The scout had turned around to see him and probably would have killed him had his hand not been occupied by the walkie-talkie. As it was, all he could do was shout some sort of warning into it before John fired two more rounds into his midsection and brought him down. His body spiraled around the trunk of a tree and skidded down the slope for a few yards. Abandoning all pretense of quiet movement, John skidded down after him, using his ass as a sled, and probably breaking his tailbone on a rock about halfway down. This sent such a jolt through his body that it spun him into an ungainly, sprawling roll down the hill as things spewed out of his pockets and backpack in a sort of avalanche-cum-yard-sale. But he got to the jihadist and stripped him of his weapon before any of the others could get there to investigate. This was a very nice piece, a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, fully automatic. John was not familiar with it. Without his reading glasses he couldn’t make sense of the little words stamped into its metal around the controls. But with a bit of groping around and experimentation he was able to figure out how to charge it and how to take off the safety.