by Peter Nealen
Lighter small arms fire joined the heavy machinegun, and then a pair of small, dark objects plopped into the snow next to the ZIL’s rear tire. There was a yell, and all of the white-clad shooters got really small. Flanagan ducked below the peak of the roof just in time.
The Russian grenades were old ones, and not nearly as reliable or consistent as the F1s they’d used on Khadarkh. He was immediately glad he’d gotten his head down, as a split second after the two sharp, heavy thuds of the explosions, he heard a fragment whizz over his head, and several more hit the roof in front of him with muted bangs.
Then more Transnistrian troops were pouring through the gap between the wrecked, slightly smoking ZIL and the gate, firing from the hip as they came.
The problem with hip-shooting, even at close quarters, is that it tends to put all the bullets at hip height and higher, as the recoil forces the rifle’s muzzle up. And the terrorist shooters had gotten low when the grenades had first landed.
Flanagan stayed where he was just long enough to see the OPFOR shooters start returning fire, dropping the first four Transnistrians in a couple of seconds. They weren’t firing controlled pairs, but they were still on semi-automatic, though they were shooting only slightly more slowly than the Transnistrians’ full auto spray and pray. They just shot each man as many times as needed until he dropped, then moved on to the next. The rifles sounded lighter and snappier than the rattling AK-47s; they sounded like 5.56 guns.
That was an observation that Flanagan made almost instinctively, born of years of being around guns and learning their differing sounds. It was a simple detail logged almost unconsciously even as he saw Gogol turn, hit his handler in the head with a fragment of brick while the man was looking toward the gate, and run toward the back.
Then he and Gomez were both sliding down off the roof, their Uzis held close to their chests as they dropped toward the snowy ground almost at the same time.
Flanagan had barely enough time to get his feet and knees together, hitting the ground in a close approximation of a parachute landing fall, though more of an “operational” one than “textbook.” That meant he hit like a sack of rocks, his legs folding beneath him as he tried to distribute the shock, landing on his side harder than he’d hoped, the Uzi’s suppressor hitting him in the forehead and tearing a gash in his skin. He could feel the liquid of his own blood running down his face, but it wasn’t in his eyes, so he sucked in his breath and rolled over, trying to shove himself quickly to his feet.
Gomez had landed better than he had, and was already up. Gogol had rounded the corner and jumped for the top of the fence, apparently oblivious to the two men who had just fallen off the roof. Of course, the intensifying firefight at the gate had probably masked the noise.
Gogol wasn’t much of a climber; he was clinging to the top of the fence with his hands, his boots scrabbling at the bricks for purchase. Gomez was already moving, lunging from his kneeling position toward the escaping gangster.
Slinging his Uzi on his back, he reached out, grabbed twin handfuls of the back of Gogol’s coat, ripped him off the wall, and spun him around to his face on the ground. Gogol squealed as he was torn away from his purchase, the noise suddenly stopping with a grunt as Gomez dropped a knee on his back, driving the wind out of him.
“Kodiak, Woodsrunner,” Flanagan wheezed into his radio, risking a clear transmission. “We’ve got Gogol out back; we need to go.”
The gunfire out front wasn’t slackening, but more and more of it sounded like the terrorists’ 5.56mm fire. That wasn’t going to last; sooner or later, the Transnistrians were going to push the wrecked ZIL out of the way and bring that KPV to bear. Then things were going to get…interesting.
Before that, he suspected that the terrorists were going to try to make their own escape, and the logical way to do it was to go around behind the warehouse.
A man in white camouflage with a dark stain down the front, an AK of some kind in his hands, staggered around the corner. It had to be Gogol’s handler, recovered from the blow to the head and looking for his wayward charge.
Flanagan didn’t give him a chance. He simply leveled the Uzi and stitched the man with a five-round burst from center chest up to his head. The suppressor wasn’t great, but the 9mm didn’t need a great one. The burst hissed and clicked, almost inaudible in contrast with the thunder out front. The first two rounds staggered him, but probably only hit his plate. The next two tore through his neck and his jaw, sending him tumbling, bleeding and gurgling, to the snow.
A final shot finished him off. As long as he still had that rifle in his hands, he was still a threat.
Then the back door to the warehouse opened, and the rest of the Blackhearts poured out, weapons up and ready.
“Over the wall!” Flanagan hissed, still on a knee, his weapon pointed at the corner that the dead terrorist had rounded. He didn’t look back to see if anyone else was covering the opposite corner, but he trusted that the team was professional enough that somebody would have seen the gap and filled it.
He could see movement out of the corner of his eye, and heard his teammates scrambling up and over the brick wall that served as an outer fence around the yard. There were grunts and scrapes, and a few clattering sounds of weapons knocking against the bricks. But the firefight out front was doing a passable job of covering the noise they were making.
Gomez was gone, hauling Gogol with him, and then a voice hissed at him, “Joe! Let’s go!”
Without questioning, he got up and turned toward the wall. He saw that he and Brannigan were the only ones left. It was typical of the Colonel; he would make sure he was the last one out.
Brannigan threw himself into a crouch at the base of the wall, his back to the bricks and his hands cupped in front of him. Flanagan wanted to protest, but bit his tongue. Brannigan wouldn’t hear it, and it would only waste more time. They were going to have bad guys coming around the corner in the next few seconds. He put his boot in Brannigan’s hands and launched himself up to the top of the wall.
Flattening himself along the top, he reached a hand down, and Brannigan grabbed his wrist. He heaved, even as he dropped down the other side, between the wall and the trees, using his own weight to assist their big commander’s climb up the wall. Then he was letting go and dropping the last foot to the ground, bending his knees to absorb the shock and hoping the snow and ice didn’t send his feet slipping away beneath him.
Brannigan hit the ground next to him a second later, even as a shout and a burst of gunfire sounded from the other side of the wall. Their friends were coming fast.
“Go!” Brannigan hissed. The rest of the team was already across the alley, down in the trees, and moving back toward the north and the vans. Flanagan dashed for the treeline, Brannigan half a step behind him, their boots pounding on the slick surface of the alleyway.
He paused at the treeline and glanced back. There was movement at the top of the wall behind them; somebody was climbing over. He leveled the Uzi and ripped off a long burst, chipping splinters off the trees and bits of brick off the wall. There might have been a muffled yell, and the shape at the top of the wall disappeared. Then he was pounding after Brannigan again, wading through ankle-deep snow.
***
The sounds of the firefight had died down by the time they reached the vans, though the occasional rattle of gunfire still echoed through the night. This had to be the most excitement that Ribnitza had seen since 1992.
That wasn’t a good thing, and nobody had to say why. Curtis already had his van moving even as Brannigan piled in the back and pulled the door shut. “What the hell happened?” he asked. “Did Wade decide to start World War Three?”
“The Transnistrians crashed the party,” Brannigan said, his chest still heaving. “Get us clear of the city as fast as you can, Kevin. I have a feeling that this place is going to be locked down hard in the next couple of hours.”
“I ain’t the racecar driver,” Curtis said, “but Roger’s in th
e other van.”
“Just drive!” Flanagan snapped, reaching forward to grab the RPD from the front seat.
“Hey, that’s mine!” Curtis protested, looking down and then having to swerve hard to avoid crashing into a parked Lada.
“When you’re not driving, you can have it back,” Flanagan said. “We’re just gonna ditch the damned things when we get out of here, anyway. I don’t want to be trying to shoot at a truck full of trigger-happy conscripts with a 9mm.”
“Do you even know what to do with that?” Curtis asked over his shoulder, sounding even more incensed. “Being a machinegunner is an art, Joe, and you are not an artist.”
“Just shut up and drive, Kevin!” Flanagan snarled.
***
They had to turn back from hasty checkpoints going up on the roads out of the city twice, before finding a dirt road leading east into the woods in the lowlands that the Transnistrians hadn’t gotten to yet. Curtis almost tipped the van over taking the turn too fast, and was roundly cursed by the Blackhearts in the back.
“Hey, you want a smooth ride or a fast getaway?” he had answered. “Can’t have both.”
He slowed as they got into the trees, but Brannigan pointed forward. “Keep going. I don’t want to stop too close.”
“Where are we going?” Curtis asked.
“As far as we need to,” was the grim reply. “The Transnistrians and the Russians are going to be looking for us.”
“Just what the hell happened back there?” Curtis asked again. “Why are we on the target deck now?”
“We aren’t,” Childress said. “But Westerners sure will be, and I doubt the Russkis are going to care too much which band of armed Westerners they gun down.”
“They won’t,” Brannigan said. “Time’s running out.” He rubbed his chin. “Get us at least on the other side of Mihailovca Noua, then find a nice quiet patch of woods to pull over in. We need to have a chat with our friend Gogol.”
***
It turned out that the “chat” was already completed. “He opened up real quick when Wade and I started arguing about whether I should start cutting on him, or just let Wade shoot him in the guts,” Javakhishvili said with a ghoulish grin. “He got them a safehouse on a farm near Hrustovaya, just short of the Ukrainian border.”
“You’re sure he’s telling the truth?” Brannigan asked darkly. He didn’t think much of Javakhishvili’s methods of persuasion, and didn’t bother to make a secret of it. “Not just telling you what he thought you wanted to hear?”
“I’m sure, boss,” Javakhishvili said placatingly. “And neither one of us touched him. At least, not the way we were threatening to. He’s scared shitless. Trust me, I can tell. He’s sincere.”
Brannigan looked around at the weary, worn, chilled group under the bare-limbed trees. They still had about half the night left, and they hadn’t gotten much rest. But they had to risk it. “Mount up,” he said. “We’re heading north. Those who aren’t driving or riding shotgun, get some rest while you can. Let’s see if we can’t finish this tonight.”
Chapter 18
“You are sure?” Ignatiev asked.
The Russian Ryadovòy braced at attention in front of him didn’t know for sure who the man in the plain fatigues was, but knew that he had to answer his questions. That much his officers had made clear to him.
“Yes, sir,” the Ryadovòy replied. “There were definitely two groups. We didn’t see any of the second group, but the terrorists took fire from the other side of the wall as they were making their escape. We could hear it.”
Ignatiev looked at the man with narrowed eyes, unsure how much he could take at face value. The Russian peacekeepers had lost three men in the fight at the warehouse; minor compared to the loss of fifteen Transnistrian soldiers, but still the worst casualties these units had taken in a very, very long time. They were, perhaps, handling it better than most Western units would; the Russians, and therefore the Transnistrians, trained with the expectation of casualties, to the point that men often died in training accidents, if not in actual combat. But training and the reality of a firefight were two different things, and the adrenaline dump afterward made it hard to sort out what individual soldiers had and hadn’t seen.
“Very well, Ryadovòy,” he said. “You are dismissed.” The junior soldier clicked his heels together and saluted, then turned a sharp about-face and marched out of the room.
Ignatiev looked over at Lopatin, who was leaning against the wall in the small hotel room, smoking. “What do you think?” he asked.
The oily killer had watched the Ryadovòy leave the room, and his eyes were still trained on the door. “Does it matter?” he replied. “The mission was to stir up an incident in the PMR and make it look like the West was rekindling the war. That’s happened, even without us.”
“True enough,” Ignatiev allowed. “But something about this bothers me. I am certain now. There are definitely Western special operations troops in the PMR, and that is far, far too close to our territory.”
Lopatin smiled humorlessly. “It bothers you that the situation we were sent to engineer turned out to be real?” he asked, blowing a bluish cloud of smoke that wreathed his head in the chilly air.
“We were sent to engineer a provocation to justify a greater presence here,” Ignatiev said. “We find a Western secret operation. I think that, given our mandate from Moscow, I am going to alter our mission parameters.”
Lopatin’s eyes had a hungry gleam in them. “You are going to hunt these men?” he asked.
“They are enemies of the Russian Federation, conducting unsanctioned operations on the soil of a vital Russian ally,” Ignatiev replied smoothly. “It is within our mandate to aid our allies in ensuring their security. It is what we volunteered for in the first place, is it not?”
Lopatin’s grin was as human as a shark’s. “Of course, Mayòr,” he said. Ignatiev couldn’t help but grin a little back. Neither one of them cared all that much about Transnistrian security. Not when actually coming to grips with American special operations forces was on the table. “Orders?”
“We will have to find them first, and I doubt they are still inside the city,” Ignatiev said. “Our Transnistrian friends are combing every street for them.” He frowned down at the map spread on the kitchen table in front of him. “We will have to send teams out to conduct reconnaissance, with at least half the detachment held centrally to react quickly and move in on them when they are located.” He scratched his jaw. He needed to shave. “They will know that they are in danger, and will be all the more elusive and dangerous for it.” Though, they are Americantsi. Their arrogance might just work in our favor. No, we cannot simply rely on that. Approach the problem tactically and thoroughly.
Lopatin, however, had just nodded, shoving off the wall and starting toward the door. “I will get the recon teams ready,” he said.
Ignatiev just nodded, studying the map. Where are you?
***
“Stop here,” Brannigan said.
Curtis looked a little nonplused; they were in the middle of the fields, on a snowy hill, with Hrustovaya on the other side of the crest ahead of them. Curtis didn’t look confident that they’d be able to get the vans moving again if they stopped on that slope.
Neither was Brannigan, but he really didn’t want to risk rolling right into the enemy’s sentries, either.
“Everybody out,” he said. “That means you, too, Kevin,” he added, when the shorter man hesitated. “This is gonna be it; all hands on deck.”
“Fine,” Curtis said, shutting the engine off. He twisted around in his seat. “Gimme my damned machinegun back.”
Flanagan just mutely handed him the RPD, picking his Uzi up off the seat beside him. Curtis frowned a little, but took the light machinegun and checked it automatically. Then, before he could say anything, Flanagan was already out of the vehicle and standing in the snow.
Clouds had rolled in, so the field was a dim sort of gray, the amb
ient light of the towns and the night sky filtered and dimmed but not extinguished, thanks to the reflectiveness of the snow. The Blackhearts were vague figures of darkness and the same light gray, in their sodden bedsheet camouflage ponchos. The only one out of place was Gogol.
“You’re going to stick by Wade, who’s going to stick by me,” Brannigan told the gangster quietly. “If I give the word, Wade’s going to wring your scrawny neck. Ponimayesh?”
Gogol might have started a little, hearing the Russian word coming from the big American, but he nodded spasmodically, the bobbing motion clearly visible in the twilight. “Da,” he replied. He understood.
Brannigan looked back. The rest of the team was gathered in a loose perimeter around the vans, mostly down on a knee, weapons trained outboard, watching the hill in front of them and the valley behind. It wasn’t the best of places to halt, but there really weren’t any good options nearby; the only trees were close to houses, and Brannigan was banking on the night to disguise them from a distance. Getting too close to a house was going to get them compromised by noise alone.
“Two elements,” he said quietly. “Traveling overwatch; Childress, Flanagan, Gomez, and Jenkins in front, with the rest of us in trace. We’ll move up, get eyes on the objective and confirm that Gogol is, in fact, telling the truth, and our target is there. Once recon is completed, we’ll set support by fire and cordon positions, then hit the place. If we’re lucky, the Transnistrians took care of most of our opposition.” Even as he said it, he could have kicked himself. Never rely on luck, John. You know that.
I’m not relying on it. I’m hoping for it, while preparing for all of them to be in position. That’s what the recon’s for.
Gomez and Childress seemed to disagree a little on just who was going to take point, but Gomez pointed to his suppressed Uzi, and Childress nodded, clearly unhappy about it. Gomez had the quieter weapon. He’d go first.
