team of six operators in total rappelled down.
This wasn’t what he had planned for. He had expected them to set down someplace and come in on foot. Fuck, he thought to himself. Now what?
There was only one thing he could do—what he was trained to do: adapt and overcome.
Though he hated to do it, he backed up, turned around, and scrambled back in the direction from which he had entered the crawl space.
He didn’t need to see them to know there were snipers onboard providing overwatch for the operators. The moment he started firing, they’d be putting rounds all over him. The deadly difference, though, was that they’d be shooting from above, through a rotting floor, rather than trying to skip rounds off the ground and maybe hit a target hidden in a crawl space.
The presence of the helicopter was a game changer. It also provided a potential opportunity.
Harvath had less than a minute, thirty seconds at best. The moment the mercenaries triggered his IED, all bets were off.
Moving as fast as he could, he popped out of the crawl space, flipped up the night vision goggles on his helmet, and leaped to his feet. It was critical that he time his next move precisely.
Based on the searchlight, he knew exactly where the helicopter was. He made sure to keep the corner of the cabin between him and the snipers. They couldn’t shoot what they didn’t even know was there.
Already, the fire selector on the battle rifle he had taken from one of the dead Wagner snowmobilers was set to semiauto. Wrapping the sling around his arm for stability, he didn’t need to double-check that the weapons were hot. He had already chambered rounds in all of them.
The enormous helicopter continued to blast the village with whirling sheets of ice and snow, as its searchlight illuminated Jompá’s cabin with its white-hot beam.
Harvath had done countless entries over his career. Though he was tempted to stick his head out and see what was going on, he stayed right where he was.
There was only the front entrance, nothing in back. They would have seen that as they had flown over and before they had rappelled down.
Right now they’d be lining up in a stack, ready to kick in the door. After which they would charge in, searching the room for threats, their weapons sweeping left and right when . . .
BOOM.
The explosion wasn’t the loudest Harvath had ever heard. But it was significant.
While all attention in the helicopter was on the IED that had just gone off inside Jompá’s house Harvath swung out from behind the corner of the dilapidated cabin facing it and began firing.
He focused on the helicopter’s searchlight, and it took him a total of four shots to knock it out.
The instant the light went dark, he swung his barrel and dumped four more of the 7.62x39 rounds into the door area, where there was indeed a sniper.
After killing the sniper, he shifted to the pilot’s window, fired four additional rounds, and then targeted the bird’s engine with the rest of the ammunition in his mag.
If Christina was onboard, he prayed that she was strapped in. Having run the weapon dry, he ejected the empty magazine, and pulling a fresh one from his chest rig, rammed it home and cycled the bolt.
But before he could reengage, the helicopter banked hard away from him. Smoke was billowing from its exhaust and it was losing altitude. Harvath didn’t need to see any more to know the big Mi-8 was going down.
Snapping his eyes to Jompá’s house, he saw two Wagner mercenaries, each dragging an injured comrade out of the burning cabin.
He didn’t give his next move a second thought. Taking aim, he pressed his trigger and lit all four of them up.
Changing magazines, he heard a clap of thunder as the helicopter snapped through the trees of the forest beyond the village and slammed into the ground.
It was a bad crash, but based on how low the helo had been, he knew it was survivable.
Disguised in Wagner winter whites and carrying a Wagner-issued weapon, he flipped down the night vision goggles on his helmet and went to finish what they had started. His first stop—Jompá’s.
As the villagers slowly popped their heads out to see what had happened, Harvath waved them back inside. He didn’t need them making this any more dangerous than it already was.
Out of the corner of his eye, standing outside one of the cabins, he saw Sini. And