Dead fall, p.26
Dead Fall, page 26
Their rifles were outfitted with chunky, high-end night-vision scopes. Two of the men had bandoliers with 40mm grenades strapped across their chests, and launchers hanging from their backs. This was no ordinary fireteam. These were straight-up headhunters. Assaulters like this only got dispatched when a high-value target was in the offing.
Harvath was beginning to doubt that some random village spy had given them up. There had to be another reason why the Russians had sent such a crack team. Now wasn’t the time to figure that out. Now it was time to fight.
Over the radio he whispered, “Hookah, how’s your line of sight?”
“Gooder than good,” the man replied.
“Good copy,” said Harvath. “Get ready to shred these guys. On my mark.”
He watched out of the corner of his eye as Krueger and Jacks—like a perfectly trained pair of attack dogs—responded to his command. Adjusting their grips on their rifles, the men crouched even lower and prepared to pop up above the logs and begin firing.
Harvath gave the countdown. “Three. Two. One. Now.”
Jacks was unbelievably fast. He had leapt up and had his rifle barrel over the top of the log wall before Harvath or Krueger. But when he acquired his target and pressed his trigger, he didn’t get a bang, he got a shit-your-pants click. For some reason, the round didn’t fire.
To their credit, instead of acting like a pack of rabid dogs and rushing toward Jacks, the Russians relied on their teammate, who already had his weapon trained in that direction. The man put down a withering and extremely accurate barrage of fire.
A round skipped off the top of Jacks’s Kevlar helmet as he dropped to the ground. Had he hesitated even a fraction of a second, he would have been dead.
Aborting their attack, Harvath and Krueger had also dropped to the ground as logs splintered all around them.
From their position, Hookah and Biscuit opened up and began shooting. The Russian at the front of the team instantly returned fire.
Seeing that Jacks had cycled his weapon and had purged the bad round, Harvath nodded to him and Krueger. They needed to get their guns in the fight, especially before one of those Russians could transition to their launcher and let loose with a grenade.
In unison, the men jumped up, pressed their triggers the moment their barrels had cleared the wall, and sent a wave of high-speed lead toward the enemy.
The two Russians closest were cut down like someone had gone through them with a lightsaber.
The remaining two were focused on the fire they were taking from Hookah and Biscuit, who had a much harder time with their accuracy, as they were farther away.
Nevertheless, they were able to put multiple rounds on the point man, sending him down into the dirt. Which left only one.
The man got all four blades of the blender as Harvath and his team lit him up. Once the last Russian had collapsed to the ground, Harvath ordered his men to cease fire.
The cloud of weapons’ smoke blew slowly off the convent grounds. None of the Russians were moving. That didn’t mean that they could be ruled out as a threat. Not yet.
Harvath warned his team over the radio to move cautiously and to keep an eye out for a second wave. Slowly, they approached the bodies.
The first thing that became apparent was that these were definitely not run-of-the-mill soldiers. They were, as Harvath had assumed and the insignia on their uniforms confirmed, Special Forces; Spetsnaz to be exact. And one of them, it turned out, was still alive.
Always conscious of their proclivity for hugging live grenades as they died—in the hopes of taking out a few more of the enemy when they were moved or rolled over—Harvath proceeded with caution. Both of the man’s hands were visible and there were no loose grenades evident.
Separating the soldier from his weapons, Harvath did a quick assessment of the man’s injuries. He’d been shot in the abdomen and was in a tremendous amount of pain. It looked bad and there was a good chance the soldier had internal bleeding. Harvath had seen enough gunshot wounds to know that if this guy didn’t get treatment soon, he probably wasn’t going to make it.
He located the man’s IFAK and opened it up. The paucity of medical supplies, especially for a high-end Spetsnaz soldier, was ridiculous. Opening his own IFAK, he pulled out what he needed, began packing the wound with sterile gauze, and applied pressure.
“Your injury is bad,” he said in Russian. “You need a doctor.”
The man writhed in pain.
“I am going to try to help you,” Harvath continued, “but first, you need to help me. Who sent you?”
He waited but the man did not reply. “Who. Sent. You?” he repeated in Russian, but still nothing. The soldier just looked at him defiantly.
As this was happening, the two older villagers, drawn by the sound of gunfire, returned.
“Russians,” one of the men said in Ukrainian, spitting to get the taste of the word out of his mouth.
“Is he going to live?” the other asked in Russian.
Releasing pressure on the wound, Harvath stood. “No, he’s going to die.”
Harvath was under no obligation to save the Spetsnaz soldier. If the man wasn’t going to cooperate, Harvath wasn’t going to waste an additional ounce of energy on him. Reaching down, he unplugged the man’s microphone and turned off his radio. He then motioned for the two old Ukrainians to come with him.
As the blood began soaking through his bandage, the Russian tried to apply pressure himself to the wound, only to realize how much trouble he was in. “Zhdat!” he shouted in Russian. Wait!
* * *
Harvath very quickly hit the ceiling on his Russian language capability and assigned the villagers to take the soldier’s rapid, difficult-to-understand confession.
The team had been sent in search of an unknown, high-value target who was using some form of advanced encryption on his phone. Their assignment was to bring the phone and its owner back for interrogation.
When Harvath asked, “Back where?” the villagers pulled a map off one of the other soldiers and had the Russian identify where the command truck for the Leer-4 electronic warfare system was located.
Once the Russian did, Harvath had a decision to make. The soldier had lived up to his end of the bargain.
After speaking with his team, he turned his phone back on, dictated a rapid situation report, and transmitted it to Nicholas before turning his phone back off.
The convent had been exposed and was no longer safe for them. There was no telling if the Russians would send a second team or not. They would have to find someplace else to hole up. He was glad they had all gotten a shower and a hot meal when they had.
According to the Russian, his team was driving a 4x4 Škoda that they had parked nearby. Harvath sent Hookah and Biscuit to go get it.
While they were gone, he had Krueger and Jacks retrieve all of the Russians’ radios and cell phones. After pulling their batteries, he wrapped them in a Mylar space blanket and enclosed them in an empty ammo can he had retrieved from the Novator in the garage.
It didn’t make for a perfect Faraday cage, but it was better than nothing. Ukrainian intelligence might find the equipment useful, and he didn’t want the Russians tracking any latent signal.
He also didn’t want them tracking the elderly villagers who had selflessly offered to drive the injured soldier back to the front, where he could be transported to a Ukrainian field hospital.
Harvath explained the importance of keeping pressure on the wound and put together some extra gauze and bandages for the trip.
When Hookah and Biscuit arrived with the Škoda, Harvath and Jacks helped load the injured soldier and then told the villagers to get going. Whether he lived or died depended on how fast they moved.
As the Škoda exited the convent grounds, Krueger looked at the three Spetsnaz corpses and asked, “What should we do with them?”
“Gather up all their weapons and ammunition and throw it in our truck,” said Harvath. “Beyond that, I don’t care what happens.”
“Roger that,” the man replied.
* * *
As the team loaded their gear, Harvath studied his map, which he had unrolled across the hood of their armored vehicle.
“Where are we headed?” Hookah asked as he threw his pack in the back and came around to join him.
“I’m torn between the Ritz-Carlton here,” said Harvath, pointing at one of the villages he had circled, attempting a little levity, “and a pretty nice Four Seasons over here.”
“I’m more a boutique hotel man myself,” he replied. “Craft cocktails. Themed rooms…”
“Heart-shaped bathtubs,” Krueger interjected, “vibrating beds, hourly rates. You know, classy.”
Harvath smiled as Hookah gave his colleague the finger.
“All kidding aside,” stated Jacks, “even though you guys think you’ve narrowed it down, we still don’t know where the Ravens are going to be next.”
The Brit was right. It was a coin toss. Without the added piece he needed from Nicholas, there was no way to be certain. He only had his gut to go on. That meant he was going to have to take a guess. “We’re going to the Four Seasons,” he said, tapping the village on the map.
“I hope they’ve got a breakfast buffet,” replied Krueger.
“With an omelet station,” added Biscuit. “I haven’t had a good omelet in a long time.”
Harvath appreciated the esprit de corps. The truth was that they’d be lucky to find anything resembling a single creature comfort once they got out on the road. He had a very bad feeling that it was going to be Mad Max from here to the end of their assignment.
Firing up the Novator, he pulled out of the garage, pausing only long enough for Hookah to close the doors and hop back in the truck. Then, with the night-vision cameras activated, they headed north.
Based on the pattern he and Hookah had discerned, there were three locations Harvath believed were the most likely for the Ravens to target next.
He felt certain that their base of operations—or their safe house, as Hookah had called it—was close. Close, however, was a relative term. In essence, the Ravens—no matter how messed up and evil—were like any army. They were reliant upon logistics. How much fuel did they have access to? How far and over what kind of terrain could their vehicles travel? Did they have sufficient stocks of food and water, or did a chunk of their day need to be spent in finding and replenishing their supplies? What physical condition were they in? Were any of the Ravens sick or injured? Did they have access to enough manpower to capably carry out their assignments?
If the atrocity at the convent was any indication of their ability, they definitely weren’t suffering in the labor department, which remained one of the biggest problems in Harvath’s mind.
Hookah hadn’t been wrong when he had expressed his concern about potentially being outgunned by five or six to one. It was absolutely something to be troubled by. The only thing worse than those kinds of odds was having to do battle with a foe of that size while they were entrenched in a fortified position. If that came to pass, Harvath and his guys would be raising up some big prayers to the tactical gods.
Their best hope was to catch the Ravens out in the open; take them by surprise in an ambush of some sort and cut them all down. But as Harvath had found in almost every assignment in his career, Murphy—of Murphy’s Law fame—was going to want to have a say, especially as the battlefield was his playground.
There was also the issue of Anna Royko. Harvath knew close-quarters battle like the back of his hand. He had undergone so much hostage rescue training that he could do it in his sleep. But what about Jacks? Could he slice the pie and clear rooms at a level that wouldn’t get himself, or the rest of them, killed? What about Biscuit? Or Krueger? Or Hookah?
He was 99.9 percent certain that they weren’t going to find Anna tied to a tree in the middle of a field of flowers. She was going to be in the interior of a structure somewhere and that interior was going to very likely be hardened against attack. If the Ravens were halfway near as psychotic as they were made out to be, the booby traps at their lair were going to be a big problem. Was Harvath’s team up to the challenge?
Or was it going to come down to him, slipping in like the fog, killing everyone in sight, and slipping back out with Anna over his shoulder? There simply was no way of knowing. Not, at least, until they found her and could put together a full plan. For the moment, he needed to put it out of his mind. Jacks helped him refocus.
“Up ahead, in seven hundred meters,” said the Brit, who once again was riding shotgun and studying the map, “and we need to go right.”
“Seven hundred meters,” replied Harvath, “fork in the road. We go right. Roger that.”
Jacks helped count down the distance until they arrived at the fork and Harvath took it.
There were a bunch of dilapidated signs, all in Ukrainian, which Harvath couldn’t read. Some were road signs. Most were for businesses in the village up ahead.
One of the signs was bracketed with bunches of grapes. Its first four letters were the same as the word in Russian—winery.
“Look alive, everybody,” said Harvath. “We’re approaching our destination.”
CHAPTER 26
Harvath had no interest in driving through the center of town only to be met with an ambush. He’d taken that ride in the M113 on his way to the front lines and had no desire for a repeat.
Pulling off to the side of the road, on a high piece of ground, he decided that they’d take a nice, long, slow look around.
The Novator’s forward-looking night-vision camera hadn’t seen any movement. It was late. Any people still living down in the village would be asleep.
“Jacks and I are going to dismount for a quick reconnaissance,” said Harvath.
There was a chorus of acknowledgments as the two men checked their rifles and then quietly exited the vehicle.
Stepping outside, he felt the wind and was reminded of how brisk it was. If they didn’t find a decent place to camp tonight, they would have to sleep in the truck.
Besides the temperature, the other thing that was remarkable was the quiet. No dogs barking, no radios, nothing. It was eerie. Powering up his thermal device, he flipped the monocular down and scanned the village. There was not a single heat signature to be found—not even so much as a warm chimney or stovepipe. The entire town appeared deserted.
Turning to Jacks, he asked, “See anything?”
The Brit, who had put on his night-vision goggles, shook his head. “From here, nothing. Maybe if we get in closer.”
“Agreed,” said Harvath.
Once he and Jacks were back in the truck and had closed their doors, he put the Novator in gear and headed down into the village.
He drove through the empty streets. Unlike many villages he had seen, this one hadn’t been ravaged by bombs and bullets. It was pretty much intact. So where was everyone?
As they continued, he noticed that most of the doors stood open and that people’s personal property was scattered about. In his mind, that meant one thing—looting. Someone had recently been through here. Either Russian soldiers or the Ravens. He feared it was the latter.
They soon arrived at the end of the village, where he slowed the truck to a stop and took a final look around. There was another sign for the winery, informing would-be visitors that it was only two kilometers away.
“Everybody stay frosty,” he advised.
He wanted the men to remain on heightened alert. They weren’t out of the woods yet. In fact, there was every possibility that danger was waiting for them just up ahead.
The winery was fronted by a short, dirt road with rows and rows of what looked like overgrown, untended vines on each side.
As they neared the main building—a long, brick structure with terra-cotta roofing tiles—the dirt road turned into a paved drive.
Harvath kept going. His plan was to do a full loop of the property, to get a feel for who and what was there, before coming to a stop and getting out.
There were multiple support buildings as well as a wine garden with picnic benches and strings of overhead party lights. In any other situation, it probably would have been quite festive, especially on the weekends. Right now, however, it was as somber as a graveyard. There wasn’t another living soul to be found.
They parked the Novator around back, out of sight from anyone who might be entering from the main road, and climbed out. It was now time to see if these guys had what it took when it came to room clearing.
They would tackle one building at a time. He’d leave a two-man team outside to stand guard while he took the other two inside with him. He’d then switch it up at the next building.
Explaining his plan, he, Hookah, and Krueger then made entry into the first building while Jacks and Biscuit took up positions outside.
The majority of the ground floor was a tasting room with benches and long wooden tables. There was broken glass and puddles of wine all over the place. Bottles had been smashed against the walls.
They cleared the tasting room, as well as two bathrooms, a small kitchen, an office, and a storage area—all of which had been ransacked. Upstairs were several more storage areas that had also been turned upside down. Hookah and Krueger had done plenty of house-to-house urban combat in Iraq and knew what they were doing.
Harvath switched it up for the wine-making building, taking Jacks and Biscuit inside with him while Hookah and Krueger stood guard. From the crush and fermentation areas to the lab, bottling, and casing departments, the Brit and the Canadian did a good job. And while Biscuit wasn’t as experienced as his teammates, his basic skills were solid.
Once he had a feel for what they could do, he kept switching the room-clearing teams up—Hookah and Jacks, Biscuit and Krueger, et cetera—as they moved through the rest of the buildings.
One of the last structures they tackled was the vintner’s residence. It was a modest, traditional Ukrainian structure, with a feature they had been seeing across the property—a ramp.
