“Yeah, in a perfect world,” said Fisher. “Not sure we can get to the LZ in time. You keep them busy with that drone. I want SITREPs every couple of minutes or sooner,” said Fisher.
“You got it, Sam.”
Fisher looked to Briggs. “Take the backpack. Spot anything else?”
Briggs shook his head. “You know, the bodies could’ve been ejected far away from here, could be dangling from trees, hard to spot now . . .”
“Pilot seats were empty. They weren’t torn free and the seat belts were unbuckled,” said Fisher. “Either the pilots bailed out, or the jet was fitted with some kind of remote with a pilot on the ground transmitting to the tower while the jet took off.”
“So they flew it out here and deliberately crashed it? Man, that’s an expensive diversion.”
“What does he care? He’s got more money than God. Grim, we need to know if the pilots bailed out.”
“I’m already on it, Sam. Best we can do there is gather HUMINT from witnesses on the ground who might’ve spotted their chutes.”
Fisher gritted his teeth in frustration. “I want to know what happened here.”
Briggs turned around to regard the wreckage. “I still say if Kasperov was really smart, he would’ve planted bodies. That would buy him a little more time until the corpses were ID’d and ruled out.”
“Agreed, but maybe he ran out of time. Just like us. Let’s go!”
Fisher took off running to the west. Their rally point lay .8 kilometers away in a depression where the mountainside grew more level and the trees tapered off into a more barren belt of ridges and ravines. The LZ—landing zone—was just wide enough and just flat enough for their UH-60 Black Hawk with Turkish Air Force insignia and an American flight crew to set down. The chopper’s call sign was Paladin Two.
“Sam, one of the Russian choppers is breaking ahead,” said Grim. “Past the crash site.”
Fisher glanced up as the whomping troop transport cut overhead like a black cloud, running lights flashing. “ETA on our extraction helo?”
“Another fifteen minutes. We kept him on the ground to avoid being intercepted.”
“Sorry for the delay, Sam,” Charlie cut in. “I usually have no trouble disrupting the Mi-8’s radar system. I’m jamming their FLIR now, sending phantom blips to get them off our extraction bird. Two soft kills to be sure, but if those pilots visually ID the Black Hawk, there’s not much I can do about their door-mounted guns, which, according to the specs, have a thousand rounds apiece.”
Confusing a radar electronically was what Charlie called a “soft kill.” The method Fisher preferred, the “hard kill,” involved ramming a Hellfire missile down their throats.
He watched the chopper fly ahead of them, then wheel around and hover. “Shit, they’re trying to cut us off.”
“Exactly,” answered Grim.
“All right, tell our pilot business as usual. We’ll worry about those troops. Charlie, you pick the drone’s targets very carefully. You gotta buy us time.”
“It’s cool, Sam. Looks like the Mi-8 can hold up to twenty-four troops, so the odds aren’t bad at alclass="underline" forty-eight to four! We got this!”
Charlie wasn’t much of a math major, it seemed.
Fisher knifed past two more trees, broke hard left, and kept moving, with Briggs hard on his heels.
They both had activated their sonar systems. The deep hues of the forest dissolved into the black-and-white contrast of an X-ray. The system relied on sonic pulses, combined with an advanced AI controller, to penetrate through objects and walls so that they could literally see through them to mark targets. Downtime between echoed bursts along with jamming vulnerabilities and distorted images while they were on the move were the system’s chief weaknesses, but the sonar did come in handy when obstacles and terrain made threat assessment difficult.
Through that stark imagery Fisher watched as the chopper descended another twenty meters, then the crew chief lowered a pair of ropes. Two teams of troops came zipping down the lines like beads of crude oil across gleaming gossamers.
“Sam, if I can say so, this shit is not good,” gasped Briggs.
“It’s not bad, either,” Fisher snapped.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, because if we get out of this, we got one hell of a story to tell.”
“A story? Who’re we gonna tell? We don’t exist.”
“Don’t overthink it. Now, come on, pick it up.” Fisher raced up and over a small rise, kicking up ice and gravel.
“Sam, Charlie here. I count nineteen on the ground behind you, range six hundred meters. They’ve fanned out in three squads with an officer and some other logistics dickhead hanging back. We called them a search and rescue team, but these guys look like Spetsnaz, Special Forces, man. Hard-core mothers.”
Fisher snorted. “That’s perfect. They’ve got bigger egos, so when we escape it’ll piss ’em off even more.”
They were sidestepping down another slope, heading to the southwest, but Fisher swore as the forest broke off, and they would soon be forced to cross a series of rock-strewn hogbacks whose drop-offs on the left side brought flashbacks of Bolivia. The ledge was about thirty meters long but barely two meters wide, and above it, outcrops of stone jutted like awnings layered with snow, their bellies sharpened by icicles. On the other side lay more forest, and off to the northwest, their rendezvous point with the chopper.
“Wait a minute,” said Fisher, raising his palm. “Perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
Briggs arrived at his side, panting and confused. “You found us a good place to die?”
Fisher hoisted his brows. “Not us, Briggs. Them.”
8
LESS than three minutes later, they were crouched low behind two fir trees nearest the hogbacks. They each had a fragmentation grenade in their strong hands, pistols in their weak. Training, equipment, and terrain were all force multipliers, and Fisher had recognized that. Briggs, a student of military history, had agreed and reminded Fisher of the ancient battle between the Greeks and the Persians at the pass of Thermopylae. A mere 7,000 Greeks held off between 100,000 and 300,000 men for seven days in one of the most remarkable battles ever fought.
“Here they come,” whispered Briggs.
Like their comrades to the east, these troops had formed three squads, six men in each, with two squads hustling through the forest toward the pass. The third was holding back in overwatch positions along the outcroppings above the pass.
“Sam, I’ve just deployed the CS canisters,” reported Charlie. “Probably took out at least six or seven of them, but the wind’s picking up again. Looks like the rest are converging on the crash site, at least for now.”
“Roger that. Do a sweep over the tree line surrounding the jet. Double-check for bodies.”
“No problem.”
“Sam, it’s Grim. One of you needs to move ahead, pop smoke, and do some combat control for the chopper. GPS coordinates are a little off, and the pilot’s having a hard time seeing the LZ. It’s real tight down there.”
“We’ll get on it,” answered Fisher.
“Uh, and yeah, uh, excuse me, you’ve got twelve hostiles inbound with another six overhead,” she said.
“I know, Grim.”
“Why aren’t you moving?”
“You’ll see.”
The first squad of Spetsnaz ventured tentatively onto the cliff, the point man hunkered down and waving his assault rifle toward the shadows ahead. His comrades followed, their spacing well practiced, their fingers at the ready to cut loose volleys of superheated lead.
All six were passing through the hogback now, and then came the second squad, one by one. The mountainside grew so quiet that Fisher thought he could hear every piece of ice crunching under their boots. Even the wind seemed to be holding back, waiting for something to happen.
Fisher zoomed in with his trifocals. The Spetsnaz wore dark green camouflage uniforms with balaclavas tugged down over their faces. Frost was forming on the areas around their mouths. He got a better look at their weapons now, flicking his glance between them and his OPSAT, which ID’d the rifles as Kalashnikov AK-12s, the latest derivative of the Soviet/Russian AK-47 series with a curious lower number than 47. The 12 referred to the year the rifle went into production. What a shame. These were excellent new toys in the hands of men relying upon conventional tactics. They might be hard-core, as Charlie had mentioned, but they needed a hell of a lot more creativity if they were going to capture or kill Fisher and Briggs.