Gray Matter Splatter (A Deckard Novel Book 4)

by Jack Murphy

  “Where are our rucks and skis?”

  “They have set up some A-frames and pulley systems for hoisting the gear up, but it is going to take a while.”

  “Send the word down to send up six pairs of skis immediately. The enemy is inbound.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You mean what are we going to do?”

  Kurt smiled. A good man kept his sense of humor in these situations. “Even better.”

  “We’re going to slow them down.”

  Kurt frowned.

  “What?”

  “Look behind you.”

  Deckard turned around and saw four open parachutes descending in a staggered formation well off in the distance. The parachutists were descending to the ground in broad daylight, after jumping from a plane that none of them had seen or heard, most likely at high altitude.

  “Freefall jump,” Kurt said. “Those look like ram air chutes.”

  “Between them and those guys we saw scrambling along the mountains way off in the distance today, you have to wonder how many more want to join our party out here.”

  Kurt smiled. “Let’s crash it and find out.”

  * * *

  Deckard sank his whippets into the snow and pushed off.

  His peripheral vision immediately disappeared into a blur of motion as he blasted down the side of the mountain, his skis slipping right over last night’s fresh snowfall. He kept his eyes fixed on the small dots moving below him, the enemy moving about in their overwhites, so far unaware of the mercenaries above them. Maurizio came up alongside him, the rest of Deckard’s mountaineer team close behind.

  The technique was called mottis by the Finnish winter soldiers who developed a fierce reputation in World War Two for outmaneuvering Russian forces. Patrolling deep behind enemy lines on skis, the Finns would encircle and cut off the Russian Red Army, separating the soldiers from larger elements and cutting off their logistical lines. By doing this, they would wear the enemy down, draining their resources and exhausting them until they were killed or surrendered. Deckard’s men would do the same, cutting off the scouting team and delaying the main force until Samruk could effectively mass their forces and launch a successful counterattack.

  It was a gamble, but Deckard had spent his entire career threading impossible needles.

  The mountain angles were getting steeper, and boulders were coming up to meet Deckard faster than he had anticipated. Maurizio and Deckard veered in opposite directions, narrowly missing one of the ice-covered crags. Launching off a small ridge, the mercenary went airborne for several seconds before splashing down in a cloud of snow. Behind him, Nate and Dag were more or less following in the trail they were blazing through the snow. Kurt and Jacob were moving parallel to them, finding their own way down the slope.

  Dodging another boulder, Deckard scoured the terrain ahead, trying to pick up signs of the enemy again. He looked back down at the ground in front of him as he went off another ledge and sailed into the air. He came down hard, his knees acting like pistons to cushion him from the drop. As the slope leveled out, the skiers began making large, looping switchbacks as they visually identified the enemy scouts in the distance.

  By now the angles were getting even steeper and the ski soldiers were cutting through the snow until an arctic sandstorm of snow was flowing all around them. Deckard chanced a glance over his shoulder to see what looked like a white waterfall behind them. There was no way the enemy wasn’t going spot them in a few seconds. Now he could make out the bullpup rifles the Chinese, Iranian, and Russian troops were carrying. They were only a few hundred meters away.

  Letting the whippets hang by their lanyards, Deckard reached for the Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and racked the charging handle. Ten sets of dark-lens goggles looked up at five skiers descending down upon them. Deckard lined himself up on an assault lane with as few obstructions as possible and opened fire. Getting his iron sights on target while bouncing down the side of the mountain was impossible, so he simply point-shot at the nearest target, squeezing off a burst of auto-fire.

  The burst went low, kicking up splashes of snow, but kept the enemy in react mode, preventing them from opening fire first. Maurizio and Nate opened fire next, the staccato bursts of fire echoing down the side of the slope. One of the enemy troops was spun around as he caught at least one bullet in the side, his bullpup dropping into the snow.

  Deckard pivoted, his skis churning up a wall of snow that seemed to cut into his skin even through all of his cold-weather gear. He came to a stop just behind a rock poking up from the snow and took a knee. Crossing his whippets to make an X shape, he rested his AK on them and used the poles as a platform to shoot from. He got his iron sights lined up on one of the moving enemy less than a hundred meters away. He put a controlled pair downrange, the AK bucking into his shoulder but rewarding him as his target dropped in a spray that turned the white snow a bright shade of crimson.

  Now his visibility was becoming obstructed. When he fired his rifle, the hot propellant gases in his ammunition interacted with water vapor that quickly froze in the sub-zero temperature of the air, creating a fog around him that interfered with his line of sight.

  As the others were maneuvering to their own fighting positions, the cloud of snow came in from behind and whispered around the mercenaries. Several cracks announced return fire from downhill, but none of it effective. Deckard cracked off a shot at one of the enemy but missed again. Crouched over and trying to find something to use as cover, Deckard was losing the enemy in the background as their overwhites blended in. Giving one a good lead, Deckard made some bold corrections, chopping through the air with 7.62x39mm in front of where he last saw his target. Finally, he saw a figure flop over and heard him screaming between gunshots as the men to his left and right began raining down the fire.

  Several rounds buried themselves in the snow in front of Deckard, forcing him to go prone as more gunfire cut through the space he had occupied a second before. To his flank, Nate’s AK was also kicking up a fog of frozen water vapor. Despite the difficulty in shooting through the vapor fog created by their weapons, the Samruk men had the terrain advantage. One by one, the enemy fell.

  Watching his friends quickly cut down, one of the enemy turned downhill and disappeared down a ridge on the slope. Deckard let his rifle hang, grabbed the handles on his whippets to pull himself to his feet, and quickly charged after him.

  “Deckard, hold on!” Kurt yelled.

  But it was too late. He left the others to catch up, unwilling to let one of the scouts get away. Deckard avoided the bloody corpses and weapons strewn across the kill zone, skiing through red snow and dropping down the mountain. He could see the back of the survivor who was digging in with his poles, desperately trying to escape. Angling his skis straight downhill, Deckard used his whippets to dig into the snow, pushing himself even faster as gravity sucked him downward. He was quickly catching up with his target. Meanwhile, his teammates tried to catch up with him.

  The terrain bounced underneath his skis as the world flashed by, his focus on the back of the fleeing skier. For several seconds, everything else disappeared. As he closed the distance, Deckard didn’t dare reach for his AK and risk losing control. He held his right-side whippet in his fist and jabbed it forward into the back of the skier’s head as he approached. The enemy tumbled forward in a big ball of fuck, the man’s skis, rifle, and gloves flinging into the air as he somersaulted down the mountain.

  Deckard slid sideways, his skis parallel with the slope until he skidded to a halt. Reaching for his rifle, he skied over to where the squirter lay in the snow. Both of his legs were twisted in impossible, unnatural angles. With the barrel of his weapon pointed under the injured man’s chin, Deckard dropped a knee down on the seemingly lifeless body and tore away his goggles and face mask. His eyes stared up at the sky. He was Caucasian, Deckard pegging him for one of the Russians. Slowly, his eyes rolled toward Deckard.

  His lip
s moved, whispering, “Kill me.”

  Deckard pushed his own goggles up and rested them on his forehead as the rest of his team skied to his position and surrounded the sole survivor of the scouting party.

  “Who are you?” Deckard asked as he pulled down his own face mask.

  The Russian closed his eyes, seemingly at peace.

  “I can’t feel anything past my neck,” he said in accented English. “My neck is broken. I'm paralyzed. Grant me this one wish. I am a soldier, like you.”

  “Are you GRU? Alfa?”

  “Zaslon.”

  Deckard took a breath. He knew the unit but had never crossed paths with them as far as he was aware. They were a shadowy paramilitary unit that operated under the FSB. Back when he worked for the CIA, Deckard had heard rumors that Zaslon had been deployed to Iraq during the final days of the Saddam regime, where they had gathered documents, weaponry, perhaps even equipment used in the construction of weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S. invasion. Material that had originated in Russia. This was the type of incriminating evidence the Kremlin did not want Americans discovering in Iraq when they invaded.

  “Zaslon,” Deckard repeated.

  “That is who I was,” the Russian said, his breaths becoming fast and shallow. “Not who I am now.” The Russian paused. “Will you let me die honorably?”

  “If that’s your wish, yes.”

  “We are called Oculus.”

  “Russians working alongside the Iranians and Chinese?”

  “Yes, the product of American imperialism around the globe. Desperate partners who would otherwise hate each other.”

  “And they say America is a force for global stability,” Deckard said, looking away and wondering how long it would be before the other 90 Oculus members would catch up with them. “Here we are helping you guys make friends.”

  “Congratulations,” the Russian groaned.

  “Who is the ground force commander for this operation? Who is in charge?”

  “The commander from my old unit, but he is being relieved in the field. For incompetence.”

  “Relieved by whom?”

  “Someone the Chinese are sending to rendezvous with us.”

  “Is that who parachuted into the valley this morning?”

  “We saw them, but I don’t think so. I don't know who that was.”

  Deckard thought about the other group he saw up on the ridgeline.

  “In minutes, the rest of my team will arrive at this position. Keep your promise and kill me.”

  Getting back up on his feet, Deckard shouldered his AK and kept his promise.

  * * *

  Shatayeva and Fedorchenko maneuvered their platoons through the snow, closing on the enemy force as they in turn closed on Deckard and his advanced party. They skied carefully, each of them top heavy with all of the kit they carried on their backs, but morale was through the roof. Every one of them was excited to have finally fought through the cold and unforgiving terrain to close with and destroy the enemy.

  Sergeant Shatayeva got his men up on a rocky embankment halfway down the side of the mountain. PKM machine gunners quickly kicked off their skis and got down in their firing positions. Below them, Oculus looked like little army ants crossing through the snow, making way toward the firefight they had heard when their scouts were taken out.

  With the enemy a good 400 meters out, Shatayeva initiated the ambush with his Kalashnikov. The sound of his shot was instantly drowned out as three PKMs sent a spray of tracer fire downhill. The enemy turned to the sound of the guns and lit up the Samruk position, not wasting any time. But now they were fixed in position, and Fedorchenko’s platoon was skiing downhill in a flanking maneuver that would also get between Oculus and Deckard’s element, effectively shielding the mountaineering team from being overrun.

  The base of fire on the rocky outcropping was quickly engulfed in a cloud of frozen vapor, faster and with more volume than any of them had really expected. Several machine gunners and their assistant gunners attempted to shift left or right to new positions, but to little avail. They simply kept the fire on to keep the enemy’s heads down and prevent them from having freedom of maneuver or gaining the initiative.

  Keeping the tracer fire skipping into where they had last seen the enemy, Shatayeva watched 1st Platoon continue downhill, trying to keep a shallow spur between them and the enemy to cover their advance. It was a textbook fire-and-maneuver concept, and no one was more surprised than the Samruk mercenaries that it was working so well in austere conditions.

  Shaking out into an assault line, Fedorchenko’s platoon began cross-country skiing toward the enemy position. As they got closer to the 90-plus enemy soldiers they expected, Shatayeva called a ceasefire. His machine guns fell silent, using the pause in the action to load fresh belts of ammunition.

  The occasional gunshot cracked from below, but it was far from the firefight they’d been expecting. With the enemy concealed by the vapor cloud, the Kazakhs could only imagine what their teammates would find in the kill zone.

  “Objective secured,” Fedorchenko finally radioed up. “About fifteen bodies. The rest look like they slipped away into a draw, skiing farther down the mountain.”

  Tactically, it made sense. Outgunned, taken by surprise, and at a severe terrain disadvantage, there was no reason for them to stand and fight on someone else’s terms.

  “Break down those gun positions,” the Kazakh platoon sergeant ordered his men. “We are going to consolidate with First Platoon.”

  In three minutes, the men of 2nd Platoon were on their skis and crisscrossing their way down the mountain toward Fedorchenko’s men. Sure enough, there were bodies going into deep freeze on the Arctic tundra, sprawled out all over the place. Aghassi was going from corpse to corpse with their biometric scanner to collect fingerprints and pictures. However, everyone was aware that the bodies represented just a small portion of a much larger force that still numbered around 75 men. At least they had thinned them out a bit.

  “Any word from Deckard?” Rochenoire asked aloud. With his face mask pulled down, his breath was already freezing on his beard, little icicles dangling off of it.

  “He’s on his way back to link up with us here,” Aghassi answered as he finished scanning another body. The data would be uploaded back to SCOPE in the United States for analysis at the next opportunity.

  Fedorchenko skied over to the edge of a cliff where the enemy had descended from and disappeared into the white. Dozens of ski trails marked their path. Farther below, he could also see that their passage had triggered a small avalanche, which was now picking up momentum as it rolled toward the valley floor.

  “We’ll pick up their trail once Deckard and his guys get here,” Aghassi added from behind Fedorchenko.

  The Kazakh mercenary frowned as he watched the avalanche plummet away from them. Just another hazard of operating in the Arctic. He would take their previous deployments to Afghanistan, Burma, Mexico, or Syria over this nonsense any day.

  Suddenly, a hollow bloop sounded from somewhere at the bottom of the cliff. All eyes turned skyward as a black torpedo shape arced low and slow through the sky above them. Squinting in the bright sunlight, Fedorchenko could make out the tail fins of a 60mm mortar round that seemed to be moving at the velocity of a booger flicked across a junior high classroom. The mortar round reached its maximum altitude for the charge setting it was on, then its nose tipped back toward the earth and followed a trajectory that would have it land a few hundred meters above their position.

  Finally, it slapped into the mountainside and detonated with a hollow thud. Above them, the mercenaries heard the snow and ice rushing down toward their position.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Rochenoire groaned.

  Chapter 25

  The Samruk International mercenaries made a mad dash for the closest boulders or cliff faces they could find, anything that might stand a chance at shielding them from the flood of snow and ice about
to rain down upon them. Three Kazakhs from one of Fedorchenko’s assault teams reached out toward their teammate as they took cover behind one of the crags, but he was just a second too slow.

  The avalanche burst over them, sweeping the Kazakh off his feet and washing him over the cliff. Another one of the Kazakhs who had gotten behind the rock formation in time was nearly swept away as well, with snow coming up over the top of the rocks and pelting down on their heads. His teammates held on desperately to his parka, another grabbing onto the man’s rifle sling, which threatened to strangle him as he lost his footing, undulating white sheets flowing around the rock on either side.

  Fedorchenko was huddled under another cliff face with his platoon medic and another assault team. The avalanche flowed over them like a waterfall, crashing down in front of them. After a few seconds, it had passed, a relatively small avalanche.

  “Nikita,” the platoon sergeant barked, “get out there and figure out where the enemy is. Ivan, get those guns out,” he said, referring to their own 60mm mortar. The mortar section carried two 60mm mortars with the hip plate and rounds. There was no way they would have been able to make the climb with the 82mm systems, so they had been left on the Carrickfergus.

  Fedorchenko was ready to fight fire with fire. Nikita peered through the scope on his 417. Based on the direction of the enemy’s ski trail and where he thought their mortar shot had come from, he could only make an educated guess. Before they could get their act together, a second mortar round arced into the air and came down above the Samruk men. Thankfully, this one failed to trigger another avalanche.

  Ivan’s men scrambled to get the ball socket of the mortar tubes into the hip plate while others were setting 60mm rounds to explode on delay. They wanted the rounds to bury themselves in the snow before detonating.

  “Put the rounds up there,” Nikita said, taking a best guess as he pointed uphill and about 600 meters to their flank.