Before Choir left, he slit open Lawson’s vapor-barrier boot. The Delta commando’s foot was in bad shape from the deep slash of the cable, a piece of rusted, grotesquely twisted wire that had passed through the soft calf into his ankle still in place, scraping against the bone. With the morphine wearing off, Choir knew that what the doctors and nurses back in Dutch Harbor would call “discomfort” would soon set in with a vengeance. It meant that without another shot of morphine, Lawson, despite his Delta training and all the will in the world, would be unable to keep quiet, let alone put any weight on the foot. Choir pulled out the white/green winter camouflage net from beneath the Arrow’s seat and tossed it over the vehicle, propping Lawson up so that the butt of the M-60 rested in his lap with another shot of morphine by his side and an MRE with its regulation 4,200 calories for winter conditions also within easy reach. “Enjoy your picnic,” joked Choir, tapping Lawson encouragingly on the shoulder. “And remember, boyo, drink your four liters.”
“How’ll I piss?”
“Aim high,” said Choir, smiling for the first time that day. “Listen, boyo, if I don’t make it back to you, take the chance and go active with your finder beeper, but give the two hours. Don’t want the Sibirs homing in on the beep if we can help it.”
“I’ll wait,” said Lawson. “You’ll be back.”
Choir, with one last glance at his GPS, started off for the choppers, which he knew were now a mile away. He didn’t go in a straight line, using instead SAS “rabbit” zigzags and back tracks, crouching, absolutely still, listening to detect the slightest untoward noise within the rushing-river sound of the blizzard in the high timber as fresh powder snow started to fall. Passing down through the heavy drifts on the bank of a snaking frozen river, Choir scanned left to right for signs of any footprints or vehicle tracks and took another GPS fix. The choppers should now be no more than a hundred yards ahead, but damned if he could see them, his vision obliterated by either trees or the camouflage nets or—
Then he spotted the nose of one of the Cobras, and as he got nearer, experienced the pleasant fright of recognition as the bigger, almost brutish, shape of the Super Stallion became distinguishable under the snow-dusted net. At twenty yards he stopped and knelt down to make sure no one was following him. Nothing stirred but the blizzard.
He waited a full five minutes, watching. Something was wrong. He couldn’t smell it or see it, but his sixth sense told him. As sure as a mother detects the slightest change of rhythm in her baby’s sleep in an otherwise noisy house, he knew that something was amiss. For a start there should have been some sign of movement around the choppers, their crews surely as anxious, hearing the distant gunfire, to see the returning SAS/Delta men as they would be to see the chopper crews. Yet, peculiarly, he didn’t sense a trap.
Silently, his slow movements completely muffled by the blizzard, he eased forward a few yards and stopped again, noticing what looked like a patch of oil, its coloration and form different from the folds of snow about him. Then he saw it was a canteen shape. He was in a minefield.
Without moving an inch, without blinking, he stared at the choppers, knowing that everyone inside had either been taken prisoner or killed. Whatever an enemy patrol had done, securing the open area by circling it with a ring of antipersonnel mines, they had now gone, not staying with the choppers when they had heard the firing down by the lake, and obviously not having blown the choppers up for fear of drawing attention to themselves. Turning, retracing his footsteps precisely, Choir made his way back through the trees, his earlier footsteps still visible enough that he could avoid stamping on any new ground. After a quarter mile or so he paused, waited, and, sensing no danger, moved on, till, to his immense relief, he spotted the Arrow.
Lawson’s throat had been cut, his snow-veiled stare silent testimony to the utter surprise and horror with which it had happened, so much blood around the Arrow that it looked like a spill of pink algae, the snowfall diluting the dark red.
His jaw tight with anger, senses bristling, Choir saw the footsteps of the Siberian patrol. There had been three — possibly four — no doubt coming round in a circle from the choppers after hearing the Arrow making its way through the woods. The Arrow’s gas tank was punctured in three or four places, the gas gone.
Choir switched the safety off his HK-11 then began the “lope” run, the kind that, because of the high adrenaline energy it consumed — eyes, ears, trigger finger on the edge — could exhaust even the fittest commando in half an hour in the heavy snow. He heard a dog, its panting downwind of him. As it turned, one man in the group of four turned with it, but by then Choir had fired three long, rattling bursts, downing the dog and the two SPETS nearest it, the other two quickly dashing behind tall firs.
Choir, still running, suddenly tripped on hidden roots, his vest taking the brunt of the fall, bullets whistling above where a moment before he’d stood. Now rolling over, he performed the minimum requirement of the SAS, its calling card: changing the magazine in midroll, returning fire within three seconds, not hitting either of the SPETS but keeping them behind the trees, as he also took cover behind an ice-cream-domed stump.
One SPETS was firing, only the barrel of his AK-47 visible. Choir could hear the other moving twenty feet to his right, going down on his knees. Choir was lifting his weapon when, as if in slow motion, he glimpsed the other man’s face and the white toque he was wearing becoming one, suddenly blurring, the man’s face and scalp separating from him like torn paper as David Brentwood’s Heckler and Koch nine-millimeter Parabellum punched into him from behind, bark flying everywhere. There was another shot. This, in its singularity, was much louder, more of a “thwack” than the outraged chatter of David Brentwood’s machine gun. Aussie’s Haskins, firmly braced by the best Siberian pine, spoke only once, its HE/incendiary literally blowing the remaining SPETS’ head off, Salvini covering the rear.
No one spoke for several minutes, all frozen in attitude, braced for the counterattack — if there was to be one — making sure that absolutely nothing else was moving. Softly Aussie told Salvini, “Told you I heard a fucking mutt!”
They took Lawson’s dog tags but had no time to bury him. It was hardest on Choir, but it was necessary and, with only one backward glance, he moved off with the other three, telling them briefly about the choppers and the vanished crew who were no doubt dead inside them. It was up to David whether to go on and destroy the choppers but there would be the mines to negotiate — too time-consuming in itself and besides, any noise would only attract further enemy patrols. Plus the SPETS patrol could have already reported the position of the chopper to an HQ.
“We hike,” he said simply to Choir, Aussie, and Salvini. “East-nor’east.”
“Just what I felt like,” said Aussie somberly. “Bloody four-hundred-mile walk.”
They never doubted they’d make it. If an SAS/Delta man couldn’t make fifty miles a day, he was loafing. It would be eight days to the forward units of Second Army who, given the GST the team had taken out in the tunnel and the explosions from the lake, must be mightily relieved at having at least the cruise salvos already cut by more than half. Besides, the four men had their weapons, two MRE’s apiece, and after what they’d been through during winter — survival course at Brecon Beacons for the SAS, the High Sierras for Salvini — they had no fears except how cold it might become, already minus forty as it was growing dark.