The Sniper and the Wolf

79

Gil noted that Sasha Kovalenko favored his right leg as he turned to go back into the command tent, wondering what kind of wound he had sustained and when it had happened. Gil’s own battered body was still suppurating, his shrapnel wounds burning from the jagged pieces of metal still lodged in his flesh. He popped another dextroamphetamine capsule and gulped water from the CamelBak, knowing he was now robbing Peter to pay Paul.

He whispered to himself, “All you have to do is run three thousand yards, and you’re in the clear.”

Umarov took a seat on a log near a cooking fire, tussling the curly black hair of a small boy who knelt on the ground playing with a toy airplane. A woman gave Umarov a plate of food, and he sat eating, talking with a number of other men sitting around the fire.

A grenade exploded in the forest to the west, followed by the distant staccato of machine-gun fire, and every man in the camp sprang into action.

Umarov dropped his plate and stepped over the log, making for the command tent.

Gil put the crosshairs on the back of his head and squeezed the trigger.

Dokka Umarov’s head exploded like a watermelon shot off a fence post, and he dropped to the ground. The women screamed, grabbing up the children and running for the huts.

Gil slung the rifle over his back and began working to get his feet back on the ground as fast as possible.

Colonel Yablonsky and his men had been in the process of setting up their claymore screen when a small Chechen patrol stumbled across them. A brief firefight ensued, and all four Chechens were killed, but two of the Spetsnaz were hit with shrapnel, and one was shot through the shoulder blade.

“They’ll come fast,” Yablonsky said. “We’ll hit them hard and fall back through the MON screen.”

The Russian MON-50 version of the claymore mine came in two different variants. One variant fired 540 steel ball bearings, the other firing 485 short steel rods, each covering an arc of 54 degrees out to lethal range of fifty meters. Employing trip-wire detonators, the Spetsnaz had placed its mines (three of each variant) roughly thirty meters apart in order to deliver the maximum effect on the Chechen line of advance.

“Did anyone hear the American’s rifle?”

“I heard nothing,” Yablonsky said. “We have other problems to worry about now.”

The six of them formed up by twos and prepared for the attack. They could hear the Chechens shouting to one another as they came forward through the forest, ramming through rhododendron thickets and firing indiscriminately in an attempt to flush out the enemy. They were at least a hundred strong and moved with all the confidence of a superior force. Ali Abu Mukhammad commanded from the center, well back from the front, surrounded by a personal guard of a dozen devoted men. With Dokka Umarov now dead, he was the new emir of the Caucasus Emirate.

The Spetsnaz let loose with a volley of hand grenades, hurling three apiece before falling back through the claymore screen. The grenades exploded all along the Chechen line, killing or wounding nearly twenty men. Taking up firing positions among the trees, the Russians waited as the Chechens sorted themselves out, shouting for the wounded to be recovered and to close the gaps in the line.

The Chechens drew within range once more, and the Spetsnaz opened up with rifle and grenade fire, killing a dozen more before turning to run. The Chechens saw them and opened fire, dashing after them and directly into the screen of MON-50s.

The mines exploded with devastating effect all along the front of the Chechen advance, killing or wounding at least thirty more men, and bringing the advance to an abrupt halt. Men were screaming everywhere, their bodies shredded.

Mukhammad saw the devastation and called for ten volunteers to continue the pursuit while they waited for the remainder of the camp to arrive.

His personal guards volunteered immediately, but they were denied. Ten former Zapad Spetsnaz men came forward and told Mukhammad they would track down the assassins and kill them. He sent them off at once, turning to ask where the hell Kovalenko was, but no one had seen the Chechen sniper. A search of the dead was carried out, but his body was not found.

Sasha Kovalenko was in the forest on the far side of the camp, perfectly camouflaged in his Russian leshy suit, slithering slowly along the ground at a snail’s pace. He could now see the great tree from where he lay, the rope hanging down from the high limb, but there was no sign of the American sniper. He could feel him, however; his combat instincts telling him that Gil had not fled the scene. The rhododendron were not as dense here on the east side of camp, where the elevation was slightly higher, so visibility through the trees was about 60 percent.

Something moved along the forest floor to his right, no more than thirty feet beyond a rhododendron thicket. The sound was slow and deliberate, like that of a man crawling, moving parallel to his position toward the east. Kovalenko realized at once that the American was maneuvering to intercept him at the far end of the thicket.

The movement stopped, and he lay listening for five full minutes before he heard the American move again through the dead leaves. He smiled and moved carefully forward on his elbows and knees, his eyes peering out from within the leshy suit, the suppressed AK-105 cradled carefully in his arms. The ground was cleaner on his side of the thicket, so he made very little discernible sound as he moved.

Gil wasn’t sure of Kovalenko’s position, but he could feel him drawing closer, a kind of ozone slowly pervading the air around him. His arrector pili muscles contracted along his arms and shoulders, tightening his skin into gooseflesh, and he pulled the .338 into his shoulder.

He studied the terrain before him, watching not for the movement of a man but of a segment of the forest. Although highly effective from a static position, a ghillie suit was no more effective in motion than any other type of camouflage. The sound of fighting on the far side of the camp had dropped off immediately after the claymores had detonated, and there hadn’t been a shot fired since.

He closed his hand around the end of a one-hundred-foot length of parachute cord taken from Mason’s rucksack. The other end of the cord was attached to the rucksack, which he had stashed in the rhododendron thicket a hundred feet out in front of him. The cord was concealed beneath the dead leaves and other forest debris, so it would not be readily visible to anyone who didn’t already know it was there. Gil gave the rucksack a slow, steady pull of about three feet, hoping to lure Kovalenko in for the kill shot.

He was very tired, approaching exhaustion, and he was a bit shaky from the amphetamines, so when he first detected Kovalenko’s movement in the fading light of the forest, he wasn’t sure whether or not his eyes were playing tricks on him. Gil eyed the spot through the scope and finally realized that he was looking at one of the finest ghillie suits he’d ever seen. The Chechen’s movement was scarcely faster than that of the minute hand on a clock, and Gil had to blink his eyes to be sure he was seeing what he was seeing. As of yet, he did not have a shot because Kovalenko was belly-down against the ground, and Gil was concealed within a natural depression in the earth, a leafy rhododendron branch dangling overhead. His scope had an untrammeled view of Kovalenko, but the muzzle of the rifle did not. In order to fire now, he would have to raise up onto one knee, and he was not about to give a man like Kovalenko that kind of opportunity.

Listening to the movement on his right, Kovalenko decided the American must not know his position after all. He was moving too fast and making too much noise, shifting position with impatience. The movement stopped, and Kovalenko knew he had him.

He increased his pace, though only slightly, and over the next twenty minutes, he worked his way to the end of the rhododendron thicket. He shifted his angle of attack to the right, training the AK-105 in the direction he had heard the American’s movement. Then he lay motionless.

Ten minutes passed, and finally there was another sign of movement. Kovalenko caught a glimpse of a tan rucksack through the rhododendron and opened fire on full automatic, emptying the magazine and chopping the rhododendron to salad. He quickly reloaded and then got to his feet and stepped into the undergrowth for a look at the body.

The instant he saw the shredded rucksack, he knew he’d been had. He stood waiting for the lights to go out, feeling Gil standing fewer than thirty feet behind him. His hand closed around the grip of the rifle, fingering the trigger.

“You shouldn’t wait,” he said over his shoulder. “This is no game to play fairly.”

Gil had the TAC-338 shouldered, the crosshairs fixed dead center between the Chechen’s shoulder blades. “I wanted to say it’s been a helluva fight.”

Kovalenko nodded. “I watched you in the Panjshir Valley on satellite two years ago. Dragunov was there as well. You were all any of us talked about for weeks.”

“You were still with the Spetsnaz then?”

“Yes. Now, before we finish this, I want to ask you a question.”

“Ask it.”

“What did you do with the key you found aboard the Palinouros? The key you took from Miller’s body.”

“It’s in my pocket,” Gil said.

Kovalenko chuckled sardonically, shaking his head. “If I were you, I’d wait to find out what that key opened before I gave it to Mr. Pope.”

“Why’s that?”

Kovalenko whipped around with the AK-105, and Gil shot him through both lungs halfway through the spin, exploding his heart and killing him instantly. The Chechen fell over in the rhododendron, and Gil ran to the body, knifing him under the jaw and quickly shaking him out of the ghillie suit. He put on the suit and grabbed up the suppressed AK, moving out toward the camp, hoping that most of the fighting men had joined in the hunt for Yablonsky and his team.