The sniper group was feeling the stress and the pressure, not knowing how long the Russian mortars would ignore them. The guards at the camp had a dead general and a dead colonel on their hands, but no idea who had killed them. It had to be snipers. But where were they?
The base commander had received a strange and rather cryptic message shortly before General Mizon was due to arrive, an alert from St. Petersburg that some attack against the camp might soon be coming from the direction of Poland. It contained no specifics; not a time, nor even a date. He had taken the precaution of readjusting the mortars to face south, never expecting that the attack would come so soon, or if it would come at all. Nevertheless, he had distributed his firepower to best answer the situation, doubled the guard and called out a BTR-80. Now he walked a concentrated mortar barrage up the roads to Poland, blast after blast after blast.
The infantry troops following the shells reported by radio that there was no return fire and no opposition to their advance. No bodies were discovered along the roads, nor in the woodlands, which would be more carefully searched after daylight. The BTR-80 had prowled the area close to the camp and also failed to find anything of interest.
The commanding officer paused. He knew the layout of the area from having studied the maps so many times in the continuing efforts to interdict smugglers. There were numerous little trails and small ravines and natural hiding places to the west, but all were within Russian territory, and therefore unlikely routes for any attack force. He sent a squad to probe the area. Same thing to the north, but with limited manpower, he had to make careful choices. Then there was the road from the camp to the lake, but he had already increased the guard manpower there, and had received no call of alarm from them.
In fact, he had not received anything at all from those two men. The commander had an aide call the guard shack, and there was no answer. After a low, private curse, the officer remembered that message had been very clear about the threat from Poland, and had not mentioned Lithuania at all. While he had been throwing everything to the south, were the snipers escaping to the east? He summoned the BTR-80 to get down to the guard post for a look. As insurance, he also instructed one of the 120mm mortar crews to turn and start laying rounds along the track from the shack all the way to the beach.
“Bounty Hunter to Vampire,” Kyle called as he jogged along with Anneli right behind. “Bounty Hunter to Vampire.”
“Vampire to Bounty Hunter. Send your traffic.” The voice of the stealth Black Hawk pilot sounded as cool as an airline captain flying over Montana. But in the distance, he could see the bright flashes of deadly fireworks coloring the sky.
“Vampire, we are about ten minutes from the LZ. So far, it not hot.” The action was still happening far behind the fleeing team.
“Our ETA is about the same. I can see detonations from up here.”
“Nothing coming at us so far. That may change.”
“See you in ten. Vampire out.” The aircraft commander checked his dials and tried to squeeze a little more thrust out of his big engines. He did not want any dials in the red, because if this bird went down, there was none other around to take up the mission. Usually, there was a spare in the neighborhood, for helicopters could fall out of the sky for a myriad of reasons. That hard lesson had been learned on other raids over the years, from the ill-fated Iranian hostage rescue mission through the assault on Osama bin Laden’s house in Pakistan. This mission had been thrown together so fast to keep security tight that it had become an all-or-nothing play, which suited the cocky attitude of a Nightstalker crew just fine.
Swanson called out the good news to his jogging friends. Ten more minutes and they would be gone. The snipers kept their personal weapons at the ready and their minds alert. During combat, ten minutes could pass in the blink of an eye, or last a century. The fact that they had not yet been detected had been a pleasant surprise, one of which they intended to take full advantage, because it would not last forever.
Anneli Kallasti loped along better without being burdened by the comm pack. Her eyes were on the dark shape of Kyle right in front of her, with the moving shadow of Stan Baldwin beyond him. Gray Perry was behind somewhere. She had never felt more excited, and believed that she had done well on this dangerous job. She would now really have something to tell her grandchildren.
WHAM! The unexpected explosion behind them jarred the air with a passing sweep of wind and made her look back. Corporal Perry pushed to keep her going and explained in a calm, unhurried voice, “That was somebody or something tripping our Claymores. It’s a mine packed with about seven hundred little ball bearings and an explosive package big enough to choke a cow. I guarantee it just ruined their entire day. Move along, girl.”
The driver of the BTR-80 was using night-vision sights, which were not good for seeing details like the steel wire stretched a few inches above the familiar pathway to the beach. He was also being guided by the vehicle’s commander riding up top beside the large machine gun and calling down directions. The explosion wrapped the vehicle in a momentary balloon of fire and steel balls that flew from the Claymore. The commander was killed instantly and six of the eight tires were punctured, making the machine slow to a halt. The driver had been rocked by the jolt, he was temporarily deaf, the night-vision device was damaged and unusable, and the headless corpse of his commander slouched down the hatch directly behind him. He didn’t know the fate of the rest of the crew.
The base commander also heard the detonation. The soldiers at the guard shack still had not reported in and now the BTR was incommunicado and probably had struck a mine down there. The silence of the troops and the savage booby-trap helped him decide that the attackers were using the beach path for their egress. He snatched his radio operator by a shoulder strap and yelled, “Tell that BTR to keep moving! Have the northeast mortar turn and saturate the area near the lake. That’s where they are!”
The BTR driver heard the instructions, ignored the dead commander in the hull, and put the big armored troop carrier back into motion, rocking it to and fro to escape the tangle of vines and trees into which he had run. Some other crew member tossed out the body and took his place, but buttoned the hatch tightly. Some of the tires might be shredded, but the BTR could still ride on the rims, and he had fresh orders to keep going. The damaged machine would be slower and more awkward, but it was still able to move. It jerked free of the brambles and roots with screeches of protesting metal, only to run over a second Claymore after struggling only fifty feet. This time the explosive charge penetrated the gas tank, and the entire BTR brewed up in a ball of flame.
The action was speaking to Kyle Swanson. In his mind’s eye, he had been able to picture the response back at the camp by the sounds and direction of the gunfire. That was all a puddle of harmless noise, and he had filtered each sound as they moved ever closer to the lake. Not a single shot had come near them. The BTR’s loud engine had been distinctive enough for him to picture it grinding up the path on which they were running, then the familiar explosions of Claymores — sharp and jolting — meant that the armored vehicle had taken two in its guts, for he no longer heard the engine. The most immediate threat was off the board.