Right there, not sixty yards away, stood the mammoth black guy who’d ridden shotgun during the first helicopter attack. How had he not heard him? How had he not seen him?
Sampson was six nine and weighed two hundred seventy-five pounds, but this guy was big too, six foot six easy and pushing the upper two hundreds.
Massive. Solid muscle. A Goliath.
And Goliath was dressed and equipped for modern war, right down to the black clothes, the black gun, the Kevlar vest, and the goggles he wore.
Those can’t be night-vision, Sampson thought. They’ve got to be thermals.
Goliath started to swing his head.
He’s going to peg my heat signature in this rain!
Sampson dropped the binoculars and shifted to get behind the bear gun. He moved too fast. M’s man jerked his head Sampson’s way.
Before Sampson could flip off the safety on the Ruger, Goliath leaped sideways and started sprinting downhill off the trail and in an arc through the trees, firing short bursts at John. Rounds smacked the front side of the hummock and blew mud in his face.
Sampson swung the barrel of the bear gun after the running man. He fired and missed, hitting a stump just behind the giant.
Ducking down, John ran the bolt on the .375 just before Goliath responded with another burst that chewed up the front of the hummock he was hiding behind.
When Sampson peeked again, Goliath was still running like hell and across the hill. When John had first seen the giant, he had been at Sampson’s eleven o’clock. Now he was at ten o’clock and showed no signs of slowing.
Sampson swung the gun after him, fired, and missed again. Nine o’clock.
What’s he doing? Where’s he going?
Sampson ran the bolt a third time, looking past the running Goliath all the way to seven o’clock, and understood. There was a ridge about seventy yards out that climbed and ran west toward the river. He was going for higher ground.
Sampson knew he’d have to reload after this next shot and wanted to make it count before Goliath could get the advantage and shoot down on him.
Keeping both eyes open, John swung the .375 after the running giant a third time, found the man’s left side in the sights, moved the crosshairs just ahead of Goliath, and tapped the trigger. The bear gun roared.
The heavy bullet hit the giant in the ribs below his shoulder.
Dead before he knew it, Goliath did a twisting somersault, bounced off the trunk of a burned tree at the base of the ridge, and crashed to the ground, unmoving.
Chapter
101
I pumped the action on the ten-gauge, got upright on wobbly legs, and looked over the top of the embankment at the dead guy on the trail. He was on his back and unrecognizable.
His eyes were gone. His face looked like hamburger ground by buckshot fired at point-blank range.
I climbed the embankment, trying to breathe slow and calm the adrenaline, and squatted by the dead man, meaning to search him for identification. But then I noticed he had an earbud in and a tiny bone-conduction mike taped to the hinge of his left jaw.
I rolled him over, found a small Motorola radio clipped to his belt at the small of his back, and took it. I popped out the earbud, wiped the blood off it, and stuck it in my own ear, hoping to listen in on whoever else was in the woods hunting us.
Across the river, an automatic weapon fired a short burst. A second later, a rifle shot went off. Another burst. A second rifle shot. Another burst.
The third rifle shot sounded different, abrupt, as if it had connected, and it went unanswered long enough that I allowed myself a smile. If that was the bear gun I’d heard, Sampson was still alive.
“Big DD? Do you copy?” came a male voice through the earbud. “Vincente? Do you copy? If you can’t talk, tap twice.”
Figuring the dead man at my feet was Vincente, I carefully peeled off the tape holding the microphone and tapped it twice.
“Good man,” the voice said. “Big DD? Come back?”
The radio stayed silent for several seconds before a woman answered, choking, “He’s gone, Butler. I saw him hit. I…I see Sampson! He’s moving in that open timber! He’s going to Dawkins’s body!”
“Where?” Butler demanded.
“Face the river, Cap. Two hundred vertical up, at your one o’clock, he’s heading toward the base of that ridge.”
“If you can see him, shoot him, Purdy!”
The big gun went off from downriver.
“Missed,” Purdy said, sounding disgusted.
“I have him now!” Butler said.
Three rapid shots went off from a lighter rifle, not far away, less than a hundred and fifty yards from me, over a brushy knoll toward the river, out there in the open where the fire must have burned hottest.