Authors: Matt Hilton
The Devil's Anvil
Also by Matt Hilton
Dead Men’s Dust
Judgement and Wrath
Slash and Burn
Cut and Run
Blood and Ashes
Dead Men’s Harvest
No Going Back
Rules of Honour
The Lawless Kind
Short Stories in Ebook
Joe Hunter: Six of the Best
Dead Fall – A Joe Hunter Short Story
Red Stripes – A Joe Hunter Short Story
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Matt Hilton 2015
The right of Matt Hilton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 473 61001 9
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
The one is for Sue Fletcher
‘Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.’
– Michael Corleone (paraphrasing Niccolò Machiavelli),
The Godfather Part II
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola
Contents
1
‘Keep your head down this time, Billie, and don’t move. They won’t see us if you stay still.’
There were three men in a GMC Suburban hunting us, two in the front and one in the back. The bottle-green SUV was canted on its chassis, the right side sitting in a deep rut in the road where it crested the hill, the other wheels on the grass embankment. One of the men held something to his face, the glint of moonlight off lenses betraying a set of night vision binoculars. He scanned the road and the forest on both sides. His friends relied on their unassisted vision as they checked out the road both front and back.
They couldn’t see the woman or me.
Wilhelmina ‘Billie’ Womack was scrunched in a hollow in the forest floor, with a stack of broken twigs piled in front of her offering further concealment. I was ten feet away, crouching behind the bole of an ancient fir tree. A storm had torn down the upper half of the tree during a previous season, and the tangle of its brittle branches hid me from the watchful eyes of the hunters in the Suburban.
‘Where are the others?’ Billie whispered. ‘What if they’re moving in behind us, Joe?’
‘It’s always a possibility, but I won’t hear them if you keep talking. Do as I say, keep still and stay silent.’
Billie was a spirited woman, not someone who ordinarily took orders lightly. But I was glad to find that this time she knew I was speaking sense, and that it was best to keep her head down.
The Suburban didn’t move. The men inside continued to search the woodland, but none of them was looking our way. The road before them wasn’t an easy track to negotiate, not even for an off-roader. Best-case scenario was if they reversed back the way they’d come, took another route through the forest. Yet it seemed they weren’t ready to give up on the hunt. I listened. Distantly I could hear another engine, alternately revving and petering out as a second SUV pushed its way along another trail. The terrain was hilly, densely forested, and though there was no way of pinpointing the direction of the second vehicle it sounded far off and of no immediate concern. A helicopter kept buzzing overhead, but the canopy was too thick for its crew to see us. More worrying were the searchers on foot who for all I knew could be close.
Occasionally I heard the crackling of twigs, but again the sound was distant. Didn’t mean that a more accomplished stalker wasn’t nearby. My friend Rink could move through this forest without setting a foot wrong or leaving a distinct track, and there were plenty of trackers as skilled as him, some more so. Truth was, the people hunting us were more capable than many. They didn’t rush trying to flush us out; once they’d got in position, they were controlled and methodical in their search. Someone guiding them was laying down a search grid and sooner or later they’d stumble on to our position.
I was armed, albeit lightly, with a SIG Sauer P226 and a folding knife. But those that sought us came with heavier armament: rifles, automatic pistols. It was serious artillery to bring down an unarmed, untrained woman. Our only advantage was that those chasing Billie didn’t realise who was with her. The only person who could have told them about me was in no position to do that. He was lying at the bottom of a ravine with a broken neck.
The man with the binoculars swept the ground before us, but continued past without being alerted to our presence. He must have said something, because the driver brought the Suburban forward a few yards. The big car tipped like a seesaw as it negotiated its new position, but it inched forward again. Then, once out of the deepest ruts, the driver steered it down the hill and so close that I could smell the exhaust fumes that plumed from the tail pipe.
‘They’re going to see us . . .’ Billie’s voice was high-pitched, fraught with anxiety.
‘Hold your position. They’re not aware of you, and things will stay that way unless you move.’
‘Please, Joe,’ Billie said. ‘Don’t let them take me.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised.
My pledge might have rung empty to her. Billie had come to me for protection, and in her mind that might mean firm and resolute action, not hiding like rodents in a burrow. But I was one man against many, outgunned and outmanoeuvred, and her best hope for safety was that we’d go unnoticed by the hunters. I was itching to do something more telling than crouch behind the fallen tree, and if it had been only my life on the line I’d have probably gone for broke. I bit down on the urge to shoot it out with the men in the SUV.
They passed us by.
I sighed as the Suburban jounced a route along the trail and headed up the next incline. I followed the big car’s progress, seeing it through drifting rags of blue smoke that hung in the cold moonlight like will-o’-the-wisps. As it crested the next rise it paused again as the men inside checked the terrain for any telltale signs.
Billie adjusted her position so that she could check where the car was and I heard the crackle of twigs beneath her elbows. The sound was a faint rustle at most, but in the stillness of the forest she might as well have jumped up and down, waving her arms and yelling ‘Over here!’. A corresponding crackle alerted me to the location of something moving through the brush. I hoped in that fraction of a second that it was merely a forest creature, startled by our proximity, but knew our luck was out.
Twisting round, I brought my SIG to bear on the man who’d risen from a dry watercourse about twenty feet behind us. He was wearing cammo fatigues to help blend with the forest. It seemed a lot of trouble to go to when hunting a townie like Billie, as did the rifle the man aimed. The only saving grace was that my movement surprised him. He’d been stalking the woman, closing in on her, and was up until that moment unaware of my presence. He was no weekend warrior though, and my presence gave him only a split second’s pause. He swung his rifle on me even as I shot at him.