Page 50 of Dead Fall

Harvath swung the machine gun and began firing before he had even gotten a full sight picture. In so doing, he tore a racing stripe down the side of the building before sawing the Russian in half, just as the soldier managed to launch his weapon.

The rocket ripped through the air and sizzled right past them, missing the APC by less than two feet.

Harvath didn’t want to see what might be coming next. Thankfully, he didn’t need to tell the driver to get them to cover. The man was already moving.

He pulled down a narrow side street and stopped. Staying on the .50-cal, Harvath yelled down below for the rest of the soldiers to grab what they needed and to dismount.

Making a run for the bridge was totally out of the question. Even if it was safe to cross and hadn’t been rigged with explosives, the Russians were armed with RPGs. The APC couldn’t outrun those. What’s more, Harvath knew damn well that they had just gotten very lucky. The next Russian to materialize with an RPG wasn’t going to miss. Which meant that being anywhere near the APC right now was a bad idea.

They needed to find a good, defensible position and get their arms around what they were dealing with. How many Russian soldiers were out there? What kind of weapons and equipment did they have? And, if necessary, how quickly could the Ukrainians get reinforcements to them?

The first thing that they needed to settle was who was in charge. As the only officer, Harvath didn’t plan on holding a vote. These soldiers were under his command.

Giving a rapid series of orders, he then dropped down into the APC to grab his gear. The supplies they were being forced to leave behind, particularly the rockets, grenades, and ammunition, turned his stomach. It was destined for the men at the front. He would be damned if he was going to let the Russians have any of it. But by the same token, he thought it might make pretty good bait.

Working as quickly as he could, he manufactured a very guerrilla-style, down-and-dirty set of booby traps. Exiting the rear of the APC, he made sure the driver saw what he had done, just in case he didn’t make it back and someone else needed to disable them.

Loaded down with gear, not knowing what kind of a fight they had just driven into, Harvath directed the soldiers toward one of the nearest concrete buildings—the village school.

In addition, he wanted a sniper of their own on a roof nearby and one of the Ukrainian soldiers immediately volunteered.

After agreeing on the best location, the man performed a quick radio check and then took off as two of his colleagues covered him.

That left positioning the remaining soldiers inside the school so that they didn’t provide any weak spots that the enemy might exploit.

From a weapons standpoint, all of the men were outfitted with rifles as well as sidearms and a few grenades each. Harvath’s biggest hope hadbeen to find a tripod for the .50-cal somewhere in the APC. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen one and neither had the driver. They would have to do without the heavy machine gun.

The other issue Harvath had to contend with was exactly when, and how, to engage the Russian soldiers. He and the Ukrainians might be able to leverage the element of surprise, but once that was gone, they would be at the mercy of whatever the Russians threw at them. If Russians decided to rain down RPGs, or worse, Harvath was going to need a very good Plan B.

That was why he was intent on quickly gathering as much intelligence as possible.

He decided he’d be the one to conduct reconnaissance, taking one other soldier with him. The best English speaker was a tall, blond-haired twenty-two-year-old from Odesa named Oleh. Harvath told him to load up on extra grenades and ammo and then went to speak to the APC driver. He was leaving him in charge of everything until he got back.

Certain that the driver knew what he wanted him to do, Harvath grabbed a few extra items and then slipped out the back of the school with Oleh.

Weapons up and at the ready, they stuck to backyards, moving swiftly but carefully from the ruins of one building to the next.

However many Russians there were in the village, it wasn’t going to take them long to locate the APC. Once they had found it abandoned, there’d be a house-to-house search for its occupants. Harvath wanted to be back at the school before that happened.

His plan was to push to the town square, loop behind it, and come up the other side. That would put him in the vicinity of where the church sniper and the Russian with the RPG had been.

Like the forest with its dachas outside of Kharkiv, this area had seen some pretty heavy fighting at some point. If not for the bullet holes and bomb craters, it might have been easy to imagine that a massive tornado had swept through, flattening almost everything in its path.

Surveying the destruction, particularly the downed power lines, torn-up streets, and uninhabitable houses, Harvath couldn’t help butwonder what had become of all the inhabitants. How many had survived? Where had they gone? How would they start over?

These had not been wealthy people. Many would have had children and grandparents and pets. Judging by the debris, they had left many of their possessions behind, probably fleeing with whatever they could carry or cram into a vehicle.

He was reminded, yet again, of images of World War II—civilians fleeing the Nazis with everything they owned in a suitcase, or piled high on a wagon, maybe balanced on the back of a bicycle. It was almost surreal thinking about this happening today—in the era of smartphones, high-speed internet, and artificial intelligence. No matter how many leaps forward we took in technology and modern conveniences, war didn’t disappear. Many human beings were still nothing more than animals at their core.

It was reality, but it still pissed Harvath off. Oleh should have been at university, dreaming of graduation, and maybe thinking of a more serious commitment with his girlfriend. Instead he was carrying a rifle, picking his way through some rubble-strewn village he had probably never heard of, risking his life to push foreign invaders out of his country. Had you told him a year ago that this was where he was going to be, he might never have believed you.

But maybe he would have. The Ukrainians knew that they had a revanchist Russia on their doorstep. When nothing happened to Peshkov after his first incursion, back when Oleh was just in grade school, why wouldn’t the young man have expected the Russians to be back?

The death. The destruction. The gruesome barbarity. It was difficult to find words for. It was even tougher to wrap your head around—especially in the twenty-first century.

Harvath’s heart broke for these people. No matter how this war ended, things were never going to be the same for them.

He felt even worse for their children. No adult, much less a child, should ever be exposed to what so many of them had been forced to suffer. He had no idea how you ever fully healed from that kind of psychological and sometimes even physical trauma.

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