The Hunting

by Stephen Leather

Genres: Crime Fiction; Spy Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Money can't buy everything
But it can buy revenge

Can a doctor take lives instead of saving them?

British doctor Raj Patel puts his own life on the line to treat the injured in war-torn Syria. His medical skills help casualties survive against all the odds.But Raj needs to rely on a completely different set of skills when he is taken hostage in a treacherous case of mistaken identity.

Billionaire big-game hunter Jon van der Sandt is driven by revenge - his family have been killed by jihadist terrorists and he wants his vengeance up close and personal. He has hired ex Special Forces hard men to snatch the ISIS killers from the desert and transport them halfway across the world to the vast wilderness of his American estate.
But they grab Raj by mistake, and once the killing begins it's too late to plead mistaken identity. To survive, he'll have to become as ruthless a killer as the man who is hunting him.

(P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Release date: February 4, 2021

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 272

Sample

The overhead sun was relentless as it burnt down through the cloudless sky. Jon Van der Sandt had a wide-brimmed hat shielding his face and impenetrable Oakley sunglasses protecting his eyes but there was nothing he could do to make the air that he breathed any cooler. He stopped and took a swig from his water bottle.

‘Not far now,’ said his guide, as if reading his mind. The guide was in his late twenties, almost half Van der Sandt’s age, but he had been born in Botswana and knew every inch of the thirty thousand-acre game farm. His name was Paul Falkner and his family had owned the farm for three generations. He was a good six inches taller than Van der Sandt, lanky with barely an ounce of fat on him, his hair bleached blond by the sun and his skin the colour of polished mahogany. Like Van der Sandt he was sporting a wide-brimmed floppy hat, though there was a racy snakeskin band around his. Both men were wearing olive shirts and shorts and Timberland boots, and hunting vests loaded with ammunition.

‘I’m good,’ said Van der Sandt. He didn’t want the fact that he had stopped for a drink to suggest weakness. He was tired, but after five hours of walking through the bush, who wouldn’t be? He knew that many Russian hunters, and lately the Chinese, preferred to be helicoptered in close to their prey. He had even heard stories of them mowing down elephants and rhinos from the air, not even bothering to land. That wasn’t the way that Van der Sandt hunted. He went in on foot with only what he could carry. Man against beast and let the strong survive.

He placed the water bottle back in his belt and Falkner began walking again. They were on the track of a small herd of elephants: two males, five females and two juveniles. Falkner was following their trail and figured that they were a mile ahead, maybe less.

Van der Sandt was paying handsomely for the hunt, and he had already been rewarded with a white rhino and three buffaloes, one of which had the biggest spread of horns that he had ever seen. The three-day hunting holiday was costing twenty thousand dollars, which included the necessary licences, but each kill added to the bill. The rarer the animal, the higher the price, and in the case of the buffalo, the massive spread of the horns had meant the kill came with a thirty thousand-dollar price tag. The elephant they were tracking could easily cost more than twice that; it depended on the length of the tusks. According to Falkner, it was a fifty-five-year-old bull that weighed close to seven tons. If that were true, it would be the largest elephant Van der Sandt had killed, and Van der Sandt had killed dozens.

He was carrying his gun and ammunition. Some hunters had a bearer following behind with their gear in the way that golfers used caddies, but Van der Sandt was old school. If he could have done without Falkner he’d have gone into the bush alone, but he wasn’t familiar with the area and it would have been foolhardy in the extreme to go solo.

The rifle Van der Sandt was holding was a double-barrelled sidelock made by William Evans of London, and it was his pride and joy. It had been handmade to his requirements and was chambered for the .500 Nitro Express cartridge, the favourite ammunition of big game hunters around the world. The gun had taken almost three years to produce and the action plates and body were engraved with scenes from his favourite hunting grounds in Africa and Asia, with the initials of his wife and children incorporated into the design. He had never told his wife what he had paid for the gun – close to two hundred thousand dollars – but he considered it money well spent. It was perfectly balanced and the eleven-pound weight helped deal with some of the recoil. Not all of it, by any means, and firing the gun meant putting a lot of weight on the front foot and holding the stock tight against the shoulder. It wasn’t a gun for amateurs – if you weren’t careful you could pull the trigger and end up flat on your back. And if your shot had just missed a seven-ton elephant, a mistake like that could easily be fatal.

A double rifle was vital just in case the first shot wasn’t a killing shot. An elephant would charge if it wasn’t killed instantly and having the second cartridge ready to fire could be a life saver. The new breed of hunters tended to prefer pump-action guns with five or more cartridges in the magazine, but Van der Sandt was contemptuous of them. If two shots wasn’t enough to bring down your quarry, you had no business being a hunter. And it wasn’t unknown for pump-action guns to jam. A double never jammed. You pointed it, you braced yourself, and you pulled the trigger. Job done. And you had a back-up shot ready to go. Van der Sandt had requested double triggers. He could have gone with a single trigger but the mechanism was more complicated and more likely to fail.

Van der Sandt’s gun had twenty-four-inch barrels, shorter than the twenty-six or twenty-eight inches that most hunters went for. The longer the barrels, the less the tendency for them to rise up after firing, but the shorter barrels were easier to manoeuvre through thick bush. Van der Sandt’s gun had a V-type open rear sight with twenty-four-carat gold inlay. Some hunters used telescopic sights but Van der Sandt was also contemptuous of that – if you were so far away that you needed a telescopic sight you weren’t really hunting. The whole point was to get up close and personal and to look your quarry in the eye as you pulled the trigger.

Big game animals were only dangerous when they were close up. If an elephant was a hundred metres away and it spotted a hunter, it would probably amble off. But if it was just ten metres away, it would throw out its ears and charge. Same with buffaloes, which were actually way more dangerous than elephants. At a hundred metres a buffalo was as docile as a dairy cow, but bump into one in the tall grass and it could be deadly.

Van der Sandt wouldn’t even consider taking a shot at an elephant if he was more than twenty-five metres away. The same went for rhinos. The rhino he had killed the previous day had only been twenty metres away when he had pulled the trigger.

He had a dozen cartridges affixed to his hunting vest. The minimum legal calibre for hunting game in Africa was a .375 belted rimless Nitro Express – also known as the .375 H&H Magnum, manufactured since 1912 by a London gunmaker, Holland & Holland. The bullets ranged from seventeen grams to twenty-three grams. But Van der Sandt’s gun was built to take the much larger .500 Nitro Express, which had a jacketed bullet of thirty-seven grams, almost one and a third ounces of lethal lead. The cartridges cost more than ten dollars each. Van der Sandt had shot with the .500 Nitro Express across Africa and had used it to good effect hunting brown bears and polar bears in the wilds of northern Canada. One of his best hunting trips ever had been the nine hours he had tracked a huge male polar bear across the frozen Arctic Ocean, culminating in a single kill shot to the brain. The Americans had banned the hunting of polar bears for anyone other than Alaskan natives in 1972, but it was still allowed in Canada, and since the Americans had banned the importing of polar bear trophies in 2008, Van der Sandt had to ship his trophy back to his mansion in London. The British had no qualms about big game hunters putting their trophies on show, probably because they were the country that had invented the concept of killing for sport. The same would go for the tusks of the elephant Van der Sandt and Falkner were hunting. The ivory was valuable – it had peaked at more than two thousand dollars a kilo in 2014 but had since fallen back to seven hundred dollars. But even at that price the tusks of a serious bull elephant could be worth more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. But it wasn’t about the money, it was about the trophy. A way of remembering the kill. Of honouring it.

Falkner bent down and examined the tracks. On his back was a bolt-action Winchester Safari Express chambered for the .375 H&H Magnum. It was a nice gun with a polished walnut stock. Falkner had added a scope because his role was tracking and protection; he had to be able to neutralise any threat at a distance if an attack looked imminent. While it was the elephant they were after, the bush was still home to lions, cheetahs and hippos, any one of which might decide to attack them. The Winchester was almost three pounds lighter than Van der Sandt’s gun, but the small cartridges caused less recoil. It had a five-round magazine which, with one in the chamber, gave Falkner six shots to play with.

Falkner straightened up. ‘We’re close,’ he said.

Van der Sandt flashed him a tight smile. To their left was a dried-up creek and beyond it a sandstone rock on which were sitting three female lions. The male was probably sitting in the shade somewhere. Van der Sandt wiped his forehead with his sleeve as he stared back at the lions. He had killed more than a dozen over the years, all males, but there was little sport in killing a lion. Lions were light-boned and soft-skinned and you could pretty much hit them anywhere and bring them down. Elephants and rhinos, and even buffalo, were much harder to kill and required a more advanced skill set. One of the lionesses yawned as if showing contempt and he smiled and raised his gun. He aimed at her and mimed pulling the trigger. ‘Bang,’ he said. She yawned again, and then studiously licked her paw.

Falkner was already walking away and Van der Sandt hurried after him. They spotted a leopard in the distance, sitting on a low branch of a baobab tree, difficult to see against the pinkish-grey bark. Usually at this time of the year the tree would be covered with large white flowers, but like all the vegetation it was suffering from the lack of water.

Falkner held up his hand in a clenched fist and Van der Sandt stopped. The guide pointed off to the right. ‘A couple of hundred metres,’ whispered the guide, taking his rifle off his back. ‘If you listen really hard you can hear them feeding.’

Van der Sandt cocked his head on one side and concentrated. Off in the distance he could hear a whispered rustle. Falkner started walking again, toes first and then the heel, his boots crunching softly on the spiky undergrowth. Van der Sandt followed. They moved through a patch of brambles that tugged at their boots and socks, then across a dried-up creek. As they reached the top of the bank they saw the herd, standing in a thicket of shrubs. The animals were ripping the shrubs apart and shoving the vegetation into their mouths with their trunks.

The two juveniles were sticking close to the females. Some distance away was a male but it wasn’t the target; it was only about ten feet tall, still an adolescent, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old.

Baby elephants took milk from their mothers until they were between five and eight years old but were taught how to feed themselves. Usually they took only the softest vegetation but the drought meant there was little of that about and the youngsters were clearly having trouble chewing the dried-up twigs and branches.

The male looked over in their direction and flapped its ears. It was probably due to leave the herd and either fend for itself or join up with a group of other young bulls. Elephant families were matriarchal, led by an older female. She was usually accompanied by her sisters, though sometimes non-related females were allowed into a herd. The males came, mated, and went.

The elephant flapped its ears again, then gathered a clump of sandy soil in its trunk and flicked it towards them. Falkner had his finger on his trigger but the elephant was just posturing – there was no real danger of it attacking. It nodded and snorted and threw several more snoutfuls of soil towards them. The largest female – presumably the matriarch of the herd – looked over at the male, then turned to look at the hunters. She tilted her head on one side, trumpeted, and then went back to helping one of the juveniles rip apart a shrub.

Van der Sandt stood next to Falkner. The two men looked around, trying to locate the trophy bull. Van der Sandt knew that he would be close by.

They heard a branch cracking off to the right and then they saw it. Van der Sandt grinned. It was huge – one of the biggest elephants he had ever seen. It would certainly be the largest he had killed. It was close to thirteen feet tall and its tusks must have been at least eight feet long. It was attacking a spreading baobab tree, using its massive tusks to strip away the bark and chewing on it contentedly. Elephants spent eighteen hours a day feeding, and during that time a fully grown animal could put away more than four hundred pounds of vegetation. Despite being herbivores, elephants weren’t able to digest cellulose so most of what they ate passed through undigested. They preferred to graze on brush and grasses, but the drought meant they were in short supply, so these elephants had no choice other than to attack the trees and bushes they found.

Falkner nodded and motioned for Van der Sandt to go forward. It was to be Van der Sandt’s kill so he was to take the lead, but Falkner had his gun at the ready just in case.

Van der Sandt felt his heart pounding in his chest – literally the thrill of the hunt. He breathed evenly as he moved slowly across the brush. Brambles scraped against his boots but he ignored them, totally focused on his quarry. They were a hundred feet away from the bull but it seemed to be unaware of their presence as it ripped away the bark.

There was another trumpeting from the lead female. Was she trying to warn the bull? Probably not. Her only concern was the females and the calves – the bulls came and went and were totally replaceable.

Falkner moved to the side, switching his attention back and forth between the herd and the trophy. Van der Sandt had his finger outside the trigger guard but had the barrels up. His heart was still beating fast and his hands began to shake as his body reacted to the adrenaline that was coursing through it. The elephant turned so that its back was full on to them and its tail twitched as it continued to attack the tree. The baobab tree had a long lifespan and there were examples that were more than two thousand years old, but by the time the elephant had finished, this tree wouldn’t last much longer. It wasn’t only the drought that was killing the habitat.

Van der Sandt began moving to the side. The best place, possibly the only place, for a quick kill was to shoot the elephant between the ears, four to six inches below the eyes. The instinctive reaction would be to shoot above the eyes but there was too much protection there and even the Nitro Express round would have difficulty penetrating the skull at that point.

He was now about fifty metres from his quarry. Falkner had moved with him so that he could keep the herd in view but could also shoot the trophy if it charged. Falkner nodded his encouragement. Van der Sandt swallowed. His mouth had gone dry and he licked his lips. He really wanted a drink from his canteen, but now was not the time to be sating his thirst. The elephant turned its head as if sensing their presence for the first time. It was upwind of them so it hadn’t smelt them, and they were moving quietly so Van der Sandt was pretty sure it hadn’t heard them either. There was another instinct at play, an animal sense that was warning the elephant there was danger nearby.

Van der Sandt kept walking. Forty metres. His right foot brushed a rock and a large snake slithered away into the bush. Botswana was home to more than seventy species of snakes, including venomous ones like the black mamba, the puff adder and the Mozambique spitting cobra, but he had disturbed a non-venomous rufous beaked snake so he ignored it.

The elephant was slowly turning now, shuffling its massive feet and raising its trunk. Thirty metres.

The elephant threw up its trunk and trumpeted at the two hunters, then flapped its ears menacingly.

Van der Sandt slid his finger over the front trigger. The elephant stamped on the ground raising clouds of dust. Then it threw its head up and down, snorting angrily, and flapped its ears even more. Van der Sandt’s mouth was completely dry now but his hands had stopped shaking.

The female was trumpeting again but he ignored it. Falkner was behind him to his left but Van der Sandt ignored the guide, too. The elephant was the centre of his universe. If it charged now he would have only seconds in which to react. Twenty-five metres.

The elephant stamped with both front feet, then pawed at the ground, still flapping its ears. Van der Sandt knew that the pawing was a prelude to a charge so he stopped where he was and raised the rifle. He took a breath, held it for a second, and then braced himself and squeezed the trigger. The round smacked into the bridge of the trunk. The perfect shot. The elephant blinked and then shook its head and flapped its ears. A dribble of blood ran from the wound. Van der Sandt fired again but this time his aim was slightly off and the shot hit the beast above the eyes.

Van der Sandt was already ejecting the two used cartridges as the elephant turned to its right. Falkner was at Van der Sandt’s shoulder now but the guide kept his gun down. He knew this was Van der Sandt’s kill and he wouldn’t interfere unless their lives were in danger. Van der Sandt slotted in two fresh cartridges and snapped the breeches shut.

The herd had scattered and were running away from the sound of the shots, the mothers helping their calves along.

The trophy elephant was walking away and looked as if it was straining to break into a run. Van der Sandt walked quickly, bringing the gun to bear on the animal’s left hip. The important thing to do now was to put the animal out of its misery. He stopped, took aim and fired at the animal’s rear leg. It buckled and the elephant sagged to the side, its ears still flapping.

Van der Sandt walked around the animal as it slowly sat back on its haunches, giving a wide berth to the trunk that could easily break his leg if the animal lashed out. The elephant’s massive chest was heaving now but the eyes were still clear and it watched Van der Sandt as he came to a halt close to its shoulder. The elephant’s left eye kept watching him as he pointed the gun at the beast’s ear and pulled the trigger. The shotgun exploded and the elephant keeled over. Its chest heaved twice and then went still.

‘Nice kill,’ said Falkner, clapping Van der Sandt on the shoulder. ‘Has to be seven tons at least. And look at the size of those tusks.’

Van der Sandt grinned. It was one hell of a trophy. It was just a pity that he couldn’t take the tusks back to the United States. He took his iPhone from his vest and gave it to Falkner. ‘Let’s have some pictures,’ he said.

He knelt down by the dead animal’s head and posed as the guide snapped away with the phone. Van der Sandt had stopped posting pictures of his kills on social media after seeing a number of hunters named and shamed by the public. These days he kept the photographs for personal use, or to show fellow hunters. Van der Sandt had given up trying to bring people around to his way of thinking. He enjoyed hunting and there was no way he was going to give up that enjoyment just because some ill-informed snowflakes didn’t like what he was doing.

Falkner took a dozen or so photographs and then gave the phone back to Van der Sandt. He took out his radio and called the support team who were waiting in Land Rovers a mile away. They would cut up the animal, distribute the meat to local villages and transport the tusks back to the lodge. They would also bring with them a chilled bottle of champagne and canapés to celebrate the kill. The two men would be driven back to the lodge to continue their celebrations.

Van der Sandt rested the gun on his shoulder and looked down at the dead beast. It had been a hell of a kill. One of his best.

Laura Van der Sandt’s phone buzzed on the table next to her sun lounger and she picked it up. She pushed her Gucci sunglasses onto the top of her head and squinted at the screen, smiling when she realised it was her husband calling on FaceTime. She took the call and waved when she saw him grinning at her. ‘Soaking up the sun?’ he asked.

‘Factor fifty, so I’m good,’ she said.

‘How is it?’

‘Lovely,’ said Laura. ‘What about you? Is everything okay?’

‘Perfect,’ said Van der Sandt. ‘Shot a seven-ton elephant this afternoon with tusks that must have been eight feet long.’

Laura’s face tightened and her husband was quick to pick up on it. ‘Don’t be like that,’ he said.

‘Like what?’

‘You know like what. Like I was doing something wrong.’

Laura sighed. ‘Honey, you’re killing an animal for sport.’

‘And there’s nothing you like more than a rare fillet steak with all the trimmings.’

‘But you’re not eating the elephant, are you?’

‘It’s pest control,’ said her husband. ‘There’s a drought here in Botswana and the elephants are destroying crops and damaging property as if there was no tomorrow.’

‘They’re trying to survive,’ said Laura.

‘And. . .