by Scott McEwen
Couture shook his head.
“Want me to give him a call, sir?” Brooks asked.
“No,” the president said. “He’d call if he had anything. There’s no point in interrupting him.”
Couture smiled inwardly, recalling how distrustful they all had once been of the new CIA director.
The images of seven men appeared at the bottom edge of the screen, hiking north along the bank of a wide mountain stream that cut the valley for which Gil and Dragunov were bound.
“Tighten that up, Major.”
The seven looked to be Chechen fighters, heavily loaded with packs, machine guns, and RPGs. They were walking slowly—plodding along—and seemed to have hiked in from a long way off.
“Insurgents,” Brooks muttered. “Probably coming up from Azerbaijan.”
Couture lit a cigarette and exhaled with a sigh. “Get ready for another gunfight, gentlemen.” He clicked the Zippo’s lid closed and tucked it into his pocket, muttering to himself, “Okay, Gil. Don’t get sloppy now.”
64
THE CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS
Gil and Dragunov left the cover of the forest to find the early morning sun shining on their faces. The open valley stretched away to the east, with a shallow mountain stream running through the middle of it toward the south. Ice Age boulders littered the landscape, left behind by receding glaciers ten thousand years earlier. Squat, thick hardwoods dotted the expanse, free to expand their limbs outward instead of having to race for the sky in competition for the sun. Beyond the valley, perhaps a thousand yards, the forest began again, but Gil knew the battle would be decided here. In the valley.
They kept moving, Gil’s gaze scanning the terrain for the place he would set up with his rifle.
“There,” he said, pointing beyond the stream and up the slope to the east. “See those rocks?”
“A textbook position,” Dragunov said.
Gil looked at him. “Which is exactly why we can’t set up there.”
“Right.”
They moved fast down the slope, rounded a copse of trees at the edge of the stream, and came face-to-face with a patrol of seven bearded Chechens.
Everyone froze.
The Chechens were visibly weary from their trek. Six of them stood looking slack jawed, rifles slung, but one of them held his AK-47 by the foregrip in his left hand, his wild eyes scanning the slope behind Gil and Dragunov to see if they were alone.
Everyone knew there was going to be a shoot-out, but neither side knew exactly what it was up against.
“Long walk?” Dragunov asked in Russian.
The man with the AK in his hand nodded. “Da.”
“Looking for Dokka Umarov?”
The man nodded again.
“He’s dead,” Dragunov said. “What’s left of his force has surrendered to the Spetsnaz. There’s no reason for you men to be caught up in it. You should go back to where you came from.”
One of the others started to unsling his rifle, but Gil leveled his AN-94 and locked eyes. “Nyet.”
The Chechen narrowed his gaze but took his hand from the rifle strap.
“The others don’t speak Russian,” Dragunov said in English. “Ready yourself. I’ll take the leader.”
Hearing Dragunov speaking English threw the Chechen off, but before he could make heads or tails of it, shots rang out from the edge of the forest, and his friends grabbed for their weapons.
Gil let loose with the AN-94, cutting two of them in half at close range.
Dragunov shot the man with the AK, but the remaining four got their weapons loose. He leapt among them, leveling one with a butt stroke to the jaw. Another spun around and whacked him in the back of the helmet with his AK-47, causing him to stumble toward the stream.
A pair of Chechens danced away into the trees, one of them firing wildly from the hip and hitting Gil on his armor. The other tossed a grenade onto the creek-side shale and dove for cover.
The grenade went off on impact, and Gil was thrown into the water, his legs and one of his arms taking shrapnel and bits of shale. Dragunov was blown over and landed on his butt with a splash, firing a 40 mm grenade into the copse of trees.
Dragunov’s aggressor was blown off his feet as well, and he too landed in the water, jumping up and beating Dragunov over the head with a rock, smashing the NVGs still clipped to his helmet.
Gil struggled to rise, his brains scrambled by the blast. He fell over in the water and sighted down the barrel of the AN-94, squeezing off the last two rounds in the magazine and shooting Dragunov’s attacker.
With bullets striking the water around him, Dragunov got to his knees, unslinging the SVD sniper rifle from his back and setting up the bipod mounted just forward of the ten-round magazine. He lay belly-down with his eye to the scope, preparing to engage a mob of ten Chechens charging downhill. He shot the leader just above the groin.
Umarov’s nephew Lom dropped his rifle and grabbed his gut as he collapsed, summersaulting to a stop.
Dragunov squeezed off another round, hitting his second target in the chest. He fired twice more, shattering a pelvis and blowing away the side of another’s head. His fifth shot shattered a femur; his sixth took off most a shoulder. The four remaining Chechens skidded to a halt and turned tail back toward the tree line. Dragunov shot the seventh in the tail bone, and the remaining three he dead-centered between the shoulder blades.
He slung the empty rifle and grabbed Gil up out of the water. “Can you run?”
“Frog’s asshole watertight?” Gil muttered, stumbling on the slippery rocks.
Dragunov didn’t know what that meant, but Gil was walking, and that was all that mattered. There was a burst of fire from the copse of trees where he had fired the grenade. He grabbed Gil’s rifle from his hands, flicking it toward the trees, and fired another grenade to finish the wounded Chechen.
They ran for the far side of the valley, Gil’s mind clearing slowly on the way, and made it to another patch of trees on the upward slope. The two of them sorted themselves out under cover and reloaded their weapons.
“How are your wounds?” Dragunov asked.
Gil gazed at him and shrugged.
Dragunov saw that his eyes were glassed over, the pupils dilated, and reached for his aid kit. “You’re concussed.” He dug out a dextroamphetamine capsule and a cigarette. “Swallow that and smoke this.”
Gil downed the capsule with a swallow from his water tube and poked the cigarette between his lips. “I’m not exactly sure this is how you’re supposed to treat a concussion, Ivan.”
“Too bad,” Dragunov said. “We’re going up against Kovalenko, and you need to clear your head.”
Gil threw the cigarette down after the first few drags. “That’s not helping.”
“The amphetamine will take effect within three minutes.”
“Feelin’ it already,” Gil muttered, some of his focus beginning to return. “Gotta love the go pills.”
“There are more in your aid kit if anything happens to me,” Dragunov muttered, getting to his feet. “Now let’s move. We have to displace before they can zero our position.”
He took one step and flew back against a tree, letting out a gust of air as though he’d been kicked in the chest by a kangaroo and crumpled to the ground.
Gil sprang forward, pulling him to cover behind a large rock and ripping open his jacket to see the bullet had penetrated the ceramic breast plate. He tore out the plate and checked behind it to see that the projectile had fragmented and that the Kevlar had stopped the fragments, as the system had been designed.
“Wake up!” Gil smacked his face. “Wake up!”
Dragunov opened his eyes. “Stop hitting me.”
“You’re dead, baby!”
The Russian’s eyes grew wide, and he grabbed his chest. “What does that mean?”
Gil sat him up with a grin. “It means our Chechen friend out there thinks he just killed you.”
65
BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL,
Bethesda, Maryland
Pope kept one eye on the satellite feed while he spoke on the phone with Mark Vance, ex–Delta Force operator and CEO of the private military company Obsidian Optio. Obsidian deployed private mercenaries around the world, protecting various governmental and corporate interests. Chief among those interests were some of the world’s most vulnerable petroleum processing facilities. Gil was on Obsidian’s books as an employee but only as cover for a double hit he had carried out on two Al Qaeda terrorists in Morocco the year before.
“You say he’s where?” Vance asked.
“Just over the Georgian border into Russia,” Pope replied. “The Georgians are refusing to violate Russian airspace to pull him and his Spetsnaz partner out. So I need your people to fly in there and get them.”
“What about the Russians?” Vance said. “If the other guy is Spetsnaz, why don’t they pull them out?”
“It’s political,” Pope said. “Putin is making a point that I don’t have time to explain.”
“Well, Christ, Bob, we can’t violate Russian airspace.”
“You’ve got your own helos in Georgia that you’re using to patrol the BTC pipeline,” Pope said. “All you have to do is send a couple of them north for an hour or so and pull my guys out. Keep them close to the ground, and Russian radar will never even know they’re there.”
“Bob, that’s just not something we can do,” Vance insisted. “We can’t violate a country’s airspace like that.”
“You violated Brazilian airspace six months ago when your op to eliminate Joaquín Silva went bad.”
“That wasn’t us!” Vance said, obviously shocked by Pope’s knowledge of the operation. “And I resent the implication, Bob! Goddamnit! We’re on a telephone here!”
“It was you,” Pope said, his voice rising, “and I have the proof. Now, are you going to help me out, or I am going to share that proof with Brasília? I understand you’re about to sign one hell of an account with Telemar communications.” Telemar Participações, a $48 billion Brazilian telecommunications company, was the country’s third largest corporation. “It’d be a shame,” Pope said, “if the Brazilian government prevented that deal from going through.”
“Damn you, that’s blackmail!” Vance growled.
“It’s business,” Pope said icily. “And in case you haven’t gotten the news yet, I’ve just been appointed director of the CIA. So if you plan on continuing to do business with me, you’d better find a couple of pilots who know something about flying snake-and-nape, because I’ve got two men in the Valley of the Shadow badly in need of extraction!”
Vance was quiet for a long moment. “So you’re the head motherfucker in charge now,” he grumbled.
“That’s right,” Pope said. “And I understand you’ve got a Killer Egg stashed east of Tbilisi. You’d better send that along in support of the evac. It’s likely to be a hot EZ.” Killer Egg was the nickname for a Boeing AH-6 Little Bird helicopter, heavily armed with rockets and Gatling guns.
“You know entirely too much about our operations,” Vance said. “How many of your people do you having working on the inside?”
“Are you going to get on the phone to your people in Tbilisi or not?” Pope said. “Time is running out for my men.”
“I’ll pull them out,” Vance growled, “but you can bet your ass I’ll be expecting a quid pro quo one day. This could cost us a helluva lot if it goes bad.”
“That’s why it’s so important,” Pope said. “I’ll have Midori call you immediately with the coordinates and the rest of the particulars.”
Pope hung up and called Midori, telling her what he wanted. Then he called the president at the Pentagon. “Mr. President, I’ve arranged for evac. You don’t have to bother with the Georgians anymore.”
“Who the hell did you get, Bob?”
“Obsidian Optio.”
“Obsidian! How in hell did you get Vance to agree to it?”
“I twisted his arm, Mr. President.”
“How’d you—never mind!” the president said. “I don’t want to know. Let’s just hope they get there in time.”
66
THE CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS
After agreeing to separate, Gil left Dragunov and moved carefully from cover to cover toward the south, allowing Kovalenko to catch glimpses of him but not enough to risk getting shot. He knew the Chechen was in the tree line on the far side of the valley, so, relatively speaking, the bullet would take a little bit longer to reach him. This extra bit of time would be measured in tenths of a second, but it was enough for Gil to leap between rocks or trees without having to worry about Kovalenko forcing a shot that could potentially expose his position. The biggest risk was that he might anticipate Gil’s movement, firing a split second before he made his dash, thus delivering the round in time to intercept him. For this reason, Gil had to be very careful to keep his movements jerky and unpredictable. It was a dangerous game, and if he played it too long, he would certainly be killed.
The plan was for Gil to draw Umarov’s men southeast of Dragunov’s position. This would put their backs to Dragunov and allow him to start picking them off without immediate danger from Kovalenko. And this would force Kovalenko to make a choice: either let them escape or begin maneuvering against two different sniper positions at the same time. Gil had no doubt he would choose the latter.
The bulk of Umarov’s men had reached the stream by this time, and it was apparent from the size of the force that additional reinforcements had arrived. There were at least a hundred men maneuvering through the trees and around the boulders. The fighters at the front of the advance had spotted Gil’s movement, and they took the occasional potshot at him as he darted from cover to cover.
After traveling a few hundred meters around the eastern rim of the valley, Gil was forced to pause, having arrived at a particularly wide gap in the trees, where a large fissure cut down through the slope like a firebreak. The fissure was four feet across and five feet deep. He could leap across it easily, but the jump would give Kovalenko time enough to blow him away. He crouched with his back to the rock and thought about the Chechen sitting in his hide across the valley, undoubtedly licking his chops as he waited for Gil to make the obligatory leap of faith.
He envisioned himself in Kovalenko’s position, eye to the scope, watching the left side of the fissure for the first hint of movement, then squeezing the trigger, delivering the bullet at the same instant Gil landed on the far side.
Gil darted halfway from behind the rock and pulled back quickly. A bullet struck the rocky ground on the far side of the fissure, kicking up dust, and Gil lunged forward again, throwing himself across the fissure and diving onto his belly behind another rock. A second bullet nicked the heel of his boot as he pulled his legs to safety.
Kovalenko would be cursing him now, and Gil stuck his middle finger up over the rock for a half second and pulled it back. A third round stuck the rock and ricocheted with a whine.
“Good, you’re pissed,” Gil muttered. “Wait till you find out Ivan’s still alive.”
The first group of Umarov’s men had arrived within effective AK-47 range about a hundred yards down the slope, and it wasn’t more than ten seconds before Dragunov’s first shot rang out across the valley, cutting down a man in the midst of shouting orders to pick up the pace.
Gil scrambled from behind the rock into the trees, where the cover was more substantial. Dragunov fired again, and another Chechen toppled over about seventy yards downhill, shot in the small of the back.
Gil hunkered in with his own SVD. He placed the PSO-1’s unique T-shaped reticle on the face of the next Chechen in line and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck the man
in the left eye and blew out the back of his head. The body spun a tight pirouette to the ground, and the sight had a chilling effect on the rest of the skirmishers, sending them scrambling for cover behind rocks and in shallow depressions. Nothing demoralized infantry like sniper fire.
Gil now had a good estimate of the angle from which Kovalenko was firing, and he knew he would be safe behind the tree until Kovalenko could displace for a better shot. He concerned himself with a pair of Chechens who’d taken cover in a shallow defilade a hundred yards downslope. The two men were pouring AK-47 fire into the trees off to the left. He placed the reticle on the forehead of the first guy, allowing for the drop of the bullet, and squeezed the trigger, blowing off the top of his head. Then Gil shifted a hair to the right and shot the second one through the center of the face. The head snapped back and then forward again, smacking against the ground.
Another, braver pair of Chechens attempted to maneuver uphill through a dense copse of trees, and Gil was about to squeeze the trigger when Dragunov—who must have worried that Gil couldn’t see them—shot one through the pelvis. The Chechen went down screaming, and Gil shot him through the head.
The other guy panicked and darted from the trees on the far left side, where Dragunov would not have a shot at him. Gil led him six inches and squeezed the trigger, hitting him in the left temple and blowing out his eyes. He swung back to the right and shot another man in the face just as he was stealing a peek from behind a boulder. The body fell from behind the rock, and an arm reached out to grab him. Gil shot it off at the elbow.
“Looks like you’re gonna need some help with those ketchup bottles from now on, partner.”
Bullets splintered the tree limbs just above him, and he marked the shooter two hundred yards downslope behind another rock. The rock wasn’t very large, but Gil could see only the barrel of the rifle and the top of the shooter’s camouflaged cap. He squeezed the trigger. The round hit the forestock of the AK-47 and ricocheted into the Chechen’s eye.