The explosion took Eddie Burt unawares. He wasn’t looking in that direction, which was a good thing because it didn’t night-blind him. He picked it up in the corner of his vision-the flash came an instant before the noise. Instinctively he swung his rifle toward the creek and then in the darkness that followed the explosion he saw a man break out of the trees, running toward Hanratty’s corpse. A spasm peeled Burt’s lips back and he laid his cheek along the rifle stock and steadied the sights with the speed of long practice and squeezed his shot, but he saw just as he fired that the running man had dived off to the left. Burt worked the bolt, threw a fresh cartridge into the chamber, fired again at the moving shadow in the woods. Baraclough was firing and the Major’s gun barked once, and Burt chambered a new round and sought his target.