One of those flashes turned into a lightning bolt with still images printed along its surface, each cell depicting Sarah receiving the news of his death. No, he couldn’t put her through that…
Muted gunfire stitched up the mountainside, and he could feel the rounds thumping into the earth behind him. Was he hit by shrapnel? Was he okay? Where the hell was he?
The moment came down like an avalanche, and barely conscious of his movements, he was already on his feet, digging in deep, charging up the mountain, with more gunfire trailing. He ripped free a grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it over his shoulder without looking.
To his left rose a stand of pines, and he darted toward them, boots sliding as he fought against the incline, his ears ringing loudly from the explosions.
Those sons of bitches were coming up behind him, but he had the high ground, if nothing else.
He had two more grenades left. Tugging down his trifocals, he went to sonar, marked the positions of nine men now who were fanned out in a semicircle within the trees, with several more, three or four, in the distance.
Night-vision mode allowed him to zoom in on the nearest troop. Seeing an opportunity, Fisher shoved up his goggles and got behind the AK-12’s attached scope. As a rule of combat — and if you had a choice — you never trusted an enemy’s rifle. He sighted the forehead of the nearest troop, then panned right to the next three about a yard back. The second man was there, leaning out from behind the trunk. Fisher knew that once he fired the first round, the second guy would switch positions, ducking for cover — but his tree wasn’t quite wide enough, and so when he did try to hide, Fisher would exploit that reaction.
The moment seemed perfect, and firing down at a sharp angle decreased the amount of bullet drop, placing the odds of a better shot in his favor.
If he did it right, gripped the weapon firmly with his left hand, gently with his right, then exhaled halfway, every shot would be a surprise. There was no conscious pulling of the trigger, only pressure until the round exploded from the barrel. It did. The troop’s head snapped back as Fisher was already shifting fire to the second one — who moved exactly as predicted. Fisher caught him in the side of the head.
The other troops detected his muzzle flash and sent volley after volley of automatic weapons fire in his direction. Rounds tore apart the pines and ricocheted off the rocks behind him.
At the next pause in fire, he was on his feet, gritting his teeth and clambering for the next stand of trees back to his left, the gunfire resuming and ripping past him now. The bullets sounded like sand thrown into a fan, and a round or two might’ve struck his legs, he wasn’t sure, the Kevlar certainly protecting him at this range, but he wasn’t sticking around to tempt fate any further.
A blur raced over his head and zoomed back down the mountain. He recognized the buzzing of the drone’s rotors and sighed with relief.
“Goddamn, Charlie, you’re a little late!” he cried.
“Sorry, Sam, the drone took fire. Lost one rotor. Had to reboot. Just get out of there!”
“That’s the plan.”
“Sam, don’t move,” cried Grim. “There’s another squad. They just got in front of you. They came up on your flank. You’re about to be surrounded!”
“Then, Grim, I need to move!”
“Sam, I have an idea, but you won’t like it,” said Charlie.
Fisher reached the next tree, dropped to his knees, then leaned over, stealing more breath. He was a few seconds away from collapsing. “Charlie, what’re you thinking?”
“The Black Hawk’s armed with Hellfire missiles—”
“Absolutely not!” shouted Grim. “He’s too close and while I can explain away a Black Hawk off course, I can’t account for missiles fired on Russian ground troops.”
“Forget the missiles,” said Fisher. “I’ll slip past that squad ahead. Briggs, what’s your ETA to the landing zone?”
The man’s voice came broken and breathless: “Uh, just a minute or two, I think.”
Fisher activated his sonar and wished he hadn’t.
His heart sank, and a string of expletives slipped from his lips. He was surrounded, all right, with six strung out above him, seven or more moving up from behind, a couple more on each flank, with his perimeter narrowing from thirty or so meters to twenty and decreasing by the minute. Not an ingenious way to capture someone, given the risk of cross fire, and there was an opportunity for Fisher to get them shooting at each other, but he’d rather just get on the move. Somehow.
“Sam, I’m looking at sonar now,” said Briggs. “You won’t make it.”
“Sure, I will.”
“Look, you’ve told me there’s nothing more important than the mission. Not you, not me, not anyone.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I get that. I respect it. But all we got out of this drop was a backpack. And we’re not going to lose you over a backpack.”
Fisher grinned weakly over the irony. “All right, Briggs, I see your point.”
“Good. I’m going after the three guys east of your position.”
Fisher could almost hear the smile on the man’s face.
Just then the drone returned to Fisher’s side and Charlie was barking in his ear: “Attach your last two frags, Sam. I’ll light ’em up!”
Fisher tugged out the grenades and got to work. Clip one, clip two. “Okay, rock ’n’ roll, Charlie.”
“Sam, break to the left,” said Grim. “The widest gap between the troops above you is there.”
“Right along where the trees thin out?” he asked.
“That’s it.”
Fisher clutched the rifle to his chest, broke from the trees, and sprinted off toward the next patch of cover: a small mound with a large shoulder of mottled rock rising to knee height behind it. He trudged up through the snow, getting about ten meters ahead, when the first salvo of rifle fire split wood like a dozen hatchets in the trees ahead. He craned his head back as a few more rounds thumped into his boot prints. Cutting a serpentine path while crouched down, he reached the rock, his pulse drumming in his ears.
“Get down, Sam!” cried Charlie.
The kid had control of the frags, and if he said to “get down,” then Fisher sure as shit wouldn’t argue. He threw himself behind the rock, and not a second too soon. An explosion tore across the hillside only a few meters back, the ground trembling and erupting, waves of flying dirt reaching as far as the rock. At the same time, shrapnel cut through that dirt storm to strike with metallic snicks against the stone.
The shrieks that split the night were bone-chilling but quickly cut off by the second grenade, which Charlie had deposited atop the troops even farther back, the burst more distant, the echoing cries sounding inhuman at first before they, too, were lost in the reverberating thunder.
The sound of Briggs’s P220 .45ACP pistol cracking in the distance sent Fisher springing from his cover behind the rock and scrambling back up toward the three men waiting for him in the trees ahead. While the canopy was thinning out, the remaining branches were thrashing about in the rotor wash as the Black Hawk banked hard just a dozen or so meters above them.
And then, much to Fisher’s shock, the chopper’s door gunner opened fire on the tree line with his M240H, a classic and supremely badass machine gun sometimes known as the “240 Hotel.” The weapon was capable of delivering up to 950 rounds per minute of 7.62x51mm ammo out to a range of nearly 1,800 meters. Splintering branches and hunks of bark flitted down and were churned up by the rotors as he targeted the three Spetsnaz troops pinning down Fisher.