Page 72 of Dead Fall

“No one else,” Givi replied. “This is a medical transport. I am going to pick up wounded men from the front.”

The soldier searching the UAZ touched one of the freshly painted crosses and held up his gloved hand to show his colleague the paint that had come off.

“Where did this vehicle come from?” the soldier continued.

Givi shrugged and replied, “Russia?”

“Where didyouget it?”

“We found it.”

“Found it where?”

“About fifty kilometers back. Near the spot where our APC broke down. What’s the problem?” asked the Ukrainian, who then raised his voice as if he was getting frustrated. “No one told you I was coming?”

“Calm down,” the soldier said.

“Calm down? There are wounded men at the front. Men who need to be evacuated. Every second we waste is a second off their lives.Fucking shit.”

From his position in the trees behind the checkpoint, Harvath had heard the conversation, but hadn’t been able to understand it. At least not until Givi had used the code words at the end—Suka blyat. These were not Ukrainians. They were Russians and the checkpoint was bogus.

Slinging his rifle over his back, Harvath drew his knife and crept toward the nearest soldier.

Approaching him from behind, he covered the man’s mouth with his left hand and used his right to press his blade against his throat. Then,very quietly, he whispered in the man’s ear the phrase that Zira had taught him: “Saypalianytsia.”

Partially uncovering the man’s mouth, he listened, but instead of saying the passphrase in Ukrainian, the man began to babble in Russian. Harvath sliced his throat and dropped him to the ground.

With the soldiers focused on what was happening in the headlights of their vehicles, they paid no attention to other threats that might be lurking in the dark.

Harvath’s task for now was to eliminate the rest of the Russians without letting any harm come to Givi.

If he’d had a suppressed .22 pistol with subsonic ammunition, he might have risked putting bullets in the three remaining soldiers behind the checkpoint vehicles. The two Russians with Givi probably wouldn’t have heard a thing. But as it was, even his suppressed Galil made a distinct crack when fired. The moment that Russians heard it, it would have been like a starting pistol going off. The race for cover, and maybe even to put a bullet in Givi, would have been on. Harvath would have to stick with his knife.

The sloppiness of the Russian soldiers was another testament to the poorly trained fodder that Peshkov was feeding into the maw of the war.

Harvath grabbed the next soldier from behind and plunged his blade into the notch at the base of the man’s skull, the foramen magnum, and twisted his knife like a corkscrew, severing his spinal cord and, with a slap to the pommel of the blade, turning out his lights for good.

He took the next soldier out by coming over the top of the man’s right shoulder, plunging his blade through the base of his neck, and executing a flick of his wrist that sliced fully through the man’s throat, severing both his arteries. Lowering him to the ground, Harvath left him to silently bleed out in the road while he stalked his final Russian soldier.

This man was a challenge. He seemed nervous. He was pacing—two feet forward, two feet back. Making him an even more difficult target was the fact that he kept changing his orientation. One moment he was watching the interrogation taking place in the headlights, the next he was looking off into the woods on his side of the road. Getting the drop on this Russian pinball might not be possible. There was, however,something else Harvath could try, but his timing would have to be perfect. Givi’s life depended on it.

The best way to kill three birds was to have more than one stone. In Harvath’s case, the best way was to have plenty of stones and a frag grenade.

Staying out of sight, he leaned against one of the checkpoint vehicles and prepared his rifle. Normally, a shot like this, out in the middle of nowhere without a night-vision scope, would be next to impossible. But thanks to the Russians having left their high beams on, he liked his odds.

Reaching into his pouch, he pulled out a frag. Peering behind the vehicle, he saw the nervous Russian soldier still pacing nearby—two feet forward, two feet back; facing the interrogation, turning to look off into the woods.

Resetting himself, Harvath steadied his breathing. If there was one thing he had learned, it was that once the pin was out of the grenade, the sooner you got it away from you, the better. He was about to violate that lesson—big-time.

To be clear, pulling the pin didn’t initiate the fuse inside the grenade. The pin was merely a safety device. Releasing the lever—the concave handle on the side of the grenade—that had been previously held in place by the pin was what got the party started. Its biggest drawback, though, was its unpredictability.

Once the lever had been released, the time to detonation could be anywhere from two to six seconds. That was why there had been so many movie and TV scenes depicting a grenade landing in a foxhole, only to have soldiers pick it up and throw it back at an enemy position, where it then detonated. That was what could happen if you had a slow burner.

If you had a fast burner and let go of the lever without immediately tossing it, you could lose your hand, your arm, half your body, or even your life. The bottom line was that it was a crapshoot; totally uncertain. There was only one way to find out.

He pulled the pin, released the lever, and counted.One. Two. Three. Then he lobbed the grenade through the air at the pacing Russian.

The device made a perfect arc and detonated just as it was about to hit the ground in front of him, killing him instantly.

---