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CHAPTER SIX

Kaliningrad. Warehouse District.

Propenko snapped his team to attention. He scowled over the nine men standing in line as if he might just condescend to let them lick his boots, but only the soles. He shook his head in disgust and pointed at McCarter. “This man is God! I am prophet! Do you have any questions?”

None did.

Manning smiled and spoke low to McCarter. “Nice touch.”

Gaz the Bagman had turned out to indeed be a bag of money.

Rather than accept bully boys from Moscow, Propenko had taken the money and privately gone shopping. It had been a risk, but McCarter had gone along with it. Propenko had used his personal connections and found ten Russian military policemen of the Western Military District, special oblast unit, who were more than willing to make some cash on the side. Save that one was missing; McCarter was pleased with the transaction.

All of the assembled men had the Russian Federation equivalent of fast-reaction-team training and all of them spoke English. Several were local boys and spoke Polish. All had proved themselves as tough, capable and utterly corruptible soldiers. Being utterly corrupt military police in Fortress Kaliningrad, they had easily been able to acquire high-quality weapons and gear. They had brought a truckload of body armor, night-vision goggles, com gear and stubby, Kashtan submachine guns with sound suppressors and red-dot sights. As well, there was an assortment of grenades, though, the Phoenix Force leader knew, they were less than lethal flash-stuns and sting-ball, blunt-trauma weapons.

McCarter and Manning had helped themselves. It was good kit, but it was light, “slender gear’” as McCarter’s father would have said.

Every scenario the group had run ended up with the real enemy force coming in hard and heavy. Phoenix Force would have to rely on the reinforced Able Team and Dragonslayer to make up the difference.

Propenko strode up to McCarter and saluted. “They are ready for your inspection.”

“You said you’d hired ten.”

“I did.”

“Where is our missing military policeman?”

“Do not know. Missing man is youngest. Perhaps he is late, or screw up getting off duty tonight.”

“Well, then, we’ll just have to make do, won’t we?” McCarter scanned his squad. “They seem likely enough, I’ll give them that.”

“Good news is they are Russian boys. They have seen far too many action movies and shows on cable television. Trained from childhood to think officer with English accent is best of best. They will think you are James Bond or General Montgomery or both if you let them believe. I suggest you do.”

“Right.” McCarter strode forth and stopped just short of being a Monty Python skit as he laid it on thick. “Right! Listen here, you communist heathens!”

Several of the men smirked.

McCarter allowed it. He wanted cohesion and camaraderie on this one. Propenko could instill blind fear and obedience if the situation warranted. “The situation is simple. There happen to be some right bloody bastards in Poland who don’t belong there, and there are men in Moscow with money. Manna from bloody heaven, amounts of money, my lads!

“The pricks in Poland, who are squatting there quite unreasonably, have given the men in Moscow grief, added insult on top of injury, and cost them blood and money. The men in Moscow have shown the infinite good taste and wisdom to hire me. I have sent forth Mr. Propenko, and he has hired you. I am informed you are all Military Police—Voennaya Politsiya, VP—Western District, special unit. The best of the best! You know how to conduct a raid, how to kick ass and know how to take prisoners and collect evidence! The money men in Moscow would dearly love to speak with these men, so alive if possible. I am informed we will have satellite and ground level intelligence.”

The Russians nodded and made affirmative noises.

“You are all being issued communication gear. All battle instructions will be in English. This is Operation Red Wolf. We are Wolf Pack.”

The Russians liked the sound of it.

McCarter snarled. “Wolf Pack! Sound off!”

The Russians shouted out in domino effect. “Wolf One. Wolf Two. Wolf Three. Wolf Four, Wolf…”

“Memorize it,” McCarter ordered. “From now on we have no names. I am Alpha.” McCarter snapped his head toward Propenko. “He is Lobo.”

Wolf One was a black-haired, bearded, buff individual and he gave Manning a wary look. “Him?”

“He is Werewolf. He will be operating independently, with the biggest bloody rifle you have ever seen. If all goes well, we go in tonight. Until then, I am told we have been given unlimited privileges at Luffy-Land.”

Several Wolf Pack men made smothered throw-up noises. Others laughed.

“Right!” McCarter nodded at a table covered with steaming aluminum takeout dishes. “We have cots and Kazak barbecue. I personally recommend you stay here, eat your fill, check your weapons and sleep if you can. If we get the go-ahead? It will all happen very fast.”

The men nodded and started to break up.

Propenko roared something Old Testament in Russian. The nine men snapped to attention.

McCarter gazed long and hard at his squad. The nine men absolutely refused to meet his gaze. McCarter suddenly pumped his fist and bellowed as only an old-school British Officer could. “Wolf Pack!”

The squad roared in return. “Wolf Pack!”

“Right! Fall out!”

The men fell out nodding and making enthusiastic noises. They seemed excited about the plan and thankful to be a part of it.

Outside the warehouse a motorcycle screamed to a halt. A lanky, blond young man came running in breathlessly laden with two heavy, bulging, XL gear bags. Propenko already had a face like a skull. Filled with fury, it was a death’s head to behold. He rounded on the young VP soldier. He didn’t yell. The young man went pale as Propenko read him the riot act in a guttural hiss only the two of them could hear.

“Mr. Propenko!” McCarter shouted.

Propenko snapped around. “Dah!”

“Bring that man to me!”

Propenko escorted the man into McCarter’s presence. McCarter nodded at Gary Manning, who drew his pistol. Propenko shoved the man to his knees. The nine Russians stared in sudden shock and apprehension at their young comrade.

“Mr. Propenko. Who the bloody hell is this and what is he doing in my warehouse?”

“The late one.” Propenko glared bloody murder at the young man. “The…how do you say? The rookie!”

McCarter’s voice suddenly dropped to a frighteningly conversational tone. “And where have you been, my good man?”

Manning pointed his pistol at the young man’s head.

The young man gulped. “Ukov, Maksim. Reporting for duty! Regretting delay!”

“You weren’t talking to someone, were you? Perhaps telling them you were coming here?”

“No, sir. I am told we are perhaps performing raid. Perhaps snatch-and-grab. I was acquiring materials.”

“What materials?”

Maksim Ukov shrugged off his pack straps and opened one of the bags. “Gas masks and—”

“What the bloody hell do I need gas masks for?” McCarter thundered, though he was secretly grateful for them.

Ukov showed some guts and managed a sly look. “In case we use these?”

The young Russian opened up his other bag. It was full of light blue grenades the size and shape of tallboy beer cans and covered with Cyrillic writing.

Propenko squinted at the munitions and made a noise of approval.

“Mr. Propenko?” McCarter inquired.

Propenko showed a rare smile. “Blue Blitz.”

McCarter was aware of it. “Knock-out gas.”

Manning lowered his pistol.

Ukov grinned hopefully. “Thirty cartridges, if it pleases?”

McCarter gazed down at the young Russian. “Well, you romantic schemer, you.”

* * *

Gulf of Gdansk

ABLE TEAM WAITED, along with three members of Phoenix Force, for the imminent attack. Carl Lyons looked over their defenses one more time. The situation wasn’t as bad as it could be. Barbara Price had once again done very well for them with very little. The Polish duck-hunting lodge was more than a hundred years old. The walls were made of heavy stone-and-mortar masonry. The windows were narrow, could almost be described as firing slits and had heavy shutters to resist Baltic storms. The front, side and back doors were incredibly thick, iron-bound oak that looked as if they might be petrifying rather than weathering. Most of the house was bulletproof up to .30 caliber. The main approach to the lodge was a bit of raised single-lane road with wetlands overgrown with small trees on either side. The house sat on an acre or two of raised land with larger willows and alders forming a tiny forest. Behind the house the land fell away into a genuine fen that turned into a duck hunter’s dream of a swamp that drained into the gulf.

It was cold and wet and wretched, but it was defendable.

The lay of the land was in the Stony Man team’s favor, and out in the fen sat Jack Grimaldi in Dragonslayer. The chopper still wore her pontoons but she had machine guns slaved atop each one of them and rocket pods on stalks on either side of the fuselage. All of the equipment was mounted with explosive bolts and could be ejected into the marsh with the press of a button.

Encizo had built a cheery fire and his teammates chewed duck jerky and dunked black bread into steaming mugs of black tea with lemon and honey. Lyons lifted his chin as the wind moaned against the shutters. He almost felt bad for Calvin James. The Navy SEAL was somewhere out there in the wind, rain, darkness and muck watching the main approach to the lodge. It was a shit detail, but of course that was what SEALs did.

Lyons clicked his com unit. “How’s it hanging, Cal? Cold as a well digger’s ass?”

“Gdansk is God’s country,” James replied dryly. “I’m coming back.”

“Copy that.” Lyons looked to Schwarz and checked his watch. Schwarz sat by his laptop and a small array of communications and security gear. He’d spent the day putting surveillance gear and some unpleasant surprises for trespassers around the manse. “How are we doing?”

“We have two more hours of satellite window, then we are going to have a half-hour gap before the Farm can get eyes on us again. We’ve—” Schwarz sat straight as his computer pinged a message from McCarter.

Coming in hard

“We’ve got Wolf Pack on the way!” Schwarz announced.

Lyons strode over and messaged back.

Come and get it

Kurtzman’s window popped up on Schwarz’s screen. “Able. Be advised. You have major movement to the north and south.”

Lyons leaned over and looked at the satellite image. They had heat signatures, and a lot of them. “Wolf Pack is coming in from the east.”

“Affirmative.”

“Where the hell did these guys come from?”

Kurtzman wasn’t happy. The bad guys had snuck under his radar. “It’s like they popped up out of the earth.”

Lyons wasn’t happy, either. The bad guys had managed to get into the swamp behind them. “So we have to assume Wolf Pack has been compromised.”

“We always did.”

“And they are heading into cross fire.”

“That is correct. I already informed them.”

“Tell Jack to get airborne, message McCarter and tell him to plan B as hard as he can.”

“Copy that.”

The Able Team leader took up his weapon. “Able! Gear up! Here it comes!”

* * *

The Game Room

PYLE SAT HUNCHED in front of his massive screen. His fingers hammered his keyboard. “They’re communicating!”

“With whom?” Kun asked.

“It’s scrambled. They have to be bouncing it off a satellite.”

“How many satellites could be giving them real-time imaging and intelligence?”

“No. It’s communication. It could be being bounced from multiple—”

“That is not what I asked you.”

Pyle flinched and, nervous habit, tugged at his nose ring. “You think they’re piggy-backing?”

“Currently, somewhere on this planet,” Kun stated what to him was completely obvious, “there is a room much like this one. Inside it there are men, much like us. They are our real enemies. We are not taking advantage of poor native criminals or guerilla fighters in Africa or a ‘Stan’ country. We have encountered another genuine player. I am not sure whether they are state-sponsored, rogue or deniables. Regardless, we have a real game on hour hands.”

Pyle called up his file on all satellites and their orbits. “Checking.”

Rong sat in front of three screens swiping his fingers across them to pull up and expand images. This was the action, and absolutely the part of his job he loved. It was a cross between a strategy game and a first-person shooter, but the blood and the stakes were real. Not for him, but nevertheless it gave him a thrill as none other. Seventy-two hours ago, the first Battle of Gdansk, as Rong liked to call it, was the first battle he had ever lost since moving from online gaming to gaming with human lives in the Game Room. That loss still stung. A lot.

He watched the enhanced thermal images of Propenko and the meat shields sweeping toward the lodge in a very professional manner and felt a glimmer of foreboding. “I don’t like this Alpha, International Man of Mystery bastard, him or his Wolf Pack. I don’t like them at all.”

Kun watched his screens. He didn’t like Alpha and his Wolf Pack, either, except for the fact that he loved them. Kun loved challenges. He lit a cigarette, reached into his mini-fridge and mixed himself the single vodka martini he would allow himself until the battle was over. Kun normally didn’t care for alcohol or its effects, as it dulled his senses for the experiences he enjoyed the most, but in battle the prop was important to him. His team perked up at the sight of him mixing it.

Junior Pyle grinned. He and Rong, on the other hand, were stopping just short of main-lining energy drinks through an IV. “Here we go!”

“In case of trouble, or when the bell tolls,” Rong gleefully intoned. “Have no fear, because Bond has Seoul.”

Kun loved Rong and what he was going to do to him even more.

Rong broke the mood. “Shit!”

“What?”

“Wolf Pack just stopped moving.”

Kun swiped his screen and expanded his view of the skirmish line that had suddenly stopped. “They know.”

“What do we do?”

Kun spoke a sentence that pleased him very much. “Let the Wolf Pack have it. Give them all of it.”

Heat signatures popped up in the thermal imaging as engines roared into life.

* * *

Wolf Pack

MCCARTER READ THE message about the enemy moving in from north and south. The question now was would he be able to weld Wolf Pack to his will. He’d held up his fist and the pack’s fighting line halted. He took a brief meeting with Manning and Propenko and then addressed the men. “Lads? We are righteously rogered!”

The Russians vaguely rippled in place. They clutched their weapons and made unhappy noises as they didn’t quite understand but feared the sum of all fears.

“Men? We are betrayed. We have enemy units coming in with overwhelming force from the north and the south.”

Engines stuttered and belched into life in the surrounding fen in agreement.

Russian swearwords snarled out of the trees.

Propenko raised his voice for the first time. “English is battle language!”

“They have armor! God!”

“Who said that?” McCarter roared.

“We’re screwed!”

McCarter recognized Maksim’s voice. “Mr. Propenko. Bring that man to me.” Propenko loped into the alders and seized Maksim by his hair. He dragged the young man screaming into McCarter’s presence by one hand almost effortlessly while he withdrew his knife with the other. Maksim screamed.

“English!” Propenko hissed.

“We are dead!”

McCarter took a risk and tapped his Farm-issue phone. “Ironman, we have armor on the move.”

“Copy that. We have eyes on.”

“We are counterattacking to the south. Get Jack airborne and—” Gunfire crackled in the direction of the Baltic.

Jack Grimaldi broke across the line. “I’m getting shot at!”

Schwarz confirmed the worst. “We have satellite. You have four armored vehicles. They are coming straight through the swamp and not stopping for shit. They must be amphibious. They can follow us right into the Gulf!”

McCarter listened to the sound of amphibious armored vehicles splashing, grinding and snapping their way through the wet forest as though it didn’t exist. Heavy machine guns opened fire and traversed through the trees reaping branches and shuddering trunks.

Manning hugged muck again. “Déjà vu, anybody?”

McCarter ate mud and listened to the incoming fire and his instincts. They spoke to him. Once again the enemy eyes in the sky could see them, but their soldiers on the ground could not. Their fire was being directed and it was incoming fire from antiquated com-bloc amphibious vehicles without stabilized weapons wallowing through a swamp. The moment they got up onto the road or the raised bit of the hunting lodge’s land proper, everything would change for the worse.

Worst case they would get up on dry land and ram right through the walls of the lodge while they disgorged assholes out their back hatches.

McCarter growled at Maksim and snatched grenades out of his pack. “You! You godless heathen! You’re with me!” His voice boomed in command. “Werewolf! Lobo! We’re taking out their armor! Wolf Pack! One Blue Blitz each! Wait for my signal! If you don’t get the signal in five minutes? Drop gas and make for the lodge, or disperse and make a run for the border! Your choice!”

The Wolf Pack rode on the cusp of panic.

The pack saw their Alpha male leap up and charge into the teeth of the enemy armor.

McCarter slapped his phone onto the Velcro strap on his wrist and shouted into his com link. “I need eyes!”

The Farm provided. In the thermal satellite imaging the cold of the swamp was white and gray and the heat images of the four armored vehicles wallowing forward through the swale were black. All McCarter could see was the stuttering orange flash of their guns, but that was enough to pick his path and avoid their fire. The closer he got the more certain he became. He ran along the slightly firmer mud just below the raised road and Maksim loped on McCarter’s six with the strength and agility of youth.

“What do you want me to do?” the Russian shouted.

“You’ll know.” McCarter put his submachine gun in his left hand and used his trigger finger to pull the pin on the Blue Blitz in his right. Manning was right; it was déjà vu all over again. McCarter found himself charging through the cold, Polish wetness at vehicles chain-sawing through the trees with automatic weapons seeking his life. The armored vehicles suddenly hit their headlights.

It was the worst mistake they could make.

McCarter had seen the like many times. They were very old MT-LBs. The armored vehicles had treads like a tank and their armored bodies were long, wide and low, and had a distinct “frog that had been stepped on” silhouette about them. These APCs were designed to cross soft ground where tanks and jeeps would fail, and swim short distances if needed. Their problem was that they were sixty-year-old technology and exactly the kind of armored vehicle one could buy on the black market in Eastern Europe and Russia. They were perfect for raiding a duck lodge at two o’clock in the morning in Gdansk. Their 14.5 mm

heavy machine guns were a few hairbreadths short of being cannons in their own right.

The MT-LBs and their operators were not ready for the leader of Phoenix Force leading his own personal Russian wolf pack. The long, low shovelnose of the vehicles was far easier to run up than the front of a semi-truck. It formed a very convenient assault ramp if you were the sort of person who charged armored vehicles head-on. McCarter vaulted from the muddy berm onto the prow of the armored personnel carrier. Someone inside shouted in alarm. The turret turned but McCarter was already inside its arc of fire and they had left their hatches open for firing and deployment.

McCarter opened his right hand.

The cotter pin of the Blue Blitz grenade pinged away and the hissing cylinder dropped down the open commander’s hatch. Men with guns popped up out of the hatches as expanding gas plumed from the vehicle’s every orifice. McCarter ran across the hull top and dropped into the swamp.

Maksim held his breath and leaped atop the vehicle. His silenced submachine gun cracked every head foolish enough to burst out of a hatch. The APC slewed as the driver succumbed to the gas and plowed into a berm. Maksim finished his deck run and jumped into the fen beside McCarter. McCarter pulled the pin on another gas grenade. The enemy had deployed their vehicles two by two, one pair flanking each side of the road. He watched as the wingman swerved and crushed stunted trees. “Tell me that wasn’t fun.”

Maksim’s teeth flashed in the dark. “You’re great!”

“Stay out of the headlights, we have one more.”

* * *

The Game Room

“WHAT THE HELL?” Pyle shook his head as a second armored unit came to a mysterious halt and then a third. “Nothing hit them. Nothing! They’re not on fire or blowing up and there are no visible firing signatures. I mean what the hell?”

Kun pondered the conundrum of his stalling armor attack. The com link was blowing up north and south. Save for his armored vehicles, there was only silence.

Rong zoomed and expanded his screen to maximum. It made the image a little fuzzy and the mist around the tanks was getting thicker by the second. He joined Pyle in the head-shaking business. “It looks like they’re smoking like chimneys, but their heat signature hasn’t changed.”

“Gas,” Kun surmised.

“Gas?” Pyle frowned. “Tear gas can’t stop a tank.”

“It can if someone tosses a grenade into the cabin. But in that case the men would be abandoning ship as if the hold was filled with angry bees. This is not tear gas.”

Rong’s jaw dropped. From his view from above, the black, motionless armored vehicles with their shovel noses suddenly looked disturbingly like coffins. “Poison gas?”

“I find that difficult to believe.” Kun considered his options. Each MT-LB held a squad of eight men. Operation Gdansk Deux had just lost almost all of its assault force without inflicting a single casualty on the enemy. The men to the north were mostly snipers whose job it was to keep the men in the lodge pinned down. Wolf Pack’s job had been to tear apart the frontal assault like good little meat shields and make the men in the lodge expend most of their ammo. Then the armored wave would go in, ram down the walls and forcibly extract the targets. Then Mr. Paulus would zip-tie them hand and foot, lay them one by one in front of the tank treads, feetfirst, and ask them questions while the eleven-ton vehicles steamrolled up their bodies in six-inch segments. To Kun’s knowledge, no one had ever stayed salty by the time the treads hit their hipbones. When the interrogation was over, the process had the added benefit of turning the bodies into mulch, which was easily disposed of, particularly in a swamp. It was a good plan; Kun had come up with it, and he had been relishing watching the last part in particular, in person.

The plan had gone to hell in a handbasket.

Kun tapped his private com line to Mr. Paulus. “Deux Leader, this is Game Master, do you copy?”

“Copy, Game Master.”

“The plan has gone to hell.”

Mr. Paulus’s Slavic accent was clipped and hard. “Copy that, Game Master.”

“I believe the MT-LBs have been gassed.”

“Yes, I have retrieved three of my men. All show signs as if they are drunk or on drugs. The Russians brought knockout gas. The concentrations inside the vehicles may have been lethal.”

Kun knew there was no such thing as knockout gas. Blue Blitz and its few siblings in the genre of war gases were anesthetics and, as any anesthesiologist would tell you, turning off someone’s higher brain functions without dangerously affecting lower ones like respiration and heart rate was a tricky business. In practical use in riots and hostage situations, knockout gas had extremely mixed results. In battle there was hardly ever a specialist checking your vitals and asking you to count backward from one hundred as he monitored your vitals. “Can your remaining men get past it?”

“We must assume they have more gas, and we are not equipped with gas masks. We must assume if the enemy is using gas then they have gas masks. This will grant them a great deal of autonomy of action we will not have.”

Kun loved listening to Mr. Paulus talk. “Recommendations?”

“Bring in the helicopters. Have them hover over the armor to disperse the lingering gas clouds.”

“Do we have anyone left who knows how to drive an MT-LB?”

“Myself. We will open all the hatches and blast out the gas. Then choppers hover over us as we full assault.”

* * *

Wolf Pack

“IRONMAN, THIS IS ALPHA.” McCarter stared up through the trees into the night through his Russian Federation NVGs. They were bulky and nowhere near as good as Farm equipment. “I hear rotor noise and it is not Dragonslayer.”

“Copy that.”

“Multiple rotors. At least two birds, running without lights. They seem to be hovering over the road.”

“Copy that, Alpha.”

“Farm, do we have eyes?” McCarter asked.

“Twenty minutes until next window,” Kurtzman reported.

“Sometimes—” Propenko suddenly grinned beneath his goggles “—man must just go see for himself.”

McCarter had to admit the Russian prison commando was growing on him. “Right, then. Ironman, we’re going to go have a boo, as Gummer would say.”

“Copy that, Alpha.”

“Lobo, Maksim, with me!” McCarter glared at the oldest, grizzled Russian in Wolf Pack. “You—Grigory! Take Wolf Pack to the lodge. Ironman is now your commander.”

“Dah.” Grigory sliced his hand toward the lodge and Wolf Pack melted away north through the twisted, Baltic swamp trees. McCarter and his Russians ran south back along the banks to the battle scene they had just left.

“Sons of bitches!” Propenko declared.

The two helicopters hovered over both sides of the road, hammering the air with their rotor wash. The remaining Blue Blitz clouds were shredding apart. None of the enemy had gas masks but well more than a dozen men were doing triage. They had stacked close to twenty men who would never wake up into a dead pile like cordwood. Another dozen-plus men were being slapped around and having cold, Polish swamp water flung in their faces.

“Ironman, this is Alpha. The enemy is regrouping. Two helicopters. And will counterattack at half platoon strength.” McCarter watched one of the vehicles belch blue smoke and crank back into life. “Armor is reengaging!” The helicopters rose over the tree line and McCarter could see door gunners hanging on chicken straps and weapons attached to the skids. “I have two gunships.”

“Alpha, I recommend you pull back to the lodge. Get some stone between you and them.”

One of the helicopters broke off, dipped its nose and thundered toward the lodge. “Ironman, you have—”

The helicopter ripped around in a tight U-turn and the glare of its spotlight slammed into angry, incandescent life and illuminated McCarter and his team. The Phoenix leader knew satellite surveillance had finally found them. “Disperse and regroup!”

McCarter’s team bolted in three directions.

Soviet heavy machine guns hammered into life and young Maksim twisted and fell as he was hammered apart. McCarter grimaced and emptied his weapon up into the aircraft. The slow, silent, subsonic bullets weren’t exactly antiaircraft material but they sparked against the fuselage and caught the helicopter’s attention. The chopper’s nose and its spotlight spun in McCarter’s direction.

Propenko knew the drill and emptied his weapon into the chopper’s tail as it turned. The chopper pilot panicked and took the better part of valor. The gunship swung out over the trees away from the incoming fire so it could pick its own advantageous gun run. McCarter drew grenades. He hurled a flash bang at the MT-LB as it lurched up the embankment and hit the road and threw another. The grenades detonated with a sound like cannon shells. Like chopper pilots, armor drivers could be convinced they were being hit heavy, and sometimes sparks and thunder rattling off their hull and smoke clouding their periscopes could make them panic.

Whoever was driving wasn’t having it.

The machine gun turret turned and tried to finish what the first chopper had started. McCarter threw himself down as the second chopper rose and began lacing the tree line with tracer fire. “A little help, then!”

Grimaldi shouted across the link. “Dragonslayer inbound!”

The MT-LB went incandescent as it turned on its infrared searchlight and the turret swept around.

McCarter squinted through his NVGs, flicked his selector to semi-auto and popped off three quick shots. The searchlight of death shattered and died. The armor kept lumbering forward without headlights or searchlights.

“Bastard…” McCarter emptied his magazine into the armored vehicle to attract its attention. Sparks spattered off the hull and it didn’t give a single shit. The armored vehicle literally seemed to come alive as it grabbed onto solid road and charged forward. About a score of men were charging behind it. “Ironman, this is Alpha. You have incoming armor! One vehicle. Infantry behind.”

“Copy that! Gummer?” Lyons inquired.

Gary Manning sounded positively smug. “Oh, I see him.”

Manning happened to be on the roof of the lodge with a Polish Tor .50-caliber anti-matériel rifle. He muttered happily to himself. “No chance, that’s what you got…” He squeezed the trigger and half a second later his armor-piercing round shrieked six inches below the MT-LB’s turret proper. The machine gun suddenly drooped very convincingly as if the gunner’s life had been torn out of his body. Manning worked the very large bolt of his weapon and went for the driver. The driver’s heavy steel shutter suddenly dropped down and Manning recognized the spark spray of a remarkable ricochet. He ignored the shuttered windows and hatches and began punching holes through the vehicle’s rooftop.