The big Keldara stuffed the crackers in his mouth and washed them down with the beer. The entire bottle disappeared in one swig. Then he belched.
“Better,” Shota said. “Thank you, Kildar.”
“Now head back to your position,” Mike said. “Don’t fire the rocket until Dmitri or Oleg tell you to.”
“Okay,” Shota said. “I go back now.”
“You know,” Olga said, “if he was smart, he’d be scary.”
“Yeah,” Mike admitted. “Knew a guy like him on the teams, once. But smart. Wasn’t as big but I’d swear he was just as strong. And you’re right. He was scary. There’s a couple of Deltas like that. Big as a house and smart. Those guys are freaks of nature. How are the boys?”
“Still with us,” Olga said. Her arms were red to the elbows with blood. “But they’re losing a lot of blood no matter what I do. When can we get them out of here?”
“Valkyrie, Valkyrie, ETA?”
“Five mikes, Kildar.”
“Standby.” Mike reached down and switched frequencies without looking. “Tiger Three, status?”
“Looks like a council of war. There are a bunch of guys scattered around on the hills just hanging out. Minimum of fifteen mikes if they move right now. Got some sniper fire. Lasko’s picking them off as fast as they get in position, though.”
“Roger, out.” Another freq switch. “Valkyrie, Valkyrie, dustoff hot. Position will be marked with yellow smoke.”
“Roger, Kildar. Inbound your position, three mikes.”
“YOSIF!” Mike yelled. Team Yosif had set up secondary positions to either side of the command bunker, a combination final security team and reserve.
“Yes, Kildar!”
“Dustoff coming in! I need some bodies!”
Mike crabbed past the casualties then crawled through the rear exit of the bunker — a narrow passage between the original boulders — and stood up in the area behind. It was on the reverse side of the small hill from the Chechens and, hopefully, out of sight of their snipers. He pulled a yellow smoke grenade off his harness and tossed it to the more-or-less level ground just as he heard the “whop-whop” of the Hind on its way in.
“Valkyrie, LZ is marked.”
“LZ in sight,” Tammie replied. “Stella, we taking any fire?”
“Negative, ma’am,” the crewchief replied.
“Okay, the job is toss the boxes out as fast as possible then load the wounded. I’m not going to stop while you toss, just for the wounded. Got it?”
“I think I can handle that, ma’am,” Stella said, a note of humor in her voice.
Stella Kulcyanov was seventeen, just. She had all the height and musculature of the Kulcyanov Family but was dark of hair and eyes, the latter showing the traces of some Tartar ancestor. Her first experience of a “real world” mission had been sliding down a rope into the offices of an Albanian owned nightclub in Romania, in the midst of a hot firefight. Her job had been to pull every last hard drive in the room in no more than three minutes. She had managed to do it in two minutes and forty-eight seconds, slightly bettering her best time during rehearsals.
As the Hind slowed while passing over some boulders she released her grip on the spades of the minigun, slid back the troop door and started tossing boxes out of the helicopter. About half of the cargo was ammunition crates which were heavy but nothing compared to hay-bales; she picked up one in either hand and hurled them out the door. The rest were wooden boxes, gifts from the Mothers of the Keldara to their sons. Those, she handled with a bit more care.
The last thing out the door was a big rubber bag. That was the hardest to maneuver. It had to be rolled and there wasn’t a good way to grab it. She finally lay down on the floor and pushed it out with her boots.
By that time the helo had come to a stop and she scrambled forward to help with the stretchers.
“We’ve got it,” Yosif said, climbing into the helo. “Hey, Stella. Where’s Gretchen?”
“In the Halls,” Stella said, looking at the casualty. Ama Ferani had been hit by something that had smashed his leg just above the knee. A tourniquet was on and he wasn’t losing much blood but she didn’t think he’d keep the leg. “Hit by the bunkers in the pass.”
“Shit,” Yosif said, shaking his head. He grabbed the next stretcher and put it in the rack. And the next and the next. Two were walking wounded, Karoly Makanee with a round that had punctured his body armor low on the left side and Pedar Shaynav hit in the upper right arm. The round had hit the brachial artery and he was half unconscious with blood loss. “She was true Keldara.”
“As are you, Yosif,” Stella replied. She was already hooking Pedar up to a liter of whole blood. She wasn’t sure which of the stretcher casualties, or maybe even Pedar, would need the defibrillator. The Ranger medic had started to explain it and she’d cut him off; she’d seen one before and the instructions were easy enough to read. Compared to circuit diagrams they were comical. “Aer Keldar.”
As the helo lifted into the air she hooked up two more liters of blood then turned to the miniguns again. The bird would be crossing near the defense position closing the pass. She may be an angel of mercy on this mission, but she was more than willing to be an avenging angel.
The Valkyr were, after all, warriors.
“We are agreed, then,” Commander Bukara said, trying to hold onto his patience.
The Chechen resistance had something resembling a high command but they were in the hills nearer to Grozny. They’d been sending suggestions, most of them idiotic, throughout the entire action. But here, Bukara was the senior most commander.
That didn’t mean he could just order the other groups around. Each of the Chechen “battalions”, most not much larger than a traditional company, were groups controlled and kept together by individuals. And a bigger bunch of prima donnas it was hard to find.
“I still feel that if you wish to command you should lead,” Commander Sorrano said, his face hard.
“My force has been chasing these bastards for the last nine hours,” Bukara said, patiently. “Now, as the wolf pack changes members to drag down the deer, we shift over. There are six hundred of you with your combined groups. There are only a bare hundred of them, now that we have done cutting them down on the chase. I have taken nearly a hundred casualties. But if you’re afraid of a few Keldara… ”
“We are not afraid,” Sorrano said. He was a big man, dark of face and hair, wearing bandoliers of ammunition for the PKM he carried across both shoulders and four gigantic daggers on his belt.
He probably thought it made him look fierce: to Bukara it made him look like an idiot. Some of the links in the bandoliers were clearly kinked; if he tried to use the ammunition, his gun was going to jam. And Bukara, who had been in more than one hand-to-hand battle, had never used more than one knife in his life. His experience of “hand-to-hand” was that you generally used the biggest, heaviest thing you could get your hands on, generally an empty rifle. Knives were weapons of absolute last resort.
“Then don’t you think that over six hundred of you are capable of killing less than a sixth your number?” Bukara asked, patiently. “My men will be in support. We will establish a base of fire on the hilltop to keep their heads down. My mortars will be in support shortly. You should have fire from them before you reach the objective. All you have to do is run up a hill and kill them. What could be easier?”