Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [12]
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A hunted man will usually go for a hiding place below normal eyelevel and his pursuers will look to the ground in their search for him. The instinctive crouch is common to hunter and hunted alike. This was why Keefer had climbed up into one of the trees to wait.
By full dark no one had come and he was satisfied that, for the moment anyway, his adversary considered him dead.
Whoever it was might be godlike in other ways, but at least they weren’t omniscient. He had thought while he waited, but for the life of him he couldn’t work out which of the two possibilities it was most likely to be. And that was the point: it was for the life of him...
Carefully he took a second night-sight lens from his weapons belt and dropped it into his left eye. He blinked rapidly to position the tiny image intensifier and waited for his optic nerves to adjust to the return to stereoscopic vision.
Some definition was lost now that both eyes contained the lenses but flat vision, no matter how bright and clear, was no good when you were moving. And moving fast and far was Reefer’s next priority. It was only a matter of time before the forensic team finished sifting the roasted crud they had scraped off the road and discovered that he was not one of the ingredients. He needed to be long gone before that happened.
At the base of the tree he paused briefly to allow his muscles to uncramp. He breathed deeply and slowly, consciously relaxing and boosting the oxygen in his blood to its optimum level. At the same time he switched a moment’s total concentration to each of his senses in turn. Sight, hearing, smell, touch, even the taste of the air around him was for a fleeting instant his only contact with reality, the only input his brain acknowledged. It was a personal discipline he had painstakingly developed and practised until it was virtually automatic. In a few seconds every sense was tuned and Keefer had become the perfect refinement of his ancestral line. The fine-honed instincts of the killer-ape were balanced and ready to be channelled by the brain of the thinking man.
He moved off, heading away from the road towards the fields on the far edge of the wood. As the trees and undergrowth thinned out he increased his pace, so that by the time he reached the last of the cover he was running.
Before he hit the open ground he changed direction suddenly, ran parallel to the boundary of the wood, then swerved again and headed out at a flat run.
Almost immediately a prickling blaze of small-calibre tracer bullets burned through the darkness. Thin streams of killing light smashed through the wood at the point where Keefer should have emerged if he had followed the direct line into the open. But he had not followed the direct line and this made the use of tracers a bad tactical error.
The incandescent brightness blinded the marksmen’s night-scopes leaving their target unseen and momentarily unseeable. That gave Keefer the edge. Although the sudden light blinded him too he plunged on, his eyes closed, his remaining senses hyped-up and compensating. And Keefer was fast.
The firing stopped as suddenly as it had begun. In the abrupt darkness Keefer dropped to the ground. Although his eyes were closed he knew he had flanked two firing positions.
Soundlessly he drew the ancient handgun he favoured for multiple contests. His nose told him these were men.
Androids didn’t sweat or touch the air with the taste of fear.
As the afterimage faded from the lids he opened his eyes again. In a shallow depression about twenty metres from where he lay were two men. They were scanning the wood with their night-scopes, anxiously searching for signs of movement. Keefer snaked towards them.
From a range of five metres he carefully shot one of them in the base of the skull. The roar of the gun and the impact of the bullet, which tore off most of his companion