The Sniper and the Wolf

51

Gil knew the Chechens might spot Dragunov dangling above them at any second. He picked up a fallen branch the size of a ball bat and hurled it through a gap in the trees behind his own position. The branch landed with a heavy thud, and the Chechens fell silent, bringing their AK-47s to bear. He watched as the leader gave orders to fan out left and right, and considered how best to deal with them; even a single rifle shot might be enough to bring the entire forest down on his head.

Two men flanked right around the boulders, and two flanked left, cutting into the forest at an oblique angle. The leader came directly toward Gil’s position. Gil drew his knife. The Strike One was loaded with subsonic ammo, but even with the suppressor, it would make too much noise given the close proximity. The Chechen leader came on, and he was almost within striking distance when one of the limbs supporting Dragunov’s weight snapped with a sharp crack. The parachute ripped, and Dragunov plummeted toward the forest floor, jerking to a stop with his heels twelve inches off the ground.

The Chechens scrambled back in that direction, calling out as they moved.

Gil pounced on the leader from behind, ramming the knife into the side of his neck to sever the trachea and ripping it out the front. He tossed the body aside and joined in the wild dash toward Dragunov’s position, taking advantage of the enemy’s confusion to sweep in among them as they converged on the helpless Russian dangling in the harness and struggling to draw his pistol.

One of the Chechens punched Dragunov in the face, and another slugged him in the ribs with the stock of an AK-47.

Gil buried the knife in the back of the slugger’s head, whipping around to open fire on the others at point-blank range. His assault was so swift and sudden, they scarcely had time to realize what was happening. He shot all three in under a second and holstered the pistol, retrieving the knife from the dead man’s skull. Then he cut Dragunov loose from the harness and helped him to rest against a log.

“You okay?”

“The ublyudok cracked one of my ribs,” Dragunov growled.

Gil wasted no time getting him ready to fight, attaching the night vision goggles to his helmet and unslinging his AN-94. “Rest here and catch your breath.” He shoved the rifle into the major’s hands. “I gotta grab the rest of my shit.”

When he returned, Dragunov was on his feet and shrugging out of his combat harness.

“What’s wrong?”

“You have to wrap my ribs. I can’t shoulder a rifle with this kind of pain.”

They stripped his gear, and Gil bound his torso tight with an elastic bandage. Dragunov was suited back up and ready to move within a couple of minutes.

He bumped Gil affectionately on the shoulder. “If that branch had broken before you drew them off, they’d have torn me apart.”

“There’s no accounting for luck in combat, partner — we got lucky.” Gil took out his GPS unit to double-check their bearings, and Dragunov got on the radio to Archangel with a situation report.

“Ready to go?” Dragunov asked, holding the cracked rib on his left side.

“Yeah, let’s get the fuck outta here before another patrol comes along. We got a lotta real estate to cover, and I wanna be in position to take that fucker out before first light.”

Kovalenko had been spotted in a truck near the South Ossetian — Russian border the day before, and they were headed for his projected insertion point: a one-lane bridge at the bottom of a river valley north of the remote Sba Mountain Pass. Dokka Umarov was known to have teams of insurgents operating in that region, and according to GRU intelligence, it was the most expedient location for Kovalenko to link up with Umarov’s people. The fact that Gil and Dragunov had already run afoul of a Chechen patrol seemed to confirm the intel.

They moved out with Gil on point, and he set a brisk pace, relying on their night vision to give them an edge.

An hour after Gil and Dragunov cleared the DZ, a hooded figure cloaked in a ghillie suit crept into the kill zone, gripping a suppressed AK-105 assault rifle in 5.45 mm. He carried a Russian-manufactured ORSIS T-5000 precision sniper rifle in .338 Lapua Magnum with folding stock slung over his back. Crouching low in the darkness among the bodies of Umarov’s men, he removed his night vision goggles and used a thermal monocular to scan the terrain for any lingering footprint-shaped heat signatures. When he was sure that he was alone, he examined the bodies and weapons, drawing back the bolt of each AK-47 to sniff the breach. The bodies were cool to the touch, and the breaches of the rifles smelled like clean gun oil.

Sasha Kovalenko then threw back the hood on the ghillie suit and rose up, studying the grisly scene of battle with prurient interest. Whoever had killed the four men at his feet had done so at point-blank range, and with such speed that not one of them had gotten off a single shot. Looking up into the tree, he saw the camouflaged canopy hanging torn from a broken limb.

Sixty feet away, he found the patrol leader’s body and knelt beside it, taking note of the grisly manner in which he’d been slain — stabbed through the side of neck, instantly severing the larynx for a guaranteed silent kill. Instinct told Kovalenko this was the work of the American. He must have taken the leader from behind before engaging the rest of the patrol where they had found Dragunov hanging from the tree. Had Dragunov been unconscious? Was he injured? And how had the American gotten so bloody close to them without drawing fire? It was all open to surmise, but one thing was certain: the prey had taken the bait, and this time Kovalenko held every advantage.

Within three minutes, he picked up their trail and moved out at a comfortable pace. There was no need to hurry. His job wasn’t so much to kill them as to prevent their escape.