The Hunt

71

As Jaeger and Narov charged through the gap in the wrecked perimeter fence, they were up to their knees in swirling water. It slowed them, making them easier targets. The roaring from the ruptured pipelines masked the sound of the gunshots, but Jaeger saw the kick and spurt where the first of the rounds tore into the floodwaters.

Narov dropped to one knee in the cover of a boulder, bringing the Dragunov to the aim. ‘Engaging! Push for the accom block! Will cover you!’

Jaeger knew how utterly critical it was that they seized the initiative. Hit by total surprise by the avalanche of floodwater, the enemy would be shocked and in disarray. Before they had time to regroup, Jaeger and his team had to finish this.

He powered onwards, wild bursts of gunfire chasing his heels. Via his SELEX headpiece Narov provided a quiet, steely commentary as she went about her work with the Dragunov.

‘Enemy down, laboratory, ground-floor window far left… Enemy down, laboratory…’

Sprinting like a man possessed, Jaeger gained the cover of the accommodation building, his momentum making him shoulder-barge into the prefabricated wall. He felt a jolt of pain from the impact, but blanked it completely.

‘In place, accom block, eastern wall,’ he panted into his SELEX.

‘Copy,’ a voice breathed back at him. It was Raff. ‘Turbine hall clear. Going into desalination plant… now.’

‘Copy,’ Jaeger confirmed.

‘Coming in to join you,’ Narov radioed Jaeger.

‘Move on my fire!’ he confirmed.

In his present position, he was pressed against the eastern wall of the accommodation block. Like this, he was sheltered from the fire coming from the direction of the laboratory, set some four hundred feet up the valley.

Four hundred feet was approaching the limit of the Diemaco’s effective range, but not so Jaeger’s grenade-launcher. As he’d learnt on ops in Afghanistan, the 40mm fragmentation grenade was a perfect anti-personnel weapon in such terrain. Basically, the hard valley floor would do little to soak up the blast, shrapnel scything out and ricocheting in all directions.

The grenade had a lethal radius of over thirty feet: anything caught within that distance was dead. It had a danger radius of over four times that: if you were within 120 feet of the blast, you could suffer serious injury. As a result, you didn’t need pinpoint accuracy; you just needed to lob a round in the general direction of the bad guys.

With practised hands, Jaeger flicked a lever to open the M203’s breech, slotted in the snub-nosed grenade and slid back the launch tube. He flicked up the M203’s sight, which sat atop the weapon like a tiny ladder and allowed grenades to be fired accurately over anything up to 500 feet.

He was good to go.

He braced himself, eased one foot and his shoulder around the wall of the accommodation block and took aim. As he did so, a burst of incoming fire kicked up the dirt just a little low and to his front. Kammler’s gunmen must have seen where he’d gone to ground and were waiting for him to show.

As Jaeger sighted on their muzzle flashes – his weapon held at a twenty-degree angle to lob the grenade – the enemy gunmen walked their rounds ever closer to his position, using their bullet strikes to adjust and raise their aim.

Just as they seemed poised to nail him, the incoming fire ceased abruptly. Narov’s voice crackled through the SELEX: ‘Enemy down, laboratory, central window…’

That’s my girl, Jaeger told himself.

He squeezed the M203’s trigger, feeling the reassuring kickback of the weapon firing. The half-kilo snub-nosed projectile left the muzzle at 250 feet per second. He counted out two seconds in his head, knowing that Narov would have treated the crump of his opening fire as her signal to move.

The grenade struck, the dirty-white plume of its explosion spreading out low to the ground, then punching a fist of smoke into the air. Jaeger ducked back into cover, slotted in another round, reached around the corner and fired again.

Within ten seconds, he’d peppered the eastern flank of Kammler’s laboratory with a scything wave of shrapnel. But even as he unleashed the fourth of his twelve 40mm rounds, he feared that his wife was very likely somewhere in that building.

Jaeger forced such fears from his mind, otherwise they’d push him to the edge, which was just what Kammler wanted. He had to reason Kammler would try to keep her out of the line of fire. She was his main bargaining chip, and it would do him little good to get her killed.

Narov dashed into the cover of the wall beside him. They paused for a few seconds to catch their breath. To gain entry into the accommodation block, they’d have to move around the southern wall where the deluge had hit, and go in through a broken doorway.

And that was going to expose them to the full brunt of the enemy’s fire.