Epilogue
It was about two hours later when I drove my rental Chrysler 200 back down the mountain, around the line of the Pennsylvania State Trooper cars.
Joe Walke sat beside me, and Rosalind and Roxie slept in the back.
“I owe you my life, both of you,” I said to Mr. Walke, as we pulled up in front of a crumbling old Victorian in Marble Spring, a block behind the church.
“You’re good people, Mike. You would have done no different for us, were we in trouble. Good people are the same everywhere. They help each other.”
“They tuned you up pretty good, and you lost your truck and the ATVs. I feel terrible.”
“Ah, the vehicles are insured, and a crack or two to this old noggin ain’t nothing at all. I actually feel sorry for those stupid young men.”
“Sorry for them?”
“Look what we as a nation asked them to do. Go off to war, ride on helicopters, and kill people in some far-off hellhole. Then they come back, and we ignore them. Too busy playing with our phones. We couldn’t care less.
“Any wonder these kids would want to line their own pockets? Hell, everybody else seems to be doing the same thing these days.”
“Not everybody,” I said, and shook his hand.
“So long, Mike,” Mr. Walke said with a wink. He lifted his sleeping granddaughter out of the backseat. “You find yourself around these parts again, look me up. We’ll go down to the veterans’ hall for a jar or two.”
“Will do,” I said, smiling.
He’d just closed the rear door of the car when my phone, sitting there in the drink holder, started to ring. I’d glanced at it coming into town and had seen the screen filled with messages.
“Hello. Mike here,” I said.
“Sweet mother of hope, you’re alive,” Mary Catherine said. “Well, thanks for calling, Mike. We haven’t been worried sick about you or anything. What happened, the case went late? You decided to stay over in DC? That Parker woman wasn’t around, was she? You better hope not.”
“I stayed over in Pennsylvania, actually,” I said.
“Pennsylvania?”
“Well, it’s sort of a long story,” I said, glancing back up at the misty hills above the town as I followed the state road toward home.
“Don’t make a sound. Not a single sound.”
Someone is luring men from the streets to play a mysterious, high-stakes game in the English countryside. Former Special Forces officer David Shelley will go undercover to shut it down. But this might be a game he can't win.
The hunt is on.
Read on for a special excerpt from the shocking new thriller Hunted, coming soon from
Two men trod carefully through the trees in search of their prey. Bluebells and wild garlic were underfoot, beech and Douglas firs on all sides, tendrils of early morning fog still clinging to the damp slopes. Somewhere in this wood was the quarry.
The man in front, feeling brave thanks to the morning sherry, his bolt-action Purdey and the security man covering his back, was Lord Oakleigh. A Queen’s Counsel lawyer of impeccable education, he had an impressive listing in Debrett’s and his peer’s robes were tailored by Ede & Ravenscroft. Oakleigh had long ago decided that these accomplishments paled in comparison to the way he felt now—this particular mix of adrenaline and fear, this feeling of being so close to death.
This, he had decided, was life. And he was going to live it.
The car had collected him at 4:00 a.m. He’d taken the eye mask he was given, relaxed in the back of the Bentley, and used the opportunity for sleep. In a couple of hours he arrived at the estate. He recognized some of his fellow hunters, but not all—there were a couple of Americans and a Japanese gentleman he’d never seen before. Nods were exchanged. Curtis and Boyd of The Quarry Co. made brief introductions. All weapons were checked to ensure they were smart-modified, then they were networked and synced to a central hub.
The tweed-wearing English contingent watched, bemused, as the Japanese gentleman’s valet helped him into what looked like tailored disruptive-pattern clothing. Meanwhile the shoot security admired the TrackingPoint precision-guided rifle he carried. Like women fussing over a new baby, they all wanted a hold.
As hunt time approached, the players fell silent. Technicians wearing headphones unloaded observation drones from an operations van. Sherry on silver platters was brought around by blank-faced men in tailcoats. Curtis and Boyd toasted the hunters and, in his absence, the quarry. Lastly, players were assigned their security—Oakleigh was given Alan, his regular man—before a distant report indicated that the hunt had begun and the players moved off along the lawns to the treeline, bristling with weaponry and quivering with expectation.
Now deep in the wood, Oakleigh heard the distant chug of Land Rover engines and quad bikes drift in on a light breeze. From overhead came the occasional buzz of a drone, but otherwise it was mostly silent, even more so the further into the wood they ventured and the more dense it became. It was just the way he liked it. Just him and his prey.