Arctic Storm Rising by Dale Brown (android based ebook reader .TXT) 📕

there on that damned spur, they had a tremendous advantage over his handful of survivors. All he and his troops could make out were the deadly flashes stabbing out of that boulder field—as their rifle and machine-gun fire swept the valley and this barren slope from end to end.

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 onthat flank had been killed or badly wounded in the first few seconds of this firefight. That left a shift to the right. Hebelly-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 assaultrifle.

“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 goodcover there, he judged, but it was too far away, more than three hundred meters. If he tried to redeploy his men there, theAmericans 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 thosebastards! 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 floppedover into the snow, killed instantly.

The surviving Russian whirled around and opened fire on full automatic, hosing down the distant streambed around where hethought that shot must have come from. He could see snow and bits of torn brush pinwheeling away as his bullets tore at theground. His eyes narrowed as he leaned into the burst. Accuracy was important, but there were times when you needed to throwlead 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 bodyarmor.

 

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—”

His smile froze. Boyd was dead, lying facedown on the lip of the streambed. Sanchez, ashen-faced, had slid back down a fewfeet. 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 Russianalike—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 outof 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 bustedleg.”

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 justleaves 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