The Hunt: ‘A great thriller...breathless all the way’ – LEE CHILD. T.J. Lebbon

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СКАЧАТЬ was as if Rose had given him not quite enough to survive, and on purpose.

      She wants me to lead them on, survive just long enough for her to do her thing. He wished he didn’t think that, but he could not deny the logic of the idea. She wanted to kill the people she called the Trail; those who organised the hunt, not the hunters themselves. And to do so the hunt had to continue, and she had to draw them in. If he escaped too quickly and his family were killed, her own venture might be over.

      Until this happened to some other poor bastard.

      But he had his own reason to lead on the hunt and not escape. She knew that, and if what she had told him about her own murdered family was true, she knew it better than him. If he escaped, his family would die.

      ‘I need to stay alive. But I can’t escape.’ It was impossible. He could see no good ending to this, and he felt like curling up and crying it all away. Man up, Terri would have said, laughing ironically because over the past few years, when his love of the outdoors had led to new, more extreme adventures, he’d become what she sometimes called ‘gnarly’. You’re just a bit dangerous, she’d sometimes say to him, and he could tell that she liked that.

      ‘Harden the fuck up,’ he said.

      He looked down the hillside again, and three of the five hunters had vanished. In the few seconds that he’d spent looking through the rucksack and feeling sorry for himself, they must have spread out and started up the mountainside, secreting themselves behind scattered rocks and clumps of vegetation. He squinted and scanned close to the road, but he could only see two. Rambo was advancing slowly up the slope, making no effort to hide. Close behind him came another man, fat and already struggling.

      The helicopter started powering up. Something glinted from its interior, the sun glaring from glass, and Chris realised that they were looking for him. They must have spotted him as they were descending, and now one of the bastards from the Trail was trying to give the hunters a head start. He crouched down further, realising that the sudden movement was the worst thing he could have done.

      He didn’t hear the shouted instructions, because they were too far away. But looking between rocks, he could see the shape in the helicopter pointing directly up at his position.

      As the aircraft doors closed and it lifted away in a violent storm of dust, something smacked from a rock thirty feet to his left. It took him a moment to realise it had been a bullet.

      Shouldering the rucksack, Chris hunkered down and crawled back into the rocks, keeping low, climbing one boulder and dropping behind another. Down the slope the helicopter soon rose into view against the mountain opposite. It looked so small and harmless, but he dreaded it coming towards him. It could act as spotter, hovering above him wherever he went and however fast he ran, and it would draw the five hunters towards him like moths to flame.

      Maybe he could run faster than them, move across the terrain quicker. But with the helicopter above there was no escape.

      That’s exactly what they want, he thought. Yet again the hopelessness of the situation smashed in. Any chance he had of saving his family involved becoming a trophy kill for one of those people behind him.

      He wondered what it would feel like to be shot. Would there be pain? Would he know he was going to die? He wasn’t sure which he’d prefer – an injury that killed him slowly, awareness leaking away as darkness came. Or a sudden head shot, bringing death before he knew it.

      The sound of the helicopter changed. He paused, crawled across a low slab of rock and risked a look across the valley. The aircraft was rising, following the line of the road back up towards the ridge where it disappeared. And the car he thought he’d seen up there – the BMW Rose had taken from the Trail people she had killed in his house – was gone.

      More gunshots rang out. They whip-cracked across the valley, and though he listened hard, he did not hear any bullet impacts. They were already shooting blind, flushed with the initial excitement of the hunt.

      He clipped the rucksack tight. In the hip pockets he found a handful of energy gels, and he tore one open and gulped down the sweet contents, placing the empty wrapper back in the pocket. Then he took a moment to examine the steep mountainside above him. If he climbed he would be slow, and an easy target if any of them happened to be a good shot. But if he moved along the slope to the south, he could just make out a slope of jumbled rocks and boulders that led up to a shoulder of the mountain. That’s where he would aim for. There would be cover there, and once up on the ridge he’d be able to make a better judgement about where he was and where he should go.

      Heart thumping, feeling strong and yet terrified, Chris started to run.

       Chapter Ten

       vet

      ‘I was a vet,’ she said. ‘We lived near Chelmsford, nice little village, friendly community. We had good friends. Adam was a landscape gardener. The kids loved the countryside. I treated animals, put them down, made them better. It didn’t feel like I was making a difference, not in the scheme of things. But for every sad owner’s face I saw, there were a dozen happy ones. Sometimes it’s the pets that make a person’s life worthwhile. A little old lady with a scratchy cat, a young boy with his dog. You can tell a lot about people by their pets.’ She turned to Holt where he sat by her window, ever-present bottle of water in his hand. ‘You ever had any pets?’

      ‘No. But I am a vet.’

      Rose snorted, then sniffed back a shuddering sob. Jesus fucking Christ on a bike, how she’d kill for a drink.

      She’d pleaded with him at first, told him how the way to come down was by reducing her intake day by day. But Holt had shaken his head. He wasn’t the sort of man you argued with, or who did things by half. She’d only known him for three days but she recognised that already. Short, slight, bespectacled, hair greying, dark skin weathered and leathery and so lined she couldn’t tell wrinkles from scars, he projected the look of a bookworm, not a mercenary. But he had such stories.

      She’d only heard a few of them so far, but he held the weight of many more. A red history, heavy with death.

      That was in the Comoros, on an island called Anjouan. A man called Badak had already killed three families. He shot the men and women to death, then raped the children and hacked them to pieces with a machete. His men feared him as a demon. I tracked them for three days, shot two of his men from a distance. The others fled. A day later I caught Badak in a snare, tied him to a tree, sliced him from throat to cock, and stuck a lizard inside him. I filmed the whole thing and let the people see.

      The stories were like a dark star within him, the black hole of his endless, terrible experiences drawing her with a dreadful gravity. They promised experience. He promised help. At last, she perceived a route out of the spiral she had descended into.

      She saw a way to hit back.

      ‘Why are you helping me?’ she asked.

      ‘Am I helping you?’

      Rose nodded. She was sweating in the steamy hotel room, shaking with alcohol withdrawal. Every time she closed her eyes she saw her family as she had found them. With a drink inside her, at СКАЧАТЬ