“Wait a minute,” said Fisher, raising his palm. “Perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
Briggs arrived at his side, panting and confused. “You found us a good place to die?”
Fisher hoisted his brows. “Not us, Briggs. Them.”
8
LESS than three minutes later, they were crouched low behind two fir trees nearest the hogbacks. They each had a fragmentation grenade in their strong hands, pistols in their weak. Training, equipment, and terrain were all force multipliers, and Fisher had recognized that. Briggs, a student of military history, had agreed and reminded Fisher of the ancient battle between the Greeks and the Persians at the pass of Thermopylae. A mere 7,000 Greeks held off between 100,000 and 300,000 men for seven days in one of the most remarkable battles ever fought.
“Here they come,” whispered Briggs.
Like their comrades to the east, these troops had formed three squads, six men in each, with two squads hustling through the forest toward the pass. The third was holding back in overwatch positions along the outcroppings above the pass.
“Sam, I’ve just deployed the CS canisters,” reported Charlie. “Probably took out at least six or seven of them, but the wind’s picking up again. Looks like the rest are converging on the crash site, at least for now.”
“Roger that. Do a sweep over the tree line surrounding the jet. Double-check for bodies.”
“No problem.”
“Sam, it’s Grim. One of you needs to move ahead, pop smoke, and do some combat control for the chopper. GPS coordinates are a little off, and the pilot’s having a hard time seeing the LZ. It’s real tight down there.”
“We’ll get on it,” answered Fisher.
“Uh, and yeah, uh, excuse me, you’ve got twelve hostiles inbound with another six overhead,” she said.
“I know, Grim.”
“Why aren’t you moving?”
“You’ll see.”
The first squad of Spetsnaz ventured tentatively onto the cliff, the point man hunkered down and waving his assault rifle toward the shadows ahead. His comrades followed, their spacing well practiced, their fingers at the ready to cut loose volleys of superheated lead.
All six were passing through the hogback now, and then came the second squad, one by one. The mountainside grew so quiet that Fisher thought he could hear every piece of ice crunching under their boots. Even the wind seemed to be holding back, waiting for something to happen.
Fisher zoomed in with his trifocals. The Spetsnaz wore dark green camouflage uniforms with balaclavas tugged down over their faces. Frost was forming on the areas around their mouths. He got a better look at their weapons now, flicking his glance between them and his OPSAT, which ID’d the rifles as Kalashnikov AK-12s, the latest derivative of the Soviet/Russian AK-47 series with a curious lower number than 47. The 12 referred to the year the rifle went into production. What a shame. These were excellent new toys in the hands of men relying upon conventional tactics. They might be hard-core, as Charlie had mentioned, but they needed a hell of a lot more creativity if they were going to capture or kill Fisher and Briggs.
Zooming back out, Fisher noted that the point man was only a few meters away from what he and Briggs had dubbed the “rock of no return”—a small stone about the size of a volleyball they’d placed along the ledge as a landmark.
He glanced over at the young man hunkered down at his side. Briggs’s eyes were covered by his trifocals, and Fisher let his gaze drift down to Briggs’s gloved hand. Was he trembling? Was his pulse bounding? Could Fisher trust him enough to react and carry out the plan as discussed? There’d been a moment during the Blacklist operation where Sadiq had been clutching Fisher and it’d been up to Briggs to take the shot, end it right there, but the kid just couldn’t do it. Fisher had, in effect, fired him after that. They’d come to terms with the incident, and while Fisher forgave, he never forgot.
Briggs must’ve felt the heat of Fisher’s gaze, and he glanced over and nodded.
The point man lifted his hand, halting the squad.
“Shit,” Briggs whispered.
Fisher leaned toward Briggs. “Take it easy.”
A few of the troops craned their heads at the sound of the Black Hawk’s rotors approaching from the west.
The point man shouted in Russian, “Double-time!”
And they took off running—
Right into Fisher’s trap.
9
NO plan ever survived the first enemy contact, and if you believed otherwise, you were an armchair general who’d never set foot on a battlefield. The plan of going in ghost, reconnoitering the crash site, and getting out without ever being detected had already been abandoned. Taking out enemy troops while still remaining stealthy was a tactic most often employed by Fisher, one he’d recently begun calling “panther.” Going in “ghost” or going in “panther” was shorthand he used with Grim.
Going in “assault”—loud and offensive—was a last resort. They were information gatherers, not direct action specialists, but they were always prepared to bring the fight to the enemy when they had to, and bring it they had.
The point man broke the laser trip wire they’d set up on the ledge near that rock.
Fisher held his breath.
The small C-4 charges with wireless detonators that he and Briggs had emplaced along the ledge went off in a thread of echoing booms, instantly killing the point man and the two men behind him, their shredded bodies arching through the air and disappearing into the chasm below.
Fisher and Briggs hurled their grenades up and onto the outcroppings. While some troops up there and below hit the deck, others were so disoriented that they either ran or were blown right off the ledge. In the next heartbeat, the outcroppings exploded, raining down tons of rock onto the pass, crushing a few troops while a handful of others narrowly escaped back toward the forest. One man doing overwatch tumbled from the cliff above the pass, the rock beneath him having suddenly given way. The screaming and random salvos flashing from AK-12s, along with the still flickering light of burning shrapnel splayed across the cliff, cast the entire scene in a weird otherworldly glow.
As the miniature mushroom clouds of fire expanded above, rising from columns of dense black smoke, the injured appeared, a couple of troops missing appendages, crawling with what limbs they had left, scraping forward across the ice.
Before Fisher and Briggs could assess any more of their ambush, they were on their feet and hauling ass back toward the forest to circle around and above the pass. The sonar goggles revealed that there were at least five more troops left up top, all having fallen back to secondary defensive positions within the trees.
“Sam, the troops at the crash site—”
“I know, Grim,” he snapped. “But we need to clear a path for Briggs so he can get to that helo.”
“Well, you’d better move. I count at least ten sprinting toward your position.”
“Charlie, can you run interference?” Fisher asked.
“I’ll see if I can offer the drone as bait, let ’em take some potshots to keep ’em distracted. And Sam, I haven’t spotted any bodies in the trees.”
“Okay,” Fisher answered, fighting for breath. “Just slow down those bastards for me.”
He and Briggs scaled a hill so steep they were forced to lean forward and clutch at the earth and snow. At the top, Fisher’s quads were burning, and the altitude was really getting to him now. Briggs was crouched again, scanning with his trifocals. He gave Fisher a hand signal: got two guys to the left, three to the right.
Fisher gestured for Briggs to go left, take out those two quietly. Fisher slipped off across the snow and toward the other three, holstering his pistol and drawing the karambit from its sheath attached to his waistband just behind the holster.
The knife was a curved bla
de variant, a “tiger’s claw” endemic to Sumatra, Central Java, and Madura. Over his long career, Fisher had studied with many close-quarters combat experts, among them world-renowned edged weapon master Michael Janich, who’d taught Fisher to use the blade with expert and deadly efficiency. The karambit’s design made it more easily concealable in the hand as well as offering more leverage while dragging it across the neck, with the ultimate goal of opening an enemy’s head like a PEZ dispenser. The karambit’s outside edge was sharpened, its back blade nearest the handle heavily serrated to be flipped and used to hack through thicker objects or pieces of flesh. By slipping your pinky or ring finger through the ring attached to the bottom of the knife’s hilt, you could switch between forward and reverse grips in a lightning-fast 180-degree stroke. Fisher owned two karambits, one with a silver uncoated blade, the other featuring a DLC, or diamond-like carbon, coating that gave the blade a matte black appearance for better camouflage and protection against reflections that could betray his position.
Knowing most of this op would be run at night, he’d taken the black blade—which now jutted from the bottom of his fist.
At the next tree he paused and marked the positions of each troop, their weapons trained on the valley to his left. He zoomed in once more with his trifocals. The nearest troop peered out from behind a more narrow pine, his rifle at the ready, a pair of night-vision goggles clipped to his helmet and slid down over his eyes.
After plotting his path, Fisher stepped as gingerly as he could, coming in from behind the man, who turned back as he approached, but all he saw was the next spruce behind him. He didn’t realize Fisher was so close, placing a gloved hand over his mouth to try to stifle his warm breath. Once more Fisher examined the ground between his position and the soldier’s. No, not good. Broken patches of ice, pine needles, and a few brown leaves scattered on top of it all. A soundless approach would involve antigravity boots. He’d have to get Charlie on that. For now, though, it was all about reaching the troop before the man could fire and alert his comrades.
Reaching the troop . . . that was one way to do it. The other involved bringing the troop to him . . .
Taking in a long breath, the air stinging his lungs, Fisher stood and began to walk in place, the snow and leaves crunching loudly under his boots.
Then he froze, got back down on his haunches, and doused the green lights on his trifocals.
As expected, the troop clambered to his feet and left his position to investigate the noise. His movements were tense; in fact, Fisher had never seen a young man more puckered up.
As he came toward Fisher’s tree, Fisher cautiously maneuvered to the side so he could still attack from the rear. Again, the most important part of the assault was getting the troop’s finger away from his trigger. After that, the karambit would communicate Fisher’s will in a way words could not.
Fisher rose and came up on the troop like a camouflaged extraterrestrial, once part of the mountainside but now morphing into a lethal, three-eyed combatant.
In that half second when Fisher sensed the troop would whirl around, he reached out and seized the man’s right wrist, yanking it away from the assault rifle.
The blade was already tearing across the man’s throat before he could yell, and as he fell back toward the snow, Fisher eased him silently to the ground. While grisly, it was necessary to stab him twice more in the heart before he was sprawled out on his back and flinching involuntarily.
Men did not die instantly from knife wounds the way Hollywood producers wanted you to believe. It took a while to bleed out, but flooding an enemy’s throat with blood ensured he wouldn’t be screaming for his brothers as, in the minutes to come, he finally, inevitably, drowned.
Fisher took the man’s rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He was about to open the man’s belt pouch to draw some spare magazines when he spotted movement farther up the mountain. He dashed off, the thumping of the Black Hawk much closer and certainly welcome. With that racket concealing his footfalls, he wasted no time rushing up on the next troop and working the knife the way a symphony conductor instinctively works his baton. The troop saw nothing, felt only a hand, the edge of the blade, the warmth of his own blood spilling down his chest.
As Fisher silently finished the job with two more blows, he caught sight of the man’s painfully young eyes, and that youth reminded him of a moment after he’d had a few drinks and his guard was down. His daughter, Sarah, had asked, “Is it easy to kill a man?”
He’d considered the question for a long time, then finally told her, “When it’s for our country, I try not to think about it. But most of the time I do. And it’s never easy. Or fun. Or anything that should be glorified.”
Breathing a heavy sigh, Fisher traded his blood-soaked gloves for the troop’s, then hustled out of there.
“Hey, Sam, Briggs here. Two down, nice and quiet. But they’re coming up fast from the east. If you want me on combat control for that helo, I need to roll now.”
“Go. I’ll be right behind.”
Following a deep cut in the mountain formed eons prior by glaciers, Fisher abandoned his assault on the last troop, who was just north of his position.
Maybe they could lure that soldier into following, then double back to take him out once they were near the LZ. Getting to that troop now would take Fisher too far off the trail and leave Briggs more vulnerable to those attackers from the east.
With his lips chapped and nose sore from the cold, Fisher dragged himself up another ten meters, the grade nearly 40 percent now, his breath ragged. He had to stop, find some air, find some way to actually catch his breath.
And that’s when the grenade went off.
The white-hot blinding flash, followed by the ear-rattling ka-boom sent him crashing forward and burying his face in the dirt. Grim and Charlie were screaming in his ear for him to move, and for a moment, the world seemed to tip on its axis.
There was no rush of imagery from his past, no reflections on his divorce, or anything else—just that terrible ringing and white noise, the blinding flashes like old flashbulbs going off repeatedly in his face.
One of those flashes turned into a lightning bolt with still images printed along its surface, each cell depicting Sarah receiving the news of his death. No, he couldn’t put her through that . . .
Muted gunfire stitched up the mountainside, and he could feel the rounds thumping into the earth behind him. Was he hit by shrapnel? Was he okay? Where the hell was he?
The moment came down like an avalanche, and barely conscious of his movements, he was already on his feet, digging in deep, charging up the mountain, with more gunfire trailing. He ripped free a grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it over his shoulder without looking.
To his left rose a stand of pines, and he darted toward them, boots sliding as he fought against the incline, his ears ringing loudly from the explosions.
Those sons of bitches were coming up behind him, but he had the high ground, if nothing else.
He had two more grenades left. Tugging down his trifocals, he went to sonar, marked the positions of nine men now who were fanned out in a semicircle within the trees, with several more, three or four, in the distance.
Night-vision mode allowed him to zoom in on the nearest troop. Seeing an opportunity, Fisher shoved up his goggles and got behind the AK-12’s attached scope. As a rule of combat—and if you had a choice—you never trusted an enemy’s rifle. He sighted the forehead of the nearest troop, then panned right to the next three about a yard back. The second man was there, leaning out from behind the trunk. Fisher knew that once he fired the first round, the second guy would switch positions, ducking for cover—but his tree wasn’t quite wide enough, and so when he did try to hide, Fisher would exploit that reaction.
The moment seemed perfect, and firing down at a sharp angle decreased the amount of bullet drop, pl
acing the odds of a better shot in his favor.
If he did it right, gripped the weapon firmly with his left hand, gently with his right, then exhaled halfway, every shot would be a surprise. There was no conscious pulling of the trigger, only pressure until the round exploded from the barrel. It did. The troop’s head snapped back as Fisher was already shifting fire to the second one—who moved exactly as predicted. Fisher caught him in the side of the head.
The other troops detected his muzzle flash and sent volley after volley of automatic weapons fire in his direction. Rounds tore apart the pines and ricocheted off the rocks behind him.
At the next pause in fire, he was on his feet, gritting his teeth and clambering for the next stand of trees back to his left, the gunfire resuming and ripping past him now. The bullets sounded like sand thrown into a fan, and a round or two might’ve struck his legs, he wasn’t sure, the Kevlar certainly protecting him at this range, but he wasn’t sticking around to tempt fate any further.
A blur raced over his head and zoomed back down the mountain. He recognized the buzzing of the drone’s rotors and sighed with relief.
“Goddamn, Charlie, you’re a little late!” he cried.
“Sorry, Sam, the drone took fire. Lost one rotor. Had to reboot. Just get out of there!”
“That’s the plan.”
“Sam, don’t move,” cried Grim. “There’s another squad. They just got in front of you. They came up on your flank. You’re about to be surrounded!”
“Then, Grim, I need to move!”
“Sam, I have an idea, but you won’t like it,” said Charlie.
Fisher reached the next tree, dropped to his knees, then leaned over, stealing more breath. He was a few seconds away from collapsing. “Charlie, what’re you thinking?”
“The Black Hawk’s armed with Hellfire missiles—”