His smile froze. Boyd was dead, lying facedown on the lip of the streambed. Sanchez, ashen-faced, had slid back down a few feet. He was fumbling to stuff a field dressing into the gaping hole blown in his upper arm.

“Ah, hell,” Pedersen muttered. He sighted back through the rifle scope. From what he could see, there weren’t many Russians still moving. But from here, he could draw a bead on every last one of the sons of bitches. He tracked left a little, settled his sights on a new target, breathed out, and very, very gently, squeezed the trigger.

Out on the valley floor, another Spetsnaz commando went down.

Flynn climbed slowly to his feet. The staccato rattle of gunfire and the sharp crack of exploding grenades had finally stopped. But now the sounds of war had been replaced by eerie moans rising from the horribly wounded men—both American and Russian alike—sprawled across the hillside or huddled among the rocks.

Still holding his light machine gun, Hynes came over. “What do we do now, Captain?” he asked. “We sure kicked the shit out of those guys, but they kicked the shit out of us, too.”

Flynn nodded wearily. His best guess was that only three or four of the Russian Spetsnaz troops were alive, though badly wounded. They were certainly in no condition to keep fighting. The rest were dead.

His tactical radio crackled suddenly to life. “Sir, I know you said not to use this thing, but I’ve got a situation down here,” he heard Pedersen say. “Boyd is dead. And Rafe’s hurt pretty bad. And I can’t make it far on my own with this doggone busted leg.”

Flynn keyed his mike. “Roger that, Private. Hang tight. We’ll come get you.”

Hynes whistled softly in dismay. “Jesus, sir. Boyd and Sims makes two dead. And with Leffert and Sanchez wounded, that just leaves six of us on our feet.”

Flynn sighed. “Five, PFC. Sergeant Takirak is dead, too.”

The other man’s eyes widened in shock. “The sarge? Killed? How?”

“Enemy action,” Flynn said tiredly. That was true enough, for a certain definition of “enemy,” he thought. This still wasn’t the right time to break the news that Takirak had actually been a GRU deep-cover agent. The moment for that would come later, when they were all safe—and after he’d had a chance to brief Alaskan Command’s counterintelligence people. Takirak must have been running a network of other spies. To keep them from bolting for safety before they could be pinpointed and arrested, it was vital to keep the information about his death and real identity tightly held.

“So what’s the plan, sir?” Hynes asked somberly.

“We need to get that satellite connection working and contact JBER,” Flynn told him. “We need medevac ASAP for our injured guys and for our prisoners. No one who’s been wounded will last long in this cold.”

Hynes took a deep breath. “That ain’t happening, sir.” He jerked a thumb toward the boulder field. “Sims had the radio with him. It took a bunch of splinters when that Russian grenade went off.”