EndWar

Real-time video from the drone showed two heavily armed Spetsnaz troops posted on the landing outside the main door to the observation deck. Both were staring down into the stairwell with digital binoculars pressed to their masks. They resembled darkly clad aliens, armored and deadly. A third troop appeared and reached into a satchel.

“Grenade!” one of Rakken’s men cried over the radio.

Rakken already had an image from his point man’s helmet camera. The grenade had been dropped at an angle intended for their landing, but it flew wide, and plummeted toward the very bottom—

Two seconds later it exploded, the staircase and railings reverberating.

“Sparta Team, they still can’t get a decent angle on us. Let’s pick up the pace!” Rakken cried.

However, every man on his rifle squad was already breathless, including himself.

And they were only halfway up the tower.

“Incoming, shields up!” yelled Rakken’s point man.

Dozens of rounds began pinging and ricocheting down at them, and Rakken crouched down behind his shield, feeling the vibration of several impacts as the shield’s liquid outer layer grew hard, absorbed the blow, then returned to its fluid state. The Russians were simply delaying them now, and Rakken wouldn’t stand for that.

“Sparta Team, I don’t care about that fire! Move out!”

Not two heartbeats after Rakken gave the order, the entire tower began to shake, as though from some massive earthquake.

“Sergeant!” cried one of Rakken’s team leaders. “What the hell is that?”

Major Alice Dennison was riveted to her monitors. She had just watched the Rods from God platform commanders line up for their shot. Then the rocket-and-fin-equipped tungsten rod had streaked away from the cylindrical platform, its engine glowing as it reached a speed of nearly 36,000 feet per second — about as fast as a meteor until retro rockets kicked in to prevent it from burning up. The rod was nearly twenty feet long, one foot in diameter, and its heat-shielded nose cone had grown cherry red as it had vanished into the atmosphere.

The rod had all the destructive effects of an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon without all of the radioactive fallout. It relied upon kinetic energy to destroy everything in its path.

Dennison had views from several cameras on the ground when the rod slammed into Highway 2, directly in the middle of that long convoy of Russian vehicles.

And now a swelling sphere of destruction spread from the impact site, the ground heaving up in great torrents, as though a billion subterranean explosions were going off in succession, chutes of fire and smoke lifting hundreds of feet into the air. The kill zone continued to spread, vehicles instantly pulverized by the unstoppable force.

She could only imagine what it must feel like on the ground, commanders popping out of their hatches, only to look up as the sky turned black. A breath later, they were incinerated or torn apart or buried under tons of dirt.

Dennison wasn’t sure what the quake would measure on the Richter scale, but the entire province would feel some kind of effect.

It was hypnotizing to watch, even though she’d seen kinetic strikes before. Every one was a little different, all awe-inspiring and even a little sad. No one on the ground had even a remote chance of survival.

Their ride home was nothing fancy: just a good old HH-60G Pave Hawk, which in truth was a highly modified Black Hawk whose primary mission was to conduct combat search-and-rescue operations into hostile environments.

Well, Sergeant Raymond McAllen mused, his current situation fit quite nicely into the air crew’s mission parameters.

Khaki had assisted the two pilots, one flight engineer, and one gunner into putting down in a clearing about five hundred yards south of their position; at the moment, McAllen, Halverson, and Pravota were charging toward the waiting bird, now less than a hundred yards away.

Rule and Gutierrez ran past them to provide a final few salvos of covering fire, and McAllen forced Halverson and Pravota to run ahead of him, placing himself between them and the incoming fire.

He’d read it a hundred times in the biographies of other Marines, had experienced it himself, and now, at this very moment, he knew it would hit him.

When you were just seconds away from safety, those last few seconds were the hardest.

You saw yourself getting shot at the last moment.

Saw yourself dying just as you were about to be saved.

Many combatants said they were never more scared than in the moment they were about to be picked up.

McAllen’s group cleared the forest, and Halverson and Pravota made a last mad dash for the waiting chopper, rotor whomping, engine thrumming, snow blowing hard. The gunner was at the ready near the open bay door, pivoting his.50 caliber, hungry for kills.