53
THE CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS
Gil was still on point, moving cautiously along a rough mountain trail through the forest when Dragunov’s iron grip clamped onto his left shoulder. He froze in place, and the Russian moved up against his back, sliding his arm forward over Gil’s shoulder with his index finger pointing straight ahead. At first Gil couldn’t figure out what the hell he was pointing at. All he saw in the gray-black field of the night vision goggles were more trees and the trail leading up the grade, bearing gradually off to the left.
Dragunov wagged his finger up and down, and that’s when Gil saw it: the faint glint of moonlight reflecting off of a monofilament line at the very tip of Dragunov’s finger.
Gil began to back away, but Dragunov stood firm as an oak, trailing the tip of his finger a few inches up and to the left. Gil searched beyond the finger, studying the terrain itself, and his bladder filled with ice water. There were at least ten men stretched across their approach at fifty feet, all of them expertly ensconced among the rocks
and deadfalls, absolutely motionless and appearing very much a part of the forest. Dragunov twisted at the waist to turn Gil to his right, pointing off the trail where at least ten more men were equally well disguised as natural features of the landscape.
They had walked into a textbook L-shaped ambush.
Gil knew that most, if not all, of the enemy had to be aware of their presence, the sliver of moon providing enough light for experienced warriors to easily detect movement at fifty feet. The only reason they had not yet opened fire was that they’d been ordered to wait for the trip flares that were almost undoubtedly spread across the line of advance. Tripping one monofilament line would likely send up an entire series of star clusters that would bathe the entire scene in virtual daylight, leaving Gil and Dragunov to die in a murderous cross fire.
Gil nodded and shrugged his shoulders, unsure of how else to ask Dragunov what they should do. They sure as hell couldn’t discuss it verbally, with the enemy close enough to piss on them.
Dragunov pushed down on Gil’s shoulder. The two of them lowered themselves into crouched positions and began backing away slowly. After they’d withdrawn perhaps ten feet, the forest exploded around them. They threw themselves against the ground as rifle fire and tracers from PKM machine guns streaked over their heads—close enough that Gil could feel their heat raising the hairs on the back of his neck. They shoved themselves along backward on their bellies, bullets grazing their helmets, nicking their body armor, and shattering the radio units attached to the backs of their harnesses.
Dragunov rolled from the trail into a shallow defilade and pulled Gil in after him, giving them a moment of respite.
“They were here waiting for us!” Gil shouted over the din.
“I know—we’re betrayed!”
The flares went up, and it was suddenly as bright as Wrigley Field on game night.
Gil rose up just long enough to fire a 40 mm grenade into a PKM machine-gun nest. The grenade detonated on impact, and men screamed.
Dragunov fired a grenade across the trail where the enemy was displacing to outflank them, killing three.
An RPG streaked out of nowhere, detonating against a nearby tree. Dragunov sprang up, using the pall of smoke for cover as he grabbed Gil’s harness. “We’re leaving!”
They pulled back under the cover of the smoke and hightailed it into the darkness. The firing kept up for another twenty seconds, but it was clear the enemy had lost sight of them. They kept up a good pace.
“Fucking comms are dead!” Gil hissed, tearing off the headset.
“Mine too. We’re on our own now.”
“Not that we could have trusted the extraction zone anyhow. How far up the chain do you think we’re compromised?”
Dragunov paused atop a small boulder, checking their six. “Impossible to know. It only takes one rat to spoil the pantry. Strange . . . they’re not following.”
“Probably looking for our bodies. Don’t worry, they’ll be hot on our asses soon enough.”
“I’m not so sure,” Dragunov muttered. “Let’s keep moving. We’ve got a long way to go before we get to friendly ground.”
They didn’t cover more than a few hundred meters before both men were cut down by a burst from a suppressed AK-105.
54
THE PENTAGON
The president of the United States, along with General William Couture, Chief of Staff Glen Brooks, the secretary of defense, and assorted members of the Joint Chiefs, sat before a pair of giant high-definition television screens in Satellite Command Center 4, watching on helplessly as Gil and Dragunov walked unwittingly into the L-shaped ambush. The white heat signatures of thirty-five Chechen bushwhackers were visible to all.
“My God,” the president muttered, his palms sweating. “Can’t they see them?”
“Apparently not,” Couture said, clenching and unclenching his teeth. “If they’re not using thermal night vision, they may not see them until they’re right on top of them. It depends on how well hidden the enemy is, sir.”
One of the two figures reached out and touched the other on the shoulder, halting their advance.
“There! They see them!” Brooks piped up.
“For all the good it’s going to do them,” muttered one of the Joint Chiefs.
They watched as Dragunov pointed out the enemy positions over Gil’s shoulder, with everyone in the room guessing that it was Gil doing the pointing. The figures then lowered themselves to the ground and were in the process of backing away when all hell broke loose on the screen.
The president watched the hot tracer rounds zip across the screen, the flares going off, followed by the explosions of 40 mm grenades and men thrown dead against the ground.
“Holy Jesus,” he said, getting to his feet and making it so Couture had to push back from the table to see. “We’re going to lose him this time.”
Couture nodded, silently agreeing with the commander in chief that no one was likely to survive such a hailstorm of lead.
Brooks, who had never experienced more during his time in the Teams than a limited exchange of fire over a couple hundred meters, was filled with a mixture of dread and awe. He was sure he was witnessing the final moments of a fellow SEAL.
The RPG detonated against the tree in a white flash, temporarily obscuring their view of the battle, and everyone held his breath. A few seconds later, they saw that Gil and Dragunov had successfully broken off contact with the enemy, and they released a collective sigh.
“How the hell did they manage that?” the president wondered.
Couture frowned as he watched Gil and Dragunov run for their lives. “Shithouse luck, sir.”
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
THE CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS
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.”
“Maybe we should stay put, lay for him here.”
Dragunov shook his head. “If it was only him, I’d agree, but this is Umarov’s territory. More men will be coming soon. Our only chance is to keep moving east.”
“Deeper into Umarov’s territory?”
“Kovalenko and the others are blocking the west. The north and south are impassable. That leaves the east.”
“Shitty and shittier,” Gil muttered. “Look, we should hold here. Let Kovalenko and the others pass us by, then get back on a westerly heading.”
“The others may pass us by—but
he
won’t!”
“You’re sure of that?”
Dragunov picked up Gil’s helmet and gave it to him. “We’re not in Sicily now. This forest is his home. He grew up in these mountains, and he’ll know what we’re up to. I’ve fought on his side too many times not to know his instincts, but listen: it will be daylight soon, and three thousand meters east of here is a valley where we can draw him into the open—catch him in a cross fire. If we’re both manning a rifle, one of us should live long enough to get off a shot.”
Gil looked at him while putting on his helmet. “And you don’t think he’ll figure out what we’re up to?”
Dragunov chuckled. “Of course he’ll figure it out, but a fox driven before the hounds has only so many options—and running toward the hounds is never one of them.”
Gil felt a spasm in his gut, wincing as he lowered the NVGs over his eyes. “I can’t argue with good Russian logic.”