by Tom Clancy
He fumbled through the keys, cursing as he tried several on her shackles until the lock finally turned.
The moment those shackles fell off her ankles, the entire facility shook as though it were being excavated by a giant backhoe, the force so strong that it knocked both of them to the floor, the walls sounding as though they were caving in, the lights flashing, the deep reverberations coming straight through their torsos. Then, as the ground continued to rumble so violently that neither of them dared move, Osin knew what was happening, and he wondered if the Americans had changed their plans . . .
This wasn’t a “rescue” operation but an attempt to terminate their POW.
Or maybe Theron had been wrong about them. Maybe they knew the Snow Maiden was here, and this was their mission to kill her, with him squarely in their way.
* * *
A glimmer woke in the gray-black sheet of clouds, the tinniest of flashes over the fort’s communications dishes lying in silhouette like palms cupped toward the sky.
Next came a strange rush, like air blowing across the top of a deep-throated bottle.
And then the first of twelve impacts ripped into the ground with a force so sudden and loud that it drove Lex and his men back onto their rumps.
As the tremendous earthquake continued, sounding like a million bass drums being hammered by enraged musicians, Lex rolled forward onto his hands and knees. Borya had patched them into the night-vision security cameras around the base, and Lex picked up his tablet and watched the devastation unfold in a phosphorescent glow.
The first rod struck the ground a few meters south of the main comm dishes, and the ground heaved as though the blast had come from within, cracking the concrete pylons and sending all four dishes plummeting to smash like fragile flowers across the service roads, metal peeling back like petals and jutting into the earth. The radar station buildings below the dishes were lifted into the air and flipped over like pancakes, the men inside given instant funerals and burials, sans all the dramatic weeping and overpriced caskets.
Even as that rumbling cacophony continued, two more rods punched with sudden flashes into the hangars, and once more the buildings rose as though carried on typhoon seas, colliding with one another as massive puzzle pieces of asphalt hurtled into the air, trailing swirling dust clouds that whipped over the MiGs whose pilots were still trying to lift off. Several planes were just leaving the runways, others lining up, idling, while still more were kicked onto their backs by the rods’ initial impact—until a third and fourth rod struck, blanketing the area in so much flying debris that Lex couldn’t see anything.
Off to the south, where hundreds of troops were just evacuating the barracks and attempting to cross the field toward their waiting APCs, came the next two rods. Lex gasped. The double impact catapulted those men into the air like confetti, a fountain of tiny bodies blasting skyward and quickly joined by their vehicles, tossed around like toys.
The next six rods struck in quick succession, obliterating the big TELs with their S-300 missile tubes erected, the earth cracking all around them and literally swallowing several of the launchers.
Lex wasn’t sure how many of the artillery pieces had been destroyed, since a wall of sand and rock had suddenly been formed, the rods digging a massive trench along the base’s west side.
That several of the guard towers had remained intact was a small miracle; however, the troops manning them were already abandoning their posts and climbing down with reckless urgency while below them, the convoy of Cockroaches that had been assembling before the strike vanished into yet another deep fissure cutting a jagged line from the runways all the way out to the southern perimeter.
With the ground still shaking hard beneath his boots, Lex stowed the tablet and got to his feet. He signaled to Slava, and together, they rigged up.
“Raider Team, this is Actual. Radio check, over,” Lex called.
Each man sounded off.
“All right, we got the ultimate diversion down below. And it looks like the evacuation from the HQ is already in progress. We’re going down.”
“We got you covered up top here, boss,” said Borya as the first wave of dust came in, followed by a much denser wave, and suddenly they were standing not in a snowstorm but a billowing dust storm with visibility down to a meter.
Over the side they went, with Lex stealing looks at the mountain road below and the blast doors that had slid open to allow those on foot to come charging outside, some of them collapsing to their knees and passing out, while a few wearing masks attempted to wave the others onward.
They didn’t have much time. He and Slava needed to get down to the motor pool and cut off all those vehicles there to prevent Ragland from being smuggled out that way. He’d memorized the facility’s layout, had selected the correct charges, and would be pleased to get in touch with his inner pyro within the next two minutes.
Slava was a beast on his ropes, rappelling down the mountainside nearly twice as fast as Lex, who planned to later remark that the man’s considerable weight was what allowed him to drop like a rock.
They’d picked a location along the mountain that would help conceal them as they drew up near the blast doors, descending along at an angle that put them off to the west, about a hundred meters away, with a broad lip of stone standing between them and the entrance.
But now, with all the dust—much more than Lex had ever considered—that didn’t matter. Anyone without a mask was now choking or rushing back inside. The roiling clouds reminded Lex of some of the artillery barrages he’d survived, the smoke and fires so dense back then that all you had were your buddy’s shoulders for reference.
It dawned on him as he booted off the rock and zipped down the line that their plan to flush out the Spetsnaz might be backfiring on them. The storm had shifted the wind’s direction and the debris was now blowing up toward the mountain. The Russians would know this and want more than ever to evacuate the Cockroaches and APCs lying in wait in that motor pool.
His breath shortening, Lex pushed off and made a tremendous drop, one so aggressive that he nearly lost his footing, but saw he was quickly gaining on Slava.
Barely fifty meters now to the road, which vanished once more in the next wave of dust.
Just then, as he took in a deep breath to prepare for the next push, the trembling ceased, the mountain growing still.
“Slava, we need to cut off that motor pool. Let’s haul some ass, bro! Come on!”
“Waiting on you, boss. Just hit the ground!”
“Here I come.”
Lex slammed hard onto the road, his knees buckling for a second, but then he leaned back on the cliff, caught his balance, and began to unclip his rope.
They tucked in close to the mountain, readied their rifles, and double-checked their web gear. Lex gave Slava the hand signal to go.
Four guards were hunkered down beside the open blast doors, the checkpoint abandoned, the secondary pedestrian entrance also unguarded.
He and Slava rushed toward those men.
THIRTY-ONE
Spetsnaz Headquarters
Fort Levski
Bulgaria
The Snow Maiden couldn’t recall if this region of Bulgaria was prone to earthquakes. It was certainly prone to attack, and whatever they were hammering the base with—bunker-buster bombs, a kinetic strike, something—they were doing one hell of a job, the floor rolling beneath them, the concrete walls cracking and groaning like the hull of some ancient ship.
She’d felt her legs come free just as the first impact reached them, and in those next few seconds, she’d found her opening and taken it:
She slid her legs up and around Osin’s shoulders, locked those legs around his neck, and drove her knee into the back of his head, effectively cutting off his air. She called on everything she had left—
Squeezing. Squeezing. The floor shaking. Osin
gasping behind his gas mask, his fingers digging into her legs as he writhed, his entire body shaking for a moment as she shifted position, trying to force off his mask with her other knee.
When she’d been recruited by the GRU, they’d told her you never forget the first man you kill. There might be dozens after him, but you never forget the first.
What they didn’t know, what they couldn’t possibly know, was that she had already killed years prior. She’d been seventeen, and her victim was a woman at least ten years her senior.
It came back to her in flashes now, the memories disjointed by time, guilt, denial. A walk home from her part-time bakery job late at night in Vladivostok. Piles of dirty snow lying along Fokina Street. Power lines drooping with icicles spanning the street between the old buildings. And then shouts. A woman being assaulted by another. The Snow Maiden intervening, telling the younger woman to run away, she taking on the assailant, a foreign woman waving a small knife. She might’ve been Chinese, Mongolian, the Snow Maiden wasn’t sure.
A feeling had overcome her, one she couldn’t control. A hand to the wrist, stopping the knife, freeing it.
Then fingers around the woman’s throat, some crazed desire to kill her, as though this woman represented everything she hated in her life. Why did she feel this way? Explanations were meaningless.
There was only the rage, and the rage had frightened her because deep down it felt terribly good. And when she’d run off, leaving the dead woman lying there with that cold, vacant look in her eyes, she knew her life would never be the same. She was a killer. All the GRU had done was teach her how to do it more efficiently. The resolve had always been there.
Maybe this guy, this Lieutenant Colonel Osin, really was trying to save her. His mistake. His body went limp between her legs—
But she wasn’t foolish enough to release him. Not yet. She knew that old gambit. She held her grip and ticked off another sixty seconds as the reverberations grew more intense.
The lights flickered and went out.
In the dark now, she booted herself around, fumbling blindly for the keys. She found them beside Osin’s leg and began the excruciatingly slow process of inserting one after another until the shackles finally clicked open and she slipped free her hands, reflexes causing her to rub her sore and swollen wrists.
Red emergency lights flickered near the ceiling as she shot to her feet, grabbed Osin’s pistol, searched him, found his mini tablet and smartphone. If she could crack them, they might reveal his true intentions for trying to rescue her.
She remembered her prisoner’s uniform, bright orange with a smiley-face sticker on the breast that said Hello, I’m the World’s Most Wanted Terrorist—or it might as well have. Off came Osin’s pants and shirt, slightly too large for her, but she rolled back the sleeves, tightened the belt to the very last hole. She’d fool them only from afar, so she’d avoid any close encounters. She went back to the guards and took their sidearms, tucking one in her pocket, the other in the waistband at her back. She grabbed a fourth pistol, then used the heel of her hand to shove the gas mask a bit tighter around her face.
Then, for just a few seconds she reflected on the moment. Earlier she’d been sitting in that shower, trying to reconcile with the last chapter of her life. She laughed incredulously, then shivered back to the moment. She might have a chance.
With that, she bounded up the hallway, toward the elevators and stairwells, leaving—as always—death in her wake.
* * *
Spending a few seconds telling the guards a story of why they needed to get into the base was an option that Lex could have employed. He felt confident that he and Slava would be as convincing as ever.
Donning their active camouflage and moving in short bursts was another possibility—but it would slow them down.
Bullets were the most expeditious way of gaining entry, and the drone’s first scan had indicated that these were the only guards outside at the moment.
Lex and Slava ran up, waving their arms to get the guards’ attention through all the swirling dust.
The men got to their feet, presenting larger targets. Lex clutched his suppressed pistol with both hands, the clicks like those produced by air guns, the results, of course, much more deadly. The troops fell in succession. That this encounter had been captured by security cameras at the entrance didn’t matter; those troops were assumedly busy with the evacuation and had long since left their stations.
Slava moved up as they raced past the bodies and inside, beyond the blast doors, then hunkered down near the four-meter-tall hydraulic and motor assemblies just behind.
Lined up along the wall were several battery-powered transports, the military version of a golf cart used by officers and dignitaries too damned lazy to walk around the base. Lex and Slava climbed into one, and Lex took the wheel and tapped the touch-screen controls. No security locks or passwords here because those same officers didn’t want to remember a pass code or even be inconvenienced by waving a security ID before a scanner. They raced off down the two-lane passage, Slava’s tablet indicating they had a half-kilometer trek into the mountainside.
Along the route they passed at least ten overloaded carts heading in the opposite direction, a few of the masked passengers waving at them to turn around.
“Borya, we got some coming out,” Lex reported over their team channel.
“Don’t worry, boss, I’m on it.”
“Roger that. Might lose comm soon.”
“Okay, still good for now, though,” answered Borya.
Abruptly, Lex and Slava reached level one: the motor pool.
Holy shit, Lex thought as he jerked the wheel and pulled the cart off the road and into a service lane. He and Slava hopped out and hunkered down.
They’d entered an absolutely mammoth-sized cave, much larger than the schematics suggested, with rows of vehicles stretching off into the distance. A few squads of masked troops were running toward the idling APCs—eight-wheeled BTR-82s, and all around the perimeter more troops lay supine or prone, victims of the gas before they could find protection. There had been no way to tell exactly how many gas masks the Spetsnaz troops might have available to them, but the assumption of “not enough” was panning out.
The backup generators lights were burning, and it took a moment for Lex’s vision to adjust as he and Slava reached into their packs and produced their CQ9 tactical charge launchers, better known by Marine Corps engineers as “breach barrels.”
Each short-barreled rifle was fitted with a magazine containing a half dozen L45C4 dome-shaped “sticky” charges composed of C4 and a special adhesive polymer containing a wirelessly triggered Class B-W blasting cap no larger than a thumbnail.
The primary electronic detonator was located within the rifle itself, and all Lex needed to do was throw a switch to shift from firing the charges to triggering them via a wireless signal. Point, shoot, thump, charge in place, wait for the green light. Boom!
The only snafu was bad aim—then you were stuck blowing up the wrong object or location or abandoning the charge, which in turn compromised operational security.
No, that wouldn’t happen now. They opened fire on the ceiling above the tunnel, carefully positioning all twelve of their charges. The engineers had analyzed this section of the headquarters and had issued their report for what they quipped was the proper, decent, and correct application of high explosives (always a good thing) for maximum demolition based on the design and integrity of the support structure. Lex’s math was much simpler: X + Y = blow shit up!
Once the charges were set, Lex and Slava rushed toward the elevator column erected like a gleaming black megalith in the center of the circular motor pool.
Over the team channel, Lex gasped, “And three, two—”
They squeezed their triggers, and the towering cupola of rock above the tunnel entrance, along with the tracks for the secon
dary set of blast doors, exploded in thundering strings that boomed in an arc before bringing down enormous pieces of stone right into the tunnel, the rubble piling up fast to cut off the IFVs, BTRs, and any other smaller vehicles like the carts whose crews and drivers would try to escape.
Like the exterior entrance outside the mountain, this tunnel also had a pedestrian exit that as planned would remain untouched. They’d discussed how Ragland might be smuggled out aboard a vehicle during the attack. They needed to flush out the base but force personnel to do so on foot. A tricky gambit to be sure, but the engineers had come up with a decidedly effective solution.
Now it was time to put their Metal Storm ordnance to work, creating a secondary diversion within the motor pool. Each of their Izhmash assault rifles had been fitted with a 3GL forty-millimeter semiautomatic underslung grenade launcher. Unlike single-shot weapons, these clip-on launchers tripled their effective firepower and eliminated the hassle of carrying a separate weapon. Each of the grenades was preloaded and fired via an electronic signal; thus the only moving parts on the unit were the grenades themselves.
They cut loose on the APCs and IFVs, sending grenades flying and exploding across the vehicles, troops ducking before being swept up in the clouds of dust now swelling from the collapsed ceiling.
Beaming at each other, they tossed away their barrels and clipped in new ones. Six more grenades flew across the motor pool and exploded in blinding flashes, the subsequent fires and burning shrapnel rising in veiled columns of orange light that seemed to undulate and quiver with a life of their own.
There was so much chaos and confusion spreading like a virus through the level that most of the troops were leaping for cover instead of pinpointing the source of fire, and Lex and Slava were already charging around the lifts before they ever emerged from their positions.
That, Lex thought, is what Marine Corps combat medicine looks like. He caught his breath, cleared his throat, and spoke loudly through his mask. “All right, I want two Seekers up here.”