The Sniper and the Wolf

64

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.”