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gnawing at lichen on the bark of a tree.
    Danny hadn’t waited for the Old Man’s permission. He’d crouched and steadied himself. Then he’d done as he’d been taught. He’d locked his entire body as he’d aimed. He’d slowed his breathing and relaxed. As he’d squeezed the trigger, he’d exhaled, imagining the round he’d just fired first impacting and then snatching away its target’s last breath.
    Danny had been nine years old that morning. More than four decades had passed since then. Time enough for him to have married and had two kids of his own. And all the horrors that had happened since.
    In spite of that, Danny still felt the same now as he had done on the morning he’d gone out after the deer. That same catch-breath of anticipation before the kill, that same deliberate unfurling of a bridge between life and death, and the same first step on it: he felt all that now and knew there could be no turning back.
    And for that he was glad. Because, make no mistake, the group he’d tracked here, the same terrorists who’d planned to torture and murder him and Lexie, he no longer thought of them as human. They were nothing but prey.
    A voice like river grit being sifted through a coarse steel sieve cut clean through his thoughts.
    ‘So are we going to do this shit, or what?’ Spartak said.
    All six foot seven of Spartak Sidarov was crouched low in the moonlight beside Danny in a thicket of brambles on the rusted railway track, about as subtle and as small as a tank.
    Spartak’s grizzled shovel of a face was pressed up to his ear so that he could make himself heard above the rain and the howling wind. So close that Danny could smell the stink of tobacco and salt liquorice on his breath.
    Danny lowered the telescopic night-sight he’d been looking through. He gazed down at the Geiger counter strapped to his wrist. The digits were still spiking up into the red, meaning the radiation level remained dangerously high – even for the Zone.
    The Zone of Alienation had been established in 1986, following the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor disaster. The entire population from the surrounding area had been evacuated at the time to protect them from the fallout, and most had never come back.
    More than 600,000 recovery workers, known as liquidators, had been drafted in to work here between ’86 and ’92. Their job had been to hunt out the worst of the radioactivity and bury any materials particularly affected where they found them. Thousands of liquidators had died in these places, or had later become severely disabled as a result of the radiation poisoning they’d suffered.
    The worst hot spots were still potentially lethal today. And the Geiger counter on Danny’s wrist left no doubt in his mind that he and his team were crouched dead centre in the middle of one now: Pripyat, Ukraine. The faster they got this done and got the hell out, the better it would be for them all.
    ‘Ready?’ he said, turning to Spartak.
    Spartak’s crooked teeth glinted ghoulishly in the green neon glow of the GPS locator cupped in his enormous gloved hand. He pushed his tangled mop of thick black hair back from where it had been plastered across his wide brow by the rain.
    ‘I was born shit fucking ready,’ he said. ‘Ready to rumble and ready to roll.’
    Danny smiled wryly. Languages had always come easily to him, and he spoke a half-dozen fluently, including Spartak’s native and learned tongues of Ukrainian and Russian. But the big guy preferred practising his English whenever Danny was around. He had ambitions to move to America one day, marry a Californian girl, with ‘an ass as firm and as smooth as a peach’, and go into politics the way Schwarzenegger had done.
    Danny hadn’t yet told him that the only real impediment Spartak needed to overcome for this plan to work was that he’d been raised on pirated American action flicks back in the eighties so he thought that cursing like an extra from
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