Frozen Conflict (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  Automatic fire suddenly blasted from up near the top of the draw, and Brannigan threw himself flat. After a moment, though, he could tell that it wasn’t aimed at them; it was going overhead and off to one side, toward the treeline behind them. Twisting his head to look up, he could just see what might have been the roof of one of the UAZ vans up above. Their ride was there, and somebody was laying down covering fire with one of the RPDs.

  “Get to the vans!” he bellowed. “Go!” He scrambled up, his boots slipping and sliding in the snow, then got his feet under him and surged forward. A second RPD joined the first, just before the first went silent.

  There were only a few dozen yards to go, though it was mostly uphill on snowy, frozen mud. Ahead, he saw Gogol slip and fall and Wade haul him up with a snarled curse.

  The second RPD fell silent, and then the first started up again. Only a few yards more. Then Brannigan was at the side of the vans, which had been pulled up on the side of the dirt road running between fields, partially obscured by the hedgerow paralleling it. Bianco had braced his RPD against a tree trunk, giving him a better angle to shoot downhill, and Javakhishvili had Curtis’ machinegun, only a few feet away, in a similar posture.

  Looking back, Brannigan could see the pursuit wasn’t following, at least not up the draw. Hancock and Santelli were right behind him. “Everybody in!” he panted. His lungs were aching from the cold. “Move it!”

  It took scant seconds for the Blackhearts to pile into the vans. Brannigan stepped up next to Bianco, pointed his AKM down the draw, and snarled, “Get in!” before dumping half the mag. As Bianco hauled his RPD up and turned toward the van, Brannigan ripped off the last of the magazine.

  A quick glance showed him that he was the last one out. Stripping the empty mag out, he ran to the lead van and jumped in through the side door, the vehicle rocking on its shocks as his weight hit it. Gomez hauled the door shut, and then Brannigan was almost thrown to the rear as Curtis threw the van in gear and gunned the engine, sending the UAZ surging away from the kill zone. A few sporadic bursts of fire cracked past, but none of it was close enough to hit, and then they were away from the draw and masked by the terrain.

  “Keep an eye out,” Brannigan wheezed as he rocked a fresh magazine into his AKM and yanked the charging handle back. “They’ll try to flank us, and if they didn’t have outriders out to block the roads, they’re dumber than I thought.”

  That last gave him a bit of a chill, the more he thought about it. As long as they were in the vans, they were more mobile, but they were also limited to the roads. Sooner or later, they were going to be trapped.

  ***

  Ignatiev took Borodin’s report calmly, his mind racing. He had the bodies he needed; even if they weren’t Americans—and the Kryptek camo they were wearing made it very likely that they were—the Kremlin could still spin the situation to their advantage. And he had the prisoner. But there were more out there, and he couldn’t just let them get away. Regardless of his success so far, if the last of the Western operatives escaped, he would pay the penalty for it. He’d still be seen as a failure, regardless of the propaganda value he’d already delivered.

  And Emil Yevgeniyevich Ignatiev would not accept that.

  He turned to his counterpart, a barrel-chested powerlifter named Kapitàn Gregoriy Kravchuk. “They will be trying to cross the river to the Moldovan side,” he said. “You need to tell the border checkpoints to shut down all crossings from here to Tiraspol.”

  “Already done,” Kravchuk replied. “The border checkpoints have been closed since yesterday, when this really started to get heated. Our friends are taking this intrusion very seriously.”

  Ignatiev nodded. “Good.” Moscow would, as well. He looked over at Lopatin. “Get the men back to the vehicles,” he said. “We need to get north and see if we can cut them off.” If they were cut off trying to get over the border into The Ukraine or across the river into Moldova, it would still be a successful mission. But he wanted to be in on the kill himself.

  ***

  They were getting closer to the river when Wade finally decided to take matters into his own hands.

  He’d been in a constant, fuming rage ever since Brannigan had put him in charge of Gogol. His anger wasn’t directed at Brannigan; he knew that he was probably the best man for the job, however much he hated it. He hated being shackled to the sniveling little gangster, and wished with all his heart that he could just put a bullet in him.

  John Wade had one of those rather contradictory personalities that one could often find in combat arms. He could be furious without being resentful, and simply use his frustration and rage to fuel himself when he was wet, cold, and bone-tired. But that rage still had to have a target. He knew that directing it at Brannigan was pointless and wrong, so he directed it at Gogol. If they hadn’t been double-crossed, he never would have had to babysit the gangster.

  He shifted in his seat, facing Gogol, who had been all but consumed in his own misery since he’d been thrown, none too gently, into the van. Gogol must have sensed that something had changed, because he lifted his head, his dark eyes meeting Wade’s icy blues.

  Gogol shrank back a little bit. There was no pity in Wade’s stare. No friendliness. It was the look of a man contemplating the sudden and violent demise of the creature he was staring at.

  “You and I both know that the border crossings are going to be shut down after all this commotion,” Wade said softly, his calm voice only emphasizing the threat that was written all over his face. “But I’m sure that’s happened before. I’m equally sure that you and your people have ways of getting across the river that don’t involve having to bribe the border guards.”

  Gogol must have been really miserable. He just stared dumbly at Wade for a long moment, his eyes blank. Then he started to shake his head, weakly.

  “This isn’t a negotiation, Gogol,” Wade said, his voice getting even softer. “Either you show us where the boats, or whatever you use to get across, are, or I crush your trachea and watch you strangle to death right here.” He smiled, and it was a shark’s expression. “Clock’s ticking.”

  Gogol gulped, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing even though he had his head tucked as far into his soaked greatcoat as possible. His eyes shifted around the van, but none of the other mercenaries were even looking at him. In fact, they seemed to be pointedly looking away, letting Wade do his thing.

  Only when Wade started to move did he flinch back violently, compressing himself into the corner between seat and window. “Boats!” he shrilled. “There are boats! We keep them in several places along river!”

  “Where’s the nearest one?” Wade asked.

  “I…I don’t,” Gogol started, but Wade cocked a fist, and he thought better of his denial. “Is dock, south of Cuzmin!” he said, holding his hands up to try to fend off the blow. “But it might be iced over.”

  “We’ll see,” Wade said. He looked toward the front of the van. “Hey, Vinnie, you hear that?”

  “Got it,” Bianco replied. He lifted his radio to his lips to send the word to Brannigan, in the other van.

  Wade looked at Gogol. “Congratulations. You bought yourself a little more time.”

  He knew that Brannigan wasn’t going to let him just wring the little bastard’s neck. Brannigan was upstanding like that. He’d find a way, though. Just give me an excuse, you sniveling little fuck.

  ***

  They got another three kilometers before Brannigan decided they needed to ditch the vans. They’d caught glimpses of what might have been patrols on the roads nearby, and it was only a matter of time before they hit a roadblock.

  Childress had stopped breathing twice on the way out of Hrustovaya, but Javakhishvili got him started again each time. He was fighting, but he was in bad shape. Brannigan kept looking back at him, and when they stopped, he was the first one to carry him, carefully slinging the younger man over his shoulders and slipping as quietly as he could into the trees.

&
nbsp; They didn’t see any more patrols as they ghosted through the woods to the east of Cuzmin, trading off carrying Childress. They had to pause every few hundred yards to make sure their teammate was still alive and not bleeding to death. But his condition wasn’t getting any better. He was visibly weakening, and Javakhishvili had to decompress his chest again two more times before they reached the river.

  There were, in fact, two fishing boats right where Gogol had said they were. They had even been pulled up onto the bank, so they weren’t frozen into the ten feet or so of ice that lined the banks of the river. They were still frozen to the ground, but it was easier to break the keels free from the frost on the ground than to get them out of ice that would have been ringing their hulls otherwise.

  It was brutal work getting the boats out onto the water; the ice was too thin to support a man’s weight past the first couple of yards, so they had to get the boats in, get everyone aboard, and then push through the cracking ice with the oars. It was still mid-afternoon, and they had to keep security up, Jenkins, Gomez, Curtis, and Bianco anxiously watching the treeline over the sights of their weapons as they pushed sluggishly out into the current.

  The river wasn’t fast moving at that spot, but it still moved them a couple hundred yards downstream before they had to repeat the process of getting through the ice on the Moldovan bank. Brannigan ended up through the ice up to his waist, with Childress on his shoulders, getting back up onto the riverbank.

  “We need to find some shelter and go static for the night,” he said, shivering violently. If they didn’t do something quickly, he was going to hype out, and then he’d be in as much trouble as Childress. “Ditch the rifles and the machineguns in the river, along with the chest rigs and the ponchos. We’re just tourists from this point on.” Except for Childress. That problem was still nagging at him. There was also the slight matter of what to do with Gogol.

  All of that would have to wait until after they were warmed up and Childress was stabilized.

  “Not sure that’s such a good idea, boss man,” Hancock said quietly, his eyes still on the Transnistrian side. “Especially not if we’re going to be holding security on Sam this close to the other side. We need more than a couple of pistols and a couple dozen rounds of 7.62x25.”

  “Let’s keep the Uzis and a couple of the Vz.58s,” Santelli suggested. “We can disguise them well enough until we get farther away.”

  “Fine, do it,” Brannigan said, trying to suppress the shaking that was getting downright painful. He couldn’t feel his toes. “Let’s get the hell out of this field.”

  ***

  Ignatiev stood at the bank, staring across the Dniester. His face was a blank mask, but his mind was spinning. The report had been clear enough. Twelve men, including one who appeared to have been badly wounded, had gotten across the river, using fishing boats. Closing the border had failed. They’d found another way.

  He could already hear the whispers, already see the report that praised his success at capitalizing on the opportunity posed by the Western intrusion into Transnistria while simultaneously damning him for losing the last of the intruders. He might not be demoted, but his career as a field officer would be over. He’d be relegated to a minor desk in the GRU, there to rot until he retired, probably in worse shape than Beksryostnov.

  He was too stoic, too Russian a man to snarl. He simply turned. “I need volunteers,” he said. “A small intrusion team to cross the river tonight. The Amerikantsi think they are safe on the other side, among the Romanians. We will disabuse them of that idea.”

  In the end, he got ten men. More than enough.

  ***

  Jenkins was tired and cold. He couldn’t remember ever being this cold, not since BUD/S, and that had been a different kind of cold. Coronado had never threatened to freeze digits off.

  He looked down at the suppressed Uzi laid across his knees as he tried not to shiver and wish for a fire. You were a SEAL. Cold ain’t shit to you.

  He forced his eyes away from the silhouette of the Israeli submachinegun to scan the field outside the barn again. He knew what the others thought about him. He didn’t dare get lax. Some of that was simply trying to prove himself, even while he felt that he shouldn’t have to. Some of it was simply upholding the reputation of the SEALs.

  Movement caught his eye and abruptly broke his reverie. Something, or someone, had just moved between the trees, not far from the barn. That was on the east side. The side facing the open fields and the river. Back the way they’d come.

  He checked his watch. No, it was still the middle of the night. Still too early to be a farmer, especially in this cold. And he was pretty sure it wasn’t a cow, either.

  There it was. And it was definitely a human silhouette, that time. A human silhouette moving carefully and stealthily, slipping from tree to tree.

  Oh, shit. They came after us. They must have followed the tracks in the snow. They’d tried to brush them out, but there was only so far that was going to work, and against a committed tracker, it wasn’t going to work at all.

  He nudged Gomez with his boot, where the other man was sleeping against the wall beside him.

  “What is it?” Gomez whispered. He didn’t even sound groggy. Damn, he must be a light sleeper. If he was even sleeping at all.

  “Company,” he said, pointing. Gomez sat up, twisting around to peer out of the hole in the barn wall that Jenkins was using as a loophole.

  Gomez didn’t cuss, didn’t say much of anything. He just rolled to his feet and went to rouse Brannigan.

  Brannigan was just as quiet as he came to join Jenkins, the PL-15 in his big hands. Jenkins had forgotten they’d even had that. Gomez was quietly rousing the rest of them.

  “Damn,” Brannigan whispered, as he watched the line of men come out of the trees, rifles in hand, cautiously approaching the barn. They were spreading out, moving like they were going to throw a cordon around the barn. “Good thing Roger talked me out of ditching everything.” He looked around. The rest of the Blackhearts were up, the pistols, the other Uzi, and the two Vz.58s held ready. “There’s only one way into this barn, so let’s make it count. And gents? We ain’t gonna have another chance at this, so hit what you aim at and shoot fast.”

  Without another word, the Blackhearts faded into the shadows around the barn, weapons aimed in at the doors. Jenkins moved away from the hole in the wall to find his own spot. There wasn’t exactly much in the way of cover; they’d have to get low and get in the first shots. With a faint rustle, Javakhishvili dragged Childress into a corner, trying to keep him out of the line of fire.

  Then they waited.

  Footsteps crunched faintly outside. A whispered voice said something in Russian. Then the door was yanked open, and a figure appeared, silhouetted against the snow outside, rifle leveled. He fired a two-round burst as soon as he cleared the door, the bullets smacking into the wall about three feet above Jenkins’ head.

  With a snap-hiss, a three-round burst from Flanagan’s Uzi cut him down. Then the door was full of bodies, and the Blackhearts were pouring fire into it. They had the advantage of shooting from dark to light, and the contrast was perfect.

  Muzzle flashes flickered in the dark and unsuppressed 7.62x39 rifle fire roared over the lighter pops of pistol shots and the snap-hiss of the suppressed Uzis. The Russians couldn’t see what they were shooting at. The Blackhearts could. In seconds, the shooting had fallen silent. The doorway was heaped with corpses.

  More footsteps crunched outside; someone was running toward the door. Jenkins saw Flanagan move up and lean against the front wall. His Uzi spat, and a body hit the ground outside.

  Then everything went quiet, and they waited, each man mentally counting how many rounds they had left. It wasn’t much. They’d barely be able to deal with a second rush, if it came.

  But it didn’t come. If there were any other Russians outside, they were biding their time, provided they hadn’t beat feet.

  “Who’s got the sub
guns?” Hancock whispered.

  “Here,” Flanagan replied.

  “I’ve got one,” Jenkins said.

  “Sweep the outside,” Hancock said. “The rest of us will get ready to move. We need to get clear before more show up.” His voice turned wry. “Apparently, the Russians don’t care about that line of demarcation as much as we hoped they would.”

  Jenkins got up and padded forward, joining Flanagan at the door. They paused a moment, then went out in opposite directions, splitting up to cover the full one hundred eighty degrees in front of the barn doors.

  No targets. The dead Russian was lying on his face a few feet in front of Flanagan, unmoving. He was briefly tempted to put another bullet in the man’s head, just to be sure, but if he was playing possum, he’d have to come up to breathe pretty soon. He was sure the man was dead.

  A look around the corner was equally clear. Flanagan had turned to join him; trying to take opposite routes around the barn would be to risk friendly fire.

  By the time they’d made a full circuit without encountering any more of the enemy, the rest were ready to move. Childress was unconscious, but he was still breathing.

  “Find us a vehicle,” Brannigan told Gomez. “There’s got to be a farm truck around here somewhere.” He turned to Gogol. “You do one more thing, and you get to go free,” he said. “I’m sure that you people have resources on this side of the river, too. Find us a safehouse where we can hole up until we can arrange for transportation, and we part ways when we leave. Screw us, and even if we’re going down, I’ll let Wade have you.”

  Gogol didn’t have any resistance left. He just nodded.

  With Gomez in the lead, they left the barn, heading deeper into the village.

  Behind them, Mayòr Emil Ignatiev stared sightlessly up at the dark, cloudy sky. His eyeballs would be frozen by morning.

  Epilogue