Arctic Storm Rising

Thirty-Seven

Flynn doubled up his thermal mask and used it to mop Takirak’s blood from his eyes, the rest of his face, and the razor-sharp blade of his combat knife. Finished, he tossed the sodden mask away in disgust. Then he took out a field dressing from his first aid kit and wrapped it around his gashed left forearm. Finally, he retrieved his pistol from the ground, brushing off the ice and snow that coated its muzzle and slide before slipping it back into his chest rig.

Off to his right, a little higher up the spur, Flynn heard the faint clatter and rattle of equipment. Six soldiers and airmen, all he had left under his direct command, were moving into position. Below the other side of this hill, his remaining men, Sanchez, Boyd, and the injured Torvald Pedersen, had gone to ground in some bushes a few hundred yards away. He would have liked to order them back to the main unit, but radioing them would be the only means of doing that. It was too risky. For all Flynn knew, their tactical frequencies and encryption systems were one of the secrets Takirak had already passed on to his fellow Russians.

Staying low, Flynn risked a quick look out across the open slope. The white-camouflaged Russian Spetsnaz commandos were still advancing along the valley. Apparently, they hadn’t heard his brutal, hand-to-hand fight with Takirak, probably thanks to the noise made by the northerly winds hissing across hard-packed snow.

Flynn watched the enemy soldiers for a few more moments. It was pretty clear that they planned to bypass this particular piece of high ground — probably intending to climb the main ridge instead, before turning to hit the unsuspecting Americans from behind. Their plan would have worked, if he hadn’t already figured out that Takirak had betrayed the ambush positions he’d first chosen. As it was, leapfrogging forward along the valley floor only exposed the Russian flank to attack from this rocky spur.

He left Takirak’s corpse crumpled in the snow and moved back around through the jumble of boulders to rejoin his troops — reclaiming his M4 carbine on the way. The first man he came to was Private First Class Cole Hynes. Hynes was crouched behind a cairn of smaller rocks that formed a natural breastwork about waist-high. His bipod-mounted M249 Para light machine gun was positioned on the pile of rock, aimed straight downhill. “You find the sarge, sir?” he asked quietly.

Flynn nodded. “Yep.”

“Is he coming?”

Flynn shook his head. “Sergeant Takirak’s just fine where he is, Hynes.” Even if he’d felt up to it right now, there wasn’t time for any complicated, morale-busting explanations about Takirak’s real identity as a Russian spy.

“So, those guys?” Hynes nodded at the snow-camouflaged shapes still moving by bounds along the foot of the hill. “Are they who I think they are?”

“They’re definitely Russians,” Flynn confirmed.

“So I can shoot ’em?” Hynes asked hopefully.

Flynn nodded. “But only on my order, PFC.” He clapped the younger man on the shoulder. “Hold tight for a few more seconds, okay?”

Hynes nodded enthusiastically. “Copy that, Captain.”

Flynn moved on down the line, quickly making sure that the rest of his troops — Airman Peter Kim, and Army Privates Wade Vucovich, Mike Sims, Floyd Leffert, and Gene Santarelli — were in position and understood the situation. Sims, Leffert, and Santarelli were known in the unit by the collective nickname of the Three Amigos, because they seemed perfectly content to spend most of their waking hours — both on duty and off duty — in one another’s company. Most of that, from what Flynn could tell, was due to a shared passion for video games and the same Swedish heavy metal band. He figured that was as good a basis for camaraderie as any other.

One by one, all five gave him a tight nod or a swift thumbs-up signal. Satisfied, he reversed back down the line and took up a position just to Hynes’s right, prone between two gray boulders. Another quick look down the slope showed that the Spetsnaz commandos were right where he wanted them — directly in front of his men and out in the open. They were a little over two hundred yards away. Carefully, he sighted on one of the Russians, a soldier carrying an AKM equipped with a 40mm grenade launcher. “All Kodiaks,” he said loudly, raising his voice to be heard down the line. “Hit ’em! Now!”

Flynn squeezed off three quick shots. Snow spurted up behind his chosen target as the first two rounds missed, but the third hit the Russian in the side. The enemy soldier went down hard. On his left, Hynes opened up with his M249 light machine gun, firing short bursts down the hill — walking them across the Spetsnaz formation. Two more of them crumpled right away. Blood pooled red on the white snow.

Across the hillside, the other Americans joined in, firing down at the enemy commandos caught in the valley. Flashes lit the night. Another Russian fell. The rest, reacting fast, dove for whatever cover they could find and started shooting back — aiming toward the muzzle flashes.

5.45mm and 7.62mm rounds whip-cracked just over Flynn’s head, smacking into boulders and then ricocheting away with weird, keening wails. Shards and splinters of pulverized rock spun away after them. “Stay low, Kodiaks!” he called. “And pour it into them!”

Sighting through his scope, Flynn found another target, a Russian prone behind a low rise. Only the man’s helmet and rifle were visible. He squeezed the trigger several times. More chunks of snow and ice sprayed up, torn by bullets striking home at nearly three times the speed of sound. The Russian soldier disappeared, either hit or scrambling for new cover.

One of the enemy commandos got a grenade launcher in action. It coughed, hurling a 40mm caseless grenade up the slope.

Craack. The grenade detonated several meters behind the American line with a dazzling flash. Fragments whistled across the hill. “Shit!” one of the Three Amigos said suddenly, sounding surprised. “I’m hit.” From the deep Alabama twang, that was Leffert. His friend Sims reared up to take a look and then took a bullet in the shoulder, falling back with another shocked cry.

“For Christ’s sake, stay down!” Flynn yelled. He glanced to his left, toward the clump of rocks occupied by the two wounded Amigos. “Sims? Leffert? You okay?”

“I’m not hit bad, sir,” Leffert called back. “I can still fight. But Mike’s pretty bad. He’s losing a whole lotta blood and his damn shoulder looks like it’s hanging by a thread.”

Flynn gritted his teeth. Besides being their radio and coms expert, M-Squared had also been tapped to be their unit medic. One more crime to lay at Takirak’s feet, he thought bitterly.

Down in the valley, the Spetsnaz grenadier popped back up, ready to fire again. This time, Hynes was waiting for him. The machine gunner put a three-round burst right into his chest. The Russian fell backward in a red mist of blood and shattered bone.

Flynn fired again at another commando darting uphill to gain a better position. He missed, and the enemy soldier threw himself down into a small depression on the slope, disappearing from sight. His jaw tightened. From the number of bodies now strewn across the valley floor, they’d already inflicted heavy losses on the Spetsnaz force. That wasn’t shocking, since surprise and cover both favored the Americans. But enough Russians had survived the opening fusillade and found cover of their own to turn this into a pitched battle — one whose outcome was still seriously in doubt. Now they were trying to establish a firm base of fire of their own, one that would allow them to keep Flynn and his men pinned down long enough for an assault force to close in and wipe them out in a close-quarters fight.

The M4 went dry. Rapidly, he hit the mag release, let the empty fall out, and slapped in another full magazine. Immediately, he opened fire again. At the same time, he felt as though his mind had split in half, with one part fully occupied by the need to find and kill the enemy… and the other busy weighing different tactical options. Breaking contact and falling back up the hill was a nonstarter. As soon as the Russians got into these rocks, they’d have all the advantages superior numbers and training could provide. And with Leffert and Sims wounded, he didn’t have enough able-bodied troops left to maneuver to the right or left in the hope of taking those Spetsnaz bastards in the flank again.

“Which leaves what, Nick?” Flynn muttered, squeezing off more shots and feeling his M4 thud back repeatedly against his shoulder. “Pray… and hope for luck? Real good plan there, genius.” But then again, he thought grimly, what other options did he really have?

In the narrow, brush-choked gully around the other side of the spur hill, Torvald Pedersen heard the sudden crackle of automatic-weapons fire when Flynn and the others sprang their ambush. The noise only grew in intensity as more and more rifles and machine guns joined the fray. Startled by the explosion of noise where there had been only silence and the hiss of the wind, he sat bolt upright, ignoring the stab of pain from his fractured leg. “Holy shit! You guys hear that? There’s one big, mother-humping battle going on!” He grabbed Rafael Sanchez by the shoulder. “Rafe! We’ve gotta go help the rest of the team.”

The big New Mexican nodded slowly, but then he frowned. “Yeah, but the captain told us to stay put.”

“Maybe we should call in and ask for new orders?” Boyd suggested from the other side. He’d unslung his own M4 and was crouched at the lip of the shallow gully, watching the north. Dozens of split-second flashes brightened the night sky along the crest of the hill above them.

“Can’t,” Sanchez reminded them. “The captain ordered radio silence, remember?”

Pedersen nodded. “Exactly! Which is why we need to use our initiative, just like they trained us to do. Right?” he demanded.

Boyd pulled at his jaw. “Yeah, you’re right.” But then he waved a hand out across the open expanse of snow. “Trouble is, crossing that valley right now looks a lot like suicide to me. If just one bad guy pops up and catches us out there without any cover, we’re fucking toast.”

“That’s why we stick to this streambed,” Pedersen argued. A frozen stream ran along the middle of the shallow, brush-lined depression. It snaked down into the valley and then swung north.

“The sled won’t make it through that rough ground,” Sanchez said. “And you’ve got a busted leg.”

Pedersen grinned up at him. “That’s why you’re going to sling me over your shoulder again, big guy.” He lifted his weapon. “And my rifle, too, this time.” As the team’s designated marksman, Pedersen carried an M14 Enhanced Battle Rifle — a vastly modified and improved version of the old 7.62mm weapon last used in the field by U.S. troops in South Vietnam. When equipped with a telescopic sight, it had an effective range of more than eight hundred yards.

Spetsnaz Major Gennady Korenev risked a quick look up at the hill towering above them and ducked back again. More enemy rounds snapped through the air just over his head. Little geysers of snow and frozen clumps of earth erupted behind him. He scowled. The Americans were better shots than he’d imagined. And, barricaded in their improvised fortress of stone up there on that damned spur, they had a tremendous advantage over his handful of survivors. All he and his troops could make out were the deadly flashes stabbing out of that boulder field — as their rifle and machine-gun fire swept the valley and this barren slope from end to end.

He glanced to his left and then shook his head. There was no way to gain any ground there. Primakov and most of the men on that flank had been killed or badly wounded in the first few seconds of this firefight. That left a shift to the right. He belly-crawled over that way, careful to keep his head below the little hummock of ground that was his only piece of cover. One of his commandos was there, periodically popping up to pepper the rocks above them with short bursts from his AKM assault rifle.

“Hot work, Vanya,” he murmured.

The soldier spat to one side, sliding another curved thirty-round magazine into his rifle. “Worse than Syria,” he agreed.

Korenev raised himself up slightly, high enough to scan the terrain to the west and southwest through his night vision binoculars. Farther out across the valley floor, he could see the dark line of a streambed snaking across the open ground. There was good cover there, he judged, but it was too far away, more than three hundred meters. If he tried to redeploy his men there, the Americans would cut them down before they’d run off even a quarter of the distance.

Instead, he angled his binoculars, sweeping the hillside as it curved around to the southwest. And then, for the first time since the Americans had ambushed them, he felt a faint stirring of optimism. There was a fold on the surface of the hill there, within easy reach from this position. It looked like a patch of dead ground to him, one that offered a comparatively sheltered approach up the side of the spur. Assault troops moving up that dead ground ought to be able to get into the rocks on the Americans’ left flank without being fired on.

He thumped his fist into the snow in sudden excitement and turned toward the other Spetsnaz commando. “Vanya! We’ve got those bastards! I see—” And a 7.62mm rifle round moving at more than 850 meters a second hit Korenev in the right side of his head, punched through his helmet, and tore out the other side in a spray of blood, brain matter, and splintered skull. He flopped over into the snow, killed instantly.

The surviving Russian whirled around and opened fire on full automatic, hosing down the distant streambed around where he thought that shot must have come from. He could see snow and bits of torn brush pinwheeling away as his bullets tore at the ground. His eyes narrowed as he leaned into the burst. Accuracy was important, but there were times when you needed to throw lead downrange, hoping to get lucky… or to at least make the enemy eat dirt.

His AKM stopped firing when it ran through its thirtieth round. Quickly, the Spetsnaz soldier grabbed for another magazine. But before he could reload, he slumped forward, hit high in the chest by another American bullet that penetrated his body armor.

Three hundred yards away, Torvald Pedersen lowered his M14 and spat out a mouthful of gravel and twigs. “Geez, that was close.” He pulled his eye away from the scope and glanced toward Sanchez and Boyd with a grin. “But I got both of those bastards. Did you see them—”

His smile froze. Boyd was dead, lying facedown on the lip of the streambed. Sanchez, ashen-faced, had slid back down a few feet. He was fumbling to stuff a field dressing into the gaping hole blown in his upper arm.

“Ah, hell,” Pedersen muttered. He sighted back through the rifle scope. From what he could see, there weren’t many Russians still moving. But from here, he could draw a bead on every last one of the sons of bitches. He tracked left a little, settled his sights on a new target, breathed out, and very, very gently, squeezed the trigger.

Out on the valley floor, another Spetsnaz commando went down.

Flynn climbed slowly to his feet. The staccato rattle of gunfire and the sharp crack of exploding grenades had finally stopped. But now the sounds of war had been replaced by eerie moans rising from the horribly wounded men — both American and Russian alike — sprawled across the hillside or huddled among the rocks.

Still holding his light machine gun, Hynes came over. “What do we do now, Captain?” he asked. “We sure kicked the shit out of those guys, but they kicked the shit out of us, too.”

Flynn nodded wearily. His best guess was that only three or four of the Russian Spetsnaz troops were alive, though badly wounded. They were certainly in no condition to keep fighting. The rest were dead.

His tactical radio crackled suddenly to life. “Sir, I know you said not to use this thing, but I’ve got a situation down here,” he heard Pedersen say. “Boyd is dead. And Rafe’s hurt pretty bad. And I can’t make it far on my own with this doggone busted leg.”

Flynn keyed his mike. “Roger that, Private. Hang tight. We’ll come get you.”

Hynes whistled softly in dismay. “Jesus, sir. Boyd and Sims makes two dead. And with Leffert and Sanchez wounded, that just leaves six of us on our feet.”

Flynn sighed. “Five, PFC. Sergeant Takirak is dead, too.”

The other man’s eyes widened in shock. “The sarge? Killed? How?”

“Enemy action,” Flynn said tiredly. That was true enough, for a certain definition of “enemy,” he thought. This still wasn’t the right time to break the news that Takirak had actually been a GRU deep-cover agent. The moment for that would come later, when they were all safe — and after he’d had a chance to brief Alaskan Command’s counterintelligence people. Takirak must have been running a network of other spies. To keep them from bolting for safety before they could be pinpointed and arrested, it was vital to keep the information about his death and real identity tightly held.

“So what’s the plan, sir?” Hynes asked somberly.

“We need to get that satellite connection working and contact JBER,” Flynn told him. “We need medevac ASAP for our injured guys and for our prisoners. No one who’s been wounded will last long in this cold.”

Hynes took a deep breath. “That ain’t happening, sir.” He jerked a thumb toward the boulder field. “Sims had the radio with him. It took a bunch of splinters when that Russian grenade went off.”

“Well…” Flynn thought about swearing and then just shrugged. There just weren’t enough cuss words in the English language to cover this situation.

From farther up the slope, Vucovich suddenly shouted. “Hey, Captain! Look at that!”

Flynn lifted his head and stared toward where the other man was pointing. There, off to the east, a flickering orange glow lit the darkness. Something was on fire out there, some miles away. Something where nothing should be. The isolated clumps of dwarf willows and spruce trees in this part of the world did not burn down in the icy, arctic winters. Not naturally anyway.

His eyes narrowed. One more damned mystery, he thought angrily. And probably one connected to that dead Russian general they’d been tracking before this battle erupted. He scuffed furiously at the snow with his boot cap. What the hell was he supposed to do now? They were dozens of miles from the nearest possible help, with no way to communicate with anyone. But if he didn’t do something soon, every injured man now in his charge was going to die — from either shock, their wounds, or the brutal, bone-chilling cold.

Thinking hard, Flynn walked down the slope to where the first of the Russians had fallen. He squatted down beside the dead man, noticing again how similar their uniforms and gear looked to that worn by his own troops. From a distance and in the dark, there was almost no way to tell them apart. His eyes widened slightly as the ghost of an idea wafted into his mind. Maybe there was a way he could solve several of his problems… with one risky move.

Suddenly excited, he straightened up. “Vucovich,” he snapped. “You and Santarelli and Kim start gathering up all the wounded. Heat up some MREs and get some food into them.” He whirled toward Hynes. “Put that MG down and grab a couple of those Russian weapons. You’re coming with me.”

Hynes stared at him. “Where to, sir? Where are we going?”

Flynn grinned at him. “We’re going to arrange a ride out of this hellhole, PFC.”