Kovalenko would be cursing him now, and Gil stuck his middle finger up over the rock for a half second and pulled it back. A third round stuck the rock and ricocheted with a whine.
“Good, you’re pissed,” Gil muttered. “Wait till you find out Ivan’s still alive.”
The first group of Umarov’s men had arrived within effective AK-47 range about a hundred yards down the slope, and it wasn’t more than ten seconds before Dragunov’s first shot rang out across the valley, cutting down a man in the midst of shouting orders to pick up the pace.
Gil scrambled from behind the rock into the trees, where the cover was more substantial. Dragunov fired again, and another Chechen toppled over about seventy yards downhill, shot in the small of the back.
Gil hunkered in with his own SVD. He placed the PSO-1’s unique T-shaped reticle on the face of the next Chechen in line and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck the man in the left eye and blew out the back of his head. The body spun a tight pirouette to the ground, and the sight had a chilling effect on the rest of the skirmishers, sending them scrambling for cover behind rocks and in shallow depressions. Nothing demoralized infantry like sniper fire.
Gil now had a good estimate of the angle from which Kovalenko was firing, and he knew he would be safe behind the tree until Kovalenko could displace for a better shot. He concerned himself with a pair of Chechens who’d taken cover in a shallow defilade a hundred yards downslope. The two men were pouring AK-47 fire into the trees off to the left. He placed the reticle on the forehead of the first guy, allowing for the drop of the bullet, and squeezed the trigger, blowing off the top of his head. Then Gil shifted a hair to the right and shot the second one through the center of the face. The head snapped back and then forward again, smacking against the ground.
Another, braver pair of Chechens attempted to maneuver uphill through a dense copse of trees, and Gil was about to squeeze the trigger when Dragunov — who must have worried that Gil couldn’t see them — shot one through the pelvis. The Chechen went down screaming, and Gil shot him through the head.
The other guy panicked and darted from the trees on the far left side, where Dragunov would not have a shot at him. Gil led him six inches and squeezed the trigger, hitting him in the left temple and blowing out his eyes. He swung back to the right and shot another man in the face just as he was stealing a peek from behind a boulder. The body fell from behind the rock, and an arm reached out to grab him. Gil shot it off at the elbow.
“Looks like you’re gonna need some help with those ketchup bottles from now on, partner.”
Bullets splintered the tree limbs just above him, and he marked the shooter two hundred yards downslope behind another rock. The rock wasn’t very large, but Gil could see only the barrel of the rifle and the top of the shooter’s camouflaged cap. He squeezed the trigger. The round hit the forestock of the AK-47 and ricocheted into the Chechen’s eye.
The wounded man jumped up and ran away downhill.
Gil let him go, knowing his bloody retreat would have a detrimental effect on the morale of the men farther downslope.
“Okay,” he muttered. “Two more rounds before I take this show back on the road.”
A bullet passed through a two-inch gap in the rocks to Gil’s right, tearing a chunk from the tree just beyond his nose. It was a round that could have come only from Kovalenko. “Fuck me!” he said, pulling back. “Time to go!”
67
Scanning the tree line to the west in search of Kovalenko, Dragunov spotted Dokka Umarov instead, more than four hundred meters away. The Chechen rebel leader was watching the hunt for the American through a pair of binoculars, with only three men for security. Dragunov knew him from the long beard, and he couldn’t believe his luck at suddenly having Russia’s most hated enemy in his crosshairs.
Eye to the scope, he placed the crossbar of the T slightly above Umarov’s head to allow for the drop of the bullet, expecting a solid torso shot. He was about to squeeze off the round when a .338 Lapua Magnum slammed into his right side, penetrating the side panel of his armor and tumbling as it tore through his abdominal muscles. Dragunov recoiled from the impact, throwing himself downhill to avoid being hit again, rolling into a cleft between the rocks, and gripping his abdomen.
In agony, he dug a fentanyl “lollipop” from his aid kit and stuck it into his mouth for the pain. The fentanyl, seventy-five times more potent than morphine, would take effect within five minutes. Until then he would be a sitting duck for anyone who came to finish him off, so he drew his pistol and waited.
Kovalenko knew that Dragunov was severely wounded this time and would die soon. He picked up the ORSIS rifle and pulled back into the forest, where he could maneuver freely without having to worry about the American. He hadn’t been able to get a clear sight picture on Gil, so he had fired through a tiny gap in the rocks at five hundred meters, knowing that he would hit close enough to scare the American into displacing. Then he had taken out Dragunov by easily hitting a six-inch gap in the trees from two hundred meters.
Now, with only one sniper to worry about, Kovalenko was free to maneuver south and wait for Gil to expose himself. Since he had forced the American out of his sniper’s nest, the Chechen infantry had gained the high ground to Gil’s rear. Soon it would be in the trees, where he would no longer enjoy the advantage of firing over hundreds of meters of open killing ground. All Kovalenko had to do was get into position by the time Gil was forced from the trees on the south end of the woods. He picked up the pace until he came to Umarov’s position and took cover behind a large pine.
“You shouldn’t stand out there exposed like that, Dokka.”
“I’ve told him,” said Basayev. “It doesn’t do any good.”
Umarov took his eyes away from the binoculars and glanced over his shoulder at Kovalenko. “Where have you been?”
“Killing Dragunov.”
“Good. Now get ready to kill the American. The wolves are in the trees with him now, and he’ll soon be flushed out the other end.”
The firing on the far side of the valley picked up, and they could hear the chatter of Gil’s AN-94 answering that of numerous AK-47s and RPKs.
“He’s falling back fast now,” Basayev said. “Running out of cover.”
Kovalenko emerged from the trees, shrugging out of the hot ghillie suit down to the waist. He took up a firing position on his belly beside a fallen tree and popped the lens caps on the scope. He was able to catch glimpses of Gil falling back through the trees, but it was obvious that even now Gil was conscious of being under a sniper’s watchful eye. He never stopped on the downhill side of a tree or a rock to leave himself exposed but was always careful to keep something between him and the west side of the valley.
“Do you have a shot?” Umarov asked.
“No,” Kovalenko said. “He’s very good… but another sixty seconds, and that won’t matter.”
“Do you hear that?” Basayev said suddenly, looking up into the sky.
Gil had run out of room to retreat. He took to one knee, his back to the open spaces, and fired the last of his 40 mm grenades. The grenade exploded and took out three men as they maneuvered beneath a jutting rock formation. He assumed that Dragunov must be dead — otherwise the men now chasing him through the trees would never have gained the high ground so quickly — and he assumed equally that Kovalenko would be waiting on the far side of the valley to shoot him the second he broke from the trees. A look over his shoulder told him the closest possible cover was a blunt outcropping of rock more than fifty yards away. The outcrop would barely conceal him from Kovalenko, much less from the Chechens now pursuing him at such close range.