BooksBarbecue
Back Manhunter
Chapters (37)
  1. Cover
  2. One
  3. Two
  4. Three
  5. Four
  6. Five
  7. Six
  8. Seven
  9. Eight
  10. Nine
  11. Ten
  12. Eleven
  13. Twelve
  14. Thirteen
  15. Fourteen
  16. Fifteen
  17. Sixteen
  18. Seventeen
  19. Eighteen
  20. Nineteen
  21. Twenty
  22. Twenty-One
  23. Twenty-Two
  24. Twenty-Three
  25. Twenty-Four
  26. Twenty-Five
  27. Twenty-Six
  28. Twenty-Seven
  29. Twenty-Eight
  30. Twenty-Nine
  31. Thirty
  32. Thirty-One
  33. Thirty-Two
  34. Thirty-Three
  35. Chris Ryan Readers’ Club?
  36. Letter from Author
  37. About the Author

‘Patrick, I’ll go for the engine,’ said Mallet. ‘You take out the driver and the guy on the back.’

‘OK.’

Bowman lined up the wire cross hairs with the cluster of figures to the right of the technical. A series of horizontal lines marked the vertical axis of the graticule. To help the shooter compensate for things like bullet drop and gravity. As Bowman looked on, the technical crawled past the treeline and reached the clearing.

The rebels swarmed forward either side of the vehicle. There were no guards at the sentry box to the side of the archway. They had been deliberately withdrawn to one of the gun pits at the rear of the stronghold. Part of the trap the team had set, designed to lure the enemy into a false sense of security. The Machete Boys would see the abandoned guard post and think the building was poorly defended. They wouldn’t spot the soldiers on the rooftop, not at this distance.

Not until it was too late.

‘Wait,’ said Mallet.

The last of the rebels glided past the treeline. The men in both columns were closely grouped together, Bowman noticed. Which was a big mistake. A professionally trained unit would have advanced to the target in a loose formation. Massed ranks of infantry were easier to cut down than individuals spaced far apart from one another.

The Boys cantered on alongside the technical as it came bouncing down the approach road towards the archway. Then they broke across the clearing. They moved five metres beyond the treeline. Then ten metres. Fifteen.

Twenty.

Mallet waited another second.

Then he pulled the trigger.

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Eight

The gunshot thundered across the breaking dawn.

Bowman looked through his scope as the half-inch-thick round struck the front of the technical, cratering the radiator and the cylinder block, killing the engine. Which was the smart move, from a tactical point of view. Kill the vehicle first, instead of the guys on foot. Disable the main threat. Specifically, the machine gun mounted on the back of the technical. Bowman couldn’t identify the weapon from this distance, but he assumed it was a DShK or similar. Something Russian, in the heavy machine-gun family, with an effective range of about two thousand metres. A much more serious threat than the AK-47 rifles the foot soldiers were packing. The team didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a burst from the technical.