The Hunted

ELEVEN

��Captain, don’t let them fire,” said Lakota from the other Husky. “Check it out. We’re rolling up on another neighborhood. Collateral damage.”

Brent couldn’t deny the fact that civilians could be injured or killed should one of those choppers go down into the homes. Of course, the Russians didn’t care if the American gunship crashed into a residential neighborhood; they just wanted that aircraft out of the sky.

And it was true that firing on them would no doubt draw a response. Those Russian choppers, identified in Brent’s HUD as KA-65 Howlers, noted as being one of the most armed and armored helicopters in existence, could tear their little trucks to shreds in all of ten seconds. And it was Brent’s job to reach Sandhurst.

He cursed and hollered into his boom mike: “All right, stay on the guns but hold fire for now. Be ready in case they turn on us.”

“Thanks, Captain.”

“Now that’s the sane choice,” said the driver.

“Shut up, Brit. That pilot’s going to die. We’ll honor him with our silence. And is that as fast as you can go?”

The driver swore under his breath and accelerated even as in the far distance, Brent watched the American gunship get double-teamed by the two Russian helicopters, while yet another Russian chopper, a troop transport, followed behind. A missile flew, and within a breath the American bird vanished inside an orb of white light. Below that orb, in an eerie slow motion, debris appeared and began tumbling down toward the rooftops of residential homes. The two choppers broke formation and wheeled back around to the north, while the third troop transport continued southward, ahead of them.

The driver got on his radio and called in his report, while Brent was interrupted by word from George Voeckler: They were just a couple of minutes away from the target location.

Brent issued a voice command to his Cross-Com, bringing up camera images from both George and Thomas Voeckler in separate windows of the HUD. He took a deep breath and waited as their car raced up a narrow suburban street.

“Looks like a police checkpoint,” said Chopra, his mouth going cotton as he eased on the brakes.

The barricade lay about two blocks ahead as they were passing through the rural village of Flexford, according to the car’s GPS. The Snow Maiden had ordered him to keep off the main highways, and this was the first barrier they’d come across. It was comprised of two police “smart” cars parked at forty-five-degree angles on either side of fluorescent red cones spanning the road.

The roadblock appeared about as dangerous and imposing as a little old man armed with a water pistol, and Chopra doubted it would pose much trouble to the woman in his backseat.

“All right, calm down,” said the Snow Maiden. “Drive right up and speak to them.”

“What do I tell them?” asked Chopra.

“The truth.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said the truth.”

He wasn’t sure what this crazy woman had in mind, but he decided he would do just that.

As he drew closer, he saw two bobbies armed only with short, wooden truncheons. The Snow Maiden, he suspected, could dispatch both of them with barely an effort.

“Chopra, don’t do anything stupid,” said Hussein. “Just hand over your identity and tell them we’re going to Dover. The truth. Just like she said.”

He looked back at the Snow Maiden, who nodded.

With a deep breath he brought the car to a stop before the cones and tapped the button to lower his window. One bobby came up to him as the other went around the other side of the car. They were both middle-aged men, a little thick around the center, and setting up this roadblock was probably the most exciting thing that had happened to them in weeks.

“Good morning, sir. Your identification, please?”

Chopra had already withdrawn his wallet and was about to hand over his ID when a thump made him flinch. The bobby fell back, away from the car.

She’d shot him right over Chopra’s shoulder.

Before he hit the ground, the Snow Maiden wrenched open her door and ran around the other side, toward the second bobby, who’d ducked at the sight of seeing his partner drop.

The Snow Maiden’s gun went off twice more. She reentered the car and slammed the door. “Go. There’ll be another car waiting for us in Chilworth.”

Chopra threw the car in gear and floored it, crashing through the cones and leaving the bodies of the two men behind. He glanced at them in the rearview mirror, then raised his voice. “You see, Hussein? You see who you’re dealing with? A thug. A murderer. Nothing more. And when she’s done with us, we’ll be shot like dogs, just like them.”

“You didn’t have to kill them,” Hussein told the Snow Maiden.

“No, I didn’t. I wanted to.”

“You really are just a killer.”

She gave a big snort. “And it’s all for my own entertainment pleasure — not yours.”

Brent didn’t realize that he was clutching the seat with both hands until a sudden bump broke his grip. George and Thomas had just left their cars and were charging up on the house, and he was watching it all in his HUD, the images piped in from the trident goggles worn by each Splinter Cell. The two spies found the body of a man lying at the far end of the driveway, near the side door. At that point, they split up, with George taking the side entrance and Thomas falling back to hold off in the yard, in case anyone tried to bolt as George entered.

No, Brent wasn’t fond of a single operator entering the house and attempting to clear room after room, but this was the best they could do, and posting Thomas outside to tag potential runners was a smart move. Bringing in a team of local police to back them up would’ve been too obvious and noisy; however, sending in George was, admittedly, not conducive to the Splinter Cell’s health. Then again he’d served in the Marines and had been well trained. You had to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The images came in from George’s goggles.

Bodies in the kitchen. Damn.

“You seeing this, Captain?” George asked.

“She was there,” said Brent. “We might be late. Now all we do is follow the trail of bodies…”

Thomas began cursing over the channel until his words turned into a warning: “Russian chopper landing in the street! Troops coming out! George, get out of there!”

With a start, Brent realized that troop transport they’d just seen had been en route to Sandhurst.

George rushed to the window, and Brent saw what the spy saw: At least a dozen darkly clad soldiers — Spetsnaz troops — were hopping down from the chopper, and the last man out was their old German friend from the Seychelles, that blond-haired bastard Heinrich Haussler.

“Hammer, this is Ghost Lead. The Voecklers are on the target zone but so are the Russians, along with Haussler. We’re too far out right now. We need some CAS for them, if you got it.”

“Negative, Ghost Lead. Close Air Support unavailable. They’re all tied up in London.”

“Then some kind of evac. Anything!”

“Negative.”

Brent swore and switched channels. “Romulus, this is Ghost Lead. You’re on your own for now.”

“Just another day in paradise.” George bounded up the staircase.

“George, I’m coming in,” said Thomas.

“No, you fall back, out of sight. You come in here, you’re done, you hear me? I’ll get out. Do not give up your location. Just do what I say.”

Brent could barely contain himself as he witnessed George’s escape. At the top of the stairs, the Splinter Cell turned right, then left, then rushed toward a door and slammed it open with a fist. He stopped. Looked back. Listened.

The troops were entering downstairs.

He rushed forward, through what had to be a teenager’s room loaded with games and movies. He reached the window and tugged it open, and then he was all about his portable scaling tools, wrenching them from his web gear. He fired a zip line across to the next house, and the “sticky mount” stuck like superglue to the side.

He climbed through the window and was sliding down the line with a whirr and hiss.

It was impossibly frustrating not to be there and lend a hand. Brent reached reflexively for his sidearm to take out the Spetsnaz troops as he imagined them storming into the bedroom only seconds after George got out.

But all Brent could do was watch George gliding down toward the next house as gunfire suddenly punched holes in the wooden siding ahead of him.

Before George reached the house he fired another line at a shed lying across the backyard. The sticky mount struck the sloping roofline. George grabbed that line in one hand, and then he fired a third shot. Line number three attached itself to the roof of the current building. Using the shed line as a guide, he released the first line, gripped the second, then swung around, out of the enemy line of fire. It was a brilliant piece of maneuvering that left Brent awestruck.

Once around the next house, he slid down the rope and hit the ground hard, lost his balance, and tumbled.

“Thomas, fall back even more. Get over that fence and wait there for me. I think there’s a shed.”

“Roger that.”

George was up on his feet now, running at full tilt along the row of apartments. He ducked behind a pair of parked cars and paused.

The spy’s own labored breathing raised Brent’s pulse, and it was getting even harder to watch.

Meanwhile, Thomas scaled the fence his brother had mentioned, dropped behind, and spotted a small utility shed. He bounded for the shed, wrenched open the door, and stepped inside between pieces of lawn and landscaping equipment. He quietly closed the door and stood there, staring through the dust-covered window and just breathing. “I’m inside the shed,” he reported. “Hidden pretty good.”

“I see that. Stay there,” said George.

Brent longed to pull up a close-in satellite view of the area so he could tell George where the troops were moving. The team had nothing, though, technology rendered useless by more technology. They would rely now on their good old-fashioned wits to escape.

Thomas remained in the shed, staring through that dusty window at the second story of the apartment. He could see Russian troops appearing in the window from where George had escaped. They were tearing up the house, while one remained there, sweeping the yard with his scoped rifle.

With an audible shiver, Thomas swore again as the Russians shouted to each other on the other side of the fence.

Brent could barely breathe now as he checked the images coming in from George’s goggles. “George, just get some cover like your brother and wait for us.”

“That’s the plan,” said the spy. “That’s the plan.” He burst up from the parked cars.

From around the corner of the next apartment building came two Spetsnaz troops — Grim Reapers dressed in black uniforms and web gear, with black helmets and balaclavas concealing their identities.

They were but fifty meters away.

George dropped to the ground and shot one guy in the face with his pistol, while the other ducked and George did likewise. Gunfire struck the cars behind him as he jogged around and sought cover once more.

Brent wanted to scream at the Splinter Cell, tell him not to remain there in a standoff while that Russian troop called for backup. But George was a seasoned veteran and didn’t need Brent pointing out the obvious.

In fact, George did something remarkable again. He suddenly broke cover and darted to the building, even as the trooper, who’d sought refuge behind the corner, eased out for another look, the top of his helmet jutting out.

While the Russian’s gaze was reaching out toward the car, George came at him from the side, sliding an arm around the man’s head while raising a combat dagger high in his free hand.

George plunged the knife deep into the man’s neck, just north of his clavicle, then George grabbed the hilt and got to work. To say that George opened up the man’s head like a Pez dispenser would be understating the point, and Brent had a front-row seat to all the carnage. He grimaced.

George dropped the body and shifted to the front side of the apartment. He hunkered down beside a row of shrubs and stole a look out at the helicopter sitting in the field across the street.

Oh, no, Brent thought. I hope he’s not thinking what I’m thinking…

Two civilians had come out of the homes, one holding a kitchen knife, the other an antique-looking pistol. They were a husband-and-wife team, white-haired, wizened, and wild, and they waved and shouted as two troops who’d been stationed just outside the helicopter drifted toward them.

“No, don’t do it,” Brent muttered aloud.

It was over before it started. One Russian shot both the man and the woman execution style, boom-boom. And George just sat there and gasped. Then George cleared his throat and said, “Thomas, stay in the shed.”

“I will.”

George sighed into his microphone. “They must’ve found our car by now. We can’t get out on foot or by car if they still got that bird.”

“George, don’t even think about it,” said Thomas.

“George, just dig in and do not do anything,” said Brent. “That’s an order!”

“Too late.”

“Voeckler!” Brent cried. “What’re you doing?”

The image coming in from George’s trident goggles grew so shaky that Brent couldn’t see anything.

But he could hear the man breathing. Faster. And faster. Panting now.

The Snow Maiden let out a faint snort as she glanced sidelong at Hussein. The boy was staring out the window, looking bored and about to fall asleep as they continued on toward Dover.

Chopra was droning on and on about what the boy’s father had wanted for him, and the old man’s cadence and tone had become yet another form of white noise, like the wind buffeting the car, the engine’s hum, and the steady vibration of the tires on the pavement.

Even the Snow Maiden herself was beginning to drift off, barely listening, reminding herself that if she didn’t keep her guard up, the sixteen-year-old next to her could launch a surprise.

Abruptly, her cell phone rang. “You’ll be met at Dover,” said Patti. “They know you’re coming.”

“Excellent. Thank you.”

“I’ll see you in Geneva. Excellent work, as always.”

“You might want to call Izotov and thank him as well.”

Patti laughed. “I’m sure he’d appreciate that.”

The Russians — in their attempt to capture her — had inadvertently helped her escape. It seemed they might come in handy now, and she thought about manipulating them to her benefit in the near future.

For just the briefest of moments, though, she took herself back to the tiny town of Banff, just off the Trans-Canada Highway, seventy-eight miles west of Calgary. She was with Green Vox, that terrorist leader whose identity was kept a secret so that he could “live forever” through any number of followers assuming his role. Together, they had chosen Banff so they would be upwind from the nuclear fallout, once she had detonated the nukes. But the entire operation had been foiled by the Americans. No matter. She’d had other plans.

“I am Snegurochka. What did you expect?” she’d asked the terrorist.

“Viktoria, what are you doing?”

“Did you really think I was working with you?”

His mouth had fallen open. “You can’t be serious.”

She’d grinned and aimed the gun at him.

Vox’s eyes had widened. “Go ahead, kill me. Green Vox will return. He always does.”

She shot him between those eyes.

“Yes,” she said, staring down at his body. “You always come back — and always as a man. What a pity.”

Now as she sat in the car, she realized that an aching fear had brought on the memory. She was worried about whether the Green Brigade Transnational had given up on their quest for revenge. Perhaps her work in France had reminded them of the futility of getting too close to her.

The Americans and the Russians were so predictable, but these bastards… they were the wild cards and could appear at any time. And as she’d speculated, they could be getting leads from Izotov, who’d perhaps hired them as mercenaries in addition to his “official” efforts involving Haussler and the Spetsnaz troops. Izotov was a clever one who could be feeding information to the terrorists that he wasn’t sharing with Haussler. He might even be playing them against each other and would reward only the victors. She knew him all too well, knew that all he cared about were end results and that people were disposable, people like her husband and brothers.

In the Snow Maiden’s Russia, loyalty was a spring flower that wilted far too quickly without water.

“We’re almost out of gas,” Chopra said, wrenching her from her thoughts.

“Then you’ll stop at the next petrol station.”

“I don’t have cash, and if we use cards they will find us.”

“Exactly.”

“Please don’t kill anyone else.”

She took a deep breath. “If they cooperate, I won’t. But I make no promises.”

“How did you get to be so deplorable?”

She attempted to speak softly and not through her teeth. “I used to think they made me who I am. But I’ve always had a choice. So I choose to be this way.”

“Why?”

She let the question hang for a moment, then said, “Because I will never become their victim.”

“How would you become their victim? And who are they?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What happened to you? I’m sure you were a little girl once. A sweet child.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes. Once…”

Brent wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn’t help himself. He was as much horrified and fascinated by George Voeckler’s insanity… or bravery — the line between them was often indistinct.

The Russian pilot and co-pilot were in the cockpit of that enemy chopper and could effortlessly lift their 12.7-millimeter four-barrel machine gun, bringing it to bear. But George Voeckler knew that as well, which was why he jogged along the front of the apartments, keeping low and breaking cover only at the last second to run at the chopper, rear back, and hurl his grenade, one of six “Ghost Recon specials” given to him by Brent.

Just as the pilot swung his gun around, the fins and engine on George’s L12-7 activated, and the tiny missile streaked into the open bay door.

The whish was followed immediately by a muffled explosion that echoed strangely louder from inside the chopper.

The explosion was clearly not enough to destroy the bird, but the pilot and co-pilot had to be seriously injured, Brent thought. Thick smoke poured from the open bay door, yet the rotors kept on spinning.

A moment later, one man jumped out, staggered onto the ground, and fell. The other pilot never appeared.

As expected, the explosion drew the attention of the rest of the Russian troops, and even as George began hightailing it back out of there, the camera images making Brent dizzy, the window showing his input went blank for a second.

Gunfire boomed.

And then that “blank screen” turned out to be the pavement as the camera was raised, and it appeared someone was holding George’s trident goggles.

Haussler’s smug face panned into view. “Hello, hello, Americans! I see you, too, have come hunting. Until we meet again.” Haussler dropped the goggles, and he might’ve stomped on them because the signal cut off.

Thomas screamed into his microphone, and Brent got on his channel. “Don’t you move. You stay there. I’ve lost one man, and I won’t lose another, do you hear me, Thomas?”

“No way. I’m going!”

“If you go, you die, and you die like a fool. That’s not what your brother wants. Do what he said. Stay there! We’re coming for you!”

Brent regarded the driver. “You need to get us there, now!”

The driver gritted his teeth and accelerated even more, as Thomas once more announced that he was going after his brother.

Brent wondered what he would do were he in that shed and his own brother had just been killed. Hiding there would feel like an act of cowardice. He should face his brother’s killers. So he understood, in part, how Thomas felt, but remaining wasn’t being a coward; it was being smart, and Brent so much as told the man that. “Just stay there, buddy. Stay there.”

“I’m not leaving him there.” Thomas lapsed into a string of curses.

“Just listen to me, bro. You got a whole squad of troops out there. And just you. I need you alive. You hear what I am saying? I need you to stay there. That’s all you have to do. Just sit tight. We’ll get George. He’s not going to lie there for long. Just believe me, all right?”

Thomas kept swearing. “This is not the way it was supposed to happen. I’m the one who should’ve died! I’m the loser, not him! I’m the loser.”

“Just calm down. We’re on our way.”