Gambit by David Hagberg (fantasy novels to read txt) 📕

“Better than we are,” Bender said.

The one round in the chamber and the four standard-issue 15-round magazines they carried gave them sixty-one pistol shots each, plus the half-dozen 40-round mags for the room broom Mac had left for them, for an additional 240 rounds.

“But we have the high ground, and they won’t know that we’re here,” Alicia told him. What she left unsaid was that if whoever was coming managed to get past McGarvey and Pete, then this could end up as another Little Bighorn.

Vetrov and his five operators checked each other’s equipment, especially the parachutes, then they and the pilot and copilot went on oxygen.

“Drop in two minutes,” Borisov called from the cockpit.

Darina came back. “Are you ready?” she asked.

Vetrov gave the thumbs-up.

“I’ll be glad to get rid of you bastards,” she said. She undogged the hatch, but before she could pull it in and to the right, Vetrov took out his pistol and shot her in the head at point-blank range.

The noise was soft but loud enough for the pilot to hear it and understand what was happening. He was reaching for a pistol in a compartment beside his left leg when Vetrov came forward and shot him in the back of the head.

“Hatch,” he spoke into his lapel mic, and almost immediately, the inside of the aircraft was hit with near tornado-force swirling winds, the temperature dropping to nearly below zero almost immediately.

He found the fuel dump switch, guarded by a red cover, and switched it, and by the time he got back to the open hatch, the plane had already began to climb because of the decreasing weight.

“Teper, teper, teper!” he shouted. Now, now, now! He stepped out of the aircraft, the wind slamming into his body like he’d hit a brick wall.

He immediately stabilized his altitude, head down, body angled forward, arms to either side for steering, and he began the long drop from ninety-five hundred meters to less than four hundred before he would open his chute. At forty meters, he would release his equipment bag, letting it fall five meters on its lanyard.

He checked his helmet’s small rearview mirror to make sure that his crew was stacked up directly on his six, everyone’s chute in good order.

The island, laid out like something from a virtual reality game, was exactly like the images they had studied over the past thirty-six hours while they were in transit. The harbor town of Livadi well off to the southeast to the right of his glide path was where it was supposed to be.

He angled slightly left, which would bring him across the bay and put him on the ground at fifty meters below the lighthouse. His operators would assemble at his landing site, and within ninety seconds they would have stuffed their parachutes in one large plastic bag, taken out their submachine guns, switched on their night vision goggles, and started up the hill.

They knew the drill, and they had their orders, so none would have to be given verbally. They were stealth fighters, and Vetrov was proud of what they were capable of.

SEVENTY

“Pick a bush and curl up next to it with your eyes skyward, your pistol in hand,” McGarvey said.

Pete was momentarily confused. “What?”

“Get down and roll up in a ball. If they jumped out around thirty thousand feet, it’ll take them three minutes of free fall before they open their chutes, and the clock has already started. They’ll be equipped with night vision goggles, but at any distance, the resolution won’t be good enough to tell us from scrub brush.”

“I got it, but I hope they haven’t figured it out, too,” Pete said.

“They’ll be watching the lighthouse, and we should be behind them if they’re accurate with their landing.”

“If these guys are Spetsnaz, they’ll be just about as good as our SEAL Team 6 operators, and they should nail it.”

“I’m counting on it,” McGarvey said. “Now get on the ground and make like a bush.”

Pete pulled out her Glock, lay down on her left side next to a bush, and pulled her knees up to her chest, putting her in a position so that her gun hand was free and she could look up at the sky as well as see McGarvey curled up a few feet away.

“This okay?” she asked.

“Fine. But don’t open fire until I do, and don’t waste ammunition shooting blind. Pick your target, and make sure he goes down. There’s bound to be six or more of them, and I want to even the odds as fast as possible before they turn around and start shooting back.”

“By then, with any luck, Bender and Alicia should start, catching whoever’s coming in a cross fire.”

“With any luck,” McGarvey said. “Keep frosty, wife.”

“You, too, husband.”

Alicia had found a pair of Steiner mil spec binoculars hanging on a peg just within the doorway to the bedroom, and she laid her room broom aside and got them. First, she scanned the ground that sloped gently down to a narrow little valley where McGarvey said he and Pete would position themselves.

But making several slow sweeps where she thought they might be, she couldn’t make them out. Either they had moved somewhere else or they were damned good at finding hiding spots.

“What do you see?” Bender asked. He was nervous.

“Nothing yet,” Alicia said, and she looked skyward toward the north in the direction McGarvey figured the jumpers would be coming from. But if they’d made a HALO jump and were already in the air, they would be moving above 150 miles per hour. They would be dressed in black and would be nearly impossible to spot.

She laid the binoculars aside and picked up the submachine gun.

“Still nothing?” Bender asked.

“Nothing,” Alicia said. Earlier, her nerves had been jumping, but now that she knew an attack was imminent, she’d calmed down, her heart rate barely above sixty. It had been the same for her in the Marines. As soon as a firefight