RAPP felt something nudge him in the ass and he swung a hand back, smacking his horse on the nose. It finally wandered off in search of something to graze on.
His guide, Nazar, was lying next to him in the trees ten feet from the edge of an empty road. His expression suggested he might cut and run at any second, but so far he was staying put. The man wasn’t former military or even Ukrainian intelligence. He was just a slightly puffy farmer who had grown up in the region and had the bad luck of being Danya Bondar’s cousin.
While ops weren’t his thing, there was no denying his informal skills on the intel gathering front. He’d built an impressive network out of like-minded rural neighbors, tracking Russian movements, taking surreptitious photographs, and keeping logs of men and equipment. Not pros, but motivated as hell not to have the Russians roll over them and their families.
“It’s been three hours,” Nazar said in passable English. “Our information must be bad. We should go.”
So far all they’d seen were a couple of deer and the shortening of the shadows thrown by the trees. The intel that had been passed to them from the locals suggested that a contingent of Russian troops had split off from a larger force just after crossing the border. Even at a crawl, they should have been there an hour and a half ago. But Rapp wasn’t ready to give up yet. This was a perfect location—remote, with dense foliage that made it easy to get close to the road and would cover their retreat if things got out of hand.
He glanced over at the Ukrainian, examining his weathered face, wool coat and cap, and passed down hunting rifle. He likely owned better gear but wanted to reinforce his image as a simple farmer—a station in life that he’d mentioned on at least ten occasions already.
“Could they have turned off, Nazar? Taken another route?”
“No,” the man admitted. “There’s nowhere to do this. Maybe they went back?”
Rapp doubted it. Military commanders tended not to change their minds on simple matters like moving troops in noncombat environments. A more likely explanation was that one of the local informants had ratted them out and the Russians were now creeping up on them from every direction. No reason to tell Nazar that, though. He already seemed stretched to his limit.
Another ten minutes passed before Rapp’s satphone began to vibrate.
“Yeah,” he said quietly into it.
“I’ve got eyes on them.”
Coleman was in a similar position across the road and about a hundred yards to the south.
“How many?”
“One Ural-4320 transport truck riding high on its suspension. I’d swear it’s empty. Fourteen men walking behind it.”
The situation in Ukraine seemed to get more bizarre every minute. If the Russians were in the process of supplying an invasion, why send an empty truck up a shitty mountain road to nowhere? And why soldiers on foot? They’d all fit in the back of the Ural. Was it part of a plan to capture the locals recording their movements? Maybe. But using resources to run down a bunch of farmers playing spy didn’t seem all that rational.
The sound of a rough-running motor started to separate itself from the quiet scraping of Nazar scooting back toward the horses. Rapp grabbed him by the jacket.
“The human eye picks up movement. If you’re still, they’ll go right by.”
Predictably, the man froze. He wasn’t a coward—just a family man well outside the world he normally inhabited.
“All armed with AKs,” Coleman said quietly over Rapp’s earpiece. “But some look like they’re surplus from the Taliban.”
The truck came into view and Rapp studied it, examining the hazy image of the lone man in the truck’s cab and then turning his attention to the soldiers shuffling along behind. Most of them were overweight—some significantly so—and a few actually had gray hair. There was no formation, just men trying to find the easiest path along the dirt road and struggling to maintain what looked to be barely a two-mile-an-hour pace.
One thing was made clear by their appearance: this wasn’t a spec ops group in search of insurgents. As near as Rapp could tell, it was a group of long-retired reservists in desperate need of basic physical training.
The truck crept past, allowing Rapp to pick out more detail. They weren’t just ragtag, they were ragtag to the point of not making sense. A symphony of exhaustion, ill-fitting uniforms, and round shoulders slung with poorly maintained rifles. Beyond that, they had no gear beyond small hydration packs. Clearly their commander was smart enough to know that they’d collapse under anything heavier.
“Are you seeing this?” Coleman said over Rapp’s earpiece. “What the fuck? Are these the assholes we’ve been worried about all these years?”
The soldiers were too close for him to respond verbally, so he tapped in a text.
Something wrong. Need closer look.
“What the hell does that mean?” came Coleman’s immediate reply.
Rapp waited for the last of the stragglers to go by before speaking. “I’ll come in from the front while you flank them.”
The relief on Nazar’s face at the Russians having passed faded. “Danya said you can only watch! If you try to do anything else he said I should—”
“Shut up. Scott can you do it?”
“Well, my knee’s bothering me and my calf’s stiffened up pretty bad. But since we’re going up against fifteen armed Russian soldiers I don’t think that’s going to make much of a difference.”
“So you’re good?”
“What could possibly go wrong?”
“On my signal, then.”
Nazar started scooting back and again Rapp stopped him. “Your part’s easy. When Scott and I have control, I want you to come out, look in the trees on both sides of the road, and shout at all your imaginary men to hold their fire. Can you handle that?”
“What if you don’t get control?”
“Then get on your horse and ride it like you stole it.”
Rapp grabbed the AK next to him and ran crouched through the trees. When he was about five yards in front of the lumbering truck, he leapt into the road and fired at the windshield, aiming at the empty passenger side but still causing the driver to dive beneath the steering wheel. Two more controlled bursts sounded from the back of the truck, followed by Coleman shouting in Russian. He didn’t really speak the language, but his profession demanded mastery of a few useful phrases in dozens of languages. It was hard to get by for long without “Drop your weapons,” “If you move, I’ll cut your balls off,” and “Where’s the closest bar?”
By the time Rapp made it to the back of the truck, half the soldiers had dropped their guns and the other half were trying but had gotten tangled in the slings.
Surprisingly, Nazar hadn’t bolted. He appeared from the trees with his rifle held in front of him, shouting in Ukrainian to their non-existent comrades in the woods.
Behind Rapp, the vehicle’s door opened and a man nearly fell out. He looked to be in his late twenties—decades younger than his men—and wore a better fitting uniform identifying him as a low-ranking officer. He didn’t even bother to glance back, instead bolting immediately for the trees.
Rapp indicated for Nazar to gather the weapons lying on the ground and then took off after the young officer. After a two-minute chase, Rapp rammed him from behind and sent him sprawling across the rocky ground. He tried to roll to his feet, but Rapp shoved a boot down on his throat. For a moment, it looked like the Russian was going to try to fight back, but the barrel of Rapp’s AK pressed to his chest changed his mind.
He was even younger than he’d appeared when he’d jumped from the truck, with a pale, unlined face and stylishly cut hair. A recent university graduate spending a little time in the military to kick start his rise through Russian society. Perfect.
“I assume you speak English?”
“Yes,” he managed to get out. “I . . . I studied it.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Grigory Eristov. I—”
Rapp smacked him in the forehead with the barrel of the gun. “I don’t give a shit about your name. Who are you? Regular Russian army?”