Hunters - Matt Rogers (good novels to read TXT) 📗

have pained her greatly, but she obliged. He could sense her trying valiantly to control her breathing, settle her heart rate, quash the combination of pain and panic that made her close to hysterical.

Within seconds, she had it under control. She became silent and motionless beside him.

It never failed to impress him how expertly she’d adapted to life-or-death situations.

It had taken him far longer when he first began his career.

Seconds passed, blending into minutes.

The rain beat down, relentless, incessant.

Then a woman’s scream echoed through the ruins.

58

Thirty rounds apiece expended.

No additional curved magazines in their possession.

Game over.

Or not.

King counted seven rounds fired from the jungle, then an absence of follow-up shots. There had to be more on the way.

Unless…

Unless the hunter was carrying an M45 MEU(SOC) pistol, which sported seven rounds per mag. It would make sense, given the weapon’s prevalence in the United States Marine Corps. And the reports had sounded powerful. They could very well be a result of the MEU(SOC)’s trademark .45 ACP cartridges.

But didn’t the hunter have spare magazines? Only a fool wouldn’t.

Then the man emerged from the tree line. Just walked right out into the mud, gun holstered, hands spread wide apart. He was enormous. Six inches taller than King, at least eighty pounds heavier. He looked like a Viking. Scandinavian blood, perhaps. Blonde hair and beard. King couldn’t make out his eyes, but he imagined they were blue. The guy lumbered out into no man’s land, moving toward King and Violetta’s cover.

Violetta breathed, ‘What on earth…’

The giant shouted through the downpour. ‘You’re out, right?’

King froze.

Violetta whispered something. Her words were whipped away, washed out of earshot by the rain.

King said, ‘What?’

Louder, Violetta said, ‘How does he know?’

‘He counted,’ King said. ‘Just like I counted.’

‘You were counting semi-automatic shots. We unloaded these.’ She motioned to her useless Kalashnikov.

King shook his head. ‘It’s all the same to people like us. I used to count automatic rounds.’

‘People like us?’

Outliers, King thought. Elite operatives.

He stood up, rising above the cover of the barricade. There was no use cowering. The giant knew where they were, and there was nowhere they could run to fetch backup guns. But he hovered there, hesitant to step out.

The giant noticed his hesitancy, and spread his arms wide as if catching the rain. His wingspan was enormous. Then the man pivoted, a slow, full revolution. Proving he had only the one holster, and that the gun in it had no magazine inserted. He’d already discarded the empty mag. King saw it was in fact an M45 MEU(SOC).

King’s focus narrowed in on the big man. Assessing form, movement, stride. Breaking down the way he lumbered, how his body mass was distributed, where the weaknesses lay.

Violetta evidently saw the cogs turning in King’s brain. ‘Jason…’

King stepped out from behind cover. Turned so he could take one last look at her. Despite the rain and the mud and the fear, she was beautiful. The best thing that had ever happened to him.

If you fail, she dies.

It was a different breed of motivation. Now it was indescribable. He couldn’t feel his bad arm, couldn’t feel his broken nose, couldn’t feel the bruising all over his body, the soreness and fatigue and weakness. It no longer existed. Because this was about something bigger than his own survival.

He rounded the barricade and walked through the mud towards the giant.

59

Opal and Topaz weighed north of two hundred pounds each, but they moved through the jungle without a sound.

Even without the background roar of a storm, no one would have heard them. Every step was placed intentionally, and they balanced their silent movement with beautifully synchronised sweeps of their weapons. They maintained interlocking fields of fire, their M45 MEU(SOC) pistols covering every exposed inch of the terrain ahead. The moment either of them spotted anything strange ahead, it was game over for their foe.

But despite their training, they missed something.

Opal was thirty feet from where the tree line opened out onto the archaeological site when he put his boot down and felt a human spine underfoot.

He jolted back, locking his weapon onto the target. For the first time in months, his heart rate had amplified unintentionally. The second he made an odd movement, Topaz was there to assist, mirroring the aim with his own pistol.

Lucky they didn’t shoot, because the woman was defenceless.

She’d camouflaged herself better than a damn chameleon. Her windbreaker and jeans were covered head-to-toe in mud, and she’d been lying facedown on the jungle floor, not moving a solitary muscle. If Opal hadn’t trodden on her, he’d have swept right past her without a second look.

Now he rolled her over and jammed the gun in her face. She was a pretty Latino, but he couldn’t discern much more than that. There was a curved knife in her hands, but she released it as soon as she noticed the barrel aimed between her eyes. She clearly realised she’d have no time to use it.

Antônia said, ‘Shit.’

60

King stopped ten feet from the giant.

He wiped his face, clearing his eyes of rainwater. He refused to display emotion. He kept himself loose and supple, because tightening like a coiled spring for no reason simply drains the gas tank. When he threw a strike, he’d put everything into it. Until then…

King looked upward into the man’s eyes. A strange sensation, but he didn’t let it show. Usually he loomed over everyone.

He said, ‘Let me guess. Topaz?’

The giant cocked his head, then shook it. ‘Close. That’s my colleague. You know him?’

‘I know you go by gemstones. I guessed one.’

That drew a smile. ‘Diamond.’

‘This is stupid, Diamond.’

‘Depends,’ Diamond said. ‘For a coward, yes. For a man so desperate to cling to life out of selfish preservation instincts, yes. For me, it’s the purest test there is.’

‘You don’t have spare mags?’

Diamond reached into the back of his utility belt and produced a full magazine of .45 ACP cartridges. A single round could blow King’s head apart. Diamond tossed the magazine away, where it slapped into