Arctic Storm Rising
- Автор: Браун Дейл
- Серия: Nick Flynn #1
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 9780063015050
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Arctic Storm Rising». Краткое содержание книги:
On this side, the surviving white-robed attackers were also starting to stir, recovering from their own daze. Another few seconds and they’d be back in action.
Flynn scowled. The longer this fight went on, the worse it was going to get. It was time to end this — at least here. Rolling over, he tugged a ball-shaped M67 fragmentation grenade from one of his equipment pouches. Quickly, he flicked its safety clip away with his left thumb, twisted the pull ring, and yanked it out to release the pin. One swift glance over his shoulder showed him his target. Without hesitating, he reared back and lobbed the grenade high into the air, rolling back onto his stomach with the same fluid motion.
“Frag out!” he screamed, hoping like hell that Dykstra and Kasper could hear him through their own blast-deafened eardrums.
As soon as the grenade left his hand, its safety lever flipped open and fell away. The grenade itself soared on through a smooth arc until it thudded down high up on the dune, several yards above and beyond the little knot of prone tribesmen. Then gravity took over and it rolled downhill, right into their midst.
Flynn buried his face in the sand again.
Craaack! The grenade exploded, sending lethal, razor-edged fragments sleeting through a fifty-foot radius.
Flynn looked up. Through a small puff of dirty gray smoke drifting downwind, he saw the results. Three of the five remaining attackers were motionless — ripped into blood-soaked corpses by dozens of pieces of steel. Two staggered upright. Scarlet streaks down their faces and shredded robes showed that they hadn’t escaped the blast unscathed, but they still clutched AK-47s in their hands.
He grabbed his M4 again. “‘Iisqat al’aslihat alkhasat bik! Drop your weapons!” he shouted.
Instead, they whirled toward him, apparently still determined to carry on this fight.
“Assholes,” Flynn muttered. Gritting his teeth, he squeezed off six more rounds. Hit multiple times, the two white-robed men crumpled to the sand and lay still. They were either dead or dying, he decided. Painfully, he scrambled back to his feet.
The sound of gunfire from the other side of the C-130 seemed to be trailing away — fading from a near-continuous crackle of shots to isolated pop-pop-pops. With his carbine up and ready to fire, he moved warily off in that direction.
Greasy black smoke from the burning Mi-17 made it difficult to see much. Bodies, some in white robes, others in camouflage uniforms, were scattered in all directions. He spotted White’s gray-haired, skeletal form lying huddled near the shrapnel-torn tail section of the wrecked Super Hercules. Whether the man was dead or simply unconscious wasn’t clear, and Flynn wasn’t inclined to go check… not just yet.
At least one of the former Special Forces contractors was still alive, though seriously wounded and pretty clearly in shock. He was trying to apply a combat tourniquet to his own mangled right thigh… but his blood-soaked hands were shaking too badly.
“Hang on, trooper,” Flynn murmured, kneeling beside him. He set his M4A1 down. “I’ve got this.” Quickly, he slipped the tourniquet band through the buckle, pulled it tight, and wrapped it around the man’s leg. Then he carefully twisted the tourniquet rod, further tightening everything down until the blood pulsing out through gashed flesh slowed and then stopped.
“Thanks, man,” the wounded man said weakly. “Thought I was fucked.” But then his eyes widened as he saw something looming over Flynn’s shoulder.
Crap. He desperately grabbed for his weapon and whirled around, already knowing it was probably too late. One of the tribesmen had emerged from the thick black curtain of smoke, with a rictus grin like the Angel of Death plastered across his face, and an AKM pointed straight at Flynn’s head. The Libyan’s finger was already tightening on the trigger.
Crack.
The tribeman’s chest exploded, torn apart by a 5.56mm round fired at close range. He fell in a boneless heap and bled out across the sand.
Zalewski appeared out of the smoke, still holding the short-barreled carbine he’d fired one-handed. The big PJ’s left arm, apparently broken, hung limp at his side. Flecks of dried blood were spattered across his camouflage and body armor. Grimly, he prodded the Libyan he’d shot with the toe of his boot. “Pretty sure that was the last of ’em,” he said softly.
Flynn breathed out. “Sure hope so, Zee.” Slowly, he got back up. “And… thanks.”
Zalewski looked away from the dead tribesman and toward him. Lines of pain and exhaustion were drawn across his broad face. “What are your orders, sir?” he asked. “That we’re bugging out, I hope.” He nodded at the burning helicopter. “Because if there are more of these bastards out there, that smoke’s going to draw ’em like flies to rotting meat.”
The big man’s warning agreed with Flynn’s own somber assessment. They might have destroyed this first band of attackers, but there was no telling how many more enemy fighters were lurking at the nearby oasis — waiting to see the results of their carefully planned ambush. And with so many dead and wounded of their own, the smart move for Wizard One-One’s survivors and what little was left of the black ops team was to abandon this crash site… and fast.
Thirty minutes later, Nick Flynn sat with his legs dangling outside the open door of the heavily loaded HH-60W helicopter. Rotors beating hard, the CSAR bird lifted slowly off the ground, fighting for altitude as it flew east into the darkening sky. Bone-tired, he held on tight to the doorframe, craning his head to scan the desert rippling past below them — watching closely for any sign of another enemy ambush. Behind him, injured men were crammed into every available space inside the Jolly Green II’s cabin. There hadn’t been room or payload capacity to bring away any of their dead.
Between them, the black ops team and Wizard One-One’s crew had lost more than half their strength. Bill Wade would probably lose his leg. Mike Camarillo was dead, gunned down by the terrorists just outside the wrecked C-130. Zalewski’s arm was fractured, snapped when he’d been tossed around inside the downed turboprop’s crumpled fuselage by the suicide bomb blast. Most of the ex — Special Forces veterans working for White had been killed, some by the bomb, the rest during the ensuing close-quarters gun battle — but they’d gone down hard, taking most of the attacking tribesmen on that flank with them.
White himself was still alive, though he’d been shot in the chest. Apparently, the AK round had missed his heart, assuming he actually had one. Right now, the intelligence officer was propped up against the rear bulkhead, swathed in bandages, but conscious and glaring at Flynn.
“Fast movers at ten o’clock high,” Dykstra reported over the intercom.
Flynn looked up and spotted twin contrails arrowing westward across the sky, coming their way.
“Wizard One-One, this is Hammer Three-Five,” a crisp voice called over the radio from one of the two U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles vectored to this location. “Can you confirm the target is clear?”
“Wizard One-One confirms the target is clear, Hammer Three-Five,” Kate Kasper replied. “Anyone still breathing down there is a bad guy.”
“Copy that,” the Strike Eagle pilot acknowledged. “Target locked.” And then. “GBU Thirty-eights away.”
Flynn blinked, not sure if he’d actually seen several small specks falling off the distant F-15s or not. GBU-38s were five-hundred-pound gravity bombs converted to precision-guided munitions by bolting on control surfaces and combined inertial guidance — GPS systems. Once released at high altitude, they were capable of steering themselves to targets up to fifteen nautical miles away.