by Sean McFate
The air lit up, the lead ricocheting off the warehouse wall, as Reynolds danced a foot in front of me, the bullets tearing him apart. I grabbed him by the upper arm and hurled myself back through the door. My face was coated with Reynolds’s blood; his shoulder was disintegrating in my hands. The enemy had all the exits covered. The enemy had a machine gun trained on the alleyway, the fucking pros.
“Alpha Four down. Alpha Four down. Back alley a no-go,” I shouted, dropping Reynolds’s body and making a throat-slashing gesture at Boon. The smoke grenades had done their work, and visibility was zero in the red-and-purple haze. The enemies’ laser sites danced in the smoke, marking our targets. No time to reload the SCAR. I reached for my twin pistols and moved down the factory floor, popping skulls. A nine-millimeter pistol can sound like an air gun in battle, but it packs stopping power at close range, and three hostiles didn’t get up. I missed two more, as they slipped behind cover and turned off their laser sights.
“Fire in the hole!” someone shouted, as a satchel charge thrown from the Russian side landed in the center of the storm.
I leapt behind the smelter with Boon and covered my ears. Several kilos of C-4 cratered the floor and sent a shock wave that knocked the smelter over and stunned and deafened everyone within thirty meters. I stumbled away, right into a Russian, his muzzle pointed at my chest, and it was over, all over, until someone opened up on automatic—it was Jacobsen’s M249 SAW machine gun—and the Russian collapsed.
“Thanks Jake,” I said as I turned, still stunned, but it wasn’t Jacobsen. It was Alie, gasping for air and staring at the body, holding Jacobsen’s gun.
“I fucking pissed myself,” she said.
I looked down. She had. I almost said it was a good look, but instead I told her to fall back, this isn’t over. “Is Jacobsen dead?”
“I think so.”
The gunfire had stopped. In the smoke, the hostiles were falling back, consolidating their position outside, using the remains of the front wall as cover. Five meters in front of me, a wounded Russian attacker lay on his back, breathing heavily. His head swiveled toward me, and I put a bullet through his brain.
“Who’s hit?” I screamed into the headset, my ears aching and hearing mostly gone.
“Charro, Jacobsen, Reynolds,” Wildman said. “KIA.”
“The old man, Greenlees. KIA.”
“A couple Ukrainians . . .”
“Three dead,” Maltov said, crawling up next to me. “One wounded.”
I could see a young man a few feet away, slumped against the wall, sucking air. The other three living Ukrainians were near him, along with Sirko and Karpenko.
“Fuck.” The voice snapped from the back of the warehouse. “Holy fuck, get me out of here. Get me out of these.” I couldn’t find the voice. I was looking but . . .
“It’s me . . . It’s Hargrove.”
He was lying on his side ten meters away, breathing heavily. “Get me out of these cuffs,” he said. He smelled like shit, and his eyes were wild with fear.
“Miles is wounded,” someone said.
“Get me out,” Hargrove said.
I turned away.
“Locke. Please. Locke . . . don’t leave me.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said, resisting the urge to smash his skull in with the butt of my rifle. This was his fault. The enemy had followed his car.
I surveyed the scene before me. We were cornered in the back of the warehouse. Smoke clung to the air, and half the building was on fire. Bodies littered no-man’s-land, piles of broken concrete and glass, but no movement; the enemy had withdrawn to the other side of the flames. But they were out there, waiting. They had the tactical advantage, because they had the only exits covered, and we were stuck inside a burning building going down like a torpedoed ship.
Think fast, Locke. Think. These motherfuckers won’t wait long.
“Call your dogs,” I said to Maltov, tossing him my sat phone. “Anybody you know. Get them here.”
I scrambled to Miles. He was on his back, gasping. He had taken three shots to the ballistic vest; its ceramic plates had been destroyed, saving his life but breaking ribs. Another shot in his left arm had missed the bone but rendered the arm useless. But the real problem was his left leg, torn and soaked with blood, a tourniquet tied around his thigh.
“Femoral artery,” said Boon, our medic, as he tied on a second tourniquet. “He’s bleeding out.”
I’m not going to let him fucking die, I thought.
But a hospital was out of the question. Even if we got him there, anonymously, the FSB would pick him up, interrogate him by torture, and dump his body in a beet field. The Geneva Conventions didn’t extend to mercenaries, not that modern soldiers benefitted much either.
“Morphine,” Miles gasped.
He clenched his teeth. He knew the bargain: no extraordinary measures that could get others killed. But I had one chance. A desperate one: Winters. We just had to get out of here first.
“Ten minutes,” Maltov said, handing me back the sat phone.
Shit. Too long. I figured we had two, at the most, before the Russians came knocking again.
“Two teams,” I said, as Boon jammed the morphine into Miles. “Out the back and into the woods. Get far away, and get there fast. We’ll link up in town, on the roof of the building where Wildman killed the slags. If I’m not there by 0700, head to the extraction point and wait. I’m taking Jimmy”—I could see Miles shaking his head, but I ignored it—“and the Ukrainians and the girl—”
“We’re not going.”
I turned. It was Maltov, his three healthy men crouched behind him. “We’re not leaving,” he said. “We’re here to hang Russians.”
“Chechens,” Sirko snapped. Of course. The Colonel was right. They were mercs, not Spetsnaz.
Maltov turned and barked something in Ukrainian. Sirko spat back, then raised his rifle and stepped toward the enforcer, his finger on the trigger. I could feel the tension in his glare and the ferocity of his voice. Sirko had been pushed too far by Maltov. Sirko hated the man’s recklessness and lack of finesse. But we were part of it too: Hargrove, Alie, and me. From Sirko’s perspective, and it was a fair one, our carelessness was about to get him and his client killed.
“Enough,” I said, cutting through the heated exchange.
Sirko didn’t lower his bullpup, but Maltov laughed, even with the rifle in his face. He turned to the three men beside him, who laughed in turn. The Ukrainians were young and hard, but I could tell only Maltov’s force of will kept them together. They were terrified.
“True Ukrainians will fight,” Maltov said, turning toward me. “This . . . Russian will follow you.”
“He follows me,” Karpenko said.
The oligarch stepped forward and whispered something to Maltov. It looked like a business tip, not a good-bye. If Maltov survived, Sirko was out. He was probably out anyway. But I doubted either would survive.
Focus, Tom, I thought, looking around.
The fish truck was in the corner, untouched. It was packed with high-octane helicopter fuel.
“Please . . .” someone said.
The drone was next to the truck, also untouched. “The SA-18s?” I asked.
“Punctured,” Boon said, shaking his head. Useless.
But still, a thought was coming together. Maybe even a plan. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and I’d lived through worse . . . or almost as bad.
“Please,” the voice pleaded again.
It was Hargrove.
“Please,” he said.
He was on his back, crying and holding up his zip cuffs. What was I going to do with Hargrove? What was I going to do with the man who had brought this down on us, our extra baggage, our bad-luck charm?
Alie grabbed my arm. “He’s CIA,” she said. I had seen her vicious, and I had seen her passionate, but I had never seen her this determined. “He’s a walking international incident, Tom, not to mention congressional investigation.
”
She was right. I had to bury Hargrove deep. The Russians could never find him, dead or alive. I knew which option I preferred. So I pulled out my knife, thinking through the steps—and at the last moment, decided to cut him loose.
“Wallet,” I said with my hand out. “Keys. Badge. Anything that can identify you.”
Hargrove emptied his pockets. I ripped off his dog tags. Why would a Case Officer have dog tags? He probably bought them at the mall. Everybody thought they were soldiers now.
“Find a gun,” I said, reaching for my ruck.
It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t kill the guys on my team. He didn’t kidnap Alie. He didn’t hurt Miles.
I did.
CHAPTER 51
The Wolf stood in a copse of trees thirty meters from the front of the warehouse, watching it burn. The Chechen machine gun crew had reported only one kill behind the building; the rest had gotten the message and retreated. Part of the front wall had collapsed, enough to glimpse the wreckage inside: a shoddy barricade, a burning car. He could see five or six bodies scattered inside the building, the KIA of his first assault. The survivors were outside, surrounding the building.
He was glad it wasn’t Colonel Sirko, his old commander, who had snatched the American girl in Kramatorsk. The Wolf might not have been able to resist shooting him on the spot. Instead, it was the Ukrainian Maltov, and he had been able to follow the fool straight back here. He had scouted the warehouse quickly, planning the assault in his head. He had gone in blind, as soon as the Chechens arrived, but there hadn’t been a choice. He couldn’t afford a “wait and see” strategy with quarry this elusive, or this good. He’d been burned that way in Poltava, and he wanted payback. These Chechens were hardened fighters, men who had hunted Islamists door to door, like dogs, from Damascus to Tbilisi. This time, the plan had been pure firepower, the old Soviet way. Hit hard, hit fast. Leave corpses.
He had made two errors. The first was not killing the loud American when he arrived in the car. The second was not attacking the mercs when they opened the door to pull him inside. But his men weren’t in position, and launching a raid prematurely could have been disastrous. The Westerners could have slipped the noose.
As things stood, the Wolf wasn’t worried. He hadn’t lost. He had taken casualties, but so had they. Now they were trapped in a burning building, with wounded, and their exits were covered.
The Wolf slid the action on his twenty-year-old Steyr AUG bullpup assault rifle, his life’s true friend and companion. He stared down the scope and saw movement in the depths of the warehouse, men crouching and moving, but no clear shots.
He dropped the rifle to his side. “Be ready,” he said to the tenman secondary assault force around him in the trees.
The enemy was cornered, and they would either roast or run. It was that simple. All the Wolf had to do now was wait.
A thousand miles away, Gorelov put down his phone. Another was already ringing. “We have no troops in Little Russia,” he said with the arrogant bravado of a man used to lying in the face of clear evidence. The Russians were even showing funerals for “martyred” soldiers on state television.
“You have a brigade in Severdonetsk,” Winters replied calmly. “Three units outside Sloviansk. Not to mention the Spetsnaz near Mariupol, and the brigade helping the separatists hold the line to the west.”
“They are volunteers,” Gorelov growled, spouting the party line. “Patriots on holiday.”
The man was grasping. Winters could see it. Gorelov didn’t know military strategy. He didn’t know mud—not the business variety, but the actually stinking, bloodstained dirt. If Winters could keep the battle on this terrain, guns not numbers, then he was confident he could break his man.
“They are Russian military units, under Russian command,” he said, slowing down as Gorelov quickened his pace, “and I’m going to prove it. By this time tomorrow, the whole world will see you with your dick in the cookie jar.”
Gorelov spoke abusive Russian into one cell phone, grabbed another, shouted, then put it down. He stubbed out a cigarette and lit another. Smoke was circling his head. He grinned.
“You think a private militia can defeat us?” He laughed. “You think a man like you can defeat Russia? The mightiest empire on earth?”
Wrong move. You already said that, my friend.
“No,” Winters replied, “nor do we need to. I simply have to break you, at the point where you are weakest.”
Gorelov refused to look away, staring his opponent down as he spoke rapidly into one cell phone after another. Winters didn’t know what the Russian was saying, but he knew he was relaying threats to others further up the line, government officials, maybe military men. Good. He was probably trying to confirm the positions of Russian troops, and whether there was a Western private military company operating in east Ukraine. Let him try.
“My man will break you once, two hours from now, and then he will break you again, and again, until the world knows his name,” Winters said, feeling it now, watching the military and media campaign unfurl in his mind. “By tomorrow, he will be Nikolay Karpenko, the savior of Ukraine.”
Winters saw Everly swallow, then hesitate, and he knew he’d made a mistake, even before Gorelov slammed down his phone. He had become overconfident, Winters realized. He’d swerved back onto Gorelov’s terrain, names, and power structures, when he should have stayed in the mud.
“Karpenko?” Gorelov snorted, with a laugh that sounded like a cat caught in an industrial crushing machine. “Kostyantin Karpenko? The baby oligarch? The so-called businessman of the West? That is your man?”
Winters started to answer, but Gorelov stubbed out his cigarette, violently, snapping off the unsmoked barrel. “Karpkeno is nichego,” he barked. Nothing.
“He is a leader,” Winters said, pressing forward, knowing it was all he could do. “He is a symbol . . .”
“He is, what, maybe the sixtieth most powerful man in Ukraine?”
“Who was Stalin, before he changed his name to Joe Steel?” Winters barked, with more confidence than he felt. Press on. Right the ship. “Who was Lenin, before he murdered the czar? Who was Putin before the Wall fell? Who were you, for that matter, before your godfather lifted you to this position?”
“I was a violinist,” Gorelov smiled. He was a good one, in fact, trained at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. “Karpenko is zhaba.” A toad.
But Gorelov was the toad, squatting in his smoky backroom, puffing out his chest. “And besides,” the Russian croaked, knocking back a short glass of vodka for effect, “Karpenko is dead.”
CHAPTER 52
We moved fast and stayed low, throwing Hargrove’s personal effects onto the burn pile of equipment we were leaving behind. Then we gathered the bodies—Greenlees, Jacobsen, Reynolds, and Charro—and tossed them on top. We left the dead Ukrainians for the police, or whoever came next. Those bodies would tell the right story and, if the dead men were lucky, maybe even find their way home to their mothers for last rites.
I thought about saying a few words, but there was nothing to say. Boon took Charro’s cross and kissed it, as Charro often did, but nobody knew Jacobsen or Reynolds. They didn’t have anything that would identify them, and they didn’t seem to be carrying mementos. They were strangers.
I turned away and scrambled over to the fish truck, where the Ukrainians were gathered. “Ready?” I said.
They had been slamming vodka from the bottle, particularly the injured man, who was strapped into the driver’s seat. He was half drunk and half delirious, and he was saying something slurry and serious to each man in turn. His wound wasn’t fatal, but apparently he didn’t know that. I wondered if Maltov knew. If this was the sacrifice required.
“Good luck,” I said to Maltov, as the driver finished the bottle and smashed it on the factory floor.
“No luck necessary,” he said. “Only pride.”
The driver started the engine. I noticed he was crying. Fuck pride
.
“Take her up,” I said to Wildman. He nodded, and our drone-copter whirred up through the roof and into the night. It was met immediately by gunfire.
I walked to the pile. “Adios, brothers,” I said.
“Wait,” Alie said, running from the back of the factory, where the team was waiting at the evac door. She stopped at the pile, reached in, and carefully removed Greenlees’s wedding ring, as if she didn’t want to pull his finger too hard. She touched his cheek, then slipped it into her pocket. “Okay,” she said. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t showing any emotion. It only made her look sadder.
“Diving,” Wildman said.
I signaled to Maltov—go time—lit the fuse, and ran. The white phosphorous, or “Willy P,” would eat through the bodies and the equipment and wouldn’t stop until it had eaten two feet into the concrete floor. In ten minutes, there wouldn’t even be a tooth.
“Let’s go,” I said, as the truck crashed through the front wall, the driver’s desperate scream disappearing into the void.
The Wolf heard the motor, then saw the small quadcopter slip through a shattered window and bank upward, losing itself in the sky. It was a spy drone, probably used to scout their objective. Now it was scouting his positions. So what.
“Yego sbit’,” The Wolf said. Shoot it down.
The first barrage missed, as the copter zigzagged across the dark sky. Lousy Chechens.
“Take it down,” he said more forcefully, as the drone dipped toward them.
A kamikaze run, the Wolf thought. Or a decoy.
“Oni idut,” he yelled. They are coming.
A flash from the warehouse. A blinding white starburst. Phosphorous fire. The Wolf grabbed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The whirring of the drone faded to gunfire, the world faded into ten men firing, but he kept his eye on the target and his finger on the trigger and, just as he anticipated, a truck burst out of the warehouse. What he hadn’t anticipated, as he lined up his shot, was the explosion a few feet above them, right in the middle of his men.