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Somewhere in the remote Highlands of Scotland
Christmas Eve, 2004
Just before the last crimson-purple glow of the falling sun dipped behind the mountains and nightfall spread over the glen, the stag appeared suddenly, silently, at the top of the rise. He stood there for a long moment, as still and poised as a statue, his head held nobly aloft and his magnificent twelve-point rack of antlers silhouetted against the streaks of fire in the sky.
The stag surveyed the wintry, bleak wilderness that stretched for miles in all directions. Two centuries since the last Scottish wolf had been hunted to extinction, this was his sanctuary, his only remaining natural predator being man. He was an old male, veteran of countless rutting conquests and fights, and age and experience had made him wily enough to avoid the few human beings who ventured up here into the wilderness. Confident that all was well, the stag gave a snort or two and moved on, in his unhurried way. He paused to nibble at a shrub, then disappeared over the next rise and was gone.
The man concealed in the gorse bushes watched the animal stride away over the brow of the hill. The old monarch of the glen had come within eight feet of him without sensing a human presence.
Ben Hope stood up and slowly emerged from his cover, careful not to leave a single broken twig as evidence he’d ever been here. For the last twenty minutes, the thicket of gorse had served him as an observation point from which he, too, had been surveying the unspoilt panorama that seemed to go on forever in all directions.
Unlike the deer, Ben Hope wasn’t scanning for predators. Because he was the predator.
But his hunt wasn’t for wild quarry. He was here today to stalk a very different and far more dangerous kind of prey. His prey was a man. A man he’d known for a long, long time, whom he’d thought he could count as a loyal comrade, if not a friend. A man who was one of the remote few he’d encountered in his life whom he considered possibly more accomplished in their chosen profession, more skilled, hence more lethal, than Ben himself.
Whether that was still true, time would soon tell.
*
A chill wind was blowing from the mountains as darkness fell, numbing his face. The icy rain that had lashed the glen all day long had finally cleared, and the moon was bright, dimmed every now and then by dull clouds that threatened to fill the sky and, if the conditions changed and the wind dropped, could signal possible heavy snowfall over the next few hours.
Ben frowned up at the sky and hoped that wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t the cold that concerned him, or the possibility of getting stranded out here in the middle of nowhere. Rather, it was the near-impossible challenge of moving over snowy terrain without leaving tracks. If tonight’s operation went as he thought – and feared – it might, then the repercussions would be swift, harsh and rigorous. The kind of men who would be sent out to scour every inch of ground for miles to search for evidence wouldn’t be easy to deceive. They’d be professional trackers with years of experience and exactly the same level of training as his own. Which was the highest level available anywhere on the planet. Ben was all too aware of the resources the opposition could unleash to catch him.
He tightened up the straps of his pack and kept moving. Night came fast this far north and so late in the year. He welcomed the darkness. It was his element and he felt protected by it.
He’d long ago learned to navigate by the stars, but in these conditions of alternating cloud and bright moonlight he opted for the handheld GPS tracking and digital compass unit he carried on his belt. To avoid the single road that cut through the valley, he had selected a route that would fishhook around the objective for about four miles and take him onto high ground to the northeast, where he would mount his final OP before moving in. Route selection was the first
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