“Sam, I’m looking at sonar now,” said Briggs. “You won’t make it.”
“Sure, I will.”
“Look, you’ve told me there’s nothing more important than the mission. Not you, not me, not anyone.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I get that. I respect it. But all we got out of this drop was a backpack. And we’re not going to lose you over a backpack.”
Fisher grinned weakly over the irony. “All right, Briggs, I see your point.”
“Good. I’m going after the three guys east of your position.”
Fisher could almost hear the smile on the man’s face.
Just then the drone returned to Fisher’s side and Charlie was barking in his ear: “Attach your last two frags, Sam. I’ll light ’em up!”
Fisher tugged out the grenades and got to work. Clip one, clip two. “Okay, rock ’n’ roll, Charlie.”
“Sam, break to the left,” said Grim. “The widest gap between the troops above you is there.”
“Right along where the trees thin out?” he asked.
“That’s it.”
Fisher clutched the rifle to his chest, broke from the trees, and sprinted off toward the next patch of cover: a small mound with a large shoulder of mottled rock rising to knee height behind it. He trudged up through the snow, getting about ten meters ahead, when the first salvo of rifle fire split wood like a dozen hatchets in the trees ahead. He craned his head back as a few more rounds thumped into his boot prints. Cutting a serpentine path while crouched down, he reached the rock, his pulse drumming in his ears.
“Get down, Sam!” cried Charlie.
The kid had control of the frags, and if he said to “get down,” then Fisher sure as shit wouldn’t argue. He threw himself behind the rock, and not a second too soon. An explosion tore across the hillside only a few meters back, the ground trembling and erupting, waves of flying dirt reaching as far as the rock. At the same time, shrapnel cut through that dirt storm to strike with metallic snicks against the stone.
The shrieks that split the night were bone-chilling but quickly cut off by the second grenade, which Charlie had deposited atop the troops even farther back, the burst more distant, the echoing cries sounding inhuman at first before they, too, were lost in the reverberating thunder.
The sound of Briggs’s P220 .45ACP pistol cracking in the distance sent Fisher springing from his cover behind the rock and scrambling back up toward the three men waiting for him in the trees ahead. While the canopy was thinning out, the remaining branches were thrashing about in the rotor wash as the Black Hawk banked hard just a dozen or so meters above them.
And then, much to Fisher’s shock, the chopper’s door gunner opened fire on the tree line with his M240H, a classic and supremely badass machine gun sometimes known as the “240 Hotel.” The weapon was capable of delivering up to 950 rounds per minute of 7.62x51mm ammo out to a range of nearly 1,800 meters. Splintering branches and hunks of bark flitted down and were churned up by the rotors as he targeted the three Spetsnaz troops pinning down Fisher.
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!”