Glass Tiger
- Автор: Горес Джо
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Quercus
- ISBN: 978-1-84724-072-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Glass Tiger». Краткое содержание книги:
Corwin took the revolver from his belt, from his anorak pocket took the empty plastic water bottle and the masking tape. He taped the mouth of the bottle over the gun’s muzzle.
An unmuffled shot might just carry too far in this thin mountain air despite the fact that his pistol fired a .38 short, a relatively low-powered round without a lot of punch or noise. The plastic bottle would trap the escaping gases of his shot, muffle the sound without impeding the bullet’s flight in any way. It was a home-made silencer, good for only one shot, up close.
Thorne went around the end of the massif in a rush, dropped to the ground in thick cover. Waited, panting, for his pulse to slow. The worst kind of a stalk, where you weren’t sure the prey was even out there. The movement he had seen from below could have been a deer, a bighorn sheep, a chimera.
But he knew it was Corwin. Dorst had been right. Alison and Eden receded in his interior ladscape, replaced by the need to match himself against this master woodsman, whatever the outcome. He went down through the scattered tree-growth, slowly, silently. Whenever he passed anything that might conceal a man, he scouted the possible ambush from the side before moving on.
Corwin climbed up on a ledge and stood there for two minutes, pistol in hand. Caught a glimpse of distant movement, no shot possible. He had to push it, make it happen. He crossed the stream on a fallen log, deliberately leaving wet footprints on the decaying wood. From the end he leaped into the brush beyond, snapping twigs, rustling leaves, setting up his ambush.
Thorne heard muted snapping and rustling and froze. Moved on downstream. Wet tracks where Corwin had crossed a fallen log to the lower side. Thick growth over there where Corwin would wait for Thorne to cross the log. Still hiding in plain sight.
Thorne crawled away upstream, slowly, silently on splayed elbows and knees. Found a place well out of sight of the log that was narrow enough so he could leap over the rushing water.
He went back downstream on the lower side, moving with the silence of his years in Tsavo, expecting every moment to see some darker shadow in the undergrowth, his Randall Survivor in hand. Bring on the nightmare. But he saw no shadow. No Corwin.
Out-thought again. Anger stifled angst. Boldly he leaped up onto the log to examine the tracks. Yes. They went both ways. Corwin had recrossed to the uphill side, had gotten into the water to wade upstream while Thorne went downstream, the sound of his passage masked by water rattling over pebbles.
Corwin came out of the thigh-deep water in a rush. Rolled into a clump of willows on the down-side bank, crushing them slightly, but not enough, he hoped, to attract notice. He let himself relax, became at one with pale stems and pale leaves. His silenced revolver was ready. A quick shadow flitted by overhead and a Steller’s jay landed on a nodding branch over the water, head cocked, staring at him.
Across the stream, the tracker stepped partway out of cover, eyes searching uphill — in the wrong direction. Didn’t realize Corwin had recrossed the stream. The ambush had worked.
Corwin pulled the trigger as the jay yelled and fled. The tracker’s arms flew wide and his cap flew off as he fell in that unmistakable bag-of-bones way that meant a mortal hit, his rifle clattering on the rocks a dozen feet away.
Corwin had seen it a hundred times: a man couldn’t fake a fall like that. He started to wade into the stream to make sure the man was dead. But there was blood on the waxen face, on the rocks under the head, and he was out of time. He melted into the cover on the downhill side of the noisy torrent.
Thorne came out of it slowly. Shooting pain in his head. He didn’t know where he was, had no memory of anything. But his lizard brain down at the base of his skull knew movement might mean death, so he just opened his eyes without moving his head. Above him, sunlight through hardwood branches, pine boughs. Not Panama. Not Africa. Not the desert. The sound of an endless freight train rolling by was a rushing torrent. The mountains.
It was coming back, in fragments. A muted POP like a breaking twig. Ambushed. A home-made silencer, empty soda bottle, water bottle, one shot only. Corwin! How long had he been out? Fifteen, twenty minutes? Why had he been unconscious?
He sat up, slowly. Abominably aching head. His cap was a yard away, his rifle a dozen feet away. Must have thrown his arms wide as he went down. Blood on the rocks. Carefully probing fingers found a flap of loose skin on his forehead. Hit his head as he fell. He looked across the rushing stream. A crushed clump of willows on the other side.
How had Corwin missed at a range of six yards?
Then he heard again the Squawk! and midnight flash of Steller’s jay and Yes! More pieces slipped into place. Alerted, he had been letting himself go limp and fall like a dead body even as the slug snatched away his cap. His head hit the rocks, knocked him unconscious. Blood flowed, so he really did look dead. And Corwin hadn’t wanted to risk a second, unmuffled shot.
Thorne stood up, dreadfully dizzy, squinched his eyes at his watch. One-eleven. The speech was scheduled for three p.m. Follow the stream down the slope. Hurry!
Corwin dropped awkwardly into his spider hole, unslung the rifle from his shoulder and leaned it against the rock wall still in its carry-case. He rested his butt against the same wall, hands on knees, panting. He was winded but here. Unseen. He reached under the overhang to bring out his tripod and set it up.
He slid his bolt-action model 70 Magnum, made by Winchester in 1951, often called the Rifleman’s Rifle, from its worn fleece-lined soft-leather carry case. Its metal was heat-treated to withstand the high temperature of thousand-yard shooting. Already attached was his old tried-and-true Unertl 36-power scope that was nearly as long as the rifle barrel. Already sighted-in.
Finally, he attached the rifle to its tripod. Took out his H & H Magnum shells in .300 caliber with their four-inch-long Sierra 280-grain slugs. He slid a single shell into the chamber. He didn’t plan on needing more than one.
Thorne glassed the meadow far below. There were Hatfield’s FBI Hostage/Rescue boys right where they were supposed to be, 750 yards out from the empty podium — facing the wrong way!
And somewhere among those tumbled boulders and sharded granite and twisted pine shrubs above them, between Thorne and the Feebs, was Corwin, prepping his shot. Thorne’s self-delusions were gone. He had always known, deep inside, that he would be brought to this. Him or me. Or be Sharon’s glass tiger and let the president die.
23
Not quite mugging for the cameras, President Gus Wallberg shook hands with Ranger Rick and Sam Jones beside the steel-barred cages that held Smokey and Pooh. He had already chatted and posed with Laura Givens and Sean McLean for the media.
‘We’ll be opening the cage doors to release the bears when you start your speech, Mr. President,’ Ranger Rick explained.
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ objected Jaeger. ‘At the end of his speech, not the beginning.’
Jaeger could just see a pair of grizzly bears charging the podium in the middle of the President’s speech and being cut down by automatic weapons fire on the six o’clock evening news.
‘We know these two bears really well, sir,’ said Rick. ‘We’ll have to coax them out. The timing will work out.’
Wallberg wasn’t so sure. Vicious black deerflies buzzed around them, and he had forgotten that wild things smelled so... well, wild. He gladly started away, encased by a moving diamond of Secret Service agents.
Jaeger had been right. If Corwin was lurking here, he would die. Nothing bad could happen to Wallberg on this day.