“I’m good, man. I’m good,” Seva insisted.
He was far from good. The operative was fading fast, suffering from a severe concussion and possibly a cerebral blood clot. He needed to be strapped into the bench across from Sasha, receiving intravenous saline, but they had neither the saline nor the luxury of retiring his gun until they reached the extraction point.
“Hang in there, brother. Less than an hour to go,” Gosha said, slapping him on the shoulder.
He lifted the rifle back into position and scanned the deep purple image, sweeping left to right along the perceived level of the horizon. The Tiger hit something in the road, slamming the scope into his eye socket and dazing him momentarily. The road smoothed out again, and he got the sensation that they were climbing a gentle hill. He put the scope to his face, afraid of taking another mind-numbing punch to the head and prayed the hill’s elevation would give him the view he needed. Nothing appeared for several seconds as he anticipated the Tiger’s next jolt. Suddenly, he saw the entire formation. Three unmistakable vehicle heat signatures and a dozen smaller yellow specks surrounding them.
“Contact confirmed. Three vehicles. One Tiger on each side of the road. Utility truck behind the Tiger on the right. Marking targets,” he said, moving forward in the hatch to a position next to the grenade launcher.
He activated the AN/PQS-23 Micro-Laser Rangefinder (MLRF) and triggered the narrow beam, centering the thermal scope’s crosshairs on the rightmost Tiger. The laser was invisible to his thermal scope, but would appear as a crisp, bright line to his team’s night vision goggles, leading directly to the hostile vehicles. Unfortunately, the Russians would see the same laser and know that their blockade had been spotted.
“Got them. Three vehicles,” Farrington said.
“Same here. Give me the first target,” Seva said, suddenly flush with energy.
“Range to right Tiger?” Farrington said.
“Hold on,” he said, fumbling with the MLRF’s rubberized buttons.
The green LED readout on the back of the MLRF gave him a distance of 1700 meters, but he wasn’t sure the laser had been centered on the Tiger, since he couldn’t see the laser in his scope.
“Confirm that my laser is on target. On three, two, mark,” he said.
“On target!” Farrington and Seva yelled simultaneously.
“Sixteen hundred meters!” Gosha said.
“Mark the right Tiger for Seva and watch your rangefinder. Our first salvo goes out at 1000 meters. I need to know the instant they start shooting,” Farrington said.
“Copy that,” Gosha said. “You ready, my friend?” he said, nudging Seva.
“As long as you don’t nudge me while I’m firing,” he replied, sounding much like the smart-ass Seva he knew.
***
Lieutenant Mikhail Greshev lowered his rifle in utter disbelief. Standing on the hood of his Tiger, he had been watching the vehicle’s approach through the night vision scope on his rifle for over a minute. The vehicle had disappeared behind a hill for several seconds, and when it reappeared, a bright green laser connected his vehicle with the oncoming Tiger.
“They’re marking us, sir!” said the sergeant manning the automatic grenade launcher.
“I can see that,” he grunted, jumping down onto the hard ground.
“Do they have air support?” his platoon sergeant said from the window of the Tiger.
“Nothing was reported. They’re probably ranging us,” Greshev said. “Radio!” he said, fuming that his radioman had suddenly gone missing.
A soldier trotted up to him from the darkness and pushed a radio handset into his shoulder.
“Intrasquad net,” Greshev said, swiping the handset.
“Yes, sir.”
“Master Sergeant, make sure he’s sighted in on the 700 meter mark. Fire on my command only,” he said, sending the same command over the radio to the other Tiger. “Battalion command net,” he ordered.
“Right away, sir,” his radioman said.
He was in the middle of reporting contact with the suspected terrorist cell when one of the soldiers across the street started screaming, “They’re shooting at us!” He raised his rifle and stared through the scope, watching in horror as the grenade launcher on the approaching Tiger flashed bright green several times.
“Incoming!” the gunner screamed behind him, scattering everyone standing near the Tiger.
He did the math in his head, like he had been trained to do. The incoming fire would be inaccurate and likely ineffective at first, but the hostile force could rain grenades down on him for another fifteen seconds before his first grenades arched skyward. The terrorists had started firing well outside of the 700 meter marker. Even an ineffective barrage could cause mayhem throughout the platoon, disrupting his carefully laid plan. All of this information collided inside a brain well aware that an unknown number of 30mm high-explosive projectiles were a few seconds away from possibly landing on top of him. Suddenly confronted with conflicting information, under threat of annihilation, he did what any newly minted officer might do in a similar situation. He panicked and tried to make a last-second adjustment to a plan that would have served him well.
“Gunners, add 200 meters and fire! Add 200 meters! Fire!”
He searched for his radioman, but couldn’t make anything out in the darkness. He had been using the night vision scope on his rifle so frequently throughout the night that he had practically forgotten about the night vision goggles attached to his helmet. He took off running for the road, screaming his orders to the second Tiger and colliding with one of his own soldiers. Knocked off his feet, he regained his footing just as both of his own Tigers started lobbing grenades down the road.
He crouched in place on the side of the road and waited for the hostile rounds to land in his position, showering the black sky with glistening body parts and glowing metal fragments. Instead, the first salvo of projectiles from the inbound Tiger struck 100 meters short of their position. By the time the deep, rhythmic thumping of multiple high-explosive impacts reached him, he realized what he had done. He had effectively killed his platoon.
***
“Enemy rounds out! 900 meters to target,” Gosha screamed, keeping the laser centered on the rightmost Tiger.
“Reloading!” Seva yelled.
The AGS-30 was fed by a detachable drum that held twenty-nine grenades. With a rate of fire exceeding 400 rounds per minute, the weapon was good for four to five sustained bursts before reloading. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a spare operative to help with the procedure.
He felt the Tiger lurch forward on the road as Seva disappeared, straining at its top speed of 90 miles per hour along the improvised road. His rifle bounced everywhere as the speeding Tiger jarred him against the hatch, rendering his efforts useless.
“Help Seva reload! I need that gun back up in twenty seconds!” Farrington said.
Gosha slung his rifle and swiveled the launcher ninety degrees to the right to facilitate reloading. Twenty seconds was a tall order for a crew that had just practiced loading and reloading this system for the first time an hour and a half ago on an even road. He detached the empty drum and tossed it over the back of the Tiger, catching multiple flashes in his peripheral vision. He turned his head over his shoulder, watching in awe for a brief second as several dozen bursts of white light, surrounded by brilliant orange sparks, decorated the road behind them.
“Multiple impacts. 100 meters behind us,” Gosha said, grabbing the ammunition drum handed to him from inside the Tiger.
Now he understood what Farrington had done. He had lured them into overshooting somehow and very likely emptying their ammunition drums. At 90 miles per hour, their Tiger would reach the convoy in less than thirty seconds, which might not give the Russians enough time to put their grenade launchers back into action. His team’s biggest concern from this point forward would be vehicle-mounted machine guns and small arms fire, which was no small threat to their lightly ar
mored vehicle. Fortunately, they would have twenty-nine rounds of 30mm ammunition to even the odds. He attached the drum and secured it tightly, stepping to the right to put his laser back into action. Seva finished the job, pulling back on the charging handle and searching for the rightmost Tiger through the 2.7X sight attached to the AGS-30.
Green tracers raced past them, snapping closely overhead and bouncing off the ground in front of them.
“300 meters!”
He winced as a tracer bounced off the grenade launcher mount, sizzling the air between their heads. Unfazed by the close call, Seva put the AGS-30 back into action, concentrating the 30mm maelstrom on the two heavily armed vehicles. Through the thermal scope, Gosha saw several yellow blossoms envelop the rightmost Tiger, which was immediately followed by a similar digital light show on the left side of the road. His entire scope image suddenly turned bright white, causing him to lower the rifle. A massive fireball rose in front of them, indicating that one of the Russian vehicles had been destroyed by a secondary explosion. The AGS-30 coughed several more rounds and fell silent amidst the chaos of inbound tracers, supersonic cracks and the sound of bullets striking metal.
“Switching to rifle!” Seva yelled, indicating that the launcher’s drum was empty.
Gosha ejected the spent magazine in his rifle and reloaded another from one of the pouches on his vest, firing at the bright flashes seen through his fuzzy thermal sight, keeping only his shoulders and head exposed through the hatch. Seva took the same position on the right side of the Tiger, and they both fired furiously at the quickly approaching cluster of soldiers on the ground.
***
Lieutenant Greshev hugged the ground, flattened by the explosion of the Tiger and simply afraid to stand up. From his position on the side of the road, he could see the darkened hull of a Tiger speeding directly for him. In less than a minute, his platoon had been destroyed because of his error, and now he lay behind the bullet-riddled body of the soldier he had knocked down running blindly through the dark. A series of small explosions ripped through a small knot of brave soldiers trying desperately to put one of the platoon’s light machine guns back into action. He could see all of this now through the night vision goggles that he had forgotten about earlier. He could also see that nothing moved in his command vehicle, which had been obliterated seconds earlier by the same weapon that just killed the few surviving members of his platoon. He couldn’t imagine any of the soldiers near the light machine gun surviving the simultaneous detonation of several high-explosive grenades in their midst.
As the Tiger raced toward him, he made a split-second decision to atone for his failure and bring honor back to the platoon. He tensed his body and made sure that the safety on his AK-74 was not engaged. When the Tiger reached a point less than thirty meters away, he jumped to his feet and fired his rifle from the hip in the general direction of the speeding vehicle beside him. His lifeless body hit the ground without knowing what he had accomplished.
***
Using his rifle’s angled tritium sights, Gosha fired a hasty burst at a soldier superimposed against the flames of the burning vehicle. Before he could assess the effects of the burst, a hammer-like impact dropped him through the hatch into the rear compartment. Seva’s body followed him through the hatch, landing directly on top of him and dislocating his right shoulder, which had been pinned underneath him by the fall. The pain in his shoulder flared so intensely that he momentarily lost track of the fact that something had knocked him off his feet. He lay there for a second, unable to process what had happened, until the Tiger jolted, tearing at his dislocated shoulder.
“Motherfucker!” he said, pushing Seva with his left arm.
He could tell that Seva was dead. The operative’s body moved with little effort, displaying none of the stiffness or resistance indicative of someone still in control of his or her body. The clanging of metal projectiles against the Tiger’s hull suddenly shifted to the rear of the vehicle, settling on the back hatch and dissipating with the few seconds it took Gosha to regain his bearings.
“We’re through,” Farrington announced.
“Seva’s hit. I think I’m hit too,” he managed to say, cringing from the pain caused by the Tiger’s coarse ride.
“Slow us down to sixty,” Farrington said.
Farrington raised his night vision goggles and climbed between the seats. A bright light filled the compartment, focused on Seva, who lay on his back. The light shifted to Gosha’s face, causing him to raise his left hand.
“He’s gone. Where are you hit?”
“Right leg, maybe. My shoulder’s on fire too,” Gosha said.
Farrington helped him up onto the bench opposite of Sasha, being as careful with him as possible in the back of a dark, cramped compartment moving at sixty miles per hour down a glorified jeep trail. The experience nearly caused Gosha to momentarily black out, mainly fueled by the pain in his right shoulder. He stared at Sasha’s glazed-over eyes as Farrington examined him with the flashlight, wondering if he had survived the firefight.
“I think I dislocated my shoulder,” Gosha said.
“Let me see.”
Farrington raised his limp arm at the elbow, rotating it across Gosha’s stomach and probing along the dislocated shoulder. The pain caused by the movement of this arm caused him to grimace, but paled in comparison to what Farrington had planned for him. Without warning, he firmly swung Gosha’s forearm one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction, causing him to scream. The pain subsided within moments, restoring full mobility to his arm.
“All fixed. You have a laceration across your right thigh from a bullet that ripped through your holster. Nothing too nasty,” Farrington said, aiming the light at a red slash visible below a rip in his bloodstained khaki cargo pants.
“Patch that up with a compress, and reload the grenade launcher. I need to contact Sanderson and figure out what we’re looking at to the west.”
“Got it. How long until Black Rain is on station?” Gosha said.
“Fifteen to twenty minutes. We’ll hit Slavgorod right as they arrive.”
“We’re going around Slavgorod, right?”
“Going off-road this far from the border will give the Russians time to redeploy the bulk of the 21st in our path. We can’t get into a running gun battle with BTRs on twisting jeep trails with no cover. They’ll tear us to shreds from a distance. Black Rain will get us through Slavgorod. Then we go off-road,” Farrington said.
“We can’t survive another encounter like that.”
“I know. Patch yourself up, and get ready. We’ll be there in less than fifteen minutes, unless our air is late.”
“All right. Let’s do this,” Gosha said, not sure what to make of Farrington’s lightning advance along the most predictable route to Slavgorod.
Chapter 62
5:14 PM
CIA Headquarters
McLean, Virginia
Karl Berg watched the satellite feed closely, speaking in hushed tones to Sanderson through his headset. He didn’t want Audra to figure everything out until it was effectively too late to stop what he had planned. He glanced over the top of his computer station and caught the watch floor supervisor’s attention. Almost time. Audra leaned over and pointed at a cluster of vehicles on one of his screens. Her index finger rested on the thermal image of four BTR-80 armored personnel carriers hidden behind a thick barrier of trees north of Slavgorod. She slid her finger east along the main approach road to the city and stopped on a pair of Tigers less than a half-kilometer away.
“They need to take evasive action immediately. That’s a reconnaissance element looking to hand off targets to the BTRs. The rest of Farrington’s nine lives will be used up pretty quickly if the BTRs catch him in the open,” she said.
She was dead right, as usual. The single 14.5mm gun in each BTRs turret had an effective range of three kilometers and could fire a variety of armor-piercing or high-explosive projectiles, all of which could pe
netrate the thin armor on Farrington’s vehicle with little effort. There was no way Farrington could approach Slavgorod with the BTRs guarding the road.
“I’ll notify Sanderson immediately,” he said, feeling guilty about the subterfuge circling the air between them.
“Base, this is control,” Berg said. “I am passing positive control of Black Rain to your station. Satellite imagery confirms the presence of four BTR-80s and two Tigers on the approach road. I recommend using ordnance sparingly. Additional units have entered the city from the south and may present a challenge.”
“Which unit is Black Rain?” Audra said.
“Hold on,” Berg said.
He didn’t meet her gaze, knowing he couldn’t lie directly to her face. He concentrated on the screen and activated the communications link to Weatherman, a CIA drone operator working out of the mobile control station at Manas Air Base. Berg had managed to surreptitiously deliver one of the CIA’s MQ-9 Reaper drones to Manas, hidden amidst the logistics equipment necessary to support the temporary presence of three top-secret helicopters. The secrecy surrounding the helicopters kept prying eyes off the delivery manifests, drawing little attention to the arrival of one additional C-17 Globemaster III heavy transport aircraft from Jalalabad Air Base.
“Weatherman, this is Berg. Standing by to transfer tactical control of Black Rain.”
“This is Weatherman. Wait one.”
“Karl, who are you talking to?” Audra insisted.
“This is Weatherman. I have positively authenticated the request for tactical control of Black Rain. ETA 0418 local.”
“Good luck and happy hunting,” Berg said, ready to come clean with Audra.
He turned his head toward the watch supervisor and nodded, watching her immediately transmit an order over her headset to one of the technicians in the operations center.
“Karl, I need you to explain what is going on here,” Audra said.
“I’ve arranged an insurance policy for Sanderson’s crew,” he said.
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