The Hunted Read online

  They reached into their web gear and withdrew one of their new L12-7 heat-seeking grenades shaped like small missiles.

  “’Nades away!” he cried.

  They lobbed their grenades, and within a second of leaving their hands small fins popped out, tiny engines ignited, and the devices’ explosive payloads were about to be delivered on time, on target, strike three, you’re out!

  The grenades shot off toward the tree line with a whoosh, whoosh, boom-boom!

  The gunfire dropped off to nothing.

  “You got ’em,” cried Schleck.

  Lakota tugged down her balaclava and flashed him a smile. They high-fived and got back on their feet.

  This time Brent took lead, but he felt her there, right on his back, and he wondered if she thought he was too slow. He’d show her the “old man” could still run and bounded off down the long, dark stretch, with the sounds of the breakers echoing in the distance.

  Stones and scrub pockmarked the rugged dunes above the beach, and the Snow Maiden turned off the main road and ducked behind a row of larger, waist-high rocks, her tennis shoes quickly filling with sand. She wove through rows of tropical plants and coconut trees better known by the locals as coco de mer, found a ditch behind one particularly thick patch of hibiscus or something akin, and hunkered down there, unmoving, to catch her breath.

  She swallowed. Damn. Haussler had come this close to capturing her. First France and now this. What was wrong with her? Was she, as Patti had suggested, getting too careless? Too tired? Too sick of it all?

  Now Haussler would have all the GRU’s toys at his disposal: infrared tracking, portable radar, nanobot trackers, you name it. He may have already dusted her with the ’bots. She could not rest for much longer.

  Well, at least she’d tagged Chopra. All she had to do now was escape from the German. But who was the woman? Could she be an American member of the Green Brigade? And if the Brigade was involved, why had they attacked Haussler? Then again, maybe the Russians had not told them about Haussler, so the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing ... perhaps the Euros and Americans had new teams after her now?

  She checked her own radar and saw that Haussler had turned south up the main road running parallel with the beach. No, he had not dusted her. Not yet.

  Her GPS map showed the Lazare Picault hotel lying to the north. From there she’d hail a taxi. There would be no flying off the island. Haussler already had the airport under his lock and key. As much as she dreaded needing the help, the Snow Maiden would need to call Patti to arrange for an exit by sea.

  But one last task. From her sling bag she withdrew a battery-operated device that resembled a cell phone. She switched it on and plugged in her height and weight, and the device began to produce a heat source that would be detected by an IR sensor and draw attention. From a distance, the source could be mistaken for a person, although the closer you got, the more readily identifiable the unit became. She left the decoy in the bush and trotted off, nearly running straight into a tall man dressed in a plain green uniform. He had a rifle pointed at her chest.

  The man spoke in Russian, obviously his native tongue. “He runs that way, I run this way. I get lucky. He doesn’t.”

  “Oh, really?” she asked, the Russian rolling off her tongue and feeling like an old friend.

  “He wants us to take you alive.”

  “You’re Spetsnaz?” she asked.

  “The best.”

  “But you work for Haussler? A German? Then you’re just a dog.”

  He took a step forward. “Put your gun in the dirt.”

  “I like my gun right here, in my hand.”

  “Then I’m going to shoot you.”

  “I thought you were taking me alive.”

  “I’m going to shoot you in the leg. You have nice legs. Too bad.”

  He was in the middle of his grin when she shot him in the head so quickly that even she gasped.

  His head snapped back, and he thudded to the ground. She seized his rifle, then swore through a chill. It was worse than she’d thought. Haussler had a team of Spetsnaz at his beck and call.

  She took a deep breath.

  And ran.

  SEVEN

  Banyan Tree Seychelles Resort

  Mahé Island

  Republic of the Seychelles

  “It’s coming from right there,” said Lakota, pointing toward a narrow patch of shrubbery cutting across the back side of the dunes like a jagged scar.

  They’d been drawing up slowly on the heat source in an attempt to ambush the operator lying in wait. The Cross-Com was still unable to ID friend or foe and superimpose a targeting reticle over the person.

  As they drew closer, the signature got weird.

  “Fire?” Brent guessed as they shifted farther up into the dunes, then crouched even lower as they neared the source, now glowing brilliantly in their HUDs.

  “No, it’s not fire,” said Lakota. “No scent. No smoke. I think I know what we have here ...” She moved ahead, leaned over, and picked up the device in her gloved hands.

  Brent hurried up beside her. “Wow, decoy.”

  “Just to slow us down.”

  “Schleck?” Brent called. “Launch the drone.”

  “Roger that.”

  From his vantage point high in the hills, Schleck would activate and send airborne one of Ghost Recon’s latest UAV6a Cypher drones, no larger than the size of a Frisbee and equipped with a comprehensive array of high-tech sensors, including chemical and radiation detection. Brent had been holding off on using the device because he never had much luck with them. They’d crash or get whacked by the enemy before he collected any usable data. His colleagues used them with great efficiency, but the gods of technology never smiled down on him. And worse, after each mission he’d have to answer for the cost. It didn’t matter whether he was the operator or one of his people. He had no luck, but that excuse wasn’t good enough for his superiors.

  But what the hell; he’d take another gamble now ...

  “Drone away,” announced Schleck.

  As Brent and Lakota set out once more, following footprints that still held the slightest trace of a heat source, Schleck said the drone was closing on the enemy operators. There were, according to his count, six men remaining. Although the drone’s little motor was relatively silent, Brent knew that if Schleck took the bird in too close, one or more of the bad guys would go duck hunting. He warned Schleck about that.

  “Roger that, Captain. Got news on the primary target and pursuer. They’ve split up. One’s heading north, the other south. Not sure who’s who, though ... Would you like me to follow one?”

  “Not yet. Stay with the others and report back.”

  “You got it.”

  “There’s a hotel to the north,” said Lakota, reading something in her monocle, assumedly her GPS.

  “North it is.”

  They followed the dunes, the heavy sand beginning to slow them. In the distance, lights from the next hotel glimmered, and it wasn’t two minutes later when Brent heard a faint rush of air and knew what was happening.

  “Get down!”

  He grabbed Lakota by the back of her shirt collar and drove her onto her back, into the sand. The explosion tore into the dunes behind them.

  “Captain, I’m sorry, I lost them for a minute. But now you got two guys on your six, one hundred meters out,” said Schleck. “Cross-Com says that grenade was a Russian 99Z. These guys are packing the hot stuff.”

  Brent’s head was still spinning from the drop and subsequent burst. Yet he and Lakota rolled over onto their bellies and propped up onto their elbows. Targeting reticles began to float across his HUD.

  The enemy operators advanced, drawing up on the next dune. For a moment, Brent got a bead on one, his reticle flashing crimson. He squeezed off a salvo, but the guy dropped quickly back behind the rocks.

  “They’re trying to slow us down and keep us busy while they get the Snow Maiden,” said
Lakota.

  Brent answered through a groan, “I know.”

  The second guy was shifting left in an attempt to flank, but Lakota was on him, tracking for a second until she fired three shots, and Brent watched the target fall.

  “One more,” she said, her voice coming in a near-purr, feline and deadly.

  If he hadn’t switched his gaze back to the rocks he would’ve missed sight of the first guy, hurling his next grenade.

  Moments like this sometimes came at him in an almost underwater slowness.

  But sometimes they came in a hypersensitive way, as though the world were suddenly being fast-forwarded, the contrast jacked up to ten, every sense tingling—which was how he viewed the battle zone now.

  He shouted to Lakota and they bolted around the rocks to the next ditch, where, at the foot of a palm, they dropped again, like baseball players diving for home plate.

  A rumbling concussion shook the ground. Within the next heartbeat, shattered stone began raining over them in a moment that seemed torn from the Book of Revelation. The 99Z wasn’t quite as sophisticated as Ghost Recon’s grenades, but the device did have a nasty byproduct—if it didn’t kill you, it dusted you with nanobot trackers so the next grenade could better lock on.

  Knowing this, Brent burst up from his cover and ran directly at the rock face behind which stood their attacker.

  This wasn’t some foolhardy attempt at bravado, or some selfless act to earn himself a posthumous Medal of Honor.

  Brent just knew how to kill this guy: Fight fire with fire.

  He already had one of his own grenades in hand, so as the guy popped up to set free his next one, Brent’s bomb was already in the air.

  The light of that tiny engine streaking away like a frightened firefly was enough to make Brent gasp, “Yes.”

  It was the single-second moment of surprise that doomed the bad guy. He’d assumed he would finish his prey, came up, and realized he’d been had.

  His mouth fell open before the missile-like grenade struck him dead-on in the chest. He exploded in a small conflagration, an arm tumbling here, a leg there.

  “Come on!” hollered Lakota.

  “On my way!” Brent answered, jogging back toward her.

  “Captain, I just spotted the primary target,” said Schleck. “I know you said stick with the bad guys, but I just put the drone in tight—and it’s definitely her.”

  The Snow Maiden reached the short wrought-iron fence that marked the perimeter of the hotel grounds. To her right lay the long, circular drive leading up to the valet station and the taxis. To her left stood the entrance to a labyrinthine series of walkways between clusters of bungalows not unlike those found at her own hotel. It was all quite posh and welcoming.

  She paused a second, panting, heard the curious hum from above, then glanced up. She cursed in Russian as she frowned at the tiny UFO marking her every move.

  No, this wasn’t Haussler’s doing, was it? The Americans liked to play with these little surveillance robots, but so did the Euros.

  She drew her suppressed pistol, steadied herself, and then with a quick twist of her torso she aimed up, expecting the drone to engage in some evasive maneuver.

  It didn’t.

  She fired.

  Only after she hit it dead-on did the thing veer left, its motor whining as though it’d been stripped of all grease. She took another shot, dead-on again, and the thing plunged unceremoniously behind the tree canopy. Thump. It crashed somewhere in the forest below. She gave a slight snort and sprinted up the driveway, toward the valet station.

  There, she paid one taxicab driver to head to the airport, while she took another cab to make her rendezvous with Patti’s people, whom she’d call en route.

  The cabdriver was a lean, dark-haired man who seemed more rodent than human. He glanced back and gave her a salacious grin. In broken English, he asked, “Are you on vacation?”

  She almost smiled.

  By the time Brent and Lakota reached the Lazare Picault hotel, Schleck had already reported that two cars had left approximately five minutes prior. One was heading toward the airport; the other had taken the beach road northward and had then turned into a heavily wooded area, at which time the satellite had lost it. He’d added that the remaining operators had fallen back toward the coastline, collapsing on the head operator, who’d gone south.

  “Ghost Lead, this is Hammer,” called Dennison. “We’ve IDed the man in the Snow Maiden’s villa as Heinrich Haussler. He’s a German spy and double agent. He worked with the Snow Maiden at the GRU. We’ve reason to believe the GRU has hired him to capture her.”

  “Wonderful. So now we’ve got competition. Is he a secondary target? Can I take him out?”

  “Absolutely. However, if you can take him alive, he’d be another valuable asset to us.”

  “Roger that. I’m thinking now she sent a decoy car over to the airport. She’d never go there, but now we’ve lost her in the forest up north. I don’t have any choice. We need to head up there and engage in a ground search.”

  Brent ordered the rest of his team to pursue Haussler and his remaining men, save for Riggs, who was still holding watch over Warda. Meanwhile, he and Lakota slipped up behind one of the taxicab drivers at the hotel. Trembling over the sight of their weapons, the driver was more than happy to oblige.

  They drove up the narrow road, the cab’s headlights playing over nothing more than thick foliage to their left, more dunes to their right. Were it not for work, Brent would’ve had time to admire a spectacular sheet of stars.

  Instead, he kept his attention on his HUD and the images coming in from the others’ cameras. The foot chase down to the shoreline was going nowhere fast, and Brent realized that Haussler and his men had such an appreciable lead that if they were making a water exit, they’d reach their craft well before his people could close the gap. Still, you never knew, so he kept the bulldogs running.

  He and Lakota eventually ordered the driver to pull over along a secluded part of the road. They zipper-cuffed his wrists and ankles and left him sitting in the sand. Someone would pick him up by morning. Brent even gave him some cash for his trouble, which raised the driver’s gap-toothed smile.

  Brent and Lakota took off, reached the jungle near the Snow Maiden’s last location, and spent the next thirty minutes combing the area. They did, in fact, find her cab—or rather it and its driver found them as it rumbled down a narrow road and nearly ran them over. Brent took aim at the driver and ordered him to stop. Then he wrenched the guy from his seat and demanded answers. His gerbil-like face tightened into a knot. “I dropped her off at the end of the trail. That’s all I know. She paid me double.”

  “Where does the trail lead?” Lakota asked.

  “There’s a small boat launch.”

  Brent and Lakota raced back to their taxi and roared off up the trail. The path was barely wide enough for a car, and large fronds dragged across their roof and doors.

  Within five minutes they swung to the right and simply ended at a tall stand of palms. Beyond them lay a meager dock rising crookedly against the dark sea.

  Empty. They’d missed her.

  And Dennison confirmed that. The Snow Maiden had left in a small boat and was met by a larger, high-speed cigar boat that was now streaking away south toward Madagascar. They could follow the boat until it reached the coast, but after that, there was no telling where she’d go. Dennison said she’d seek authority to access one of the JSF’s space-based lasers to order a strike on the boat’s engine.

  Meanwhile, Brent and Lakota would return to the hotel to pick up Riggs and question the woman.

  The Snow Maiden was on the phone with Patti, and she’d learned that the second decoy had gone off without a hitch. At the moment, she was lying in the taxicab’s trunk. That close call with the Americans had left her breathless, but the cabbie had done his job and she would reward him handsomely, once they got back to the hotel.

  Satellites and portable drones ma
de your straightforward escapes all the more complicated, and the routes required stealth, cunning, doubling back, bribery, and whatever other incantations you could conjure up—including some low-tech trunk smuggling that made her feel like a drug runner or illegal border crosser.

  Thus, when it came to escape, she had no ego. That she had foiled them was enough. The how never amounted to much anyway. You did what you had to do. She opened the trunk’s pass-through and called out to the driver, “Nice job!”

  “It’s okay. I’m not scared of them. I hope you do not lie to me. I want the rest of the money.”

  “You’ll have it when we get back. You’d better spend it on your family—and not on hookers and booze.”

  “I will. I promise you.”

  She had no plans to double-cross the driver. She’d learned he had a family and two small daughters, even if he was lusting after his passengers. She would keep her word. She closed her eyes and remembered the promise she’d made to Nikolai at the moment of his passing: I will avenge you.

  Chopra’s plane wouldn’t arrive for another ninety minutes, so he planned to spend the time at Seychelles International Airport, tucked discreetly away in a corner seat. All he could think about was Warda’s safety and whether he really would reconnect with the young sheikh. He’d sent Westerdale back to the hotel, and the man had called to say that the police had cordoned off the place and he couldn’t get close.

  “And let me remind you, Manoj. You’d best retrieve some documentation—if you know what I mean. You cannot waltz into London as Manoj Chopra. You must assume they know who you are. And now they’ll believe that if they get to you, they’ll get to him.”

  Chopra sighed deeply. “You’re right.”

  “We’ve worked together for a while, and I’ve actually grown fond of you, my friend. Please don’t get yourself killed.”

  “I’ll be careful.”