Long Shot

by Sgt. Jack Coughlin

  “Heads up, Bushman Two,” Swanson warned in a soft voice. “There’s a Goat heading your way.” It was the same dirty green UAZ-469 utility vehicle that had been used for the earlier shift change at the guard post. Looking very much like an old American Jeep, the rough-terrain four-wheel-drive car was called a Goat, the English word for the Russian kozlik.

  “Driver plus one,” Kyle said, watching through his scope. “Seems to be in a hurry but it is staying on the road. “Maybe just another shift change.”

  Gray Perry clicked his own mike twice in affirmative response and remained perfectly still in the underbrush on a slight rise some sixty meters from the shack. The single soldier was still inside. Perry heard the coming vehicle long before he saw it, then the Goat arrived chewing dirt and made a sliding halt. The guard was suddenly alert as another soldier vaulted from the vehicle and a sergeant stepped from behind the steering wheel. The SAS sniper could not make out what they were saying, but their actions were obvious enough.

  “Bushman Two to Bounty Hunter,” he reported on the radio when the sergeant finished giving orders, got back into the car and left by himself. “They just doubled the guard out here.” He heard two clicks.

  Swanson did not consider the move unusual with the arrival of a VIP who was expected at any moment. Perry would be able to take down two men as easily as one. “Are they doing anything?” he asked.

  “Nope. As soon as the sergeant drove off, both of these blokes relaxed. Rifles leaning against the building and the smoking lamp is lit.”

  Anneli had clapped her palms over the pads to keep them close to her ears. “Kyle, I’m picking up a lot of noise in the camp. Something about moving the mortars.”

  Kyle chewed his lip in concentration, analyzing the changing situation. Again, by itself, such a reorientation was not alarming. Maybe the general was going to inspect the individual firing pits, and the officers wanted everything shipshape. The soldiers would appear to be more efficient, active and professional if they were doing something more than just standing at attention. Each of the big 120mm weapons needed a five-man crew, because the weapon weighed about 500 pounds and rested on a bipod and a huge metal baseplate shaped like a saucer. It was more powerful than a U.S. 105mm howitzer and just as difficult to move from one place to another. To manhandle the mortars to face a different direction would require a lot of work and give the look of a busy base.

  “Bushman One to Bounty Hunter.” It was Baldwin. “Any instruction?”

  “Negative, Bushman One.”

  Kyle glanced over to the border crossing. It was closing early tonight, and he watched as an eight-wheeled BTR-80 armored personnel carrier arrived at the gate after a short trip from the motor pool. The thirty-ton fighting machine with multiple machine guns and cannon was a serious addition to the overnight watch. The rumbling amphibious vehicle had a bit of trouble getting situated on the road before it settled down with its slanted nose facing south. More showing off for the general … or something else? Swanson was satisfied, at least for the moment, that it was pointed away from the snipers.

  * * *

  AT FIVE MINUTES AFTER six o’clock, the distinctive thump of spinning rotor blades clattered in the sky and a Mi-17 helicopter began its descent into Fire Base 8351. The chopper had a camouflage green paint pattern that blended its silhouette against the darkness, but the landing lights glowed brightly, so it was easily spotted long before it actually lowered onto the concrete pad and cut power. The few officers in the welcoming party held their hats and turned their faces away from the brief storm of rotor wash.

  The snipers were rocks as the moment of truth approached. All emotion had been put aside, and their bodies were draped into prone positions, with their big rifles now part of them, extensions of their physical being. They were back far enough in the hides so that their weapons did not extend beyond the foliage, and squares of camo cloth were beneath the barrels to suppress telltale blossoms of dirt when the shots were fired. The two shooters breathed easily and watched. Kyle clicked on the computerized scope of Excalibur and was instantly rewarded with adjusting lists of numbers that told him everything from the temperature and humidity to the effects of gravity and the rifling spin on the .50-caliber bullet at that precise distance. He read the figures and adjusted slightly, then turned it off again. Too much information could be a distraction.

  The chopper blades slowed and swirled to a halt, leaving a gap of silence around the base, almost as if a curtain was being raised at a theater to start the performance. A side hatch opened outward and fell to become a staircase as crewmen in flight suits jumped out and chocked the wheels, locked the stairs into place and raised a collapsible handrail, then hustled away. Next out was a military photographer with cameras strapped around his neck. He moved a short distance away to record the moment, as if this purely routine visit had some historical significance. Such pictures would be autographed and sent back to the officers and men as souvenirs.

  A skinny aide with a briefcase scooted down the stairs, followed by a grim-faced, corpulent colonel whose bulk almost filled the open hatchway. He was obviously in charge of security, and nodded to the welcoming committee while taking his time to look around the illuminated area. The lights blinded him to anything in the gloom beyond. The gathered officers waited at attention until he was satisfied.

  This was not part of the plan. The snipers’ scheme was to wait until the general was standing almost immobile in the receiving line, an estimated thirty minutes from now, glad-handing and saying hello to his troops. At that moment, General Mizov would be a steady target. However, Kyle Swanson knew a good thing when he saw it.

  “Bushman One. I’m going to take the shot when the general steps into the hatchway. You do the fat guy. Anneli, get your ears packed and be ready to move. Bushman Two, get ready.”

  In the next hide, Baldwin wiped everything but the face of the arrogant security chief from his mind. The florid skin filled his scope so much that the SAS sergeant could have counted the blackheads on the man’s nose. He adjusted down to the body. The British sniper had been thinking exactly as Swanson; there would never be a better target picture. Situations change. His heartbeat was slow and the finger eased about a pound of pressure onto the trigger and held it as the colonel turned to the open hatch and called inside. All was clear. It was safe.

  Victor Mizon, wearing the new gold-braid shoulder boards that proclaimed him to be a two-star general, poked his head forward, then came to his full height of five-feet-eleven. The face was identical to the file photograph that Kyle had received. Unlike his security officer, the general was in excellent physical condition, and smiled broadly at the committee that was obviously eager to greet him. After all, it was his fiftieth birthday. He deserved spotlights and salutes tonight, for Mizon had advanced a long way since the miserable days when he was a common lieutenant at this sorry little post isolated in the middle of nowhere. Tomorrow, he would enter Moscow and be installed as a first-deputy head of the entire Border Service. For an instant, it was as if the general was standing in a picture frame, unmoving and stark in the bright light against the darkness inside the helicopter. Standing still, fully erect, holding the handrail, looking out over the fire base.

  Swanson shot him dead so fast that the general did not even feel the big bullet tear into his heart, nor hear the loud roar of Excalibur shake the forest like a giant’s bellow. The handrail helped support his weight for a moment, and just as he took the fatal bullet, Baldwin fired the second one, and the big colonel jerked, staggered backward and fell hard against a wheel of the helicopter with blood pumping from his ruptured belly.

  * * *

  THE TROOPS AT THE fire base remained frozen in position, their arms still cocked in salutes, unwilling to believe what their eyes told them was true. General Mizon lay crumpled at the top of the stairs and the fat colonel was bowled over beneath the chopper and the double-thunder blasts from two big rifles raped the orderly parade formation. Moving simultaneou
sly, everyone scattered for cover.

  Swanson, Anneli and Baldwin were already sliding backward out of the hides and pulling things together. Kyle brought up a portable satellite radio from his web gear and hit the transmit button to the helicopter waiting on the far side of the lake. “Bounty Hunter to Vampire. Bounty Hunter to Vampire.”

  “Vampire to Bounty Hunter. Send your traffic.”

  “Bounty Hunter to Vampire. Turn and burn.”

  “Roger that, Bounty Hunter.”

  From down the hillock, Anneli heard an explosive round of shouts, almost panicky commands from officers and sergeants. She said, “They are ordering the men to get up and get to their guns.”

  “Yeah,” said Swanson. “We’re out of here.”

  * * *

  AS SOON AS HE heard the shots, Grayson Perry erupted from the darkness and hit the two guards at the shack, both of whom had turned to face the camp, wondering what was happening. Perry slid the long blade of his old Fairburn-Sykes fighting knife into the neck of the first guard, pushing it easily all the way to the hilt in a single motion. Perry knew the knife was old school, almost an antique, but why change a good thing? He pushed on right across the dying man and clobbered the other guard on the head with a rock the size of a cantaloupe. The sentry fell with a crushed skull and Perry finished them both off with a few well-placed strokes of the FS knife. He dragged the bodies into the woods and dumped them, then lay beside the shack and again became invisible in his Ghillie suit of rags and leaves, gripping his submachine gun. The attack had taken less than thirty seconds, and the disposal time was about the same.

  * * *

  THE NIGHTSTALKERS HAD BEEN on alert and close to the UH-60 stealth helicopter almost since they had inserted the sniper squad into Indian country early that morning. The special-operations aviators understood how things could go bad in a hurry on any mission and stood ready to react.

  They had stayed near or inside of their bird as it rested on a small, bare landing zone near the Kaliningrad border, and other than refueling, getting some hot food and taking shithouse breaks, they had little interaction with the stern Lithuanian soldiers of the Iron Wolf Mechanized Battalion who had clamped a tight, protective perimeter around the skinny, hard-edged helicopter that was impervious to radar. The battalion commander, Major Juozas Valteris, roamed nearby. The pilot had warned him that a target was to be struck at about 1800 hours.

  At five o’clock the chopper crew had begun their preflight checks, and a half-hour later they strapped in. The mini-guns on each side were loaded and locked, and the strange bird code-named Vampire was ready to fly.

  The pilot received the call from Bounty Hunter just before six o’clock, and waved for Major Valteris to come over even as the twin General Electric T700 engines were given life and the four long major blades began to rotate. The major jumped into the deck and put on a pair of earphones connecting him to the internal network.

  “We are leaving now, Major, and we thank you for the hospitality. I am authorized to tell you that the team has hit a border firebase called Rooster Cap Nowak this evening, and there is likely to be some return fire coming this way soon. That’s all I know. We will be heading out via a different route unless there is an emergency that requires us to return here.”

  The Lithuanian officer gave the pilot a thumbs-up, removed the headset, jumped back to the ground and sprinted away. The helicopter blades were spinning faster as the engine ate more power, and in seconds, the Black Hawk was airborne, nose down and speeding into the darkness with a methodical hush-hush-hush instead of the normal helo roar.

  Valteris snapped his men to full alert and ordered an immediate change of position for his whole unit. The Russians had probably pretargeted their current location. The soldiers knew this was no drill. They buttoned up their vehicles and sped away.

  24

  AUTOMATIC RIFLE FIRE ERUPTED from the first Russian soldiers who came out of their fugue state and opened up with long rips of AK-47s that shredded the night in every direction, laying down a 360-degree mad minute of suppressive fire. Simply pulling the trigger was the easiest thing to do. An unlucky civilian truck driver went down in the wild salvo, his penalty for deciding to stay overnight at the border crossing so he could be first in line at dawn tomorrow. He had been watching the arrival ceremony from beside his truck, making him a stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time and perceived as a possible threat by panicky soldiers.

  Kyle, Anneli and Stanley Baldwin were galloping along the single trail to the east when the shooting began. They stopped a few times to catch their breath and plant some Claymore mines with trip wires as booby-trap surprises for anyone who might give chase. That initial gunfire back at the base meant little—harmless noise with no danger. Snipers throughout the ages have stayed alive by sowing confusion among their enemies, and the men at the base were reacting to a frightening, new situation. The extraordinarily loud booms of the .50-caliber sniper rifles had echoed back to the inexperienced border guards from the deep forests. None had seen any muzzle flashes. The attack could have come from anywhere, so the answering fire spewed everywhere. Every moment that the Russians spent trying to sort things out meant that the American, the Briton and the girl from Estonia would be that much farther away.

  About fifteen seconds after the ineffective shooting started, it trailed off, then ceased as officers and sergeants got control of the situation. Kyle could hear orders being shouted. Beneath the ruckus, he heard the giant diesel engine of the BTR-80 armored personnel carrier grunt to life. It was the one thing at the camp that Swanson considered to be a truly dangerous wild card. Should the amphibious vehicle come roaring down this narrow road, things would get interesting in a hurry. It could even follow them right into the water. “Run,” he told his mates, and they abandoned stealth in favor of distance.

  Heavy machine guns opened up next, the big ones on the corners of the camp, and although the firing became more methodical, it was still combing the tangled foliage that had been allowed to grow wild around the base. The gunners were still shooting at things they could not see, and followed the sweep of searchlights that were sliding around the borders. They were confident that any frontal charge from the bush would fail against the reaping bullets. To the retreating snipers, however, it was a sign that the counterfire was still in a defensive mode. The soldiers were hunkered down inside the base, waiting for another shot from the unseen enemy.

  “Bushman Two! Bushman Two!” Swanson breathed heavily as he called for Gray Perry on the net. “Coming up on you in about two minutes.”

  “Clear here,” came the immediate answer. “Come on in.” Perry lifted out of the undergrowth and assumed a kneeling position to give suppression fire if necessary. Like Swanson and Baldwin, he knew what was on the next page of the battle. Panic in the camp was evaporating and people were beginning to think. Patrols would be organized and those big damned mortars would start coughing out shells the size of small dogs.

  The team reassembled at the guard shack, but they were still some distance from the designated pickup point beside the lake. Anneli was panting with the exertion, bending beneath the square pack that held the listening device and weighed better than twenty pounds. She gasped for breath.

  “Give me that pack,” Swanson snapped.

  She looked up, hands on knees and gulped, “I can handle it.”

  “The extra weight is slowing you down and we can only move as fast as our slowest person. Give me the damned pack.” He shrugged out of his own gear and slid his arms into the electronic unit’s straps and adjusted the straps tight. Then he pulled his own ruck over his right shoulder. Stan Baldwin took both sniper rifles. “You are point, Sarn’t Baldwin. Move out.”

  Swanson came next with Anneli at his side, and Perry was once again rearguard. They all heard the new sound in the fight, the distinctive grunt of the 120mm mortars, and cocked their ears for the expected whistle of incoming rounds. Instead, the shells went the other way and impacted f
ar to the south, where the machine-gun fire seemed to be also growing in volume. Before long, the large mortars were rhythmically thumping out round after round, plastering the road network that led toward Poland with high explosives. A flare went up and glared over trees in that direction as it drifted down on a small parachute and made shadows dance in the woods.

  The sniper group was feeling the stress and the pressure, not knowing how long the Russian mortars would ignore them. The guards at the camp had a dead general and a dead colonel on their hands, but no idea who had killed them. It had to be snipers. But where were they?

  The base commander had received a strange and rather cryptic message shortly before General Mizon was due to arrive, an alert from St. Petersburg that some attack against the camp might soon be coming from the direction of Poland. It contained no specifics; not a time, nor even a date. He had taken the precaution of readjusting the mortars to face south, never expecting that the attack would come so soon, or if it would come at all. Nevertheless, he had distributed his firepower to best answer the situation, doubled the guard and called out a BTR-80. Now he walked a concentrated mortar barrage up the roads to Poland, blast after blast after blast.

  The infantry troops following the shells reported by radio that there was no return fire and no opposition to their advance. No bodies were discovered along the roads, nor in the woodlands, which would be more carefully searched after daylight. The BTR-80 had prowled the area close to the camp and also failed to find anything of interest.

  The commanding officer paused. He knew the layout of the area from having studied the maps so many times in the continuing efforts to interdict smugglers. There were numerous little trails and small ravines and natural hiding places to the west, but all were within Russian territory, and therefore unlikely routes for any attack force. He sent a squad to probe the area. Same thing to the north, but with limited manpower, he had to make careful choices. Then there was the road from the camp to the lake, but he had already increased the guard manpower there, and had received no call of alarm from them.