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
He glanced to his left and then shook his head. There was no way to gain any ground there. Primakov and most of the men on that flank had been killed or badly wounded in the first few seconds of this firefight. That left a shift to the right. He belly-crawled over that way, careful to keep his head below the little hummock of ground that was his only piece of cover. One of his commandos was there, periodically popping up to pepper the rocks above them with short bursts from his AKM assault rifle.
“Hot work, Vanya,” he murmured.
The soldier spat to one side, sliding another curved thirty-round magazine into his rifle. “Worse than Syria,” he agreed.
Korenev raised himself up slightly, high enough to scan the terrain to the west and southwest through his night vision binoculars. Farther out across the valley floor, he could see the dark line of a streambed snaking across the open ground. There was good cover there, he judged, but it was too far away, more than three hundred meters. If he tried to redeploy his men there, the Americans would cut them down before they’d run off even a quarter of the distance.
Instead, he angled his binoculars, sweeping the hillside as it curved around to the southwest. And then, for the first time since the Americans had ambushed them, he felt a faint stirring of optimism. There was a fold on the surface of the hill there, within easy reach from this position. It looked like a patch of dead ground to him, one that offered a comparatively sheltered approach up the side of the spur. Assault troops moving up that dead ground ought to be able to get into the rocks on the Americans’ left flank without being fired on.
He thumped his fist into the snow in sudden excitement and turned toward the other Spetsnaz commando. “Vanya! We’ve got those bastards! I see—” And a 7.62mm rifle round moving at more than 850 meters a second hit Korenev in the right side of his head, punched through his helmet, and tore out the other side in a spray of blood, brain matter, and splintered skull. He flopped over into the snow, killed instantly.
The surviving Russian whirled around and opened fire on full automatic, hosing down the distant streambed around where he thought that shot must have come from. He could see snow and bits of torn brush pinwheeling away as his bullets tore at the ground. His eyes narrowed as he leaned into the burst. Accuracy was important, but there were times when you needed to throw lead downrange, hoping to get lucky . . . or to at least make the enemy eat dirt.
His AKM stopped firing when it ran through its thirtieth round. Quickly, the Spetsnaz soldier grabbed for another magazine. But before he could reload, he slumped forward, hit high in the chest by another American bullet that penetrated his body armor.
Three hundred yards away, Torvald Pedersen lowered his M14 and spat out a mouthful of gravel and twigs. “Geez, that was close.” He pulled his eye away from the scope and glanced toward Sanchez and Boyd with a grin. “But I got both of those bastards. Did you see them—”