Hellfire

by Richard Turner

  Kilometers away, high in a tree, Cardinal placed his sights on one of the men he had identified as an officer. He slowly took up the slack on his trigger and watched as the man fell to the ground with a hole blasted through his right shoulder.

  There was barely a sound as Cardinal’s sniper rifle had a suppressor attached to the end of the barrel.

  He waited a couple of seconds and then wounded the first man who went to help his injured comrade. As expected, that put an end to the limited bravery the mob had. Someone panicked and opened fire into the jungle; a second later, the rest of the thugs dove for cover and fired in every direction around them. He had to go. Cardinal quickly climbed down out of the tree and pulled back some foliage, exposing his ride. He jumped onto the back of his motorbike, slung his rifle over his back, flipped his NVGs back down over his eyes, and started his motorcycle. Within seconds, he was racing down the muddy path to meet his comrades.

  In the Hummer, Mitchell spoke into his radio, “Yuri, this is Ryan, did you catch my last transmission? We had to scrub our original plan and are proceeding to the coast. ETA two minutes.”

  “Da, I got it. Will meet you offshore,” replied a voice with a thick Russian accent.

  “Gents, have either one of you ever done one of these extractions before?” Sam asked from the backseat.

  “I did once, at Ranger School,” replied Mitchell.

  “Yeah, but no one was shooting at you back then,” added Jackson as the jungle gave way to a wide-open beach.

  Jackson turned the Hummer sharply to the left and sped off down the deserted beach to their next rendezvous point. A couple of minutes later, through his NVGs, he could see Cardinal near the water’s edge. He brought their stolen vehicle to a sliding halt, turned off the vehicle’s engine and jumped out to help Cardinal.

  Cardinal, using a portable air tank, quickly inflated their Zodiac. Its proper title was a Combat Rubber Raiding Craft, but everyone inside and outside of the military called it a Zodiac, after its manufacturer.

  Mitchell stood sentry with his rifle cradled in his arms while the Zodiac was readied. He took a quick glance at his watch and swore. It would be light on the horizon in the next half hour.

  A plane was waiting across the border in Bangladesh to ferry the businessman back home to India. Mitchell knew that Yuri would have alerted the flight crew to make sure that the doctor they had hired and his team were ready and waiting when they arrived. It was going to be close; too close for his liking.

  The instant the outboard motor was placed on the back of the Zodiac, Mitchell dashed over to help Sam move the injured man from the Hummer into the bottom of the boat.

  “Okay, let’s go,” said Mitchell firmly to his team. “Sam, you look after Mister Patel. Nate, you’re steering while Cardinal and I keep an eye out.”

  As one, all four teammates grabbed hold of the ropes on the side of the all-black Zodiac and dragged it into the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal. Within seconds, they all clambered inside as Jackson turned on the battery-powered, outboard motor.

  Heading straight out to sea, Jackson called out, “Ryan, where exactly are we heading?”

  “Just aim due west and try not to dump us all into the drink,” replied Mitchell as the Zodiac raced out into the dark. It skimmed over the top of the water at over thirty kilometers an hour.

  Mitchell heard his radio squawk. Placing it close to his ear, he heard Yuri telling him that he would be in position to pick them up in the next five minutes. He was about to pass on the good news, when he spotted a large patrol boat emerge from a river, turn in their direction and begin to pick up speed.

  They had been spotted.

  “Yuri, pick up the pace. We’ve got company,” said Mitchell into the radio, before tapping Cardinal on the shoulder and pointing to the patrol boat moving to intercept them. Mitchell identified the craft as an old Patrol Boat, River, long phased out of U.S. service; it was still in use all around the world. He knew that the fifty-year-old boat could easily outrun and outgun them without even trying.

  “Nate, give us all you’ve got!” yelled Mitchell.

  Jackson looked back and saw the patrol boat cutting through the waves as it sped towards them. “Hang on,” he called out as he gunned the outboard motor.

  Leaping forward, the Zodiac quickly picked up speed. Water spray flew over the front of the boat, soaking Mitchell and Cardinal.

  Suddenly, out of the dark, .50 caliber tracers streaked past the front of Zodiac. For every tracer round the team saw, there were four bullets they never did.

  Jackson turned the outboard motor away from the incoming fire, trying to put as much distance as he could from the patrol boat pursuing them. A couple of seconds later, another long burst hit the water just beside the Zodiac. Jackson decided to change tactics and tried to zigzag across the water in an attempt to make it harder for their pursuers to hit his boat. The problem was that he lost speed every time he maneuvered their boat to avoid being hit.

  Mitchell could see the patrol boat gaining on them. Something had to be done about it before it got close enough to turn them and their Zodiac into fish food. He tapped Cardinal on the shoulder and said, “Gord, take Nate’s M203 and deal with that boat.”

  Cardinal nodded his head and went for the weapon from the bottom of the boat. He hurriedly rummaged through a bandolier filled with grenades lying on the bottom of the boat and picked out two. So he could be heard over the sound of the engine, Cardinal leaned over to Jackson. “Nate, when I give the signal I need you to slow down or I’m never going to be able to hit a thing.”

  “What’s your signal?” asked Jackson.

  “You’ll know,” replied Cardinal as he opened up the M203 and slipped in his first grenade.

  Overhead, an all-black CH-47 Chinook helicopter, like a massive bird of prey diving out of the night sky, raced over the top of the boats.

  “Yuri’s here. Whatever you’re planning to do, do it now!” hollered Mitchell to Cardinal.

  Cardinal brought up the M203 up to his shoulder, took aim, and pulled the trigger, sending the grenade flying high up into the night sky.

  Instantly, Jackson dropped his speed. To everyone in the Zodiac, it felt as if they had come to a sudden stop.

  With a pop, a flare opened up above the patrol boat, bathing it in a bright, white light. Quickly ejecting the spent casing, Cardinal slid in a high-explosive grenade and aimed. He was an accomplished sniper, but hitting a moving boat with a grenade launcher was going to take a lot of luck. He waited until the boat was so close that he couldn’t miss. Cardinal held his breath. Slowly pulling back on the trigger, he watched as the grenade flew straight into the small bridge located on the patrol boat. With a bright flash, the shell struck home, instantly killing the boat’s commander and the man steering the craft.

  Jackson took that as his cue and gunned the Zodiac’s engine.

  A split-second later, the patrol boat’s fuel drums on the back of the boat caught fire and exploded, engulfing the ship in a hellish flame. The only survivor, the forward machine gunner, scampered out of his gun turret at the front of the boat and dove into the sea just as the rest of the craft went up.

  High above in the Chinook, Yuri brought the helicopter to a dead stop in the air. He told his co-pilot to take over as he climbed out of his seat, picked up a set of NVGs and made his way to the back of the empty helicopter. At the back ramp, he flipped the light in the back of the Chinook from white to red. A second later, Yuri turned on his NVGs, reached over to a panel on the sidewall, and pressed a button. With a loud whine, the back ramp began to lower. The sound of the twin rotor blades cutting through air above instantly filled the back of the Chinook. Yuri grabbed a headset from the wall and then carefully walked out onto the back ramp until he could see the black water below.

  He had never done a water landing before. Trusting in the skill of his co-pilot, a former Royal Australian Air Force pilot, Yuri told him to gently lower the helicopter to the surface of the w
ater below.

  Through his NVGs, Jackson could see into the back of the Chinook as it slowly began to descend. With a slight twist of the wrist, he steered the Zodiac towards the helicopter. He adjusted his speed, knowing that it was going to take split-second timing if this was going to work.

  In the helicopter, Yuri crossed himself and said a silent prayer that things would work as planned. He edged out as far out as he could on the ramp and guided his co-pilot down until the ramp touched the water.

  With the front of the Chinook still up in the air at a slight angle, only the tail section with the ramp was in the water.

  Less than a second later, water flooded up over the ramp and up inside the back of the helicopter. Yuri turned his head and looked out into the dark. He smiled when he saw the Zodiac lining itself up for a run into the back of the Chinook.

  “Hang on,” Jackson called out to everyone as he gave just a little more speed to the outboard engine. It was like threading a needle; however, the thread was currently bouncing over the waves at over thirty kilometers an hour.

  When they were within meters of the ramp, Jackson slowed down slightly as they sailed through a wall of spray thrown up by the helicopter’s rear rotor blade. A second later, the Zodiac surged up the ramp and inside the back of the helicopter, and stopped.

  Mitchell and Cardinal leapt from the Zodiac and helped Yuri drag it farther inside the Chinook. As soon as they were clear of the ramp, Yuri keyed his headset and told his co-pilot to take off.

  Happy to oblige, the co-pilot applied power to the engines. In seconds, he skillfully brought the Chinook up out of the water and began to climb up into the night sky. Keeping low to avoid radar, he banked over and turned north, heading for the border with Bangladesh.

  In the back, Yuri raised the ramp, closing it. He removed his NVGs and turned on the white lights in the back of the helicopter. Yuri stood there in his usual attire of a Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts. His long, black hair was pulled back behind his head.

  “How is he?” Yuri asked Mitchell, looking down at the frail-looking man they had been hired to rescue.

  “Not good,” replied Mitchell. “Do your people in Bangladesh know that we need a doctor?”

  “Da, I spoke with them ten minutes ago. They’re waiting for Mister Patel.”

  “Thanks,” said Mitchell as he patted Yuri on the arm and made his way over to the front of the Zodiac. He sat down and looked down at the cut on his wrist. It had stopped bleeding, but still stung like hell.

  “Here, let me clean that,” said Jackson as he pulled out some disinfectant from one of Sam’s medical bags.

  “It’s not going to hurt, is it?” asked Mitchell.

  “What is it with officers? Of course it will, and I’m going to enjoy watching you whine.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they crossed over into Bangladeshi airspace.

  Mitchell looked about at his teammates and grinned to himself. He couldn’t imagine working with anyone else. They had long since moved on from being good friends. The people in the back of the Chinook were his family, and he knew that he would do anything for them.

  5

  Maliy Lyakhovsky Island

  Northern Siberia, Russia

  A cold, bitter wind whipped across the frozen landscape, stirring up the snow and making an already cold day seem even colder.

  With her hood pulled down on her parka, Katherine Reynolds quickly made her way from her tent towards a much larger green army tent that served as the expedition’s makeshift office for this year’s American-Russian dig. With the cold nipping at her exposed skin, she opened the flimsy wooden door on the end of the tent and rushed inside. At once, she felt the warmth coming from an old, iron, pot-bellied stove on her cold face.

  “Ah, good morning, Katherine, I hope you slept well,” said Boris Zakhava in English, his Russian accent heavy and thick. He was a chubby man in his late fifties with sandy-blond hair and an unkempt beard that hung down onto his old blue sweater. As the senior Russian academic on the site, he was also the team leader for the mixed group of Russian and American scientists living and working side by side on the island.

  “The tent was rattling like a banshee all night because of that dreadful wind, but I think I still managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep,” replied Reynolds.

  Dressed in warm clothing, Katherine Reynolds looked like the public’s stereotypical image of a scientist. She wore a thick pair of glasses perched on her nose. She was in her mid-forties and had never been married. Her chestnut-brown hair was always pulled back in a bun on the back of her head.

  “I didn’t hear a thing. I slept, how you say…like a baby,” replied Zakhava.

  “That’s probably because you were pickled on vodka last night, Professor,” said Donald Freeman as he placed several bone fragments on the table in front of him. A young African-American grad student, Freeman was on his first dig outside of the States.

  Zakhava chuckled. “It is an old family custom.”

  “Looks like all of Russia follows the same tradition,” added Freeman, as none of the other Russian students had reported in yet this morning.

  Reynolds grabbed herself a cup of hot coffee and then wrapped her hands around the cup, trying to warm up her still cold hands. A few seconds later, curiosity took hold, so she walked over and looked at what Freeman was doing.

  With a serious expression on his face, Freeman looked down intently at the remains of a chipped tooth from a woolly rhinoceros dug out of the permafrost a couple of days ago. Although the tooth was an interesting discovery, the team still hoped to find the remains of a mammoth. Over the years, several well-preserved mammoths had been found frozen in the ice near the camp.

  Three weeks into the one-month dig, it was starting to look like this year’s expedition was going to have to pack up and go home emptied-handed when Mary Thomas and Vladimir Manshov suddenly burst into the tent. A young couple, they had met the first day on the island and had since become inseparable.

  “Come quick,” said Mary breathlessly.

  “What is it?” asked Zakhava.

  “In the tunnel, they’ve found something,” reported Manshov in fluent English.

  “What did they find?” asked Reynolds excitedly.

  “A mammoth, they’ve found a baby mammoth,” replied Mary, smiling from ear to ear.

  “Come on, let’s get dressed and see what they’ve found,” said Zakhava, grinning.

  A couple of minutes later, Zakhava led the group through the blowing snow towards the tunnel entrance. A large wooden box had been built over the top of the opening to keep the snow from blowing down into the tunnel. They all rushed out of the wind, made their way down steps cut into the ice and walked down a tunnel carved into the frozen ground. A noisy, gas-powered generator provided the power for the lights strung along the ice walls of the passage. Dug out over the past several years, the tunnel had become a passageway back in time to the last Ice Age. It was here where they had found a mammoth the year before and where another expedition had found the partial remains of a woolly rhinoceros.

  The air hovered around freezing inside the tunnel.

  They hurried along, making their way towards a group of students huddled around a large slab of ice. Zakhava and Reynolds arrived first and bent over to examine the find.

  “My God,” murmured Reynolds. Trapped in the ice was a perfectly preserved baby mammoth. Although it was hard to see all the details, she judged by its small size that it had been no more than a couple of years old when it had died.

  “You can still see the fur on the poor little creature’s body,” said Zakhava as he moved his face close to the ice. His breath hung like a fine fog in the cool air. “Who found it?”

  “I did, Professor,” said Olga Zhukov proudly. The cheeks on her round face were deep red from the numbing cold. With ice-blue eyes and braided blonde hair, she looked like a Viking maiden.

  “Well done, Olga,” said Zakhava. He patted her on the shoulder and lo
oked around into the faces of the students. They all stood there in awe of the discovery. Some people labored a lifetime and never found a single specimen, yet at their feet was a find of extraordinary importance.

  “Okay, people, let’s all step back. We don’t need to contaminate the site any more than we already have,” announced Zakhava loudly.

  With that, Dimitri Isayev, a black-haired associate professor at the University of Moscow, took over and ushered away all those who didn’t need to be there.

  Reynolds stood there, her light-brown eyes fixed on the mammoth trapped for centuries in the ice.

  “When do you believe it died?” Reynolds asked Zakhava.

  “Well, it was found a bit deeper in the ice than the mammoth that was dug out last year, so I would have to say sometime around 11,000 BC,” replied Zakhava, absentmindedly running his hand over his thick beard.

  “Amazing, absolutely amazing.” Reynolds softly ran her gloved hand over the ice, trying to imagine the world the mammoth had lived in until it met its untimely demise.

  Later that night, after a couple of the more-experienced team members brought the frozen body of the mammoth to the surface, the camp had a boisterous celebration. Olga Zhukov was the woman of the hour. Vodka and plenty other spirits flowed freely as they toasted Olga and the mammoth.

  It didn’t take long for Katherine Reynolds to feel tipsy from the alcohol. Never a big drinker, she was already on her third plastic cup of vodka and fruit juice.

  “To the mammoth,” shouted out Zakhava, raising his cup in salute.

  “To the mammoth,” responded the students loudly, before emptying their cups and then staggering about in search of more alcohol.