Blacklist Aftermath

9

No plan ever survived the first enemy contact, and if you believed otherwise, you were an armchair general who’d never set foot on a battlefield. The plan of going in ghost, reconnoitering the crash site, and getting out without ever being detected had already been abandoned. Taking out enemy troops while still remaining stealthy was a tactic most often employed by Fisher, one he’d recently begun calling “panther.” Going in “ghost” or going in “panther” was shorthand he used with Grim.

Going in “assault”—loud and offensive — was a last resort. They were information gatherers, not direct action specialists, but they were always prepared to bring the fight to the enemy when they had to, and bring it they had.

The point man broke the laser trip wire they’d set up on the ledge near that rock.

Fisher held his breath.

The small C-4 charges with wireless detonators that he and Briggs had emplaced along the ledge went off in a thread of echoing booms, instantly killing the point man and the two men behind him, their shredded bodies arching through the air and disappearing into the chasm below.

Fisher and Briggs hurled their grenades up and onto the outcroppings. While some troops up there and below hit the deck, others were so disoriented that they either ran or were blown right off the ledge. In the next heartbeat, the outcroppings exploded, raining down tons of rock onto the pass, crushing a few troops while a handful of others narrowly escaped back toward the forest. One man doing overwatch tumbled from the cliff above the pass, the rock beneath him having suddenly given way. The screaming and random salvos flashing from AK-12s, along with the still flickering light of burning shrapnel splayed across the cliff, cast the entire scene in a weird otherworldly glow.

As the miniature mushroom clouds of fire expanded above, rising from columns of dense black smoke, the injured appeared, a couple of troops missing appendages, crawling with what limbs they had left, scraping forward across the ice.

Before Fisher and Briggs could assess any more of their ambush, they were on their feet and hauling ass back toward the forest to circle around and above the pass. The sonar goggles revealed that there were at least five more troops left up top, all having fallen back to secondary defensive positions within the trees.

“Sam, the troops at the crash site—”

“I know, Grim,” he snapped. “But we need to clear a path for Briggs so he can get to that helo.”

“Well, you’d better move. I count at least ten sprinting toward your position.”

“Charlie, can you run interference?” Fisher asked.

“I’ll see if I can offer the drone as bait, let ’em take some potshots to keep ’em distracted. And Sam, I haven’t spotted any bodies in the trees.”

“Okay,” Fisher answered, fighting for breath. “Just slow down those bastards for me.”

He and Briggs scaled a hill so steep they were forced to lean forward and clutch at the earth and snow. At the top, Fisher’s quads were burning, and the altitude was really getting to him now. Briggs was crouched again, scanning with his trifocals. He gave Fisher a hand signal: got two guys to the left, three to the right.

Fisher gestured for Briggs to go left, take out those two quietly. Fisher slipped off across the snow and toward the other three, holstering his pistol and drawing the karambit from its sheath attached to his waistband just behind the holster.

The knife was a curved blade variant, a “tiger’s claw” endemic to Sumatra, Central Java, and Madura. Over his long career, Fisher had studied with many close-quarters combat experts, among them world-renowned edged weapon master Michael Janich, who’d taught Fisher to use the blade with expert and deadly efficiency. The karambit’s design made it more easily concealable in the hand as well as offering more leverage while dragging it across the neck, with the ultimate goal of opening an enemy’s head like a PEZ dispenser. The karambit’s outside edge was sharpened, its back blade nearest the handle heavily serrated to be flipped and used to hack through thicker objects or pieces of flesh. By slipping your pinky or ring finger through the ring attached to the bottom of the knife’s hilt, you could switch between forward and reverse grips in a lightning-fast 180-degree stroke. Fisher owned two karambits, one with a silver uncoated blade, the other featuring a DLC, or diamond-like carbon, coating that gave the blade a matte black appearance for better camouflage and protection against reflections that could betray his position.

Knowing most of this op would be run at night, he’d taken the black blade — which now jutted from the bottom of his fist.

At the next tree he paused and marked the positions of each troop, their weapons trained on the valley to his left. He zoomed in once more with his trifocals. The nearest troop peered out from behind a more narrow pine, his rifle at the ready, a pair of night-vision goggles clipped to his helmet and slid down over his eyes.

After plotting his path, Fisher stepped as gingerly as he could, coming in from behind the man, who turned back as he approached, but all he saw was the next spruce behind him. He didn’t realize Fisher was so close, placing a gloved hand over his mouth to try to stifle his warm breath. Once more Fisher examined the ground between his position and the soldier’s. No, not good. Broken patches of ice, pine needles, and a few brown leaves scattered on top of it all. A soundless approach would involve antigravity boots. He’d have to get Charlie on that. For now, though, it was all about reaching the troop before the man could fire and alert his comrades.

Reaching the troop… that was one way to do it. The other involved bringing the troop to him…

Taking in a long breath, the air stinging his lungs, Fisher stood and began to walk in place, the snow and leaves crunching loudly under his boots.

Then he froze, got back down on his haunches, and doused the green lights on his trifocals.

As expected, the troop clambered to his feet and left his position to investigate the noise. His movements were tense; in fact, Fisher had never seen a young man more puckered up.

As he came toward Fisher’s tree, Fisher cautiously maneuvered to the side so he could still attack from the rear. Again, the most important part of the assault was getting the troop’s finger away from his trigger. After that, the karambit would communicate Fisher’s will in a way words could not.

Fisher rose and came up on the troop like a camouflaged extraterrestrial, once part of the mountainside but now morphing into a lethal, three-eyed combatant.

In that half second when Fisher sensed the troop would whirl around, he reached out and seized the man’s right wrist, yanking it away from the assault rifle.

The blade was already tearing across the man’s throat before he could yell, and as he fell back toward the snow, Fisher eased him silently to the ground. While grisly, it was necessary to stab him twice more in the heart before he was sprawled out on his back and flinching involuntarily.

Men did not die instantly from knife wounds the way Hollywood producers wanted you to believe. It took a while to bleed out, but flooding an enemy’s throat with blood ensured he wouldn’t be screaming for his brothers as, in the minutes to come, he finally, inevitably, drowned.

Fisher took the man’s rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He was about to open the man’s belt pouch to draw some spare magazines when he spotted movement farther up the mountain. He dashed off, the thumping of the Black Hawk much closer and certainly welcome. With that racket concealing his footfalls, he wasted no time rushing up on the next troop and working the knife the way a symphony conductor instinctively works his baton. The troop saw nothing, felt only a hand, the edge of the blade, the warmth of his own blood spilling down his chest.

As Fisher silently finished the job with two more blows, he caught sight of the man’s painfully young eyes, and that youth reminded him of a moment after he’d had a few drinks and his guard was down. His daughter, Sarah, had asked, “Is it easy to kill a man?”

He’d considered the question for a long time, then finally told her, “When it’s for our country, I try not to think about it. But most of the time I do. And it’s never easy. Or fun. Or anything that should be glorified.”

Breathing a heavy sigh, Fisher traded his blood-soaked gloves for the troop’s, then hustled out of there.

“Hey, Sam, Briggs here. Two down, nice and quiet. But they’re coming up fast from the east. If you want me on combat control for that helo, I need to roll now.”

“Go. I’ll be right behind.”

Following a deep cut in the mountain formed eons prior by glaciers, Fisher abandoned his assault on the last troop, who was just north of his position.

Maybe they could lure that soldier into following, then double back to take him out once they were near the LZ. Getting to that troop now would take Fisher too far off the trail and leave Briggs more vulnerable to those attackers from the east.

With his lips chapped and nose sore from the cold, Fisher dragged himself up another ten meters, the grade nearly 40 percent now, his breath ragged. He had to stop, find some air, find some way to actually catch his breath.

And that’s when the grenade went off.

The white-hot blinding flash, followed by the ear-rattling ka-boom sent him crashing forward and burying his face in the dirt. Grim and Charlie were screaming in his ear for him to move, and for a moment, the world seemed to tip on its axis.

There was no rush of imagery from his past, no reflections on his divorce, or anything else — just that terrible ringing and white noise, the blinding flashes like old flashbulbs going off repeatedly in his face.

One of those flashes turned into a lightning bolt with still images printed along its surface, each cell depicting Sarah receiving the news of his death. No, he couldn’t put her through that…

Muted gunfire stitched up the mountainside, and he could feel the rounds thumping into the earth behind him. Was he hit by shrapnel? Was he okay? Where the hell was he?

The moment came down like an avalanche, and barely conscious of his movements, he was already on his feet, digging in deep, charging up the mountain, with more gunfire trailing. He ripped free a grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it over his shoulder without looking.

To his left rose a stand of pines, and he darted toward them, boots sliding as he fought against the incline, his ears ringing loudly from the explosions.

Those sons of bitches were coming up behind him, but he had the high ground, if nothing else.

He had two more grenades left. Tugging down his trifocals, he went to sonar, marked the positions of nine men now who were fanned out in a semicircle within the trees, with several more, three or four, in the distance.

Night-vision mode allowed him to zoom in on the nearest troop. Seeing an opportunity, Fisher shoved up his goggles and got behind the AK-12’s attached scope. As a rule of combat — and if you had a choice — you never trusted an enemy’s rifle. He sighted the forehead of the nearest troop, then panned right to the next three about a yard back. The second man was there, leaning out from behind the trunk. Fisher knew that once he fired the first round, the second guy would switch positions, ducking for cover — but his tree wasn’t quite wide enough, and so when he did try to hide, Fisher would exploit that reaction.

The moment seemed perfect, and firing down at a sharp angle decreased the amount of bullet drop, placing the odds of a better shot in his favor.

If he did it right, gripped the weapon firmly with his left hand, gently with his right, then exhaled halfway, every shot would be a surprise. There was no conscious pulling of the trigger, only pressure until the round exploded from the barrel. It did. The troop’s head snapped back as Fisher was already shifting fire to the second one — who moved exactly as predicted. Fisher caught him in the side of the head.

The other troops detected his muzzle flash and sent volley after volley of automatic weapons fire in his direction. Rounds tore apart the pines and ricocheted off the rocks behind him.

At the next pause in fire, he was on his feet, gritting his teeth and clambering for the next stand of trees back to his left, the gunfire resuming and ripping past him now. The bullets sounded like sand thrown into a fan, and a round or two might’ve struck his legs, he wasn’t sure, the Kevlar certainly protecting him at this range, but he wasn’t sticking around to tempt fate any further.

A blur raced over his head and zoomed back down the mountain. He recognized the buzzing of the drone’s rotors and sighed with relief.

“Goddamn, Charlie, you’re a little late!” he cried.

“Sorry, Sam, the drone took fire. Lost one rotor. Had to reboot. Just get out of there!”

“That’s the plan.”

“Sam, don’t move,” cried Grim. “There’s another squad. They just got in front of you. They came up on your flank. You’re about to be surrounded!”

“Then, Grim, I need to move!”

“Sam, I have an idea, but you won’t like it,” said Charlie.

Fisher reached the next tree, dropped to his knees, then leaned over, stealing more breath. He was a few seconds away from collapsing. “Charlie, what’re you thinking?”

“The Black Hawk’s armed with Hellfire missiles—”

“Absolutely not!” shouted Grim. “He’s too close and while I can explain away a Black Hawk off course, I can’t account for missiles fired on Russian ground troops.”

“Forget the missiles,” said Fisher. “I’ll slip past that squad ahead. Briggs, what’s your ETA to the landing zone?”

The man’s voice came broken and breathless: “Uh, just a minute or two, I think.”

Fisher activated his sonar and wished he hadn’t.

His heart sank, and a string of expletives slipped from his lips. He was surrounded, all right, with six strung out above him, seven or more moving up from behind, a couple more on each flank, with his perimeter narrowing from thirty or so meters to twenty and decreasing by the minute. Not an ingenious way to capture someone, given the risk of cross fire, and there was an opportunity for Fisher to get them shooting at each other, but he’d rather just get on the move. Somehow.

“Sam, I’m looking at sonar now,” said Briggs. “You won’t make it.”

“Sure, I will.”

“Look, you’ve told me there’s nothing more important than the mission. Not you, not me, not anyone.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I get that. I respect it. But all we got out of this drop was a backpack. And we’re not going to lose you over a backpack.”

Fisher grinned weakly over the irony. “All right, Briggs, I see your point.”

“Good. I’m going after the three guys east of your position.”

Fisher could almost hear the smile on the man’s face.

Just then the drone returned to Fisher’s side and Charlie was barking in his ear: “Attach your last two frags, Sam. I’ll light ’em up!”

Fisher tugged out the grenades and got to work. Clip one, clip two. “Okay, rock ’n’ roll, Charlie.”

“Sam, break to the left,” said Grim. “The widest gap between the troops above you is there.”

“Right along where the trees thin out?” he asked.

“That’s it.”

Fisher clutched the rifle to his chest, broke from the trees, and sprinted off toward the next patch of cover: a small mound with a large shoulder of mottled rock rising to knee height behind it. He trudged up through the snow, getting about ten meters ahead, when the first salvo of rifle fire split wood like a dozen hatchets in the trees ahead. He craned his head back as a few more rounds thumped into his boot prints. Cutting a serpentine path while crouched down, he reached the rock, his pulse drumming in his ears.

“Get down, Sam!” cried Charlie.

The kid had control of the frags, and if he said to “get down,” then Fisher sure as shit wouldn’t argue. He threw himself behind the rock, and not a second too soon. An explosion tore across the hillside only a few meters back, the ground trembling and erupting, waves of flying dirt reaching as far as the rock. At the same time, shrapnel cut through that dirt storm to strike with metallic snicks against the stone.

The shrieks that split the night were bone-chilling but quickly cut off by the second grenade, which Charlie had deposited atop the troops even farther back, the burst more distant, the echoing cries sounding inhuman at first before they, too, were lost in the reverberating thunder.

The sound of Briggs’s P220 .45ACP pistol cracking in the distance sent Fisher springing from his cover behind the rock and scrambling back up toward the three men waiting for him in the trees ahead. While the canopy was thinning out, the remaining branches were thrashing about in the rotor wash as the Black Hawk banked hard just a dozen or so meters above them.

And then, much to Fisher’s shock, the chopper’s door gunner opened fire on the tree line with his M240H, a classic and supremely badass machine gun sometimes known as the “240 Hotel.” The weapon was capable of delivering up to 950 rounds per minute of 7.62x51mm ammo out to a range of nearly 1,800 meters. Splintering branches and hunks of bark flitted down and were churned up by the rotors as he targeted the three Spetsnaz troops pinning down Fisher.

Those troops answered the door gunner with rifle fire of their own.

“Charlie, what’re you doing?” cried Grim.

“You said no missiles,” he answered. “You didn’t say anything about machine guns!”

Fisher understood Grim’s fury; he also understood that not only were the troops distracted, but they had just given up their positions and sent Fisher into a flow state where there was no more thinking, only action and reaction. He bolted up to the first man, who swung his rifle down from the sky. Fisher already had his Five-seveN pointed at the man’s forehead.

The man’s gaze averted in defeat a second before Fisher shot him.

While that troop tumbled, the next one came rushing up from the west at the sound of the shot.

Fisher rolled behind the nearest tree and waited. Just as the man jogged by, Fisher swung around and stabbed him in the neck, bringing the karambit down, into the man’s clavicle, then stirring his insides with the blade.

At the same time, he had his pistol in his left hand and fired over the shoulder of his victim, striking the final oncoming troop in the chest at a range of nearly fifty meters. Some of his old navy instructors would’ve been proud of those shots…

However, the man jolted back, stepped drunkenly toward the trees, but still managed to return fire like a relentless Russian cyborg. He was obviously wearing a vest and clearly a pretty good shot, the rounds drumming into the soldier Fisher now used as a shield.

A pistol cracked jarringly close to Fisher’s right ear, and the troop ahead fell with a spasmodic jerk to the snow. Fisher craned his head.

“We’re clear, Sam,” said Briggs, lowering his weapon.

“You took out all three of your guys?”

“Yeah.”

“And now one of mine?”

Briggs frowned. “We keeping score?”

Fisher was impressed. “Shit, maybe we should!” He burst off after the man, and together they raced across the top of the hill, then once more were sidestepping along the mountain, finding better purchase in the denser sections of forest where the snow had barely filtered through. What could be described as a bang and not a true explosion resounded from somewhere behind them, and Fisher paused beneath a tree that had fallen and lay at a forty-five-degree angle across two more.

He got back on the radio. “How many left, Grim?”

“Got four still on the move, with another two or three pretty far back but en route.”

“Charlie, can you at least buzz ’em with the drone?”

“Wish I could, Sam, but the drone is toast. Lost all rotors. In order to avoid it being confiscated and reverse engineered, I hit the self-destruct. For what it’s worth, I did manage to blow it up in one guy’s face.”

“All right, this is it. We’re hitting the LZ.”

They drifted down the mountainside and within a minute were nearing the clearing. It felt like the temperature had dropped twenty degrees, and Fisher’s teeth were literally and uncontrollably chattering. Briggs popped red smoke, indicating a hot LZ to the chopper pilot, but she had already assumed that, bringing the helo in low across the treetops to avoid both radar and small arms fire. The rotors turned the smoke into crimson corkscrews as the helicopter descended.

Next came the most breath-robbing part of the mission: the final sprint to the chopper. When he was in the SEALs, this was the time when most men bought it, when they were celebrating a successful op and all they had to do was hop on a helo—

Because there was always some sniper or small squad waiting in the wings to take terribly cheap shots at those trying to escape. And Fisher could feel those rounds on the back of his neck as he told Briggs to go off first, he’d cover.

Briggs put his strong legs to work, bridging the gap between them and the hovering bird in all of five seconds.

The tree beside Fisher practically exploded with gunfire, showering him with bark as he hit the ground, rolled, then came up firing with the AK-12. He emptied the magazine at the trees in a simple wave of covering fire, spotting the silhouettes shifting between them, fluctuating like wraiths.

He tossed the rifle aside, drew his pistol, then fired once more, emptying the entire twenty-round magazine and holstering the weapon with one hand while drawing his secondary weapon, the P226, with the other.

“Sam, circle around the clearing and I’ll have the door gunner lay down suppressing fire for you,” said Charlie.

“Good call,” said Fisher.

He stole off away from the trees, racing at full tilt around the edge of the clearing — just as the door gunner went to town, the big gun thudding and spewing brass.

Instead of boarding the chopper, Briggs took up a position beside the door gunner, his goggles over his eyes, arms extended, pistol winking.

“Sam, they look dug in,” said Grim. “Make your break now!”

Knowing he couldn’t wait any longer, lest one of the troops hurl a grenade at the helo, Fisher sprang into the clearing, and while it would take just a handful of seconds to reach the bird, the moment swept by in a noiseless vacuum of slow motion.

He glanced to his left and saw the troops’ muzzle flashes within the trees. They resembled a string of broken holiday lights poking holes in the shadows.

He turned right, spotted Briggs waving him over, his mouth working, the words swept away by the powerful rotors.

The chopper’s running lights strobed in an almost hypnotic rhythm as the snow and dirt beneath it fanned away into miniature tornadoes. Fisher stomped through the wash, fully conscious that this was it, the final sprint. He hoped he hadn’t pissed off the gods of war, lest a bullet make contact with the back of his head.

He reached the chopper’s open bay door and did a flying leap inside, then turned back and thrust out his arm, hauling Briggs inside — just as the helo lifted off.

They banked hard and away, the pilot sweeping over by staying tight to the trees, avoiding any more chances of potshots and flying nape of the earth to keep them hidden.

The gunner handed them headsets with attached microphones, and Fisher got on the intercom. “Thanks for the lift,” he told the pilot.

She glanced back and smiled. “I’m sorry, sir, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Me, neither,” said Fisher.

Briggs climbed into one of the jump seats and buckled himself in. Fisher joined him and said, “Nice work.”

Briggs patted the backpack lying across his lap. “Just wish we got more.”

Fisher closed his eyes and threw his head back on the seat. “We had to follow up here. So we did.”

“Hey, well, there was something small. I forgot to mention that one of her textbooks still had the receipt inside. Had the address to her apartment in Zurich. Might be worth a shot.”

“We could’ve found her place without that.”

“Probably, but either way we should check it out.”

“Let’s run it by Grim and Charlie.”

“Roger that. And oh, yeah, I wanted to show you something.” Briggs tugged up his sleeve to expose his wrist altimeter. He thumbed a few buttons to bring up his data file, then showed the glowing screen to Fisher—

MAX SPEED: 227 MPH.

Fisher’s eyes bugged out.

Briggs smiled crookedly. “I guess Grim’s data was a little off. When she told me I was doing 210, I was already up to 221. That’s a world record no one will ever know about.”