to look up as the sky turned black. A breath later, they were incinerated or torn apart or buried under tons of dirt.
Dennison wasn’t sure what the quake would measure on the Richter scale, but the entire province would feel some kind of effect.
It was hypnotizing to watch, even though she’d seen kinetic strikes before. Every one was a little different, all awe-inspiring and even a little sad. No one on the ground had even a remote chance of survival.
Their ride home was nothing fancy: just a good old HH-60G Pave Hawk, which in truth was a highly modified Black Hawk whose primary mission was to conduct combat search-and-rescue operations into hostile environments.
Well, Sergeant Raymond McAllen mused, his current situation fit quite nicely into the air crew’s mission parameters.
Khaki had assisted the two pilots, one flight engineer, and one gunner into putting down in a clearing about five hundred yards south of their position; at the moment, McAllen, Halverson, and Pravota were charging toward the waiting bird, now less than a hundred yards away.
Rule and Gutierrez ran past them to provide a final few salvos of covering fire, and McAllen forced Halverson and Pravota to run ahead of him, placing himself between them and the incoming fire.
He’d read it a hundred times in the biographies of other Marines, had experienced it himself, and now, at this very moment, he knew it would hit him.
When you were just seconds away from safety, those last few seconds were the hardest.
You saw yourself getting shot at the last moment.
Saw yourself dying just as you were about to be saved.
Many combatants said they were never more scared than in the moment they were about to be picked up.
McAllen’s group cleared the forest, and Halverson and Pravota made a last mad dash for the waiting chopper, rotor whomping, engine thrumming, snow blowing hard. The gunner was at the ready near the open bay door, pivoting his.50 caliber, hungry for kills.
Halverson pulled ahead of Pravota, then she suddenly slipped and hit the ground. The Russian stopped and, though still handcuffed, tried to offer help. But Halverson got back up on her own and together they made the final twenty-yard leg and were helped inside by the flight engineer.
“Outlaw Team, this is Outlaw One. Everybody fall back to the pickup site. Package is loaded. Say again, fall back now.” McAllen turned and dropped onto his gut. Between him and the chopper’s gunner, they had good coverage of the tree line.
Palladino and Szymanski came bursting from the forest first, then came Friskis and Gutierrez. Khaki was already onboard the chopper.
“Outlaw Two, this is Outlaw One,” McAllen called. “Everybody’s loaded up. Come on, buddy, let’s go.”
But there was no answer from Sergeant Rule.
McAllen tried again. Then he cursed, rose, and charged back toward the tree line.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Sergeant Raymond McAllen spotted his assistant team leader lying prone beside a tree, his head low.
He wasn’t moving.
But suddenly McAllen’s attention was torn away to the trees, where several troops were darting from trunk to trunk — moving in. Gunfire immediately sounded, and McAllen crouched and charged for Rule’s position.
He took a flying leap and crashed into the snow just as Rule’s rifle boomed.
“Sergeant?”
Rule regarded him. “They’re moving up!”
“I ordered everyone to fall back.”
“I didn’t hear that.” The Sergeant banged on the headset fitted below his helmet.
“Let’s go!”
Rule fished out a grenade, pulled the pin, hurled it at the oncoming troops, then burst to his feet.
He and McAllen charged back through the forest, leaving behind an onslaught of fresh fire from the Russians.
The grenade exploded with a satisfying boom, just as the two rounded a pair of trees and spotted the chopper ahead, eclipsed by the last few pines.
Something pinged off McAllen’s helmet, then a few more pings struck his back. Aw, hell, he was taking fire.
Then a pair of sharp stings woke in his legs. He took three more steps, the pain growing unbearable.
He collapsed to his belly as Rule kept on running.
What they thought had been an earthquake turned out to be a successful kinetic strike on the Russians coming down from Red Deer, and Rakken used that good news to boost the morale of his men in the stairwell. And God knew they needed a boost.
They had about two hundred more steps to climb, and if Sergeant Marc Rakken’s legs were any indication of how the others felt, then they all could hardly stand.
But they forged on, with the Russians up top sending down bursts of fire and the occasional grenade. They also continued lobbing smoke to obscure the entire stairwell. If they had any rockets, they were waiting until Rakken’s men got closer to use them.
So up they went, stair after stair, in the smoke-filled darkness, only the sounds of the radio and their own breathing now filling their ears.
The company commander informed them that snipers in the building across the street were attempting to pick off any troops they spotted on the observation deck, but thus far those Russians had kept out of sight.
And twice Rakken had attempted to gain information from one of the five civilians ascending just behind them, a bearded, middle-aged man with the call sign “Nimrod One.”
“You just get us in there, Sergeant, and we’ll do the rest,” the man had said.
“I can help you more if I know what your job is.”
“I think you’ll figure it out pretty quickly once we’re up top.”
“Well, I have my ideas.”
“I’m sure they’re not too far off base. Now, if you don’t mind?”
Rakken almost wished this were the simple destruction of a Spetsnaz observation post. Then again, what kind of bragging rights would that earn him?
“Grenades!” shouted his point man. “Two more! Three!”
They all dropped down behind their shields as the explosions resounded—
And then, as the smoke cleared, Rakken’s men reported that a four-meter section of the staircase had been destroyed and that they would need the ropes to ascend to the next landing.
Delays, delays, more delays. That’s what the Russians wanted. The teams in the other stairwell weren’t faring much better, according to reports.
“All right, people, let’s rig this up and get climbing!”
As Rule ran toward the Pave Hawk, he couldn’t understand why Gutierrez and Szymanski were waving their hands and pointing. He tried his radio, but it was dead: either the battery was gone or he’d damaged it out there.
But it only took another pair of seconds for him to realize that they were indicating to the trees behind him. He stole a look back and saw McAllen lying in the snow.
He turned around, raced toward the sergeant, even as the chopper’s door gunner opened up on the trees to give him some covering fire.
