Those troops answered the door gunner with rifle fire of their own.
“Charlie, what’re you doing?” cried Grim.
“You said no missiles,” he answered. “You didn’t say anything about machine guns!”
Fisher understood Grim’s fury; he also understood that not only were the troops distracted, but they had just given up their positions and sent Fisher into a flow state where there was no more thinking, only action and reaction. He bolted up to the first man, who swung his rifle down from the sky. Fisher already had his Five-seveN pointed at the man’s forehead.
The man’s gaze averted in defeat a second before Fisher shot him.
While that troop tumbled, the next one came rushing up from the west at the sound of the shot.
Fisher rolled behind the nearest tree and waited. Just as the man jogged by, Fisher swung around and stabbed him in the neck, bringing the karambit down, into the man’s clavicle, then stirring his insides with the blade.
At the same time, he had his pistol in his left hand and fired over the shoulder of his victim, striking the final oncoming troop in the chest at a range of nearly fifty meters. Some of his old navy instructors would’ve been proud of those shots…
However, the man jolted back, stepped drunkenly toward the trees, but still managed to return fire like a relentless Russian cyborg. He was obviously wearing a vest and clearly a pretty good shot, the rounds drumming into the soldier Fisher now used as a shield.
A pistol cracked jarringly close to Fisher’s right ear, and the troop ahead fell with a spasmodic jerk to the snow. Fisher craned his head.
“We’re clear, Sam,” said Briggs, lowering his weapon.
“You took out all three of your guys?”
“Yeah.”
“And now one of mine?”
Briggs frowned. “We keeping score?”
Fisher was impressed. “Shit, maybe we should!” He burst off after the man, and together they raced across the top of the hill, then once more were sidestepping along the mountain, finding better purchase in the denser sections of forest where the snow had barely filtered through. What could be described as a bang and not a true explosion resounded from somewhere behind them, and Fisher paused beneath a tree that had fallen and lay at a forty-five-degree angle across two more.
He got back on the radio. “How many left, Grim?”
“Got four still on the move, with another two or three pretty far back but en route.”
“Charlie, can you at least buzz ’em with the drone?”
“Wish I could, Sam, but the drone is toast. Lost all rotors. In order to avoid it being confiscated and reverse engineered, I hit the self-destruct. For what it’s worth, I did manage to blow it up in one guy’s face.”
“All right, this is it. We’re hitting the LZ.”
They drifted down the mountainside and within a minute were nearing the clearing. It felt like the temperature had dropped twenty degrees, and Fisher’s teeth were literally and uncontrollably chattering. Briggs popped red smoke, indicating a hot LZ to the chopper pilot, but she had already assumed that, bringing the helo in low across the treetops to avoid both radar and small arms fire. The rotors turned the smoke into crimson corkscrews as the helicopter descended.
Next came the most breath-robbing part of the mission: the final sprint to the chopper. When he was in the SEALs, this was the time when most men bought it, when they were celebrating a successful op and all they had to do was hop on a helo—
Because there was always some sniper or small squad waiting in the wings to take terribly cheap shots at those trying to escape. And Fisher could feel those rounds on the back of his neck as he told Briggs to go off first, he’d cover.
Briggs put his strong legs to work, bridging the gap between them and the hovering bird in all of five seconds.
The tree beside Fisher practically exploded with gunfire, showering him with bark as he hit the ground, rolled, then came up firing with the AK-12. He emptied the magazine at the trees in a simple wave of covering fire, spotting the silhouettes shifting between them, fluctuating like wraiths.
He tossed the rifle aside, drew his pistol, then fired once more, emptying the entire twenty-round magazine and holstering the weapon with one hand while drawing his secondary weapon, the P226, with the other.
“Sam, circle around the clearing and I’ll have the door gunner lay down suppressing fire for you,” said Charlie.
“Good call,” said Fisher.
He stole off away from the trees, racing at full tilt around the edge of the clearing — just as the door gunner went to town, the big gun thudding and spewing brass.
Instead of boarding the chopper, Briggs took up a position beside the door gunner, his goggles over his eyes, arms extended, pistol winking.
“Sam, they look dug in,” said Grim. “Make your break now!”
Knowing he couldn’t wait any longer, lest one of the troops hurl a grenade at the helo, Fisher sprang into the clearing, and while it would take just a handful of seconds to reach the bird, the moment swept by in a noiseless vacuum of slow motion.
He glanced to his left and saw the troops’ muzzle flashes within the trees. They resembled a string of broken holiday lights poking holes in the shadows.
He turned right, spotted Briggs waving him over, his mouth working, the words swept away by the powerful rotors.
The chopper’s running lights strobed in an almost hypnotic rhythm as the snow and dirt beneath it fanned away into miniature tornadoes. Fisher stomped through the wash, fully conscious that this was it, the final sprint. He hoped he hadn’t pissed off the gods of war, lest a bullet make contact with the back of his head.
He reached the chopper’s open bay door and did a flying leap inside, then turned back and thrust out his arm, hauling Briggs inside — just as the helo lifted off.
They banked hard and away, the pilot sweeping over by staying tight to the trees, avoiding any more chances of potshots and flying nape of the earth to keep them hidden.
The gunner handed them headsets with attached microphones, and Fisher got on the intercom. “Thanks for the lift,” he told the pilot.
She glanced back and smiled. “I’m sorry, sir, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Me, neither,” said Fisher.
Briggs climbed into one of the jump seats and buckled himself in. Fisher joined him and said, “Nice work.”
Briggs patted the backpack lying across his lap. “Just wish we got more.”
Fisher closed his eyes and threw his head back on the seat. “We had to follow up here. So we did.”
“Hey, well, there was something small. I forgot to mention that one of her textbooks still had the receipt inside. Had the address to her apartment in Zurich. Might be worth a shot.”
“We could’ve found her place without that.”
“Probably, but either way we should check it out.”
“Let’s run it by Grim and Charlie.”
“Roger that. And oh, yeah, I wanted to show you something.” Briggs tugged up his sleeve to expose his wrist altimeter. He thumbed a few buttons to bring up his data file, then showed the glowing screen to Fisher—
MAX SPEED: 227 MPH.
Fisher’s eyes bugged out.
Briggs smiled crookedly. “I guess Grim’s data was a little off. When she told me I was doing 210, I was already up to 221. That’s a world record no one will ever know about.”
10
They rendezvoused at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, which had a U.S. complement of nearly five thousand airmen. There, Fisher and Briggs returned to Paladin to debrief while the crew took care of refueling operations.
After dragging themselves up the rear cargo ramp and passing through the hatch, they entered the command center to the concerned looks of Grim and Charlie.