Zooming back out, Fisher noted that the point man was only a few meters away from what he and Briggs had dubbed the “rock of no return”—a small stone about the size of a volleyball they’d placed along the ledge as a landmark.
He glanced over at the young man hunkered down at his side. Briggs’s eyes were covered by his trifocals, and Fisher let his gaze drift down to Briggs’s gloved hand. Was he trembling? Was his pulse bounding? Could Fisher trust him enough to react and carry out the plan as discussed? There’d been a moment during the Blacklist operation where Sadiq had been clutching Fisher and it’d been up to Briggs to take the shot, end it right there, but the kid just couldn’t do it. Fisher had, in effect, fired him after that. They’d come to terms with the incident, and while Fisher forgave, he never forgot.
Briggs must’ve felt the heat of Fisher’s gaze, and he glanced over and nodded.
The point man lifted his hand, halting the squad.
“Shit,” Briggs whispered.
Fisher leaned toward Briggs. “Take it easy.”
A few of the troops craned their heads at the sound of the Black Hawk’s rotors approaching from the west.
The point man shouted in Russian, “Double-time!”
And they took off running—
Right into Fisher’s trap.
9
NO plan ever survived the first enemy contact, and if you believed otherwise, you were an armchair general who’d never set foot on a battlefield. The plan of going in ghost, reconnoitering the crash site, and getting out without ever being detected had already been abandoned. Taking out enemy troops while still remaining stealthy was a tactic most often employed by Fisher, one he’d recently begun calling “panther.” Going in “ghost” or going in “panther” was shorthand he used with Grim.
Going in “assault”—loud and offensive—was a last resort. They were information gatherers, not direct action specialists, but they were always prepared to bring the fight to the enemy when they had to, and bring it they had.
The point man broke the laser trip wire they’d set up on the ledge near that rock.
Fisher held his breath.
The small C-4 charges with wireless detonators that he and Briggs had emplaced along the ledge went off in a thread of echoing booms, instantly killing the point man and the two men behind him, their shredded bodies arching through the air and disappearing into the chasm below.
Fisher and Briggs hurled their grenades up and onto the outcroppings. While some troops up there and below hit the deck, others were so disoriented that they either ran or were blown right off the ledge. In the next heartbeat, the outcroppings exploded, raining down tons of rock onto the pass, crushing a few troops while a handful of others narrowly escaped back toward the forest. One man doing overwatch tumbled from the cliff above the pass, the rock beneath him having suddenly given way. The screaming and random salvos flashing from AK-12s, along with the still flickering light of burning shrapnel splayed across the cliff, cast the entire scene in a weird otherworldly glow.
As the miniature mushroom clouds of fire expanded above, rising from columns of dense black smoke, the injured appeared, a couple of troops missing appendages, crawling with what limbs they had left, scraping forward across the ice.
Before Fisher and Briggs could assess any more of their ambush, they were on their feet and hauling ass back toward the forest to circle around and above the pass. The sonar goggles revealed that there were at least five more troops left up top, all having fallen back to secondary defensive positions within the trees.
“Sam, the troops at the crash site—”
“I know, Grim,” he snapped. “But we need to clear a path for Briggs so he can get to that helo.”
“Well, you’d better move. I count at least ten sprinting toward your position.”
“Charlie, can you run interference?” Fisher asked.
“I’ll see if I can offer the drone as bait, let ’em take some potshots to keep ’em distracted. And Sam, I haven’t spotted any bodies in the trees.”
“Okay,” Fisher answered, fighting for breath. “Just slow down those bastards for me.”
He and Briggs scaled a hill so steep they were forced to lean forward and clutch at the earth and snow. At the top, Fisher’s quads were burning, and the altitude was really getting to him now. Briggs was crouched again, scanning with his trifocals. He gave Fisher a hand signaclass="underline" got two guys to the left, three to the right.
Fisher gestured for Briggs to go left, take out those two quietly. Fisher slipped off across the snow and toward the other three, holstering his pistol and drawing the karambit from its sheath attached to his waistband just behind the holster.
The knife was a curved blade variant, a “tiger’s claw” endemic to Sumatra, Central Java, and Madura. Over his long career, Fisher had studied with many close-quarters combat experts, among them world-renowned edged weapon master Michael Janich, who’d taught Fisher to use the blade with expert and deadly efficiency. The karambit’s design made it more easily concealable in the hand as well as offering more leverage while dragging it across the neck, with the ultimate goal of opening an enemy’s head like a PEZ dispenser. The karambit’s outside edge was sharpened, its back blade nearest the handle heavily serrated to be flipped and used to hack through thicker objects or pieces of flesh. By slipping your pinky or ring finger through the ring attached to the bottom of the knife’s hilt, you could switch between forward and reverse grips in a lightning-fast 180-degree stroke. Fisher owned two karambits, one with a silver uncoated blade, the other featuring a DLC, or diamond-like carbon, coating that gave the blade a matte black appearance for better camouflage and protection against reflections that could betray his position.
Knowing most of this op would be run at night, he’d taken the black blade—which now jutted from the bottom of his fist.
At the next tree he paused and marked the positions of each troop, their weapons trained on the valley to his left. He zoomed in once more with his trifocals. The nearest troop peered out from behind a more narrow pine, his rifle at the ready, a pair of night-vision goggles clipped to his helmet and slid down over his eyes.
After plotting his path, Fisher stepped as gingerly as he could, coming in from behind the man, who turned back as he approached, but all he saw was the next spruce behind him. He didn’t realize Fisher was so close, placing a gloved hand over his mouth to try to stifle his warm breath. Once more Fisher examined the ground between his position and the soldier’s. No, not good. Broken patches of ice, pine needles, and a few brown leaves scattered on top of it all. A soundless approach would involve antigravity boots. He’d have to get Charlie on that. For now, though, it was all about reaching the troop before the man could fire and alert his comrades.
Reaching the troop . . . that was one way to do it. The other involved bringing the troop to him . . .
Taking in a long breath, the air stinging his lungs, Fisher stood and began to walk in place, the snow and leaves crunching loudly under his boots.
Then he froze, got back down on his haunches, and doused the green lights on his trifocals.
As expected, the troop clambered to his feet and left his position to investigate the noise. His movements were tense; in fact, Fisher had never seen a young man more puckered up.