The wind was a gale now, driving bits of ice against Sheppard's face like sand. He tried to keep to sheltered places, using trees and rocks to help cut the wind. Surely Armstrong, crazy as he was, couldn't be wandering around in this maelstrom. He had to have gone to ground somewhere.
Visibility was so bad that he nearly walked off the edge of the cliff along the river before he knew it was there. Backing up hastily, Sheppard looked over the edge, down to the ribbon of dark water only intermittently visible below him.
He should have asked Caldwell more questions. Shot and drowned. Clearly, it had happened here somewhere, along this river. Once again, he found himself swallowing back a tidal wave of emotion that he couldn't afford right now. Finding Armstrong: that was the important thing.
Choosing a direction at random, he began walking downstream, and almost immediately came upon a site of obvious disturbance. The snow was churned up, and looking over the edge again, he saw the track that had been cut by an avalanche down the side of the cliff. The heavily falling snow had covered over the worst of the devastation, but obviously things had happened here, recently.
And something else caught his eye, just visible under a thin layer of fresh snow. He knelt and touched it with his fingertips. Blood.
Rodney's blood.
Darkness clouded his vision, a rush of emotion so strong that he couldn't really put a name to it. Anger, grief, hate, fear? Maybe all of those, maybe none; he wasn't good with such things. All he knew was that for a moment, the world tilted, and he put out a hand blindly to catch himself on the nearest pine tree before he fell. His reaction surprised him. He hadn't expected it. But then, surprise was a fact of life when dealing with McKay.
He remained leaning against the tree for a moment longer, staring down over the edge. In the brief calm moments between gusts of wind, he caught glimpses of the river below, of the dark abyss between the ice-encrusted banks. The crazy-optimist part of him wanted to climb down there and search for Rodney, even knowing how unlikely it was that his friend could have survived. The realist in him insisted that Caldwell had been sure that Rodney was dead, and furthermore, every moment he waited here was another moment that the wind erased Armstrong's tracks. It was highly unlikely that he could find Rodney's body down there, and if he was to have any chance at bringing the killer to justice, he had to move now.
He closed his eyes briefly, then turned away.
Sheppard wasn't a tracking expert, but he didn't have to be in order to see the two sets of tracks -- one presumably belonging to Caldwell, the other to Armstrong -- that headed away from the river. Though the snow had begun to fill them in, it had not yet erased them and Sheppard could see how one set of tracks kept to the relative shelter of a series of small ravines, while the others went up the hill into the trees. It was not hard to tell which was the pursuer and which the pursued. Once again checking the action on his P90, Sheppard followed the tracks that he assumed to be Armstrong's.
He hadn't seen the wolves since leaving the puddlejumper, but every once in a while he heard one of those high-pitched, unearthly cries somewhere out in the storm. They were definitely still around. Earth predators, Sheppard knew, generally would not bother a man with a gun, but these things were entirely a different story. He felt his whole body quivering on high alert, senses attuned and reflexes ready to respond at a split-second's notice.
Adrenaline junkie. He'd occasionally been described that way by old girlfriends. If he'd been asked, Sheppard would have said that he wasn't -- assuming he was willing to discuss it at all. He didn't like being in danger, and loathed having other people in danger; he didn't like the woozy trembling that followed an adrenaline rush, didn't like the feeling of having other people's survival come down onto his shoulders. But there was something very intense, almost pleasurable, about the clarity that came from walking on the razor's edge, in the sure knowledge that a moment's inattention could mean death. Sheppard knew, as few people ever did, how alive you could only feel when you were in danger of losing your life.
Armstrong's tracks dipped towards the ravine a few times, then away; presumably he'd been keeping tabs on Caldwell but unable to find a good angle from which to shoot him. Suddenly they veered off. Following, Sheppard found that they were soon criss-crossed by other tracks. He could only assume that Armstrong, at this point, had run afoul of the wolves.
Ronon, and probably Armstrong, would have been able to look at the tracks and tell at a glance what had happened here. Sheppard felt more than just a little bit inadequate. He couldn't even tell which of the various series of holes in the snow leading away were Armstrong's tracks; if they'd been fresh-made, he might have been able to, but the wind had been filling them in until all that remained were rows of shallow pits in the snow.
After thinking about it for a moment, he picked out the set of tracks that seemed to have been made by a solo creature, not part of a group. These wended their way in and among the pine trees, eventually cresting the top of a hill.
The wind hit Sheppard afresh as he left the shelter of the trees. He realized that he was looking down into the same valley where he'd found Caldwell, but from a different angle. Just below him, the ground dropped away in a steep incline; at the bottom were more pine trees and, Sheppard saw, some more of the big shaggy herd animals, three or four of them clustered together with their rumps turned to the wind. Snow clung to their long coats, but they seemed to be weathering the storm effectively enough.
He also realized, after observing them for a moment, that they were acting slightly nervous -- shifting their feet, swiveling their heavy heads to look around. Wolves? he wondered, scanning the hills. Visibility came and went in the blizzard -- sometimes he could see across to the far side of the valley, and sometimes he could barely see the animals below him. If there were predators out there in the storm, he couldn't see them. Didn't mean they weren't there.
He also lost the tracks on the top of the ridge, to his dismay and anger. The ever-fainter traces that he'd been following came out of the woods here, but the wind was much stronger out in the open than under the trees, and any sign of Armstrong's passage -- if he'd even been following Armstrong at all -- had been completely obliterated. Sheppard hunted back and forth across the ridge in ever-increasing frustration, but couldn't pick up the trail again. Below him, he noticed the herd animals growing even more restless. At first he thought they might be responding to him, but then realized that the wind wasn't right for them to have smelled him, and they couldn't possibly hear him over the storm's noise. Whatever was agitating them must be in the upwind direction, towards the head of the valley.
Sheppard squinted against the scouring, wind-driven snow. It could easily be wolves -- angry, injured wolves. It could also be Armstrong, and right now it was the only clue he had. If he'd been following the wrong set of tracks, he couldn't possibly backtrack and find the right set before the wind completely erased the trail. And if he'd been following Armstrong's tracks, then the trail had gone cold. Either way, he needed a new tactic, and this was the only thing he had.
He turned and began to jog along the top of the ridge. He knew that he was exposed up here, and took a calculated gamble, hoping that the blizzard would hide him from Armstrong as effectively as it was hiding Armstrong from him. He could move twice as fast in the open, with its shallower snow cover, than in the deep soft snow under the trees. And every minute that passed, Armstrong slipped farther out of his grasp.
Or not.
It was dumb luck that saved him. He had been occasionally stumbling on the uneven footing on top of the ridge, and he tripped just as a single bullet sped through the place where his forehead had been a split second ago. It smacked into a tree behind him as the report of the gunshot reached his ears.
Sheppard threw himself flat and rolled back into the shelter of the trees, cursing himself for an absolute fool. Of course, the blizzard would only hide himself and Armstrong equally if Armstrong wasn't already hiding behind something else, waiting for him.
Caldwell's words came back to him: As you hunt him, so, I imagine, he will be hunting you.
No more shots came ... yet. Sheppard flattened himself behind a fallen, snow-covered pine tree, peeking over the top of it. In the haze of flying snowflakes, trees and boulders loomed around him as indistinct shapes, any of them providing potential cover to a killer. Armstrong could be anywhere. Looking up at the pine that had taken the impact of the bullet, Sheppard calculated its trajectory and ended up with a rough idea of where the man had been at the time that he'd taken the shot. Of course, he could easily be in motion again -- and, in fact, probably was.
On top of everything else, it appeared that Armstrong was a not-too-shabby sniper. Normally a sniper wouldn't try for a headshot if he could help it, but Armstrong no doubt guessed, correctly, that Sheppard's torso was protected. And his aim had been dead on target even in the wind. Peering over the top of the fallen tree, Sheppard gritted his teeth. Why did the man have to be so damned good at everything? Was an incompetent enemy too much to ask for?
Still no shots and no sign of Armstrong. Dropping back to the snow, Sheppard wormed his way on elbows and knees from tree to boulder to tree, putting some distance between himself and his initial hiding place. Once he thought it was safe to stand up, he did so, concealing himself behind a tilted slab of rock that looked as if a giant hand had dropped it out of the sky. His back felt horribly exposed; he didn't know where Armstrong was or what direction he might come from. Not knowing where he was, but knowing he was nearby, made the back of Sheppard's neck crawl.
Then he nearly jumped out of his skin as a commotion erupted off to his right, somewhere among the snow-covered trees. He heard a high-pitched hyena-like scream, loud cursing and automatic weapons fire, all the sounds exploding at once.
Obviously the wolves had just found Armstrong again. And now Sheppard had his answer to two questions at once: he knew where Armstrong was, and he also knew that the wolves were still hunting them. He immediately turned and began to jog towards the source of the sound, stumbling in the snow and then righting himself. Now ... now was his chance, with Armstrong distracted by the wolves and forced to give away his position. The little voice in the back of his head, telling him that it wasn't a good idea, was one he'd long since learned to ignore.
A moment later he nearly stumbled over a huge, white-furred corpse. Steam still rose from the blood leaking out of dozens of bullet holes in the wolf's pelt. The snow was trampled and sprayed with red, as if someone had painted it with a spray can. Armstrong was nowhere to be seen. Sheppard hissed softly in anger and ducked down behind the wolf's body. So close -- he was so damn close! Which way had Armstrong gone? Or could he be hiding behind one of these trees, waiting for Sheppard? He looked around warily, and then whipped his head around at a movement from behind him.
A low, warbling growl rose from the throat of the huge beast stalking towards him, no more than thirty feet away.
Sheppard didn't know what was going through the wolves' heads. Any Earth predator would have long since given up in the face of a clearly superior enemy, and fled for safer hunting grounds. These blasted things just didn't give up. Maybe they were simply too dumb to know better, or maybe humans were just so far outside their experience that they simply couldn't understand. Not that he cared, really, aside from purely academic curiosity. He gave the wolf a faceful of P90 bullets for its trouble; it dropped in a twitching heap, and Sheppard realized that he'd just done exactly what Armstrong had done, and given away his position. Cursing, he made a dash for the shelter of the trees -- then realized that he could do what he'd suspected Armstrong might have tried: he could hide and wait for his enemy to show up looking for him. Ducking behind a pine, he did exactly that.
A couple of minutes went by. No Armstrong appeared, and the only things moving were the swirling snowflakes. Sheppard had a bizarre mental image of each of them hiding on a different side of the wolf carcasses, each one crouched and waiting for his enemy to appear. If that was the case, then whoever's nerve broke first ... would lose.
He didn't move a muscle, even as his legs began to protest and the sensation slowly disappeared from the tips of his fingers and toes.
No Armstrong.
What the hell? Maybe the guy really had gotten nipped by a wolf and had crawled off somewhere to bleed to death. There was so much blood splashed around in the trampled snow that he really couldn't tell if all of it came from the dead wolves or not.
Sheppard waited another minute or two, then straightened up and, shifting the P90 to one arm, patted down his pockets for anything he could use as a decoy. He was in luck -- one of the pockets contained a folded and crumpled wool hat. Sheppard broke off a branche from the pine tree and stuck the hat on the end of it. A less convincing decoy had probably never been created in the history of sniping, but he was in a hurry and the visibility was lousy out here, and getting worse.
He poked the hat out into the open, and waved it around a little bit. Nothing happened. He withdrew it, then poked it up again, trying to make it look like somebody peeking around the side of the tree.
A stutter of P90 fire tore the branch and hat out of his hands. Bingo! And he'd seen where it came from -- behind a grove of small trees across the clearing. Sheppard returned a quick burst of fire, watching the bullets tear a spray of needles and bark from the trees. He withdrew quickly behind the tree, then peeked around it again. No more shooting, and he didn't think that boded well. Armstrong would be either waiting for Sheppard to come out into the open, or circling around --
The sound of a snapping twig alerted him and he spun around, gun coming up, just as Armstrong did likewise. At least, he could only assume this was Armstrong -- a big blond guy with a wrestler's build. Sheppard remembered seeing him around with the Daedalus crew, but they'd never been introduced.
The two men faced each other, a few dozen yards apart. Armstrong, Sheppard noticed, had a puzzled look on his windburned face.
"Well, well. Colonel Sheppard, of Atlantis. This is highly unexpected."
"Nice to meet you." Sheppard spoke through clenched teeth; his jaw was locked so tightly that the muscles hurt.
"I assume that you're not out here to chat and have a cup of coffee." Armstrong had a pleasant smile -- open and friendly-looking. Even with a gun pointed at Sheppard's head, he still looked like someone you'd want to strike up a conversation with. It just went to show that you couldn't tell by looking.
"You assume correctly." Sheppard cleared his throat, raised his voice so that his words carried through the noise of the storm, ringing and clear. "Lieutenant Armstrong, by my authority as military commander of Atlantis, you are under arrest for murder, attempted murder, and treason against your country. If you resist arrest, I will use force to restrain you, up to and including lethal force."
Armstrong just laughed. "By whose authority? We're in a whole new galaxy, Colonel. There are different rules out here." His open, friendly smile grew predatory. "The weak perish. The strong survive. Which are you?"
Sheppard, through long experience, had learned to attune himself to minute changes in an enemy's body language. He saw Armstrong's hand start to tense, just in time to throw himself to the side while simultaneously squeezing the trigger of his gun. Both of them raked a wild spray of bullets across the space the other man had occupied a second before; both of them missed, the bullets kicking up snow. Sheppard saw Armstrong dive behind a clump of brush.
"Well done so far, Colonel!" Armstrong shouted above the roar of the wind.
"Shut up, you bastard!" From his own hiding place, Sheppard swung his P90 in a quick sweep across the last place he'd seen Armstrong, giving the bushes an impromptu pruning.
"You sound a little upset, Colonel." The voice came from slightly farther away and off to his left. Invisible in the storm, Armstrong was moving.
Fury turned the blood in Sheppard's veins to molten lead. He didn't feel the cold anymore; in fact, he'd nearly forgotten about Rodney. All he wanted to do was kill this guy. Taunted, toyed with, led in circles -- he hated it.
"I know who you are, Armstrong!" he shouted into the storm. "Don't forget that! I know who you are, and I know what you've done! When I send a report back to Atlantis, there won't be anywhere in this galaxy or any other that you can hide, and you'll never see Earth as long as you live, unless it's from the inside of a jail cell!"
With that, he turned and ran, dashing a zig-zag course from tree to tree. Armstrong clearly wanted to lure Sheppard after him, intending to pick him off; Sheppard had no intention of allowing him to do that. He needed to kill Armstrong -- or at least apprehend him, he reminded himself -- as a matter of justice, but Armstrong needed to kill him as a matter of survival. If Sheppard wouldn't play the game Armstrong's way, then the traitor would have no choice but to come after him. The ball was now in Sheppard's court. He intended to keep it that way.
He needed a place for an ambush.
He was running through a region of thick pines interspersed with boulders and eerie columns of wind-sculpted rock. The valley fell away to his left, now a nearly vertical cliff. That was no good. He needed high ground. The rock towers -- tors, he remembered, was the name for such things; he'd learned that during a brief dalliance with rock climbing in his younger days -- were too steep to climb without equipment and too exposed to be much use for his purposes. The land underfoot, he noticed, was rising, and he hoped this meant it would take him up into the mountains.
Get ahead. Stay ahead. Find a high place to hide. It didn't matter if he left a clear trail or not; Armstrong would come looking for him because he didn't have a choice. And when he did, Sheppard would be waiting for him.
Gunfire, behind him. Pretty far behind him. Sheppard paused, breathing heavily, and looked over his shoulder. All he could see was snow. Another chatter of gunfire came to him between gusts of wind. Somewhere down there, Armstrong had met another wolf. How many of the damned things could there be?
At least he now had an idea of where Armstrong was. He hadn't shaken him off -- and didn't want to -- but he had a comfortable lead. Slowing to a trot, Sheppard began to investigate his surroundings more closely. He needed to find a spot with good cover and, preferably, no more than one or two approaches, yet not an obvious ambush site.
The cliff to his left mellowed out into a more navigable slope. It was still steep and tall, but probably not something that would kill somebody who fell off. To his right, he could discern a mountainside rising steeply to unknown heights. Leave the valley and try the high places, or stay with the valley and know that he wouldn't lose his way back to the puddlejumper? Choices, choices ...
A warbling cry out of the blizzard set the hairs on his arms prickling under his jacket and coat. More wolves, Jesus ... A moment later, there was furtive motion, white on white. Sheppard raised his P90 to his shoulder, trying to figure how many bullets he had left. He was going to need a fresh clip very soon, and he didn't have that many more.
The wolf circled him, barely close enough to see in the storm. Sheppard kept walking slowly, swiveling the P90 to cover it. He stepped over a bloodstain in the snow, and realized that the wolf was injured, bleeding. Maybe it was one of the ones Armstrong had shot, or maybe Sheppard himself had winged it when he'd attacked the pack earlier. It made that ululating growl again, and Sheppard, turning, saw that it had abandoned caution and rushed him, charging forward at a gallop, faster than a running horse.
"Crap!" Recoil hit his shoulder and he saw blood spray from the white fur; then a ton or so of furious predator slammed into him and sent him tumbling down the hill, locked together with the animal. He could feel its hot breath on his cheek and hear the burbling of its hoarse breathing -- he'd hit it somewhere vital, but it was still alive and he sank the fingers of his free hand into its fur, straining against bone and muscle to hold it away from his throat. If it hadn't been injured, he'd be dead: damn thing was big as a horse. Even in its weakened state, it thrashed and fought him, and a scream was ripped from his throat as claws tore through the leg of his BDUs into the flesh beneath. They rolled end-over-end in a whirling cloud of snow, Sheppard twisting his body in a desperate effort to avoid being crushed under the animal's weight. He still had the P90, and in a burst of wild strength, he brought it up under the beast's chin and pulled the trigger.
Blood exploded in his face, and so did pain, as the recoil kicked the gun back into his jaw. He thought NO ... and fell into darkness.
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TBC