feature that he could use to even up the firefight. He steeled himself for another sprint.