Contents ( 55)
- In Memoriam
- Epigraph
- Cast of Characters
- Americans
- Russians
- Canadian
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Weapons and Acronyms
- Weapons
- Acronyms
- About the Author
- Also by Dale Brown
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
Obeying, they shrugged out of their rucksacks and then hurried after him as he plowed upward through the snow and ice.
Thirty-Six
Northwest of the Spur Hill
That Same Time
As soon as the Ka-60 touched down, Spetsnaz troops slammed both side doors open and poured out in a rush. Bent low, the fourteen Russian commandos fanned out around the helicopter and then dropped flat in the snow with their weapons ready. Camouflage smocks and white helmet covers helped them blend with their surroundings.
Major Gennady Korenev carefully scanned the steep, treeless hill rising several hundred meters away. A narrow saddle of bare rock tied it to a larger ridge running off to the northeast. He couldn’t make out any movement on that southern spur, but trampled patches in the snow roughly halfway up its slope showed that several men at least had moved across that flank and then around to the other side. He lowered his night vision binoculars and nodded. The Americans, as he’d expected, were somewhere ahead of them.
Getting back to his feet, he trotted back to the grounded Ka-60. With its engines off, the big main rotors had almost stopped turning. He leaned in through one of the side doors to speak to the two pilots. “Keep your eyes open. We’re moving out after the enemy now, but we’ll be back once that little job’s done. Then we’ll all push on to pinpoint the main objective, the PAK-DA bomber.”
They nodded. “Good hunting, Major,” the lead pilot said. “We’ll be ready to take off again when you return.”
With a soft whistle, Korenev signaled his men back up out of the snow. More rapid hand signals started them moving toward the higher ground. The Spetsnaz troops went forward in short rushes, sprinting ahead by twos and then going prone to cover the men coming up behind them. It was a tactic that guaranteed his detachment always had a solid base of fire waiting on overwatch—ready to immediately engage any enemies who showed themselves.
Korenev stayed a few meters behind the right flank of the advancing troops, while Captain Primakov, his second-in-command, did the same over on the left. This physical separation helped ensure that a sudden burst of enemy fire couldn’t take them both out at once. It also allowed tighter control over the Spetsnaz unit as it maneuvered.
So the major was close by when one of his men suddenly stopped and dropped to a knee to peer at something in the moonlit snow just ahead. And when the soldier signaled him over, he was there in seconds. “What’ve you got, Vanya?”
The other man pointed to a pair of thin, rail-like tracks and two sets of deeper boot prints running roughly southeast toward a gap in the hills between this valley and the next. “More of the Americans,” he said quietly. “Two of them towing something on a sled.”
“Supplies,” Korenev guessed. “Or perhaps heavier weapons.” The intelligence reports provided by Moscow’s prized source had claimed that the Americans had left their larger-caliber weapons, a recoilless rifle, and man-portable antiair missiles behind for this mission. But he was experienced enough to understand the limitations of even the most perfect-seeming intelligence. He shrugged. “If they’ve split their forces, so much the better for us. We’ll finish off the larger group and then mop these two up for dessert.”