They were calling for the dead man.
Rapp snatched up the radio and exhausted a good portion of his Russian vocabulary by saying the word “copy” into it.
“Time to get out of Dodge before his buddies figure out what happened,” Coleman whispered.
Rapp glanced behind him at the black expanse of the Baltic Sea. Whitecaps glowed in the moonlight, breaking lazily against the beach. None looked much higher than a couple of feet—easy to swim out past but not offering much visual cover.
Worse was the beach itself. There were a good fifty yards of flat sand between them and the water. And even if they made it that far, there would likely be another ten of running through increasingly deep water before they could completely submerge. Unfortunately, better options weren’t on offer.
Rapp started to follow Coleman, who was running toward the beach, but then his mind registered something he’d glimpsed a few moments before. He dove forward, grabbing one of Coleman’s ankles and taking the man down before he broke out of the trees.
The SEAL reacted just as he’d been trained, rolling to cover and sighting over his rifle at the beach. “What?”
Rapp pulled him back to the machine gun placement and pointed to a saucer-shaped device partially obscured by leaves.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Coleman groaned as Rapp pushed the lids off one crate after another, finding all of them empty. “We’re already ten minutes behind schedule and now we’ve got a mined beach?”
When a Russian voice erupted from the walkie-talkie again, Coleman crouched and thumbed back at the body behind him. “Oh, yeah. And that guy’s buddies are about to come down on us like the wrath of God. I vote that we get the fuck out of here and live to fight another day.”
It was the smart move, but not among their choices. Maxim Krupin needed to be dealt with before this thing escalated out of control and Kennedy had lost confidence in Azarov.
“There’s an American sub out there waiting for us and we’re going to be on it.”
“Bullshit, Mitch. Sometimes you’re just beat and this is one of those times. Whatever Irene’s got going on in Russia, someone else is going to have to handle it.”
The voice on the walkie-talkie came on again, and the tone of it was easily deciphered. People were on their way. Rapp looked around him at the empty crates, the dead man’s sleeping bag, and finally at the machine gun. Time to get creative.
He walked up to the weapon and grabbed the hearing protection hanging next to the stock. The last thing he heard before everything went silent was Coleman’s quiet voice.
“Please don’t do that, Mitch.”
The gun bucked in his hand, spewing a line of tracers out onto the beach. He directed fire at the sand in front of him, churning up a section about two feet wide as he walked his aim toward the water. The barrel of the gun was already beginning to glow red when a mine finally exploded about ten yards away. He closed his eyes as the sand blasted his face, but kept his finger on the trigger.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw sand erupting about fifteen yards to the right of where his rounds were hitting. Another Russian machine gun placement had opened fire. Not certain what the target was, they were taking their cues from him.
When his ammo belt ran out, he ripped off his hearing protection and ran for the sand he’d churned up. The Russians were still firing, but their rounds were impacting well to his right, kicking up a cloud of dust that helped obscure him. There was no guarantee that he’d managed to clear all the mines and the tension of knowing he could step on one at any moment was tempting him to push too hard on the unpredictable surface.
When he was about ten yards from shore, the sound of the Russian gun changed subtly but there was no way he could look back to find out why. He hit the water at full speed, lifting his feet high to try to maintain speed. When it got knee deep, he dove into the frigid sea, scraping across the bottom on his way to deeper water.
No rounds were penetrating around him, so he surfaced, letting his head penetrate the surface just enough to see. The Russian gunner had spotted Coleman when he was in the middle of the beach and the former SEAL had been forced to turn back.
Rapp tensed as he watched his friend going for cover in the trees with the Russians doing everything they could to stop him. It turned out that when being chased by a few hundred rounds per minute, Coleman could still haul ass. He disappeared into the darkness and Rapp dove again, staying beneath the surface as he put distance between him and the shore.
Coleman would be fine. While it was true that he still wasn’t a hundred percent, it wouldn’t matter. Even at three quarters speed, he’d cut a path through the Russians that they wouldn’t soon forget.
CHAPTER 43
THE KREMLIN
RUSSIA
ANDREI Sokolov, noting that he was running almost a minute ahead of schedule, slowed his pace. The normally empty corridor was bustling with young officers, all of whom squeezed to its edges as he passed.
He was barely aware of their presence as his mind continued to focus on the ongoing situation with Maxim Krupin. Dr. Fedkin had offered no resistance at all, immediately agreeing to try to convince the Russian president to undergo a dangerous surgery that had little chance of improving his prognosis. It was something that initially had pleased Sokolov, but that now worried him. Fedkin was focused entirely on his own survival and had come to believe that Krupin was irrelevant to it. While he remained outwardly positive and proactive, it was clear that he no longer believed his patient would survive.
Two guards opened a set of double doors and Sokolov passed through, entering the cavernous hall that had been repurposed to coordinate the war. Massive screens had replaced the paper maps once used to track troop movements. Computer terminals had sprouted in place of typewriters and calculating machines, and encrypted satellite communications had taken the place of telephones and couriers. None of that mattered, though. The men, the vague scent of sweat, and unparalleled focus had been unchanged for thousands of years.
When his presence was noted, his military commanders gathered around the table centered in the room. Their faces were uniformly drawn, with eyes reddened from lack of sleep and stubbled chins. Their acknowledgment of his approach was muted, no more than brief nods and murmured greetings.
“Report,” he said to the commander of Russia’s ground troops.
“Reinforcements continue to arrive from Lithuania and Estonia, but having had no plan for their integration, we’re still struggling to make effective use of them. Cities, military bases, and strategic crossroads have been secured but aren’t proving as useful as we’d hoped. Electricity and water to them has been selectively cut off in ways that will be hard to repair, and that’s interrupting supply lines that are already overwhelmed by the increased troop numbers. Critical roads, bridges, and runways have been destroyed, slowing our men’s movements and making them easy targets for the insurgency. Also, the entire country has been booby-trapped. Everything from sophisticated laser triggered mines to simple sawed-through floorboards.”
“How long until you’ve dealt with all those traps?”
“Years,” the man admitted. “We don’t have enough men with that kind of training, and even if we did, it’s incredibly time consuming work. Probably half the population has fled their homes and many have left traps behind. Add to that the fact that it’s impossible to differentiate civilians from soldiers an—”