“Vampire to Bounty Hunter. Send your traffic.”
“Bounty Hunter to Vampire. Turn and burn.”
“Roger that, Bounty Hunter.”
From down the hillock, Anneli heard an explosive round of shouts, almost panicky commands from officers and sergeants. She said, “They are ordering the men to get up and get to their guns.”
“Yeah,” said Swanson. “We’re out of here.”
As soon as he heard the shots, Grayson Perry erupted from the darkness and hit the two guards at the shack, both of whom had turned to face the camp, wondering what was happening. Perry slid the long blade of his old Fairburn-Sykes fighting knife into the neck of the first guard, pushing it easily all the way to the hilt in a single motion. Perry knew the knife was old school, almost an antique, but why change a good thing? He pushed on right across the dying man and clobbered the other guard on the head with a rock the size of a cantaloupe. The sentry fell with a crushed skull and Perry finished them both off with a few well-placed strokes of the FS knife. He dragged the bodies into the woods and dumped them, then lay beside the shack and again became invisible in his Ghillie suit of rags and leaves, gripping his submachine gun. The attack had taken less than thirty seconds, and the disposal time was about the same.
The Nightstalkers had been on alert and close to the UH-60 stealth helicopter almost since they had inserted the sniper squad into Indian country early that morning. The special-operations aviators understood how things could go bad in a hurry on any mission and stood ready to react.
They had stayed near or inside of their bird as it rested on a small, bare landing zone near the Kaliningrad border, and other than refueling, getting some hot food and taking shithouse breaks, they had little interaction with the stern Lithuanian soldiers of the Iron Wolf Mechanized Battalion who had clamped a tight, protective perimeter around the skinny, hard-edged helicopter that was impervious to radar. The battalion commander, Major Juozas Valteris, roamed nearby. The pilot had warned him that a target was to be struck at about 1800 hours.
At five o’clock the chopper crew had begun their preflight checks, and a half-hour later they strapped in. The mini-guns on each side were loaded and locked, and the strange bird code-named Vampire was ready to fly.
The pilot received the call from Bounty Hunter just before six o’clock, and waved for Major Valteris to come over even as the twin General Electric T700 engines were given life and the four long major blades began to rotate. The major jumped into the deck and put on a pair of earphones connecting him to the internal network.
“We are leaving now, Major, and we thank you for the hospitality. I am authorized to tell you that the team has hit a border firebase called Rooster Cap Nowak this evening, and there is likely to be some return fire coming this way soon. That’s all I know. We will be heading out via a different route unless there is an emergency that requires us to return here.”
The Lithuanian officer gave the pilot a thumbs-up, removed the headset, jumped back to the ground and sprinted away. The helicopter blades were spinning faster as the engine ate more power, and in seconds, the Black Hawk was airborne, nose down and speeding into the darkness with a methodical hush-hush-hush instead of the normal helo roar.
Valteris snapped his men to full alert and ordered an immediate change of position for his whole unit. The Russians had probably pretargeted their current location. The soldiers knew this was no drill. They buttoned up their vehicles and sped away.
24
Automatic rifle fire erupted from the first Russian soldiers who came out of their fugue state and opened up with long rips of AK-47s that shredded the night in every direction, laying down a 360-degree mad minute of suppressive fire. Simply pulling the trigger was the easiest thing to do. An unlucky civilian truck driver went down in the wild salvo, his penalty for deciding to stay overnight at the border crossing so he could be first in line at dawn tomorrow. He had been watching the arrival ceremony from beside his truck, making him a stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time and perceived as a possible threat by panicky soldiers.
Kyle, Anneli and Stanley Baldwin were galloping along the single trail to the east when the shooting began. They stopped a few times to catch their breath and plant some Claymore mines with trip wires as booby-trap surprises for anyone who might give chase. That initial gunfire back at the base meant little — harmless noise with no danger. Snipers throughout the ages have stayed alive by sowing confusion among their enemies, and the men at the base were reacting to a frightening, new situation. The extraordinarily loud booms of the .50-caliber sniper rifles had echoed back to the inexperienced border guards from the deep forests. None had seen any muzzle flashes. The attack could have come from anywhere, so the answering fire spewed everywhere. Every moment that the Russians spent trying to sort things out meant that the American, the Briton and the girl from Estonia would be that much farther away.
About fifteen seconds after the ineffective shooting started, it trailed off, then ceased as officers and sergeants got control of the situation. Kyle could hear orders being shouted. Beneath the ruckus, he heard the giant diesel engine of the BTR-80 armored personnel carrier grunt to life. It was the one thing at the camp that Swanson considered to be a truly dangerous wild card. Should the amphibious vehicle come roaring down this narrow road, things would get interesting in a hurry. It could even follow them right into the water. “Run,” he told his mates, and they abandoned stealth in favor of distance.
Heavy machine guns opened up next, the big ones on the corners of the camp, and although the firing became more methodical, it was still combing the tangled foliage that had been allowed to grow wild around the base. The gunners were still shooting at things they could not see, and followed the sweep of searchlights that were sliding around the borders. They were confident that any frontal charge from the bush would fail against the reaping bullets. To the retreating snipers, however, it was a sign that the counterfire was still in a defensive mode. The soldiers were hunkered down inside the base, waiting for another shot from the unseen enemy.
“Bushman Two! Bushman Two!” Swanson breathed heavily as he called for Gray Perry on the net. “Coming up on you in about two minutes.”
“Clear here,” came the immediate answer. “Come on in.” Perry lifted out of the undergrowth and assumed a kneeling position to give suppression fire if necessary. Like Swanson and Baldwin, he knew what was on the next page of the battle. Panic in the camp was evaporating and people were beginning to think. Patrols would be organized and those big damned mortars would start coughing out shells the size of small dogs.
The team reassembled at the guard shack, but they were still some distance from the designated pickup point beside the lake. Anneli was panting with the exertion, bending beneath the square pack that held the listening device and weighed better than twenty pounds. She gasped for breath.
“Give me that pack,” Swanson snapped.
She looked up, hands on knees and gulped, “I can handle it.”
“The extra weight is slowing you down and we can only move as fast as our slowest person. Give me the damned pack.” He shrugged out of his own gear and slid his arms into the electronic unit’s straps and adjusted the straps tight. Then he pulled his own ruck over his right shoulder. Stan Baldwin took both sniper rifles. “You are point, Sarn’t Baldwin. Move out.”
Swanson came next with Anneli at his side, and Perry was once again rearguard. They all heard the new sound in the fight, the distinctive grunt of the 120mm mortars, and cocked their ears for the expected whistle of incoming rounds. Instead, the shells went the other way and impacted far to the south, where the machine-gun fire seemed to be also growing in volume. Before long, the large mortars were rhythmically thumping out round after round, plastering the road network that led toward Poland with high explosives. A flare went up and glared over trees in that direction as it drifted down on a small parachute and made shadows dance in the woods.