of the left sleeve of her winter whites. The technology had gotten to the point where she didn’t need to peel off her gloves and punch in Harvath’s location. It was being done for her by JSOC via satellite. Her job was to lead her team to him.
It was a good piece of technology to have, especially as the snow continued to fall and visibility worsened. The only downside to it, though, was the very real possibility of losing the link due to heavy cloud cover.
Knowing that Harvath was under fire, they all pushed themselves at top speed to get to him.
The plan had been for the dog sleds to transport him and the woman to the forest at the edge of the frozen lake. Once the plane had landed, the team would jump out, link up with them in the woods, and escort them back to the aircraft. They would then fly back to Pavel’s and disappear across the border. That was the best-case scenario.
The list of worst-case scenarios was endless. It included everything from Harvath and the woman being injured and needing to be carried, to Harvath being recaptured and the team needed to go inland to break him out and bring him back. The one thing they had all agreed on was that they were absolutely not leaving Russia without him.
Up at the front of their column, Sloane continued setting a blistering pace. But then something happened.
From somewhere out in front of them, they began to hear gunfire. And all at once, they took an impossibly hard pace and kicked it up. Way up.
CHAPTER 69
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In the SEAL teams, Harvath had had a good buddy from Texas. On a long deployment, when they were mind-numbingly bored, he had made the mistake of asking him what he thought the greatest state in the union was. He should have known what the man’s answer would be.
The SEAL held forth for well over an hour about how Texas, hands down, was the greatest state in the Union.
Texans were a special breed. In fact, they were some of the toughest warriors Harvath had ever encountered. As a glutton for punishment, Harvath had followed up by asking his friend what he thought the second-greatest state in the union was. The answer had surprised him.
“Tennessee,” the SEAL said.
“Why?” Harvath had asked.
“Because if it wasn’t for Tennessee there’d be no Davy Crockett and if it wasn’t for Davy Crockett, there’d be no Texas.”
Crockett, of course, had been part of the Texas Revolution and had been killed by Mexican troops at the Battle of the Alamo.
A student of military history, Harvath had always wondered what it must have been like to have been at the Alamo, to have been completely surrounded, and to have fought against such overwhelming odds.
He assumed it must have been akin to the three hundred Spartans who had held back the Persian army at the Gates of Thermopylae, or even the Allied forces that had landed on the beaches of Normandy and had pushed the Nazis all the way back to their downfall in Berlin.
The point was that some of the most important battles in history had been won not by those with the greatest number of troops, but rather those with the largest commitment to winning the fight.
And now, low on ammunition and sitting in what was shaping up to be his own Alamo, Harvath was determined to show the same commitment.
The overhang above them made it impossible to see who or what was coming downhill. Only when they pressed themselves against the rocks to either side could they even grab a partial glimpse of what was happening. And, if anyone ran up toward them from below, they were completely exposed and vulnerable.
Having warned Christina that the mercenaries were incoming, he picked up his rifle and made ready.
As he had done earlier, he once again did the math. Four dead Wagner operatives at the sleds meant there could be ten left—eight if they had maintained their two snipers aboard the helicopter.
Either way, those were bad odds and Harvath knew it. It was also the kind of battle a true warrior wished for. Only against an overwhelming force could you ever really prove that you had what it took.
The one thing about Harvath, though, was that no matter how many times he had proved it, he always felt as if he had to prove it again.
Maybe it was a hangover from his SEAL father, who never seemed happy