Sergeant Nathan Vatz shivered. Looking down, he saw his gloved hands had formed into fists and felt the sweat pouring down his face, despite the cold wind blowing across the town hall’s rooftop.
“Looks like a couple heading toward downtown. Two more holding back, probably scouts. Four breaking off, coming for us at the airport. The other four? Not sure where they’re going yet. Looks like the scouts see the roadblock, over.”
Captain Godfrey, still off to Vatz’s right, was working his Cross Com, studying the imagery coming in from Black Bear’s men at the airport. Suddenly he cried, “They’re jamming us!”
Vatz checked his own channel: static. No voice, data, imagery.
Didn’t matter. They’d hoped for the best, prepared for the worst, as always.
Every operator knew his role.
They just needed the Russians to be good enemy soldiers and die according to the plan.
The two Ka-29s, painted in camouflage patterns, swooped down into the middle of the broad intersection, their rotors echoing so loudly off the buildings that Vatz wished he’d shoved in his earplugs. They had no tail rotors, he noticed, just a large main rotor with a smaller rotor beneath it. The tail sections had horizontal wings with vertical fins attached to the ends, like the dorsal fins on sharks. Each fin was emblazoned with a bright red star.
A close look through his binoculars yielded more of the expected: Spetsnaz infantrymen visible behind the two crew members. Vatz assumed the hold was jammed to capacity: sixteen troops. Their landing gear unfolded, their noses pitched up, and they set down, one after the other.
Vatz didn’t need to give the order. His weapons sergeants knew exactly what to do next. All of them did.
He took in a long breath—
And the battle began.
TWENTY-SIX
Still crouched beneath the cellar staircase and not moving a muscle, Major Stephanie Halverson listened to the commotion going on upstairs:
“Where is she?”
“Who?” asked the father.
“The Yankee pilot!”
“I don’t know!”
A gunshot boomed, causing the mother to cry out, and Halverson thought,
They had killed the husband. They would come down and finish the job.
Suddenly, the mother bolted from her hiding place in the back and charged toward the stairs, where a Spetsnaz soldier was just coming down.
“Don’t shoot!” she screamed.
He did.
Put a bullet in her chest.
But a half second after he fired, so did Halverson, carefully aiming between the slots of the wooden stairs, her round coming up between his legs and into his torso.
He tumbled forward, his rifle dropping to the concrete. Before Halverson could come out and grab it, the boy was there, snatching up the rifle. He panted as he looked at his mother slumped across the floor—
Then a creak from the stairs seized his attention. He cut loose a dozen rounds.
Yet another troop slumped.
Halverson darted across the room, got up on a chair, broke out the window with the butt of her pistol, then hoisted herself up and squeezed through the hole. “Come on!” she cried, reaching out to the boy.
He raced over and took her hand, just as a metallic thump sounded, followed by a loud hissing: gas.
They’d killed two. Had the father shot one? Maybe. There’d only be three left, then, she thought.
Out in the snow, she and the boy ran straight for the barn, about a hundred yards away.
Gunfire boomed behind them.
She hazarded a look back. One troop, who had come out the back door, had just spotted them.
“Run!” she screamed.
Sergeant Raymond McAllen wasn’t shaking in fear but in frustration. His men had the fuel truck pulled up beside the Longranger III, the hose attached to the bird. However, filling the tanks took time. Too much damned time.
The Russian helos were twenty meters above the tarmac, ten, five…
He tightened up against the wall, his helmet and combat subsystems fully activated, his Heckler & Koch XM9 assault rifle at the ready.
Each operator on the team handpicked his own weapons, sometimes purchasing a few fancy toys themselves, and McAllen had recently been experimenting with the XM9, a weapon whose earlier version, the XM8, had been abandoned by the military.
Like the XM8, the 9 was a modular weapon with four variants: a baseline carbine, a compact carbine, a sharp-shooter, and a heavy-barreled automatic. McAllen carried the baseline carbine with attached XM322 grenade launcher.
McAllen glanced off to his left, where Palladino lay prone beneath a tree, eye pressed to the scope of his M82A1 sniper rifle with its bipod dug deep in the snow. He’d taken the big girl along for this ride, and her.50 caliber rounds would easily penetrate the fuselages of those helos, the booming alone enough to strike fear in the hearts of the enemy.
Gutierrez had positioned himself a couple meters farther south, near another tree, his SAW balanced on its bipod. Radio operator Friskis and assistant team leader Rule were closer to the chopper, each armed with an MR-C — Modular Rifle Caseless — which fired 6.8 mm caseless ammo at a rate of nine hundred rounds per minute. Both weapons were also equipped with rail-mounted 40 mm grenade launchers.
All of which was to say the boys from Force Recon were good to go and waiting for showtime.
But the order to fire would never come, McAllen realized. The Russians were jamming all communications. He would let the SF boys take the first shots, as they had indicated. His years of experience would tell him when to engage his men.
The first two helos touched down, the third and fourth only seconds behind.
From somewhere on the other side of the terminal came a boom and hiss, followed by a white streak that spanned the tarmac in the blink of an eye, reached the lead helo—
And detonated directly over the canopy.
After the initial explosion, two more quickly followed, knocking the chopper onto its side, rotors digging into the ice and asphalt, while another burst sent flames shooting from shattered windows.
Those Special Forces guys must’ve brought an AT4 from their cache back home. They had some very nice toys.
Jagged pieces of fuselage and engine components from the first chopper flew into the second, striking its rotors just as a side door popped open and the first infantryman tried to get out. Meanwhile, the third and fourth choppers began to lift off.
McAllen craned his head toward the forest. “Outlaw Team, fire!” Even as he issued the order, he burst from his position and launched a grenade at the open door of the second chopper.
That first infantryman was already cut down by Gutierrez’s machine gun — and as he slumped, McAllen’s grenade flew into the helo’s crew compartment.
