EndWar

Just then Gerard pulled open his bloody jacket and lifted his shirt, revealing a pair of dark holes in his chest. He wouldn’t make it, and neither would the engineer.

“We need help!” Vatz cried to one of the door gunners.

The guy ignored him, tending to his own shoulder wound. Gritting his teeth, Vatz pushed himself over to the Russian, wrenched up the man’s visor, and grabbed him by the neck. “Are you worth it, you bastard?”

The Russian stared up with vacant eyes.

Vatz glanced back at the remains of his team, then glared at the colonel once more and screamed, “Are you worth it?”

“They’re splitting up now,” said Black Bear over the radio.

Sergeant Nathan Vatz shivered. Looking down, he saw his gloved hands had formed into fists and felt the sweat pouring down his face, despite the cold wind blowing across the town hall’s rooftop.

Don’t do that again, he ordered himself. This isn’t about revenge. Stick to the plan, the mission.

“Looks like a couple heading toward downtown. Two more holding back, probably scouts. Four breaking off, coming for us at the airport. The other four? Not sure where they’re going yet. Looks like the scouts see the roadblock, over.”

Captain Godfrey, still off to Vatz’s right, was working his Cross Com, studying the imagery coming in from Black Bear’s men at the airport. Suddenly he cried, “They’re jamming us!”

Vatz checked his own channel: static. No voice, data, imagery.

Didn’t matter. They’d hoped for the best, prepared for the worst, as always.

Every operator knew his role.

They just needed the Russians to be good enemy soldiers and die according to the plan.

The two Ka-29s, painted in camouflage patterns, swooped down into the middle of the broad intersection, their rotors echoing so loudly off the buildings that Vatz wished he’d shoved in his earplugs. They had no tail rotors, he noticed, just a large main rotor with a smaller rotor beneath it. The tail sections had horizontal wings with vertical fins attached to the ends, like the dorsal fins on sharks. Each fin was emblazoned with a bright red star.

A close look through his binoculars yielded more of the expected: Spetsnaz infantrymen visible behind the two crew members. Vatz assumed the hold was jammed to capacity: sixteen troops. Their landing gear unfolded, their noses pitched up, and they set down, one after the other.

Vatz didn’t need to give the order. His weapons sergeants knew exactly what to do next. All of them did.

He took in a long breath—

And the battle began.

TWENTY-SIX

Still crouched beneath the cellar staircase and not moving a muscle, Major Stephanie Halverson listened to the commotion going on upstairs:

“Where is she?”

“Who?” asked the father.

“The Yankee pilot!”

“I don’t know!”

A gunshot boomed, causing the mother to cry out, and Halverson thought, This is it. It’s over.

They had killed the husband. They would come down and finish the job.

Suddenly, the mother bolted from her hiding place in the back and charged toward the stairs, where a Spetsnaz soldier was just coming down.

“Don’t shoot!” she screamed.

He did.

Put a bullet in her chest.

But a half second after he fired, so did Halverson, carefully aiming between the slots of the wooden stairs, her round coming up between his legs and into his torso.

He tumbled forward, his rifle dropping to the concrete. Before Halverson could come out and grab it, the boy was there, snatching up the rifle. He panted as he looked at his mother slumped across the floor—

Then a creak from the stairs seized his attention. He cut loose a dozen rounds.

Yet another troop slumped.

Halverson darted across the room, got up on a chair, broke out the window with the butt of her pistol, then hoisted herself up and squeezed through the hole. “Come on!” she cried, reaching out to the boy.

He raced over and took her hand, just as a metallic thump sounded, followed by a loud hissing: gas.

They’d killed two. Had the father shot one? Maybe. There’d only be three left, then, she thought.

Out in the snow, she and the boy ran straight for the barn, about a hundred yards away.

Gunfire boomed behind them.

She hazarded a look back. One troop, who had come out the back door, had just spotted them.

“Run!” she screamed.