Chapter 9
He shook his head, a look of pure disgust on his face.
“If you can’t carry your primary weapon, I’m leaving it in the snow!” Cross shouted over the rushing wind.
I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. I was using every ounce of my willpower just to manage the pain.
I grabbed my heavy weapon case with my left hand and hauled myself to my feet.
We were doing a HALO jump. High Altitude, Low Opening. It was the only way to infiltrate the airspace without triggering the bunker’s early warning radar.
We stepped out into the black abyss.
The freefall was a nightmare of rushing wind, disorientation, and freezing cold. The temperature at twenty thousand feet was unimaginable. Even through my thermal layers, I felt the cold seeping into my bones, freezing the moisture in my lungs.
My right arm was completely numb by the time my parachute deployed with a violent jerk that nearly dislocated my shoulder.
We landed in waist-deep, powdery snow on the steep slope of a jagged mountain ridge.
The silence that followed the landing was absolute.
There were no engines here. No wind. Just the heavy, suffocating silence of a frozen wilderness in the middle of the night.
Cross was already moving, burying his parachute in the snow and checking his GPS tracker.
“Overwatch position is three miles out,” Cross whispered, his breath pluming in the freezing air like smoke. “The terrain is brutal. We have two hours until the target’s rotation window.”
He looked at me, snow clinging to his eyelashes. “Can you move, or do I need to call for a medivac right now and scrub the mission?”
I reached down with my left hand, grabbed the handle of my hundred-pound weapon case, and began dragging it through the deep snow.
“Lead the way,” I hissed through chattering teeth.
The hike was a brutal, agonizing crawl.
Every step was a struggle against the waist-deep snow and the steep, treacherous incline of the mountain. We were climbing a sheer ridge of jagged granite and loose shale, hidden beneath a treacherous layer of ice.
The air was so thin it felt like breathing through a wet towel. My lungs burned with every inhalation. My thighs screamed in protest.
But the physical exhaustion was nothing compared to the pain in my right arm.
The extreme cold had sent the damaged nerves into a state of total panic. My hand was no longer just shaking; it was violently spasming. The tremors were so severe they were throwing off my balance as I climbed.
Several times, I slipped on the ice, falling hard onto my knees, dragging the heavy weapon case up with me.
Cross didn’t offer to help. He just kept setting a punishing pace, glancing back occasionally with a look of barely concealed frustration. He was convinced I was going to fail. He was convinced I was going to get us both killed.
After an hour and a half of pure torture, we finally crested the ridge.
“Get down,” Cross hissed, immediately dropping onto his stomach in the snow.
I collapsed beside him, burying my face in the freezing powder, gasping for air.
We cautiously crawled forward to the edge of the cliff.
Below us was a massive, sprawling valley. And at the far end of the valley, carved directly into the face of the opposing mountain, was the bunker.
Even from this insane distance, it looked terrifying.
Massive concrete walls, illuminated by harsh halogen spotlights. Armed patrols walking the perimeter with attack dogs. Heavy machine gun emplacements scanning the tree line.
It was a fortress.
“Distance to target,” I whispered, my voice raw and hoarse.
Cross pulled out a highly advanced laser rangefinder. He rested his elbows in the snow, painting the southern wall of the bunker with an invisible infrared laser.
“Two thousand, six hundred and forty meters,” Cross whispered. He lowered the rangefinder and looked at me. “The wind is a nightmare. It’s swirling in the valley. We’ve got a crosswind coming off the ridge at roughly twenty miles per hour, but it’s dropping to dead calm in the center, and then gusting in the opposite direction near the bunker walls.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a blender out there. The bullet is going to travel through three completely different wind zones before it even reaches the wall.”
“Set up the hide,” I said, ignoring his pessimism.
We went to work.
Cross began digging a shallow trench in the snow, building a small berm of packed ice to conceal our muzzle flash and provide a stable resting point for the rifle.
I popped the latches on my weapon case with my left hand.
The .416 Barrett lay inside, cold and deadly.
Lifting it out of the case with only my left arm was a massive struggle. The rifle weighed nearly thirty pounds. I had to awkwardly drag it onto the snow berm, my right hand violently jerking against my chest, completely useless.
