Page 54 of Dead Fall

Reflexively, the young man rolled away from where the bullet hadlanded, right toward the place Harvath had told him not to—the ruins of the open windows.

Harvath tried to signal him to go back to where he was, to retreat into the wreckage of the collapsed roof, but Oleh wasn’t paying attention.

“Get back!” Harvath shouted, giving himself away to the sniper. “Get back to where I told you to be.”

As he yelled at Oleh to return under the collapsed roof, he scanned the other buildings with his rifle, trying to find the sniper.

All the while, he was wondering why the Russians would have put a sniper here in the first place. Then it hit him. Wherever the shooter was, he had a view of this location, as well as where the fighting was up by the school and the APC. That narrowed things down considerably.

But what it didn’t do was throw a big, bright spotlight on the sniper’s precise perch.

There were a couple of locations where a shooter could be hiding that would allow him to fire in both directions. But short of a means by which to flush him out, the act of pinpointing his nest was going to be next to impossible. That was when Oleh adjusted his position again.

Propping his gun up on the sill of one of the shattered windows, he signaled Harvath to run and began firing in the direction of where he believed the sniper to be. But he was off.Wayoff.

Because of his position behind the APC, Harvath had a different vantage point than Oleh. When the sniper fired again, he saw a faint muzzle flash and now knew where the shooter was hiding.

He pumped round after round into the window and kept doing so as he ran toward Oleh.

Skidding to a stop at the pile of rubble, he lunged for cover under the collapsed roof. In doing so, he clipped a beam and sent a searing, white-hot bolt of pain down his hip.

“Motherfucker,” he growled, kicking it with his boot.

Suddenly, the debris above him shifted and he instantly regretted his hotheadedness. Rolling hard to his right, he barely escaped being hit by an even bigger, heavier beam that had broken loose from the second story. The sniper notwithstanding, this was a tremendously dangerous place to be holed up.

As he looked over at Oleh, he noticed that the man’s weapon had fallen silent and that he wasn’t moving. Harvath called out, but the young Ukrainian didn’t respond.

Careful to stay close to the wall and out of the sniper’s line of fire, he crawled to where Oleh was slumped, his back to him, just beneath the window.

Turning him over, he saw the kid’s lifeless eyes and knew that he was dead. The sniper’s bullet had entered just above his body armor and had likely traveled down to his heart, killing him almost instantly.

Harvath closed Oleh’s eyelids. There was nothing else he could do. The war had claimed another victim; one with his entire life in front of him. There would be no returning to university, no going back to Odesa, no wife, no family. Everything he’d had was now over—cut entirely too short.

As the battle raged back near the school and around the Ukrainian APC, Harvath inserted a fresh magazine into his rifle and prepared to return to the fight.

He had been wrong in believing that there was nothing he could do for Oleh. There actually was something. He could kill every last Russian in the village. And he would start by making sure the sniper who had shot him was dead.

Since putting all of those rounds into the window where he had seen the muzzle flash, Harvath hadn’t noticed any further activity. But if this was the same shooter who had been in the bell tower earlier, he might be quite practiced at fleeing the moment his nest was pinpointed. There was only one way to be certain.

Doing a wide enough loop to avoid the sniper’s crosshairs was not an option. There wasn’t time. What’s more, there was no telling what kind of damage the man could do in the meantime.

The shortest distance between Harvath and the shooter was a straight line, and, as batshit crazy as it was, that was Harvath’s plan.

Creeping to the edge of the wall, he made sure his weapon was hot, took a deep breath, and then, ignoring the pain in his hip, came out firing.

He did as he had done before—running as fast as he could while putting rounds on the sniper’s location, hoping to keep the man pinned down and preventing him from shooting back.

His plan seemed to have worked. He made it all the way to the building without being shot at.

The thought of charging into another, unfamiliar Ukrainian house in order to deal with a Russian shooter on the second floor didn’t exactly appeal to him, but Harvath had something much better going for him this time. Instead of mothballs and flour, he had fragmentation grenades.

He also had two perfect targets—the broken window the sniper had been shooting out of and a huge hole in the roof.

Using the wreckage of a bombed-out car for cover, Harvath changed magazines. Then, removing the grenades from his pouch, he pulled their pins and let them fly.

The moment they detonated, he was on his feet.

Charging up to the house, he kicked in the front door, made entry, and swept for threats.

---