Three big mule-deer bucks exploded from the thicket and charged downhill. They vaulted over the trail in front of me and bounced down the slope and out of sight.
My clothes were soaked from rain and sweat. The wind had picked up.
I tried hard not to shiver as I lowered the shotgun and peered uphill with my binoculars, looking for the source of the loud crack that had spooked the deer, looking for the big grizzly I knew was prowling somewhere in the area.
Almost five minutes passed before I caught a flicker of movement; it was followed by the soft snapping and popping of brush that at seventy-five yards became the torso and legs of a man—a skilled and trained man, by the way he fluidly moved in an athletic stance, his head swiveling, his gun held like a commando and clipped to a SWAT-style chest harness.
I recognized him. He was the same burly Hispanic who’d been hanging out the side of the helicopter during the first attack, the one who’d shot at us.
Somehow, I knew I would not get the drop on him the way I had Durango’s man. I had no choice. I had to kill him or be killed.
Carefully, I lowered the binoculars and tried to raise the shotgun up just as slowly.
But he was a pro and must have caught movement.
Bolting and scrambling across the hill, he fired a sweeping burst, left to right, that broke branches and ripped into trees, including the one I was leaning against. I kicked my feet out and fell hard on the gun and my binoculars and the forest floor, knocking the wind from my lungs.
Stifling a groan, I tried to get to my knees. But another burst of gunfire clipped the trail above me, sending dirt and rocks down on my head.
I rolled over on my back, still fighting to breathe and holding the shotgun close to my chest, the muzzle above my head. The shooting stopped.
Given the circumstances, I was outgunned, but I did not reach for the pistol at my left hip. I didn’t want him to hear anything but the rain falling and the wind blowing as I stayed perfectly still and prayed that I’d dropped from sight so fast and so close to where he’d been aiming that he’d think I was dead already.
The ache in my diaphragm had faded by the time I heard him moving down the hill in my direction, no doubt his gun up, sweeping the area where he’d last seen my head and chest.
When I heard him get close, I looked back and up to where the embankment met the trail. Then I adjusted the butt of the shotgun’s stock against my belt and tilted the muzzle up a good thirty degrees before relaxing my head against the embankment.
I did not want to but I closed my eyes so I could listen better. A full minute passed before I heard a boot make a squishing and sucking noise as it settled into the mud up on the path, which was no more than five feet wide. I took a deep breath and let out a quarter of it before settling.
Ten seconds later, another boot squished and sucked mud, then another.
He’s coming with confidence, I thought, only to have him stop for twenty seconds, then thirty seconds. I wanted to breathe, to sniff in just a little more air, but I was scared he was close enough to see my boots and lower pants now. Any twitch and he’d shoot.
Forty seconds.
My grip on the shotgun in that odd position began to slip. I was going to have to breathe. I was going to have to—
Squish. Suck.
Fifty seconds.
Squish. Suck.
I opened my eyes to slits, saw him appear over the top of the embankment.
His gun was pinned to his cheek and aimed at me, looking for signs of life, when I squeezed the trigger on a load of double-aught buckshot.
Chapter
100
On the east side of the river, Sampson had not moved position since the two bursts of machine-gun fire and the two pistol shots had gone off in the thick patch of trees a hundred yards north of his position. He was lying prone over the top of a hummock of dirt, looking through binoculars at scattered live trees and standing burned trunks between him and the heavier timber.
He started at automatic-weapon fire from across the river, his heart racing, his stomach souring. Alex was engaged.
Sampson turned his binoculars westward and focused on the big piece of timber where he guessed the shooting had come from. A second burst of gunfire confirmed it.
Sampson tried to dissect the woods opposite him but could make out nothing. He swung the binoculars back to study the timber patch out in front of him.
He went back and forth this way for ten minutes before hearing a single blast that sounded more shotgun than rifle. When he looked over there, his grin surfaced and then broadened with every second that passed without automatic gunfire.
Sampson shifted the binoculars back to his side of the river, to where the trail met the woods a hundred yards out, and saw nothing. He panned them slowly left and locked.