Long Shot

23

Anneli thought it odd that she was not frightened at all. She was wearing commando garb, was illegally inside of Russia and was about to be part of a deadly attack on a military base. A normal person should be scared to death, while she lay almost at ease in the sniper hide listening to the voices coming over her powerful electronic ears. The three men who would do the actual fighting had fallen silent except for an occasional swap of information about changing conditions. She trusted them all. Anneli had seen Kyle Swanson work before and was totally confident in him. Sergeant Baldwin was a very polite Englishman who carried the same dangerous aura as Swanson. And Gray Perry had slithered out of the other sniper hide some time ago with such stealth that she did not even know he was gone until he called in from his new position overlooking the guard shack on the trail.

She was picking up increased activity down at the base and noted the time on the thick olive-green wristwatch she had been given. It was fifteen minutes before six o’clock in the evening. She added twelve to that to figure the military equivalent. It was almost 1800, and the early spring sky had dimmed from bright blue to an overcast slate as the sun set beyond the huge trees in the west, below strings of low clouds. It had glared into their eyes late in the afternoon, then slowly fell out of sight and was replaced by the early shades of darkness. The camp lights had been on for an hour, for the general’s helicopter was due soon. Things were getting busy down there.

“Heads up, Bushman Two,” Swanson warned in a soft voice. “There’s a Goat heading your way.” It was the same dirty green UAZ-469 utility vehicle that had been used for the earlier shift change at the guard post. Looking very much like an old American Jeep, the rough-terrain four-wheel-drive car was called a Goat, the English word for the Russian kozlik.

“Driver plus one,” Kyle said, watching through his scope. “Seems to be in a hurry but it is staying on the road. “Maybe just another shift change.”

Gray Perry clicked his own mike twice in affirmative response and remained perfectly still in the underbrush on a slight rise some sixty meters from the shack. The single soldier was still inside. Perry heard the coming vehicle long before he saw it, then the Goat arrived chewing dirt and made a sliding halt. The guard was suddenly alert as another soldier vaulted from the vehicle and a sergeant stepped from behind the steering wheel. The SAS sniper could not make out what they were saying, but their actions were obvious enough.

“Bushman Two to Bounty Hunter,” he reported on the radio when the sergeant finished giving orders, got back into the car and left by himself. “They just doubled the guard out here.” He heard two clicks.

Swanson did not consider the move unusual with the arrival of a VIP who was expected at any moment. Perry would be able to take down two men as easily as one. “Are they doing anything?” he asked.

“Nope. As soon as the sergeant drove off, both of these blokes relaxed. Rifles leaning against the building and the smoking lamp is lit.”

Anneli had clapped her palms over the pads to keep them close to her ears. “Kyle, I’m picking up a lot of noise in the camp. Something about moving the mortars.”

Kyle chewed his lip in concentration, analyzing the changing situation. Again, by itself, such a reorientation was not alarming. Maybe the general was going to inspect the individual firing pits, and the officers wanted everything shipshape. The soldiers would appear to be more efficient, active and professional if they were doing something more than just standing at attention. Each of the big 120mm weapons needed a five-man crew, because the weapon weighed about 500 pounds and rested on a bipod and a huge metal baseplate shaped like a saucer. It was more powerful than a U.S. 105mm howitzer and just as difficult to move from one place to another. To manhandle the mortars to face a different direction would require a lot of work and give the look of a busy base.

“Bushman One to Bounty Hunter.” It was Baldwin. “Any instruction?”

“Negative, Bushman One.”

Kyle glanced over to the border crossing. It was closing early tonight, and he watched as an eight-wheeled BTR-80 armored personnel carrier arrived at the gate after a short trip from the motor pool. The thirty-ton fighting machine with multiple machine guns and cannon was a serious addition to the overnight watch. The rumbling amphibious vehicle had a bit of trouble getting situated on the road before it settled down with its slanted nose facing south. More showing off for the general… or something else? Swanson was satisfied, at least for the moment, that it was pointed away from the snipers.

At five minutes after six o’clock, the distinctive thump of spinning rotor blades clattered in the sky and a Mi-17 helicopter began its descent into Fire Base 8351. The chopper had a camouflage green paint pattern that blended its silhouette against the darkness, but the landing lights glowed brightly, so it was easily spotted long before it actually lowered onto the concrete pad and cut power. The few officers in the welcoming party held their hats and turned their faces away from the brief storm of rotor wash.

The snipers were rocks as the moment of truth approached. All emotion had been put aside, and their bodies were draped into prone positions, with their big rifles now part of them, extensions of their physical being. They were back far enough in the hides so that their weapons did not extend beyond the foliage, and squares of camo cloth were beneath the barrels to suppress telltale blossoms of dirt when the shots were fired. The two shooters breathed easily and watched. Kyle clicked on the computerized scope of Excalibur and was instantly rewarded with adjusting lists of numbers that told him everything from the temperature and humidity to the effects of gravity and the rifling spin on the .50-caliber bullet at that precise distance. He read the figures and adjusted slightly, then turned it off again. Too much information could be a distraction.

The chopper blades slowed and swirled to a halt, leaving a gap of silence around the base, almost as if a curtain was being raised at a theater to start the performance. A side hatch opened outward and fell to become a staircase as crewmen in flight suits jumped out and chocked the wheels, locked the stairs into place and raised a collapsible handrail, then hustled away. Next out was a military photographer with cameras strapped around his neck. He moved a short distance away to record the moment, as if this purely routine visit had some historical significance. Such pictures would be autographed and sent back to the officers and men as souvenirs.

A skinny aide with a briefcase scooted down the stairs, followed by a grim-faced, corpulent colonel whose bulk almost filled the open hatchway. He was obviously in charge of security, and nodded to the welcoming committee while taking his time to look around the illuminated area. The lights blinded him to anything in the gloom beyond. The gathered officers waited at attention until he was satisfied.

This was not part of the plan. The snipers’ scheme was to wait until the general was standing almost immobile in the receiving line, an estimated thirty minutes from now, glad-handing and saying hello to his troops. At that moment, General Mizov would be a steady target. However, Kyle Swanson knew a good thing when he saw it.

“Bushman One. I’m going to take the shot when the general steps into the hatchway. You do the fat guy. Anneli, get your ears packed and be ready to move. Bushman Two, get ready.”

In the next hide, Baldwin wiped everything but the face of the arrogant security chief from his mind. The florid skin filled his scope so much that the SAS sergeant could have counted the blackheads on the man’s nose. He adjusted down to the body. The British sniper had been thinking exactly as Swanson; there would never be a better target picture. Situations change. His heartbeat was slow and the finger eased about a pound of pressure onto the trigger and held it as the colonel turned to the open hatch and called inside. All was clear. It was safe.

Victor Mizon, wearing the new gold-braid shoulder boards that proclaimed him to be a two-star general, poked his head forward, then came to his full height of five-feet-eleven. The face was identical to the file photograph that Kyle had received. Unlike his security officer, the general was in excellent physical condition, and smiled broadly at the committee that was obviously eager to greet him. After all, it was his fiftieth birthday. He deserved spotlights and salutes tonight, for Mizon had advanced a long way since the miserable days when he was a common lieutenant at this sorry little post isolated in the middle of nowhere. Tomorrow, he would enter Moscow and be installed as a first-deputy head of the entire Border Service. For an instant, it was as if the general was standing in a picture frame, unmoving and stark in the bright light against the darkness inside the helicopter. Standing still, fully erect, holding the handrail, looking out over the fire base.

Swanson shot him dead so fast that the general did not even feel the big bullet tear into his heart, nor hear the loud roar of Excalibur shake the forest like a giant’s bellow. The handrail helped support his weight for a moment, and just as he took the fatal bullet, Baldwin fired the second one, and the big colonel jerked, staggered backward and fell hard against a wheel of the helicopter with blood pumping from his ruptured belly.

The troops at the fire base remained frozen in position, their arms still cocked in salutes, unwilling to believe what their eyes told them was true. General Mizon lay crumpled at the top of the stairs and the fat colonel was bowled over beneath the chopper and the double-thunder blasts from two big rifles raped the orderly parade formation. Moving simultaneously, everyone scattered for cover.

Swanson, Anneli and Baldwin were already sliding backward out of the hides and pulling things together. Kyle brought up a portable satellite radio from his web gear and hit the transmit button to the helicopter waiting on the far side of the lake. “Bounty Hunter to Vampire. Bounty Hunter to Vampire.”

“Vampire to Bounty Hunter. Send your traffic.”

“Bounty Hunter to Vampire. Turn and burn.”

“Roger that, Bounty Hunter.”

From down the hillock, Anneli heard an explosive round of shouts, almost panicky commands from officers and sergeants. She said, “They are ordering the men to get up and get to their guns.”

“Yeah,” said Swanson. “We’re out of here.”

As soon as he heard the shots, Grayson Perry erupted from the darkness and hit the two guards at the shack, both of whom had turned to face the camp, wondering what was happening. Perry slid the long blade of his old Fairburn-Sykes fighting knife into the neck of the first guard, pushing it easily all the way to the hilt in a single motion. Perry knew the knife was old school, almost an antique, but why change a good thing? He pushed on right across the dying man and clobbered the other guard on the head with a rock the size of a cantaloupe. The sentry fell with a crushed skull and Perry finished them both off with a few well-placed strokes of the FS knife. He dragged the bodies into the woods and dumped them, then lay beside the shack and again became invisible in his Ghillie suit of rags and leaves, gripping his submachine gun. The attack had taken less than thirty seconds, and the disposal time was about the same.

The Nightstalkers had been on alert and close to the UH-60 stealth helicopter almost since they had inserted the sniper squad into Indian country early that morning. The special-operations aviators understood how things could go bad in a hurry on any mission and stood ready to react.

They had stayed near or inside of their bird as it rested on a small, bare landing zone near the Kaliningrad border, and other than refueling, getting some hot food and taking shithouse breaks, they had little interaction with the stern Lithuanian soldiers of the Iron Wolf Mechanized Battalion who had clamped a tight, protective perimeter around the skinny, hard-edged helicopter that was impervious to radar. The battalion commander, Major Juozas Valteris, roamed nearby. The pilot had warned him that a target was to be struck at about 1800 hours.

At five o’clock the chopper crew had begun their preflight checks, and a half-hour later they strapped in. The mini-guns on each side were loaded and locked, and the strange bird code-named Vampire was ready to fly.

The pilot received the call from Bounty Hunter just before six o’clock, and waved for Major Valteris to come over even as the twin General Electric T700 engines were given life and the four long major blades began to rotate. The major jumped into the deck and put on a pair of earphones connecting him to the internal network.

“We are leaving now, Major, and we thank you for the hospitality. I am authorized to tell you that the team has hit a border firebase called Rooster Cap Nowak this evening, and there is likely to be some return fire coming this way soon. That’s all I know. We will be heading out via a different route unless there is an emergency that requires us to return here.”

The Lithuanian officer gave the pilot a thumbs-up, removed the headset, jumped back to the ground and sprinted away. The helicopter blades were spinning faster as the engine ate more power, and in seconds, the Black Hawk was airborne, nose down and speeding into the darkness with a methodical hush-hush-hush instead of the normal helo roar.

Valteris snapped his men to full alert and ordered an immediate change of position for his whole unit. The Russians had probably pretargeted their current location. The soldiers knew this was no drill. They buttoned up their vehicles and sped away.