by Peter Nealen
“Well, this is gonna complicate matters,” he muttered. The line was still a good three hundred meters away, which was just about as far as they could see in the dark, even with the lightness of the snow and the clouds alleviating some of the gloom. But their quarry was somewhere down that way, and he didn’t want Codreanu falling into the Russians’ hands any more than he wanted the unknown shooters to get him. They needed the information in the man’s head.
“Stick to the trees and the shadows and keep moving, slowly,” he whispered to Gomez. “We’ve got to hope that our friends are holed up and get bypassed.” It galled him to wish for the enemy to have any success at all, but at that point, mission failure for them also meant mission failure for the Blackhearts.
Gomez didn’t say anything, or even nod, that Brannigan could see. He just got up from his kneeling position and glided forward, resuming his advance. Flanagan was a few paces behind him.
They’d gotten about a dozen yards when all hell broke loose again.
***
The soldiers had cleared the other house and were working their way through the line of trees between the two small farms. They were running out of time and space. In the next few minutes, the broken door was going to be kicked in again, and there was no way they’d be able to hold the room for long. Redrum knew something about Russian room-clearing techniques. They’d all be dead pretty quick, no matter how many they took with them.
Flint, of course, didn’t bother to talk over the plan. He just went to the window, shoved Lezàrd aside, and carefully eased it open. The glass wasn’t exactly high quality, and the distortions were going to make aiming through it difficult.
Resting his barrel on the sash, Flint clicked the selector to semi-auto and opened fire.
Bright flame pulsed from the M21’s muzzle, blanking out Redrum’s view out the window, but Flint was shooting on semi-auto, and he knew that as chaotic and vicious as the man was, Flint could shoot. He had little doubt that a Russian was dropping with every hit. Or two; most of the contractors working for the Board were of the “if it’s worth shooting, it’s worth shooting five or six times” school of thought.
There weren’t any other windows on that side of the house, so Redrum moved to the door, cracking it open as wide as he could without opening it all the way, and stuck his own rifle out. He couldn’t see any targets at first… He paused. There. The M21’s sights were less than ideal for night shooting, but the snow made for decent enough contrast against the front sight post. He let out a breath and squeezed off a shot. The dim silhouette stepping out of the treeline at the edge of the old man’s field dropped out of sight.
Then Lezàrd stepped up behind him and ripped off a long burst on full automatic above his head. He flinched back from the noise, the muzzle blast, and the falling brass, but Lezàrd knew what he was doing. He dragged his muzzle down the treeline, sending dark figures scrambling for cover. Realizing that the Frog had it right, Redrum followed suit, driving the advancing soldiers back.
“We can’t stay here!” he yelled at Flint.
“No shit!” was the reply. “We’re gonna run out of ammo before we can kill ‘em all!”
“We can break out to the west,” Redrum said, after dragging another burst across the treeline, just to give the enemy soldiers something to think about. “They don’t have us blocked off from there, yet.” The way to the fields was still clear; the line of enemy troops hadn’t managed to get out of the trees, and the more that he and Lezàrd kept fire on them, the less likely they were going to flank the house that way.
Flint fired another rapid, hammering fusillade of shots out the window before he ducked back down and reloaded. “Fuck!” he snarled. “Fine, we’ll go that way. You two take the package and make a break for those trees; I’ll cover for you.” He looked at Redrum, his expression obscure in the darkness but his stare obvious despite that fact. “If you just keep running and don’t stop to cover me, I swear I’m going to find a way out and then I’ll find both of you and skin you alive.” From the tone of his voice, he wasn’t joking, either. And knowing Flint as he did, Redrum had no doubt that he’d flay a man alive out of spite.
He’d take his time at it, too.
Redrum glanced at Lezàrd, who was reloading his own M21. “Grab Codreanu,” he said. “I’ll lead out, you bring him after. We’ll get to the trees and set in to cover Flint.”
Lezàrd just nodded wordlessly, moving back from the door to collar the arms dealer, who was huddled in a corner, away from the shooters as well as the old man and his wife, coughing and wheezing. There was an alarming rattle in his lungs. Rather, it would be alarming, if Redrum had any intention of keeping him alive any longer than necessary.
Why the hell are we still carting this fat bastard around?
“Get fucking moving!” Flint barked, as he reared up to the window again and opened fire. Redrum stuck his muzzle out of the gap in the door, dumped half a magazine on automatic at the treeline, then yanked the splintered door all the way open and lunged outside.
He hadn’t realized just how much warmer it had been inside the house until he hit the cold air again. It was getting on toward morning, which was the coldest part of the night, and the chill threatened to snatch the breath from his lungs. He pushed through it, sprinting toward the dark line of trees at the far side of the old man’s tiny field. Snow crunched and slipped beneath his boots, threatening to send him tumbling to the ground, but he dug in and ran, his head down.
Flint’s covering fire from the house paused just a moment, and two shots barked from inside the house, more muted than the earlier gunfire, just before Flint opened up on the treeline again. Redrum didn’t have to wonder just what had happened.
Flint had just murdered the old man and the old woman. Under the circumstances, Redrum couldn’t dredge up any particular moral outrage. The farmer and his wife wouldn’t be able to tell the Russians or Transnistrians anything about their uninvited guests after this was over.
He hit a hummock in the ground wrong and went sprawling on his face in the snow. It was a blessing in disguise, though, as bullets snapped by overhead, passing right through where he would have been. He rolled to one side and returned fire blindly, blasting away at the muzzle flashes in the treeline, even as Lezàrd ran past him, pushing a stumbling, wheezing Codreanu. The incoming fire slackened, as Flint shifted his own fire to join Redrum’s, and Redrum started to scramble to his feet. If he stayed there on the ground, he was dead, and he knew it.
The trees were only about ten yards away. His head down, he dug deep and all but dove into the cover of the trees, more 7.62 rounds clipping bark off the trunks and raining bits of shattered branches down on his head.
***
The noise of the firefight was only intensifying, but Brannigan kept them moving through the trees toward it. At the very least, he wanted to get eyes on and make sure that they couldn’t get to Codreanu.
There was a burning, seething rage simmering behind Brannigan’s otherwise calm face, stiff with cold. They’d come too far and sacrificed too much to go home empty-handed now. He’d lost Aziz and Tanaka in Mexico, and Childress might well die before they could get out of Transnistria. The odds were not in their favor, but he’d be damned if he didn’t take every chance to accomplish the mission, and hopefully make those deaths count.
He realized that he was making the mission personal, but that had always been a fine line with him, long before he’d become a mercenary. If he wasn’t committed to the mission, how could he expect his men to potentially sacrifice their lives for it? It took a particularly self-absorbed, sociopathic personality to send men to die simply for points, as it were. He’d had to force himself to find the just cause in more than one mission while he’d been on Active Duty, but he’d usually found it, if only in the need to keep other Marines alive. Survival can be a just cause all on its own.
But this was something different. These terrorists, and the arms dealer they were trying to spirit away, w
ere responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people, and the deaths of at least two of his own. Their very existence offended him clear to his soul. He’d seen enough on the Tourmaline-Delta platform to know that whoever was pulling the strings, their operatives were cold-blooded, sociopathic killers. Killers using the training they’d gotten from men like him for evil. They had to be put down. And Codreanu was the key.
Gomez stopped and dropped to the ground. Brannigan quickly followed suit, as bullets started crackling through the air above them. It was clear enough that the fire wasn’t directed at the Blackhearts; it was too far off, most of it going over the field to their right, and he was confident enough that they were all but invisible in the treeline. Dawn wasn’t far off, but it was still plenty dark enough to disguise their movement.
So, what are they shooting at?
***
Flanagan had dropped to his belly at the same time Gomez had. That gunfire was way too close for comfort. But after a moment, he could tell that it was still wide enough from their position that they couldn’t be the target.
He started to crawl forward, staying low but advancing. He inched forward on his elbows, his Uzi held in both hands, so that he could snap it into his shoulder and engage if he needed to.
More gunfire rattled out in the field, and he craned his neck to try to see. There were too many trees to see clearly, but he could just make out movement and muzzle flashes in the open. Someone was running across the field and shooting back toward the treeline to the south.
He had a sudden hunch that he knew just who was who. The shooters in the treeline had to be the Transnistrians. And that meant that the dim figures running toward the trees only a few dozen yards ahead of him had to be the terrorists.
Rising to his knees, he got behind a tree and peered out over the Uzi’s sights. The trees were thick enough that he couldn’t see clearly for more than a couple dozen yards, and even then, a human figure would be quickly obscured; he’d only get the briefest of shots in the dark.
But Joe Flanagan had been a hunter all his life. He’d only need the briefest of sight pictures.
He was aware on a level that he only reached in this moment. Gomez was creeping up on his flank, and Brannigan was moving his bulk with deceptive quiet on the other side. He could even tell generally where Jenkins, Hancock, and Santelli were, even though he couldn’t hear or see them. Some of it was simply knowing the men, knowing generally where they’d be in the formation. Some of it was a weird sort of “combat sixth sense” that he’d never really understood. He didn’t really have any control over it. It just happened. He’d talked to Hancock about it, once upon a time. The other man had just nodded knowingly.
There was commotion and crunching branches in the trees ahead of him. He let his breath out, lifting the suppressed Uzi. Without looking, he knew Gomez was doing the same.
A white figure was momentarily silhouetted against the dark boles of the trees. Flanagan’s finger tightened on the trigger, and the Uzi hissed and snapped. The figure staggered, then dropped.
More gunfire roared out of the night, chipping bark and splinters off the trees. It wasn’t aimed; it was a full-auto, panicked mag dump. One of the winter-camo-clad shooters had seen the other drop and was blasting covering fire in response.
He started to move around the trunk of the tree, trying to get a shot. He could barely hear the hiss and snap of Gomez’ Uzi, at the same time Brannigan’s AKM and Jenkins’ Vz.58 split the predawn twilight with stabs of flame and rattling roars.
There was still plenty of fire coming from the southern treeline, and more from the farmhouse in reply. But whoever was up ahead had stopped shooting. And, barely audible over all the other noise, he could hear a pained moaning coming from only a few yards away.
Keeping low, his Uzi up and ready, Flanagan advanced toward the kill zone.
Chapter 22
Flint heard Redrum or Lezàrd open fire from the trees and got ready to move. Ducking away from the window, he duck-walked to the open door, momentarily cursing the idiots who’d left it open, giving the enemy a wide-open avenue to come in and shoot him in the back. Shit-for-brains must have forgotten about the militia behind us. Morons. He’d make sure they paid for the oversight later.
But he’d barely gotten to the door when Redrum’s fire fell silent.
He paused near the doorway. Without covering fire, with the Transnistrians right there, only a couple dozen yards away, there was no way he was going to make it across the field without getting shot.
You’re a fucking dead man, Redrum. I’m going to nail your feet to a rafter and start at the ankles.
But first he had to get out alive. He looked frantically around the house as an eerie quiet fell over the farm. The Transnistrians didn’t have any targets anymore, and had slowly ceased fire. Which told him that they were going to be advancing to clear the house any minute. He knew that if he was at all upright or even visible when they did, he was dead.
The farmhouse was small, and the farmer had clearly been dirt poor. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to fit in the woodbox.
There was only one option left. Heaving the farmer’s body to one side, he took a deep breath, sucked in his stomach as much as possible, and started wriggling under the bedstead. There wasn’t much room, and it wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny as a hiding place, but he got himself under, his head turned to one side, just barely able to reach out far enough to pull the old man’s corpse in close to partially cover him. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be noticed in the dark.
***
Flanagan advanced as slowly and cautiously as he dared. He could see movement through the trees, dark figures moving out of the treeline to the south and converging on the farmhouse. They didn’t have a lot of time.
He came across the man he’d shot first. Dressed in white with some mottled, scaly gray pattern camouflage, he’d taken the burst in the side, the 9mm rounds stitching up his ribs and into his armpit. The last two had probably done a number on his heart and lungs. He wasn’t moving, and he didn’t react when Flanagan prodded his eyeball with the Uzi’s suppressor, already chilled down by the winter temperatures to an icy cold.
Gomez grunted. He was standing over another camo-clad body, dark stains covering a good part of the dead man’s upper torso. There was an equally dark splash on the snow beside him; he’d taken at least one round to the head, emptying out most of his skull as he’d fallen.
The fat, balding man in soaked, tattered, bloody civilian clothes was still alive.
Eugen Codreanu had been a kingpin, probably the richest man in Transnistria at the moment, able to hire whoever he wanted and even able to buy and sell diesel-powered attack submarines on the black market. He’d had money and influence and connections. But now he’d been tortured, he was probably developing pneumonia, judging by the noises he was making, and he’d clearly been shot at least once.
He was crawling on his belly in the snow, his movements increasingly frantic, kicking up a lot more snow than he was making progress. And the long, dark stain he was leaving behind him, blood soaking into and melting the snow underneath his body, went a long way toward explaining why.
Brannigan strode past Flanagan and crouched over Codreanu. Gomez pushed past both of them to take up security to the south. Flanagan followed suit.
Behind him, more voices were raised, speaking Russian, and flashlights flickered through the trees. The militia was coming, now that the worst of the shooting had died down. The noose was tightening, and they had bare minutes to get out of it. But there was one small bit of business to take care of, first.
***
Brannigan loomed over Codreanu, who didn’t seem to notice him but just kept trying to crawl. Crouching down, he grabbed the arms dealer by the arm and flipped him over with a heave.
Codreanu wheezed and coughed and whimpered as Brannigan grabbed him by the throat, easily fending off his weakening attempts to push h
im away.
“Listen to me,” he said coldly. “I know you speak English.” That much had been in the dossier that Dalca had provided. “You ain’t got long, either, so I suggest you don’t try to play games with me.” He leaned in, knowing that all the arms dealer was going to see was the dark shadow of a man filling his vision. “I’ve got one question. Who did you sell the Russian submarine to?”
Codreanu coughed, the sound wet and gurgling. Brannigan wasn’t sure where he’d been hit, and right at that moment, didn’t much care. Codreanu was dying, and even if he’d wanted to, there was no way they could save his life, not at that point, under those circumstances. He forced himself to stare down at the man below him, suppressing the urge to look up and check how close their adversaries were.
“Please,” Codreanu wheezed. But Brannigan just shook him like a terrier shaking a rat.
“Give me a name,” he snarled. “Who did you get the sub for?”
Codreanu moaned and started coughing again. He was going to bring the whole Transnistrian Army right to them. “Listen, you piece of shit,” Brannigan growled. “I didn’t come this far for nothing. Tell me what I want to know, and at least face your Maker as something besides a complete dirtbag.” He had no idea if the appeal would work; the odds of Codreanu fearing God enough to confess were pretty long.
Don’t you shuffle off and die without telling me, you worthless bastard! Brannigan clenched his hands around the man’s shoulders. “Talk, dammit!”
The Transnistrians were getting closer. They were going to be discovered in the next few minutes. Codreanu wheezed and coughed and moaned. A voice called out a query in Russian, far too close.
Codreanu was whispering weakly, his breath rattling in his throat. Brannigan leaned in closer, knowing it might be a ruse, ready to push back and shoot the arms dealer if he tried to bite or stab him.
