The president wiped the sweat from his brow. “My God. Look at them go.” He watched them run for almost three hundred meters over rugged forest terrain. Then both men suddenly went down.
“They’re hit!” Couture exclaimed, looking across the room at the air force liaison officer. “Tighten that frame, Major!” He pointed to the other screen. “And pull that one back. Try and find who shot them.”
One camera zoomed in; the other pulled back.
“They’re moving,” someone said. “They’re still alive!”
“But who the hell shot them?” Couture asked in frustration. He was on his feet and stepping closer to the wide-angle television screen. “There aren’t any heat signatures for more than three hundred yards.”
“Maybe it was a booby trap,” Brooks ventured.
Couture shook his head. “We’d have seen an explosion.”
“There!” someone said, pointing at a brief, partial heat signature of a human form fifty or sixty yards west of where Gil and Dragunov were now dragging themselves to cover behind some rocks. The partial signature disappeared again almost as suddenly as it had appeared.
“Shit, that’s a sniper in a shielded ghillie suit.”
“What’s that?” the president asked.
“A camouflaged cloak made of heat-absorbent material,” Couture replied. “Whoever we just saw, Mr. President, he knew someone might be watching from above, and he’s taken steps against being picked up on infrared.”
Brooks snapped the pencil he’d been twiddling in his fingers. “Five’ll get you ten it’s Kovalenko. This op was compromised before they ever left Moscow.”
The president’s eyes were fixed to the screen. “Can someone please tighten the shot? I’d like to see what our men are doing behind those rocks.”
“Whatever they’re doing,” Couture said, “they’d better do it fast because here come those mean little bastards from the ambush.”
The president glanced at the other screen, where more than twenty human heat signatures were sweeping quickly westward toward Gil’s position. “I’m not going to lie,” he muttered, overawed by what he was seeing. “I’d be terrified. Hell, I’m terrified just watching it.” He met Couture’s sympathetic gaze. “Any chance they’ll surrender, General?”
Couture shook his head. “Men like Gil Shannon and Ivan Dragunov don’t even know the meaning of the word, Mr. President.”
The president turned to Brooks. “Get Bob Pope on the phone. We need to find out if Moscow’s watching this and whether or not they intend to provide any support.”
55
Dokka Umarov’s nephew Lom had been in command of the ambush, and Lom was furious with his men for having allowed the Russian and the American to escape. He drove them hard through the rugged forest, giving orders on the move for them to keep an even dispersal and not to let the enemy slip through their line. Their Spetsnaz ally Kovalenko was supposed to be out there somewhere blocking the avenue of retreat, but Lom took little comfort in this. The ambush had been deployed perfectly, yet it had failed, and the responsibility for that failure lay on his head. He’d sent a runner to Umarov’s camp for more men, but his uncle would not arrive in time. The only way for Lom to reclaim some modicum of his honor would be to catch and kill his prey before they either blundered into Kovalenko’s path or escaped altogether.
Lom and his force had so far covered almost three hundred meters, and there was still no sign of their quarry. They were not likely to have fled north because the forest ended where the high country began, and there would be little or no cover above the tree line, where the going would be far more treacherous. Retreat to the south was even less likely because of the way the terrain dropped off into a steep canyon from which there would be almost no escape.
“Keep your eyes open!” he hissed. “They cannot be far now.”
A grenade exploded forty meters to the north, and there was a wicked exchange of rifle fire.
“Move!” Lom shouted. “They’re trying to break through our line!” The last thing he needed was for the enemy to break into his rear and wind up making contact with his uncle’s force. That would be too shameful to endure.
His men up the line were shouting back and forth, confused over the enemy’s location, unable to see much by the faint light of the moon.
Another grenade exploded as Lom arrived on the scene, and this time body parts flew through the air. There was a second savage exchange of machine-gun fire, and an errant round snapped through Lom’s upper arm, grazing the bone. He gnashed his teeth against the pain, vaulting a fallen tree and screaming for his men to fill the gap where the grenade had blown a hole in their line.
A dark figure slammed into him from his blindside, moving fast, and sent him sprawling face-first into a boulder, mashing his nose and breaking his front teeth off at the gum line. He was lifting himself up when a second figure stomped on his head and leapt over the boulder, leaving him too dazed to rise again.
He was unsure of how much time had passed when one of his men sat him up against the rock and poured water onto his face.
“What! Where are they?” he said with a lisp.
“They got through,” the man said. “I’ve sent another runner to link up with Dokka. Our man knows the forest, and he should get there ahead of them.”
A hooded figure in a ghillie suit appeared like an apparition, throwing back the hood to reveal his face in the moonlight. “Who’s responsible for this unholy mess?”
Lom instantly recognized him as Sasha Kovalenko. “I am,” he croaked.
Kovalenko glanced around, hearing the moans of the casualties all around them. “Two wounded men just went through your line like shit through a goose! You’ll be lucky if your uncle doesn’t string you up by the balls.” He jerked the rifle from Lom’s hands and gave it back to the other man, saying to him, “Round up the men who are still whole and form on me. We’re moving out in two minutes.”
The man left to do as he’d been told, and Kovalenko turned back to Lom, asking disgustedly, “Can you still fight, little girl, or do you plan on spending the rest of your miserable life sucking cock with that pretty new mouth of yours?”
Lom was so ashamed and infuriated that his eyes filled with tears. “I can fight.” he said, lisping grotesquely.
“We’ll see.” Kovalenko shoved him aside. “Find a rifle and try to keep up.”
Two hundred yards east, Gil and Dragunov stopped to lick their wounds beneath an overhang.
“It won’t take them long to regroup,” Dragunov said, sweat streaming down his head from the pain in his testicles. He held a penlight as Gil unbuttoned his trousers to get a look at his groin wound.
“We hit ’em pretty fuckin’ hard,” Gil said, using his knife to cut away Dragunov’s blood-soaked underwear. “It looks like you’re in luck here, partner. The scrotum’s torn open but your balls are still in there. These thigh wounds are superficial.”
Gil wiped his bloody hands on Dragunov’s pants and sat back to begin shrugging out of his harness and body armor. “I don’t know if I got that lucky.”
Dragunov buttoned his trousers and helped Gil shed his gear. The American had a number of small holes in his abdomen where Kovalenko’s 5.45 mm rounds had defeated his armor, but the rounds had fragmented, and it looked like the fragments had embedded themselves in Gil’s abdominal muscles — painful but not life threatening.
“That was Kovalenko who hit us back there,” he said. “It was a setup from the beginning.”
“Aye,” Dragunov said. “And he’ll be coming. We’re not dead because he didn’t expect us to come running at him like that, but we have to be very careful now. There is a reason he’s called the Wolf.”