by Tom Clancy
It was unlocked, so he paused only long enough to lower his body a few inches while his mates did the same. Then the three men moved in as a team, and the lights under the three guns swept their sectors.
They found their precious cargo in the center of the unlit space. John Clark sat in a chair, his hands in his lap, squinting straight into the bright lights. Inches from him on both his left and his right, the tactical lights illuminated two figures standing, and a partial face of a third man was just visible behind Clark’s own head.
The three gunmen in the doorway—Domingo Chavez, Sam Driscoll, and Dominic Caruso—all fired simultaneously. Short bursts from their weapons cracked in the room, flashes erupted from their muzzles, and the scent of gun smoke replaced the dank smell of mold in the cabin.
John Clark did not move, did not even blink, as the bullets slammed into the three figures around him.
Holes appeared in the foreheads of the targets, but the figures did not fall. They were wooden stands, upon which photorealistic images of armed men had been attached.
Quickly the tactical lights scanned the rest of the room independently, and one of them centered on fourth and fifth figures, positioned next to each other in a far corner. The wooden target on the left was the image of a man with a detonator in his hand.
Ding Chavez double-tapped this target in the forehead.
A second light swept to the corner and illuminated the image of a beautiful young woman holding an infant in her right arm. In her left hand, low and partially hidden behind her leg, she held a long kitchen knife.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Dom Caruso shot the female target in the forehead.
Seconds later a call came from across the room. “Clear,” Driscoll said.
“Clear,” Caruso repeated.
“We’re clear,” Ding confirmed.
John Clark stood up from his chair in the center of the room, rubbing his eyes after catching the full intensity of three 200-lumen tactical lights. “Make your weapons safe.”
Each of the three operators thumbed the safety of his MP5 on and let his weapon hang freely from his chest.
Together the four men surveyed the holes in the five targets and then headed outside the room and checked the targets in the rooms off the hall. They stepped outside of the dark cabin, where they stood together on the porch to stay out of the rain.
“Thoughts, Ding?” Clark asked.
Chavez said, “It was fair. It slowed things down when I had to catch up to the guys so we could stack up at the door. But any way we roll this, if we want to breach with at least three operators, we’re going to have to wait on the driver.”
Clark conceded the point. “That’s true. What else?”
Caruso said, “When Ding and Sam engaged in the rooms off the hall, I was on my own. I covered the space we hadn’t cleared yet, which was the doorway at the end of the hall, but I couldn’t help thinking it would have been nice to have one more man to check six. Any hostiles who entered from the outside would have had an open shot at the back of my head. I kept my head on a swivel, but it’s not the same as having another gun in the fight.”
Clark nodded. “We are a small force.”
“Smaller now without Jack Junior,” Dom Caruso added.
Driscoll said, “We might want to think about bringing someone new into the unit.”
“Jack will be back,” Chavez replied. “You know as well as I do that as soon as we reactivate he won’t be able to stay away.”
“Maybe so,” said Dom. “But who knows when that will happen.”
Clark said, “Be patient, kid,” but it was clear to the others on the porch that Clark himself was champing at the bit to do something more impactful with his time. He was a warrior, he’d been in the middle of most every conflict the United States had been involved in for more than forty years, and although he’d retired from active operations with The Campus, he was clearly ready to do more than train.
Clark looked out off the porch at the Bronco now; its doors were wide open, and the storm had only increased in intensity. By now the floorboards would have an inch of standing water, and the torn fabric upholstery would be waterlogged. “Glad I told you to use the farm truck.”
Ding said, “It needed a good interior detailing.”
The men laughed.
“All right. Back to work,” Clark said. “You guys head back up the road, wait twenty minutes, and then try again. That will give me time to rehang the front door and move the configuration around. Dom, your grouping on the second target in the bedroom could have been a little tighter.”
“Roger that,” Dom said. He’d fired his MP5 three times at target two, and all three rounds had struck the target’s head within two and a half inches of one another, but he wasn’t going to argue the point with Clark. Especially since all of Driscoll’s and Chavez’s targets had sub-two-inch groupings.
“And Sam,” Clark said. “I’d like to see you breach the door a little lower. If you can get your head down another three inches as you enter, it could mean the difference between catching a round to the forehead and just getting a haircut.”
“Will do, Mr. C.”
Dom started to head off the porch, but he looked out at the weather. “No chance we are going to wait for the rain to stop before trying this again?”
Ding walked straight out into the mud and stood under the heavy downpour. “I had a drill instructor back at Fort Ord, an Alabama redneck but a hell of a DI, who liked to say, ‘If it ain’t rainin’, you ain’t trainin’.’”
Clark and Dom laughed, and even Sam Driscoll, the quietest of the bunch, cracked a smile.
2
The Russian Federation invaded its sovereign neighbor on the first moonless night of spring. By dawn their tanks ground westward along highways and back roads as if the countryside belonged to them, as if the quarter-century thaw from the Cold War had been a dream.
This was not supposed to happen here. This was Estonia, after all, and Estonia was a NATO member state. The politicians in Tallinn had promised their people that Russia would never attack them now that they had joined the alliance.
But so far, NATO was a no-show in this war.
The Russian ground invasion was led by T-90s—fully modernized fifty-ton tanks with a 125-millimeter main gun and two heavy machine guns, explosive-reactive armor, and a state-of-the-art automated countermeasure system that detected inbound missiles and then launched missiles of its own to kill them in midair. And behind the T-90 warhorses, BTR-80 armored transporters carried troops in their bellies, disgorging them when necessary to provide cover for the tanks, and then retrieving them when all threats had been neutralized.
So far, the land war was proceeding nominally for the Russian Federation.
But it was a different story in the air.
Estonia had a good missile defense system, and Russia’s attack on their early-warning systems and SAM sites had been only marginally successful. Many SAM batteries were still operational, and they had shot down more than a dozen Russian aircraft and kept dozens of others from executing their missions over the nation.
The Russians did not yet own the skies, but this had not slowed down their land advance at all.
In the first four hours of the war, villages were flattened, towns lay in rubble, and many of the tanks had yet to fire their main guns. It was a rout in the making, and anyone who knew anything about military science could have seen it coming, because the tiny nation of Estonia had focused on diplomacy, not on its physical defense.
Edgar Nõlvak had seen it coming, not because he was a soldier or a politician—he was a schoolteacher—but he had seen it coming because he watched television. Now as he lay in a ditch, bloody and cold, wet and shaking from fear, his ears half destroyed from the sustained crashing of detonating shells fired from the Russian tanks poking out of the tree line on the far side of the field, he retained the presence of mind to wish like hell his country’s leaders had not wasted time with diplomacy i
n Brussels, and had instead spent their time constructing a fucking wall to keep the fucking Russians out of his fucking village.
There had been talk of an invasion for weeks, and then, days earlier, a bomb exploded over the border in Russia, killing eighteen civilians. On the television the Russians blamed the Estonian Internal Security Service, a preposterous claim given credence by Russia’s slick and state-sponsored media. They showed their manufactured proof and then the Russian president said he had no choice but to order a security operation into Estonia to protect the Russian people.
Edgar Nõlvak lived in Põlva; it was forty kilometers from the border, and he’d spent his youth in the seventies and eighties fearing that someday tanks would appear in that very tree line and shell his home. But over the past twenty-three years that fear had been all but forgotten.
Now the tanks were here, they’d killed scores of his fellow townspeople, and they would surely kill him with barely a pause on their way west.
Edgar had gotten a call two hours earlier from a friend who lived in Võuküla, several kilometers to the east. His friend was hiding in the woods, and in a voice flat and detached from shock he told Edgar the Russian tanks had rolled on past his village after firing only a few shells, as there was nothing in Võuküla except for some farmhouses and a gas station. But behind the tanks and the soldiers in the armored personnel carriers, just minutes behind them, in fact, a force of irregulars came in pickup trucks, and they were now systematically burning and pillaging the town.
At that moment Edgar and the other men with him here sent their families away, and then, bravely or foolishly, they’d taken their rifles into the ditch to wait for the armor to pass and for the irregulars to appear. They could do nothing to stop the tanks, but they would not let their village be burned to the ground by Russian civilians.
This plan evaporated the instant a half-dozen tanks broke off the main force moving up the highway, formed a picket line in the trees, and then began pounding Põlva with high-explosive rounds.
This was Edgar’s childhood nightmare come to life.
Edgar and the men with him had vowed to fight to the death. But then the tanks came; this was no fight.
This was just death.
The schoolteacher had been wounded almost immediately. As he moved from one position to another he’d been caught in the open as a round hit the high school’s parking lot. Shrapnel from an exploding station wagon had sliced through his legs, and now he lay in the mud on his rifle, waiting for the end.
Edgar Nõlvak did not know much about military things, but he was sure that at the pace they were moving, the Russians would be in the city of Tartu, to the north of his village, by midafternoon.
A sound like paper tearing filled the air. He’d been listening to this sound for an hour, and he knew it meant incoming fire. He pressed his face back into the cold mud.
Boom!
Behind him, a direct hit on the gymnasium of the high school. The aluminum-and-cinder-block walls blew out ahead of a billowing cloud; the wood flooring of the basketball court rained down in splinters over Edgar.
He looked again over the edge of the ditch. The tanks were only a thousand meters to the east.
“Where the fuck is NATO?”
* * *
One thousand meters away, Captain Arkady Lapranov stood in the open hatch of his tank, Storm Zero One, and shouted, “Where the fuck is my air cover?”
It was a rhetorical question; the commanders of the five other tanks he controlled heard it but did not respond, and the two men in his vehicle, the driver and the gunner, waited silently for orders. They knew there were helicopter gunships they could call forward if any air threats appeared, but so far they’d seen no sign of Estonian aircraft, nor had the Russian airborne warning and control system detected any aircraft in the area on radar.
The skies were clear.
This was a good day. A tanker’s dream.
A thousand meters away the cloud of dust and smoke over the gymnasium settled enough so that Lapranov could see behind it. Into his mike he said, “I want more rounds in that building beyond the previous target. HE-FRAG. Without proper air support I am not moving forward on that road until I can see what’s to the right of the intersection.”
“Yes, sir!” Lapranov’s gunner shouted from below.
The gunner pressed a button, and the autoloader computer chose a high-explosive-fragmentation round from the magazine, and its mechanical arm chambered it. The gunner used his video-viewing device to find the building, then put his forehead against the rubber pad on the sight panel and aimed his crosshairs on target. He pushed the fire button on the control panel, and then, with a violent lurch, the 125-millimeter smoothbore gun launched a shell through the blue sky, across the fallow field in front of them, and directly into the building.
“Hit,” said the gunner.
They had been proceeding like this all morning. So far they had moved through four villages, shelling big targets with their 125-millimeter gun and raking small targets with their coaxial machine guns.
Lapranov had expected more resistance, but he was starting to allow for the fact that Russia’s president, Valeri Volodin, had been right. Volodin had told his nation NATO would have no stomach to fight for Estonia.
In his headset, Lapranov heard a transmission from one of the tanks under his command.
“Storm Zero Four to Storm Zero One.”
“Go, Zero Four.”
“Captain, I have movement in a ditch in front of the last target. Range one thousand. I see multiple dismounts.”
Lapranov looked through his binoculars, scanning slowly across the ditch.
There. Heads popped up out of the mud, then disappeared again. “I see them. Small-arms position. Don’t waste a one-twenty-five. We’ll clean them up with the coax when we get closer.”
“Roger.”
Another salvo was fired into the buildings on a low hill beyond the intersection, and Lapranov scanned through his optics. The town was deathly quiet; there was virtually no resistance.
“Keep firing,” he ordered, then he knelt back down into his commander’s station to get a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Wipe this place off the map.”
Seconds later, another transmission came through his headset: “Storm Zero Two to Storm Zero One.”
“Go,” Lapranov said as he lit his smoke.
“Movement to the south of the hospital. I… I think it is a vehicle.”
Lapranov dropped his lighter back inside and looked through his binoculars. It took a moment to find the area; the hospital was a few kilometers beyond the high school, on a small hill. But he scanned to the south of the building and finally he saw the movement on the road in the shadows.
At first he thought he was looking at a jeep, or maybe an SUV.
Another T-90 called in. “Storm Three to Storm One. I think it’s a helicopter.”
“Nyet,” said Lapranov, but he looked closer. The dark vehicle seemed to stop at an intersection, then began moving laterally into a parking lot.
“What the fuck?” Lapranov said. “Maybe it is a helo. Gunner, can you ID it through your Catherine?” The Catherine long-range fire-control thermal imager built into each tank allowed the gunner to see distant targets on a video screen. Lapranov himself had access to a Catherine screen, but he’d have to sit down inside the turret for that, and he was having too much fun up here.
The gunner came over Storm Zero One’s intercom. “Confirmed light helicopter. Single rotor. Can’t make out markings—he is behind a truck in the shade. Shit, he is low. His skids must be just a meter aboveground.”
“Armament?” Lapranov asked. He squinted into his binoculars to get a better view himself.
“Um… wait. He has twin pylons with machine guns. No missiles.” The gunner chuckled. “This guy wants to come out and play against us with his pop guns?”
Lapranov heard a commander of one of the other tanks on the net laughing.
But t
he captain did not laugh. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Designate it as a target.”
“Roger. Designated as a target.”
“Range to target?”
“Four thousand two hundred fifty meters.”
“Shit,” Lapranov said.
The effective range of the 9M119 Refleks missile system, used against tanks as well as low and slow aircraft like helicopters, was four thousand meters. This small helo hovered just out of range.
“Where is my air support? They should have seen this fucker on radar.”
“They won’t see his signature. He’s moving between the buildings. Too low to the ground. He must have flown over the hill through the entire town like that to stay off radar. Whatever the hell he’s doing, he’s a good pilot.”
“Well, I don’t like him. I want him dead. Call in some support. Pass on his coordinates.”
“Da, Captain.”
“All Storm units, load HE-FRAG and resume the attack.”
“Da!”
Within seconds, all six tanks fired 125-millimeter main gun rounds into the buildings at the center of Põlva, killing four and injuring nineteen with this single salvo.
3
Edgar Nõlvak heard the shells tear through the sky overhead, and he looked back over his shoulder in time to see them impact against the city hall and the bus station. When the smoke cleared, he noticed a vehicle moving along a road, higher on the hillside. At first he thought it was a black or green SUV; it even seemed to stop in a parking lot. It was difficult to see because it was shaded by the big hospital building next to it, but eventually Edgar realized what it was.
It was a black helicopter. Its skids were no more than one or two meters above the ground.
The man lying next to him in the mud grabbed Edgar by the arm. He pointed at the helicopter and shouted hysterically. “They are behind us! They are attacking from the west!”