Long Shot

24

Automatic rifle fire erupted from the first Russian soldiers who came out of their fugue state and opened up with long rips of AK-47s that shredded the night in every direction, laying down a 360-degree mad minute of suppressive fire. Simply pulling the trigger was the easiest thing to do. An unlucky civilian truck driver went down in the wild salvo, his penalty for deciding to stay overnight at the border crossing so he could be first in line at dawn tomorrow. He had been watching the arrival ceremony from beside his truck, making him a stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time and perceived as a possible threat by panicky soldiers.

Kyle, Anneli and Stanley Baldwin were galloping along the single trail to the east when the shooting began. They stopped a few times to catch their breath and plant some Claymore mines with trip wires as booby-trap surprises for anyone who might give chase. That initial gunfire back at the base meant little — harmless noise with no danger. Snipers throughout the ages have stayed alive by sowing confusion among their enemies, and the men at the base were reacting to a frightening, new situation. The extraordinarily loud booms of the .50-caliber sniper rifles had echoed back to the inexperienced border guards from the deep forests. None had seen any muzzle flashes. The attack could have come from anywhere, so the answering fire spewed everywhere. Every moment that the Russians spent trying to sort things out meant that the American, the Briton and the girl from Estonia would be that much farther away.

About fifteen seconds after the ineffective shooting started, it trailed off, then ceased as officers and sergeants got control of the situation. Kyle could hear orders being shouted. Beneath the ruckus, he heard the giant diesel engine of the BTR-80 armored personnel carrier grunt to life. It was the one thing at the camp that Swanson considered to be a truly dangerous wild card. Should the amphibious vehicle come roaring down this narrow road, things would get interesting in a hurry. It could even follow them right into the water. “Run,” he told his mates, and they abandoned stealth in favor of distance.

Heavy machine guns opened up next, the big ones on the corners of the camp, and although the firing became more methodical, it was still combing the tangled foliage that had been allowed to grow wild around the base. The gunners were still shooting at things they could not see, and followed the sweep of searchlights that were sliding around the borders. They were confident that any frontal charge from the bush would fail against the reaping bullets. To the retreating snipers, however, it was a sign that the counterfire was still in a defensive mode. The soldiers were hunkered down inside the base, waiting for another shot from the unseen enemy.

“Bushman Two! Bushman Two!” Swanson breathed heavily as he called for Gray Perry on the net. “Coming up on you in about two minutes.”

“Clear here,” came the immediate answer. “Come on in.” Perry lifted out of the undergrowth and assumed a kneeling position to give suppression fire if necessary. Like Swanson and Baldwin, he knew what was on the next page of the battle. Panic in the camp was evaporating and people were beginning to think. Patrols would be organized and those big damned mortars would start coughing out shells the size of small dogs.

The team reassembled at the guard shack, but they were still some distance from the designated pickup point beside the lake. Anneli was panting with the exertion, bending beneath the square pack that held the listening device and weighed better than twenty pounds. She gasped for breath.

“Give me that pack,” Swanson snapped.

She looked up, hands on knees and gulped, “I can handle it.”

“The extra weight is slowing you down and we can only move as fast as our slowest person. Give me the damned pack.” He shrugged out of his own gear and slid his arms into the electronic unit’s straps and adjusted the straps tight. Then he pulled his own ruck over his right shoulder. Stan Baldwin took both sniper rifles. “You are point, Sarn’t Baldwin. Move out.”

Swanson came next with Anneli at his side, and Perry was once again rearguard. They all heard the new sound in the fight, the distinctive grunt of the 120mm mortars, and cocked their ears for the expected whistle of incoming rounds. Instead, the shells went the other way and impacted far to the south, where the machine-gun fire seemed to be also growing in volume. Before long, the large mortars were rhythmically thumping out round after round, plastering the road network that led toward Poland with high explosives. A flare went up and glared over trees in that direction as it drifted down on a small parachute and made shadows dance in the woods.

The sniper group was feeling the stress and the pressure, not knowing how long the Russian mortars would ignore them. The guards at the camp had a dead general and a dead colonel on their hands, but no idea who had killed them. It had to be snipers. But where were they?

The base commander had received a strange and rather cryptic message shortly before General Mizon was due to arrive, an alert from St. Petersburg that some attack against the camp might soon be coming from the direction of Poland. It contained no specifics; not a time, nor even a date. He had taken the precaution of readjusting the mortars to face south, never expecting that the attack would come so soon, or if it would come at all. Nevertheless, he had distributed his firepower to best answer the situation, doubled the guard and called out a BTR-80. Now he walked a concentrated mortar barrage up the roads to Poland, blast after blast after blast.

The infantry troops following the shells reported by radio that there was no return fire and no opposition to their advance. No bodies were discovered along the roads, nor in the woodlands, which would be more carefully searched after daylight. The BTR-80 had prowled the area close to the camp and also failed to find anything of interest.

The commanding officer paused. He knew the layout of the area from having studied the maps so many times in the continuing efforts to interdict smugglers. There were numerous little trails and small ravines and natural hiding places to the west, but all were within Russian territory, and therefore unlikely routes for any attack force. He sent a squad to probe the area. Same thing to the north, but with limited manpower, he had to make careful choices. Then there was the road from the camp to the lake, but he had already increased the guard manpower there, and had received no call of alarm from them.

In fact, he had not received anything at all from those two men. The commander had an aide call the guard shack, and there was no answer. After a low, private curse, the officer remembered that message had been very clear about the threat from Poland, and had not mentioned Lithuania at all. While he had been throwing everything to the south, were the snipers escaping to the east? He summoned the BTR-80 to get down to the guard post for a look. As insurance, he also instructed one of the 120mm mortar crews to turn and start laying rounds along the track from the shack all the way to the beach.

“Bounty Hunter to Vampire,” Kyle called as he jogged along with Anneli right behind. “Bounty Hunter to Vampire.”

“Vampire to Bounty Hunter. Send your traffic.” The voice of the stealth Black Hawk pilot sounded as cool as an airline captain flying over Montana. But in the distance, he could see the bright flashes of deadly fireworks coloring the sky.

“Vampire, we are about ten minutes from the LZ. So far, it not hot.” The action was still happening far behind the fleeing team.

“Our ETA is about the same. I can see detonations from up here.”

“Nothing coming at us so far. That may change.”

“See you in ten. Vampire out.” The aircraft commander checked his dials and tried to squeeze a little more thrust out of his big engines. He did not want any dials in the red, because if this bird went down, there was none other around to take up the mission. Usually, there was a spare in the neighborhood, for helicopters could fall out of the sky for a myriad of reasons. That hard lesson had been learned on other raids over the years, from the ill-fated Iranian hostage rescue mission through the assault on Osama bin Laden’s house in Pakistan. This mission had been thrown together so fast to keep security tight that it had become an all-or-nothing play, which suited the cocky attitude of a Nightstalker crew just fine.

Swanson called out the good news to his jogging friends. Ten more minutes and they would be gone. The snipers kept their personal weapons at the ready and their minds alert. During combat, ten minutes could pass in the blink of an eye, or last a century. The fact that they had not yet been detected had been a pleasant surprise, one of which they intended to take full advantage, because it would not last forever.

Anneli Kallasti loped along better without being burdened by the comm pack. Her eyes were on the dark shape of Kyle right in front of her, with the moving shadow of Stan Baldwin beyond him. Gray Perry was behind somewhere. She had never felt more excited, and believed that she had done well on this dangerous job. She would now really have something to tell her grandchildren.

WHAM! The unexpected explosion behind them jarred the air with a passing sweep of wind and made her look back. Corporal Perry pushed to keep her going and explained in a calm, unhurried voice, “That was somebody or something tripping our Claymores. It’s a mine packed with about seven hundred little ball bearings and an explosive package big enough to choke a cow. I guarantee it just ruined their entire day. Move along, girl.”

The driver of the BTR-80 was using night-vision sights, which were not good for seeing details like the steel wire stretched a few inches above the familiar pathway to the beach. He was also being guided by the vehicle’s commander riding up top beside the large machine gun and calling down directions. The explosion wrapped the vehicle in a momentary balloon of fire and steel balls that flew from the Claymore. The commander was killed instantly and six of the eight tires were punctured, making the machine slow to a halt. The driver had been rocked by the jolt, he was temporarily deaf, the night-vision device was damaged and unusable, and the headless corpse of his commander slouched down the hatch directly behind him. He didn’t know the fate of the rest of the crew.

The base commander also heard the detonation. The soldiers at the guard shack still had not reported in and now the BTR was incommunicado and probably had struck a mine down there. The silence of the troops and the savage booby-trap helped him decide that the attackers were using the beach path for their egress. He snatched his radio operator by a shoulder strap and yelled, “Tell that BTR to keep moving! Have the northeast mortar turn and saturate the area near the lake. That’s where they are!”

The BTR driver heard the instructions, ignored the dead commander in the hull, and put the big armored troop carrier back into motion, rocking it to and fro to escape the tangle of vines and trees into which he had run. Some other crew member tossed out the body and took his place, but buttoned the hatch tightly. Some of the tires might be shredded, but the BTR could still ride on the rims, and he had fresh orders to keep going. The damaged machine would be slower and more awkward, but it was still able to move. It jerked free of the brambles and roots with screeches of protesting metal, only to run over a second Claymore after struggling only fifty feet. This time the explosive charge penetrated the gas tank, and the entire BTR brewed up in a ball of flame.

The action was speaking to Kyle Swanson. In his mind’s eye, he had been able to picture the response back at the camp by the sounds and direction of the gunfire. That was all a puddle of harmless noise, and he had filtered each sound as they moved ever closer to the lake. Not a single shot had come near them. The BTR’s loud engine had been distinctive enough for him to picture it grinding up the path on which they were running, then the familiar explosions of Claymores — sharp and jolting — meant that the armored vehicle had taken two in its guts, for he no longer heard the engine. The most immediate threat was off the board.

“Spread out!” he called. “Anneli, stay behind me.”

Baldwin went off the path for about ten yards to the right and Perry angled out to the left, while Kyle hugged the path with Anneli. The snipers knew that mortar fire would be incoming, and by fanning out, no one round could take down all of them. A few more minutes were all they needed. They could actually smell the fresh water of Lake Vištytis.

They did not stop when the first 120mm round nosed over at the top of its trajectory and fell to earth with a shrill whisper. It was far behind and to the right, just ranging fire with no true aim. The problem for such indirect fire was that it required a spotter to give the gunners accurate coordinates. This mortar crew had to be working from a grid map showing preregistered points. Swanson heard a second distant cough and, within seconds, picked up the sound as the rocket round tipped over and started down. It came in off to the right and still behind them, tearing into the forest with a ferocious roar.

“They are going to give us a rolling barrage up the path!” yelled Gray Perry. “Going to get closer.”

“I got water straight ahead!” called out Baldwin.

The downward whine of another mortar shell signaled for all of them to hit the ground, and Kyle pulled Anneli down hard. The blast was still in the woods, on the left, and while the trees ate the metal shrapnel, they also loosed a storm of wooden splinters. As soon as the explosion was over, the four were on their feet again and running as hard as they could.

“I see the helo coming,” said Stan Baldwin. He broke open a green glowstick and waved it toward the big shadow approaching low on the water.

Another ominous whistle in the sky gave warning of more incoming, and everyone hit the dirt again. “Hang on, Anneli. We’re almost home.” She cuddled close to his back, almost spooning with her arms around him. For her, safety meant being as close to Kyle as she could get.

The incoming mortar round struck the tops of the trees just above them and detonated with a lethal airburst that forced the cone of destruction straight down on the path and a mini-hurricane of metal shards and jagged wood swept the area as entire branches cracked off.

“They’re hit, Stan! Kyle and Anneli are down!” Gray Perry sprinted from his position and started pulling debris from atop his mates. Baldwin dropped his guiding luminescent wand as the helo settled into a hover just inches above the sandy beach, and ran back up the path to rescue his friends. They heard Kyle groaning.

A crew member of the Nightstalker team hustled up to help, and they flung away the junk until they reached the two people trapped beneath. There was a lot of blood, and Anneli lay still. “I got her! You guys bring Kyle,” Perry shouted and lifted the girl as easily as picking up a pillow. “I got you, Anneli. Don’t you worry, girl. Old Grayson has you.”

Another mortar blast whizzed in to punish the forest again, off to the right, and the concussion shook the Black Hawk chopper that fought to maintain its midair balance. Gray Perry laid Anneli flat on the deck, and a medic moved in to examine her. She made not a sound.

Swanson was regaining his senses by the time he reached the helicopter and was helped aboard, then the other two men jumped on, the crew chief told the pilot that all were accounted for, and the stealth bird immediately put on power and eased up and turned north, clawing for altitude and invisibility. Swanson, from a height of a hundred feet, saw two more mortar rounds explode simultaneously and harmlessly along the beach. He turned to Anneli, but when he reached for her, Baldwin stopped him hard.

“You stay still, Kyle. The others are tending to our girl. You’ve been hit, too.” The SAS sergeant began cutting away the sniper’s trouser legs, which were soaked in blood.