A Death in Sweden(53)

They ran hard, a good fifty yards into the woods, before cutting off on another path, heading towards the car that had been parked ahead of them, roughly parallel to the track. They stopped then and dropped down into a squat, shielded from view by the undergrowth which was thick and almost impenetrable in places.

Dan couldn’t hear anything at first, as both of them fought to slow their breathing. But then, as the silence took hold they began to pick up voices, one ahead of them through the trees, the other more distant and off to the left. He got the feeling they were talking to each other on the phone.

They were still listening when a shot went off, cracking through the branches off to their left. A couple of birds took flight in response.

Whispering, Dan said, “Just shooting for the hell of it, seeing if he can flush us out.” He put his rucksack on the floor, attached the silencer to his gun and said, “You stay here, look out for people approaching from the left. I’ll be back in a minute.”

She looked ready to object, but he was already on his way, moving fast and low through the undergrowth, going out of his way to stay on the straggling natural paths that cut through it, ending up circling behind the two guys who’d originally been ahead of them.

He stood behind the partial cover of a tree then and looked out. He could see the parked car, facing away from him, one guy standing closer to Dan’s hiding place, smoking and kicking his heels. The other guy, the one on the phone, was in front of the car.

He didn’t recognize either of them. The one at the back was solidly built, the one on the phone more sinewy, but he could imagine both of them working the door of a nightclub. They were both dark-haired, the bigger one almost a skinhead, a white scar visible through the hair on his skull. The guy on the phone was speaking in a Slavic language of some sort, and that matched their looks too.

There were too many trees between him and them to be sure of hitting them both from here. He looked at the undergrowth, following the nearest rough path to where it hit the track, but it was a good twenty yards beyond the car, not a great place to emerge.

He could always walk through the undergrowth, and it looked mostly like bracken, but if he hit a patch of briars he’d be in big trouble. Briefly, both guys had turned so that they had their backs to him, so Dan moved one tree closer, then a second. It did seem to be bracken alone, and he was close enough now that he might even have been willing to take a chance at shooting them from there.

Then the phone call came to an abrupt end and Dan heard the motorbike kick into life again in the distance. It had taken them long enough, but they’d decided on their next move. The big guy stubbed out his cigarette on the floor and walked towards his partner.

Dan slid out from behind the tree and moved towards them, easing through the bracken. And he was almost on them when he heard a violent rustling in front of him and an explosion of movement and feathers as a game bird of some sort burst out of the bracken and flew up into the branches above.

Both guys turned, the big guy going for his gun, the other only momentarily hampered by still having his phone in his hand. Dan fired, hitting the big guy in the chest. He fell back against the car and Dan fired at the other, hitting his shoulder. He dropped his phone, but scurried behind the front of the car.

The big guy was wheezing, trying to get control of his gun arm again. Dan shot him in the head, then threw himself into the bracken so that he was lying on the floor near the edge of the path. He could see the smaller guy now, crouching behind the front of the car. Dan fired twice, under the car, both hitting him—he crumpled onto the dirt floor.

Then a round from the sniper rifle hit the windshield with explosive force, shattering it. A second round came a moment or two later, hitting one of the front tires. The guy was pretty good, there was no doubting that, hitting the car at that distance, with Dan’s own SUV in between.

So that had ruled out the possibility of taking their car, and Dan also didn’t wait now to check that the smaller guy was dead—he was pretty bashed up at the least. Dan scrambled back to his feet and ran back towards Inger, conscious all the time of the motorbike, the sound of which he couldn’t quite pin down to a specific direction.

He saw her lowering her gun again as he emerged along the path, and he nodded, liking the fact that she was taking no chances.

He dropped down next to her and said, “I took out the two who were over there, one dead, the other dead or badly hurt. The guy with the sniper rifle’s pretty good though.”

“He was shooting at the car?”

“Yeah, took out the windshield and one of the front tires.”

The motorbike revved and produced some weird kind of Doppler shift as if it was suddenly coming towards them, and they both looked into the woods.

Inger pointed at the path on which Dan had just returned, and said, “We can either stay and try to get the other three, or we can take that path until we’re out of the forest.”

“I think if we follow that path it would put us on the right side of the woods to get into Auxerre.”

Again, the motorbike noise shifted, as if he was sweeping through the woods trying to flush them out.

Dan looked in that direction and said, “We could take them, I’m sure we could, but we don’t know how long it would take, or how many more people they’ve got nearby.”

“So we go?”

He nodded, but didn’t move, and said, “Only trouble is, as long as we’re here in the trees, the sniper’s got a tough job, and the bike doesn’t have much of an advantage. We get out of these woods, we’re in open country.”