Retaliation

CHAPTER TWO

Ambush site west of Romanovka, Siberia

When morning broke, there was a mist of rain. Perfect weather for ducks and an ambush. Boris was talking to his field officers. They were expecting the NVG force from the West to arrive in three or so hours so he had time to conference with them and send them back to their men. The other ambush force had moved to within a mile last night from their positions to the northeast of the route that the NVG had chosen. They would be moving in slowly on bellies over the next three hours.

These reinforcements would be in position and had orders to advance fast on the initiation of combat. It would be a quick, ugly fight. They couldn’t risk whoever was sent to investigate realizing how many men were involved. Danislav was grumpy, though. He wouldn’t be going wolf with the rest of the pack.

Boris needed him and his experience to command the other flank and as the backup commander.

Morale was high. Now they just had to wait, and Boris was praying that everyone stuck to the plan. He had enough men and Weres to run down anyone fleeing from a botched ambush, but it would increase his casualties. That was the last thing he needed at this time. It would make future actions… harder.

Boris spoke, “We must stick to the opening moves of the plan. Impress the importance of that on your men. It will reduce our potential casualties immensely. After that confusion should spread through their ranks. Any deviation from the plan to take advantage from that point is fine. But stick to taking out their APCs and a vehicle at both the front and rear of the column first. No rifle fire before we hear the Carl Gustavs hit.”

The officers nodded, and he dismissed them.

They heard the column approaching about five minutes before they were in the center of the trap. When the surveillance system showed the column in position, he clicked the radio four times, giving the Carl Gustav teams weapons free status. The smells of propellant, explosives, burning metal and flesh soon filled the air. Screams of agony came from the men in the APCs as they burst into flames, their fuel tanks ruptured. The destruction could be heard for miles. The explosions signaled the ambushing riflemen to open fire on the column from both sides.

With the road effectively blocked at both ends by burning vehicles, the NVG troops quickly disembarked. It was that or risk certain death inside their vehicles once the Carl Gustavs were re-loaded. The NVG troops threw themselves into the ditches at the edges of the roadway. They scrambled to return fire. Boris could hear an increase in weapon reports from the other side of the ambush as his reserves flooded into the fight on that flank.

This battle was going far smoother than he could have imagined.

Boris started giving orders over the radio, directing troops to concentrate their fire on the larger concentrations of enemies he could see through the video feeds.

Suddenly an explosion rocked his half buried command post. He felt a chunk of the wood from the wall slam into his chest as he was thrown from his seat. Then all he knew was darkness.

Danislav swore when he saw the explosion near the command post and heard a burst of static over the radio. Orders from Boris stopped transmitting. “Fuck your mothers you black asses” could be heard for some distance as he got himself under control.

“Bear one, do you copy? Bear One, Two or Three, if any of you copy, please respond.”

There was silence over the radio.

“This is Wolf One. Communications with Bears has been terminated. Wolf One is now taking command and control until communications are re-established.”

“Cossack Alpha and Cossack Zeta move to cut the ends of the roads NOW. Nova troops are moving to escape the Bear trap.”

Confirmations filtered back from all six in command of the companies and platoons so designated and Danislav saw soldiers swarming to cut off the ends of the ambush site.

“Valkyrie Alpha One, break half a squad from your group off and send it to bunker Bear and see what happened. Re-establish communications if possible.”

Confirmation came across. They were too far away for Danislav to see any movement but the Valkyrie groups were made up of a mix of mercenaries with medic training and those doctors and nurses who chose to stay. If anything could be done, they would do it.

As new knots of resistance formed Danislav redirected fire at them. The occasional shot from the Carl Gustavs could be heard being fired into the NVG holdouts now as covering fire kept the heads of those in the ditches down.

Danislav prayed that whatever had hit had just knocked out the radios in the command bunker. He certainly did not want to inherit control of the entire operation. He would do it, but it was definitely not something he wanted. Boris had raised him from a pup when he found Danislav in one of the orphanages in the north. He did not want to be mourning the only real father he had known. But, if it came to that, he would carry on his goals and mission, though.

A familiar voice cracked over the radio. Dan’s. “Wolf One, this is Skyhawk. Do you request air support? Four armed pods are available and less than a minute out.” Boris had discussed this with him in detail. Under no circumstances was he to call in air support unless the ambush failed. It hadn’t.

“Negative Skyhawk. Negative. Ambush is stable. Air support is not required. Keep Ace out at this time.”

“It would reduce casualties Wolf One.”

“Using it as this juncture may increase all future casualties Skyhawk. Do not engage Skyhawk. Please clear the line.”

Danislav sweated profusely after he said that. He hoped he hadn’t pissed Bethany Anne’s team off. There was no way that he wanted to do that. However, he also needed to stick to that part of the plan. He hoped they understood ‘man on-site’ situations. Dan had obviously wanted to get the air support down there. What a proklyatyy klastera yebat he thought.

Taking a deep breath, he turned back to commanding the battle. The last thing he wanted was to give them a bigger excuse to be angry. He was sure he wouldn’t like it if he made her team angry.

Janna returned to consciousness with the sting of long cuts up and down her arms, as well as many nicks and light wounds with plastic shrapnel in them. They were all surface wounds, though. She slowly and carefully looked around. The entire setup was trashed. There was no way that they could command from here so she turned to the exit. It was blocked, with the framing timbers fallen into haphazard piles.

“Boris, if you’re gonna command the rest of this, you need to get out of here.”

There was silence.

Janna looked around and saw Paul on the ground, but apparently breathing. He was probably unconscious. As she turned further, she saw Boris. He was still in his chair but didn’t seem to be moving. As her vision cleared more, she realized that he looked as if he were pinned to the seat by a three-foot splinter of wood that went through his chest. It was the only way he and the chair could still be together.

Her basic training kicked in. He was the priority casualty if still alive. She moved over to him and checked his pulse. It was weak and thready, but still present. Turning him and the chair so that he was on his side, she found that her initial guess was correct. There was a piece of wood penetrating the back of the seat. She quickly looked around the bunker for the first aid kit, but could not see the familiar red cross of its cover. The kit was probably somewhere under chunks of wood or beneath some of the dirt that had rolled in. She didn’t have time to look for it, let alone dig it out.

She swore. Then she thought about the situation. She had to get the damned splinter off the seat and out of Boris. She was surprised how small the pool of blood was under and around him. The splinter must be sealing the wound.

She started by twisting the chair back and forth around the splinter. It had gone in low on Boris’s chest. It had missed the heart and, despite the fact that it was beating steadily, she couldn’t see any signs of consciousness nor breathing. She twisted the chair back and forth trying to loosen it. She heard the wood whine as she applied gentle pressure. Finally, it broke free. Unfortunately, a fair chunk of the splinter through Boris’s back came free as well, and his blood started pumping out quickly. She swore in dismay and ripped off her BDU shirt to help put pressure on the wound.

Pressing the shirt tightly against the gushing wound, she now had his blood covering much of her body, trickling into many of her own injuries. Something in the back of her mind tickled at her. She tried to place it. Then it clicked. Bethany Anne had mentioned that she had healed a large bullet wound all the way through her body some time ago. She had said that it had taken a lot of energy but that she had been ‘weaker’ back then. Standard first aid practice was to leave an object like this in the wound, but Boris was far older than Bethany Anne. Surely his body had access to whatever energy Bethany Anne had referred to after all that time.

She knew the legends all referred to how fast werewolves healed and the wolves were somewhat scared of Boris. That meant he probably recovered at a similar rate or a group of them would have taken him out. She had a minute or so of indecision and checked his pulse. It was getting weaker. If the splinter was left in, she felt he would die. Taking it out, with his presumably faster healing, might be his best chance., It was then she noticed that her shirt wasn’t soaked through yet. It should have been with the amount of blood that had been coming out. That clinched it for her.

She quickly moved him from the chair and rolled him onto his back. Bracing one foot on his chest next to the splinter and the other on the floor beside his body, she grabbed it just above where the blood was on the splinter. She pulled hard, trying to keep it coming out as straight as possible. As she was pulling it out, Janna could feel her feet slipping. She fell forward when it came out more easily than she had expected. Her face intersected with the small geyser of blood spraying from his chest wound.

Startled, she gasped as she landed, swallowing a fair amount of blood in the process. Rolling away from the wound, she grabbed the BDU top again to put pressure back on the injury. She felt somewhat queasy at having swallowed human (well, Werebear) blood but continued to keep the pressure on for a minute or so. When she pulled the fabric away, there was a thick scab over the area so she checked his pulse again. It was stronger than the last time she had checked.

But he still wasn’t breathing.

She switched to rescue breathing, alternating with light compressions to his chest. As she was taking a breath in over his mouth, he coughed a wet fountain of blood into her face. By reflex, she swallowed more of the blood, not even spluttering as she had earlier. He was now breathing well on his own. She let out a relieved sigh.

The sounds of combat had died down outside, either while she was unconscious or while she had been treating Boris. She looked down at her body. She was covered from head to toe in blood, mostly his. Her vision began to blur as she looked back up at Boris’s face. He was actually quite handsome, she thought vaguely. Then it occurred to her that shock must be kicking in. Why else would she think that about her commanding officer? She looked up at his eyes, saw them opening, and murmured “Such wonderful eyes, my beautiful…” as she collapsed over him.

As Boris regained consciousness, he looked down his body at the person who had, from the look of the blood on their face, been giving him first aid. He heard a ragged feminine voice say “Such wonderful eyes, my beautiful…” and felt her collapse on him. He couldn’t recognize her by looks, as covered in blood as she was. Her odor was also masked. He could definitely tell it was a ‘she’ when the person collapsed on him. He checked her pulse. It was strong and steady. He shook his head to clear it and realized three things.

The bunker was wrecked and all the equipment in it was a write-off.

From the sounds of things, the battle was over. As he doubted he had been out for long, he felt the most likely reason was that they had one convincing victory.

And finally, the bunker was partially collapsed in on itself. There was currently no exit. The woman who had collapsed on him had to be Janna. His mind fought to think clearly, Janna had called him ‘My beautiful…’?

Boris spent several moments as he tried to get his mind wrapped around her comment.

Had they both been hiding their attraction from the other? Was it just shock that had caused her to say that? How could he deny his own attraction to her now? How could they work together now? These were amongst the questions that rocketed through his mind. It wasn’t like he could answer them right now so he shook himself and refocused on the problems that he could address.

While his mind kept whirling, he moved the only two tables left intact into a shelter for Paul and Janna. The blood on the floor, the disarray of the room in general and the position of the chair in which he had been sitting told him what the extent of his injuries must have been.

He saw the massive splinter of wood and winced internally. With him unconscious and the splinter through his body, Janna may have saved his life by her actions. Impaling was one of the few things that Weres couldn’t necessarily deal with for more than a couple of hours. When the body couldn’t expel the object, healing the damage was blocked.

She was either incredibly smart and willing to take risks, or foolhardy. He didn’t really believe the reckless option. That opinion was further validated when he found her blood-soaked BDU top. Rather than waste time digging out the first aid kit from a shattered section of the bunker she had chosen to use materials at hand to put pressure on his wound.

He carefully moved Paul and Janna’s unconscious bodies to a protected position under the tables, then looked for the best exit strategy. Shifting the timbers away from the door seemed to be a bad idea. He couldn’t be sure that moving debris out of the jumble would not cause more of the bunker to collapse, so he looked for the area that had the most blast damage.

He undressed, and put his clothes under Janna’s head as a cushion, trying very hard not to examine his caring action. He changed to his bear form and started to dig a way out. The combination of his strength and the sharp claws of his bear meant that it didn’t take him long. The timbers in that area had been shattered, and the bunker hadn’t been thoroughly dug in to start. Instead, they’d covered the upper section in dirt and covered it in turf to camouflage it as a small hillock.

He dug carefully, compressing the sides and roof of the tunnel with his body as he moved forward. When the excavation broke through to the surface (well, into the crater that had to be the cause of the problem at least), he found a small group of four had unpacked their collapsible shovels and were beginning to dig to meet him. Three backboards were lying on the edge of the crater with one of the Valkyrie nurse’s and one of the merc medics organizing supplies. Those who had been manning the shovels took a quick step back.

Boris quickly moved over to the backboards and touched two of them. He then pointed to the rope on one of the soldiers webbing and indicated they should tie the backboards to him. When the nurse objected, the merc medic overruled her. Dragging the backboards behind him, secured to his waist, Boris lumbered back down the tunnel. He stopped every few steps to compress the sides and top again, trying to ensure that their escape route would remain safe. Once all the way back, Boris changed back to his human form. Moving over to his unconscious subordinates, he checked their status. Both had strong pulses and were breathing well. He decided to get dressed before he carefully strapped Paul and Janna to the backboards.

He tied Paul’s backboard to the rope at his waist. Crouching down to avoid the tunnel ceiling, he pulled Paul along with the waist rope and dragged Janna’s backboard behind that. As soon as his chain of backboards and bodies cleared the tunnel, he passed Janna off to the medics and then helped the four waiting soldiers pull Paul up the tunnel on the backboard sled.

He decided it was best not to dwell on their injuries. The medic and the nurse declared them both stable, and he had troops to organize. They had to leave in the next six hours for their deployment areas. As it stood, no one would be able to actually pinpoint the time this battle had taken place, and he wanted to maintain the secrecy as long as possible. The sooner his teams could start gathering information, the sooner he would have more targets to strike.

The first step to retaliation was complete.