MORGAN, COOK AND Lewis threw themselves to the ground within a half second of hearing the first round crack by. By the sound of the round’s low buzz, Morgan knew that the bullets were subsonic, and from a pistol. The fire was accurate, and so the firer must be extremely lucky, or within fifty meters.
No—firers, Morgan corrected himself, hearing overlapping shots as broken branches and splinters fell down onto his head.
“They’re over there!” Morgan said, calculating the location by observing the strike marks as the bullets thwacked into the trees.
Lewis sprang up and half stumbled behind a small boulder, her feet slipping on the wet soil. The shooters saw her move and sparks flew up from the rock as rounds ricocheted from its surface.
Morgan watched, heart in mouth, as Lewis raised herself into that fire and began to shoot double taps at their assailants. Thinking that her fire would distract them, he took the chance to bound into better cover, grabbing Cook by her jacket and pulling her with him as she scrabbled along on her hands.
“Are you hit?” Morgan asked her.
“I’m good,” she told him. Morgan felt his chest sag in relief.
“Change position!” he shouted to Lewis, and the police officer ducked. Sure enough, a few rounds smacked just behind where her head had been.
“Give me the gun!” Morgan called to her, crawling forward.
“Fuck off!” Lewis snarled back, rising from her new cover to deliver two double taps, before dropping down again and scuttling into a new position. “This isn’t Hollywood—I don’t need the Americans to save me.”
“Christ, she’s enjoying this.” Cook shook her head, crawling beside Morgan—without a weapon herself, the former soldier had never felt more vulnerable, or useless.
“Bloody right I am!” Lewis shouted. “Fuck off back home!” she shouted over the rocks at the attackers.
And perhaps they listened, because the echo of gunshots through the trees was steadily giving way to the hammer of the rain. Morgan looked through a hand-width gap between rocks and saw two silhouettes moving a hundred meters away through the foliage. They were not firing now, but one shape moved as the other held position and took aim. Either they’re military, Morgan thought, or they took the time to learn a killer’s profession.
Lewis was looking over the sights of her pistol as Morgan reached her side.
“This is gonna be a lot of bloody paperwork,” the police officer said, panting for breath.
“Thank you,” Morgan told her, feeling guilty that he had ever doubted the woman. “And now, if it’s all right with you, officer, I’d like to go get these bastards.”
Chapter 33
JACK MORGAN’S BOOTS thumped into the wet dirt of the path as he ran back to the Range Rover. He was wary of an ambush, but the shooters had moved off in a different direction—Morgan reasoned that the angle meant they would reach the vehicle first. Cook was warning him that there could be a second group of shooters waiting at the vehicle, but Morgan was willing to take that risk—he had to. He had made sure that he was at the front, ahead of the only armed person in their team—if Morgan was wrong and there was a second ambush, then he would be the first one into it. It was a gamble, but every second bought the shooters time to escape.
He saw the Range Rover through the trees and motioned for Lewis and Cook to stop as he ran on alone. Drawing closer, he could see that the vehicle’s tires had been slashed, but that fact gave him no concern—he had insisted that the Range Rover come with run-flats. Jack Morgan had learned the hard way how vulnerable tires can be, and how useless the rest of the vehicle becomes without them.
“Come on!” he called, happy that the coast was clear.
“Over there!” Cook pointed as she sprinted.
Morgan turned to follow her indication, and spotting the blurred shape of a four-by-four moving two hundred yards to his right.
“Get in! Let’s go!” he urged, jumping behind the wheel himself. Lewis piled into the passenger seat and Cook the rear. They had barely touched the seats before Morgan was gunning the engine and slewing forward through the wet muck of the clearing.
“Jane, keep trying the phones!” Morgan instructed as he blasted the Range Rover through the narrow track between the trees. “Lewis, what’s your ammo count?”
“Magazine and a half,” she told him. “Twenty-five rounds.”
It would have to do. Ahead of them, on a parallel track, Morgan could see a black Land Rover Defender whipping through the branches. In that vehicle were at least two shooters—what was their ammo count?
“Still nothing on the phones,” Cook announced, cursing as they hit a hard bump and her head bounced off Lewis’s headrest.
“The tracks merge soon!” Lewis shouted, the Ordnance Survey map spread on her lap. “No more than half a K!”
“We’ll let them get out in front,” Morgan told her. “We need to trap them, but we can’t do it until we’ve got help on the way.”
“No telling how much ammo they’ve got,” Lewis agreed.
Up ahead, Morgan saw a figure loom large in the window of the Defender’s passenger seat.
“Down!” he shouted as a pistol’s muzzle flashed and the first of three shots thumped like a hammer strike against the Range Rover’s hood.
“Down!” he ordered again, this time because Lewis was making to stand up on her chair, pushing upward as she retracted the Range Rover’s sunroof.
Two more shots cracked. The driver’s-side mirror shattered, its electrics hanging like spilled guts as a warning to Morgan.
“Lewis! Get back in here!” he shouted, but the police markswoman was already firing steady single shots, Morgan chancing to look from the track as sparks flew from the Defender’s metal.
Lewis’s fourth shot smashed into the passenger window.
“I think I got him!” she shouted, her triumph cut short as Morgan pulled hard on her belt, yanking her down savagely as a low branch swiped hard across the Range Rover’s roof.
“Thanks.” She grinned, knowing that she had been a second from death.
“I think you did get him,” Morgan replied—no more fire was coming from the Land Rover, and it pulled ahead of Morgan, both four-by-fours now on the same narrow track. Outside, the rain began to pour harder, cascading through the Range Rover’s open roof and lashing against its windshield.
“Can you get a plate?” Morgan asked the officer.
“I can’t. I can’t see a bloody thing.”
He was about to say that it was likely covered up anyway, when Cook’s voice came from the back seat—she had found a signal. She was straight onto Private London, coordinating the police’s response. “Pass me the map,” she told Lewis, who retrieved it from the dirty footwell. “I need to send them grid references.”
Confident that there were reinforcements on the way, Morgan knew it was time to play the endgame.
“Next time the track splits, we get ahead of them and box them in.”
“Can’t we just follow them out to the main roads?” Lewis asked. “Let the uniforms take over?”
Morgan shook his head. “They’re armed, and the last thing these roads can handle is a high-speed pursuit. People will get hurt.”
Lewis nodded her head, understanding. Those people would be innocent, unwitting of the game they had been caught up in. Their families would lose loved ones, and never understand the reasons why.
Not so Morgan, Lewis and Cook. Each had made a decision to serve, be it the Marine Corps, police force or army. Each had chosen a life that put others’ needs before their own. Each had chosen a job where the possibility of sacrificing yourself for the good of strangers was a well-known requirement. Cook and Morgan were out of uniform now, but such things were embedded in their characters.
“We’ll keep them bottled up until the cavalry gets here,” Lewis said, accepting what could happen to them in that attempt.