The badly wounded man was firing a pistol because he was no longer in any condition to wield a rifle. “Leave me, Colonel. I’m slowing you down.”
Yablonsky propped him against a tree. “You’re sure, Maxim?”
“I’ll never make it. Leave me a grenade, and I’ll make it count.”
Yablonsky pulled the pin on a grenade and put it into the younger man’s hand. Then he patted him on the face and dashed off to catch up with the other four Spetsnaz men.
Maxim crawled forward on his good arm, gripping the grenade. When the Chechens broke cover, he released the safety lever and counted to two before biffing the grenade in their direction. It detonated on impact and blew three of them off their feet. The others overran him and stabbed him with bayonets before moving on.
Yablonsky heard the blast and rallied his men to make a brief stand. They were running out of 40 mm grenades, but they had to keep the enemy back on its heels as much as possible. They fired a volley, and the last of the Chechen Spetsnaz were blown away by the barrage, giving them a much-needed respite.
“Let’s not stop to watch the birds fuck,” Yablonsky said. “The rest are not far behind.”
Gil caught up to the tail end of the pursuers. He could hear them crashing through the forest ahead of him, calling out to one another to keep themselves organized. The 40 mm barrage echoed through the trees, and everyone picked up the pace.
He switched the AK-105 to semiauto and shot a straggler in the back, stepping on his head as he dashed over him. He shouldered the rifle and shot another man through the back of the skull.
A Chechen to his left heard the hiss of the rifle and jerked to a stop. “Kovalenko? Is that you?”
Gil shot him through the face and kept moving. He picked off a dozen men in this same manner, shooting them silently from behind, sometimes at ranges of up to forty yards, but a group of seven Chechens got wise to him and stopped to form a rear guard, thinking that one of the Spetsnaz men had slipped through the net and gotten into their rear.
Gil crouched motionless in the rhododendron, looking straight across a small glade at the men waiting in ambush. He was tempted to stand up and pretend to be Kovalenko, but it would only take one of them to call his bluff, so he remained motionless, losing time to the mission as he waited them out.
After almost ten minutes, the Chechens began to grow restless, whispering back and forth across their line. A few minutes after that, all but one of them pulled slowly back and resumed the pursuit.
Gil stayed where he was, watching the spooked Chechen who’d been left behind to cover the rear.
He waited until the man displaced to better cover; then he shouldered the rifle and shot him through the neck.
A hundred yards farther on, Gil came across Maxim’s body. He saw the Russian was still alive and knelt to check his wounds. It was obvious the young man didn’t have long to live. He put back the hood of the ghillie suit, and the Russian opened his eyes, recognizing Gil.
“Umarov?” he asked.
Gil drew a finger across his throat, and the Spetsnaz man smiled. He died a few moments later, and Gil moved out.
He caught back up to the posse shortly after they’d left the forest to descend into the river valley that led downhill to the west toward the bridge. He took cover in the tree line and picked off eleven of them over open sights before they realized they were being fired upon. When the rest finally did realize what was going on, there was nothing they could do about it. Gil was so well camouflaged, they couldn’t tell where the shots were coming from. So they ran. They ran as fast as they could over open terrain — and Gil killed ten more of them before finally tossing aside the AK-105 and unslinging the .338.
He looked through the scope to see thirty more Chechens stretched out along the riverbank in hot pursuit of Yablonsky and his men. The Spetsnaz team was in full sprint for the bridge that still lay five hundred yards ahead. The Chechens fired wildly as they ran, but there were at least five hundred yards between the two parties, and the Chechens were too tired for accurate shooting at that range.
Gil set up the bipod and positioned himself behind the rifle. He shot the man closest to Yablonsky in the small of the back from almost eight hundred yards. Then he worked the bolt and fired again, picking off the next closest man. He shot them off the riverbank one at a time, working his way back.
The Chechens gave up the chase and sought whatever cover they could along the riverbank.
Yablonsky and his men pulled up short, stopping to launch the last of their 40 mm grenades in a high arc, blowing the Chechens off the bank and into the river. Then they watched as the last one was picked off by sniper fire, hearing Gil’s shot echoing down through the valley.
The Spetsnaz men held their positions, watching Gil come walking down the side of the mountain carrying the .338 in his right hand, with the ghillie suit draped over his left arm. A French Puma and a heavily armed Cayuse helicopter flew into the valley and hovered high over the southern bridgehead without crossing into Russian airspace.
When Gil finally limped up, he smiled and offered Yablonsky the ghillie suit. “This was Kovalenko’s leshy. I thought you might offer it to Putin as a souvenir, with my compliments.”
Yablonsky smiled back, accepting the suit and passing it off to one of his men. “Umarov is dead?”
“You bet.”
The Russian gestured across the river. “Are those helicopters here for us?”
“They better be,” Gil said, setting off for the bridge. “I’m in no shape for walkin’ home.”
The helos landed as they walked along the bank.
“I got close to Mukhammad,” Gil said, “but I didn’t have a shot.”
“Don’t worry about him,” Yablonsky said. “He doesn’t have the influence that Umarov had. Not yet, at least.”
They were met halfway across the bridge by Mason and three other heavily armed men. There was also a civilian among them, a man in his forties with thinning blond hair wearing a North Face jacket.
Gil returned Mason’s sniper rifle. “I lost your ruck. I’m sorry.”
Mason accepted the weapon. “You brought back the part that counts, Chief.”
“Master Chief Shannon,” said the civilian. “I’m Parker Smith with the US Embassy in Tbilisi. I was sent by the State Department to debrief you on the elimination of Dokka Umarov. There’s some concern that we won’t be able to confirm his death because you chose to kill him with a headshot, so I need you to—”
“Give me your hand,” Gil said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, give me your hand.”
Smith was reluctant but did as he was told.
Gil put the thumb of Dokka Umarov into the palm of Smith’s hand and closed his fingers tightly over it. “This is all the DNA you and the State Department will need for confirmation. Now fuck off.”
Gil turned and limped away toward the waiting helos. “Come on, Colonel. First beer’s on me.”
Smith opened his hand and turned green, stepping to the side of the bridge and retching over the railing.
EPILOGUE
Three months later, Gil and Crosswhite were walking across a self-storage lot on the outskirts of Paris, not far from the rail yard where Gil had his first run-in with Kovalenko.
“So tell me about this girl,” Gil said.
Crosswhite took a drag from a cigarette. “Not much to tell.”
“I know better than that. You moved to a communist country to be with her, for Christ’s sake.”