Page 117 of Dead Fall

Kicking the man’s weapon away, he rolled him over, patted him down, and restrained him with flex-cuffs. Then he rushed to Fields.

She was struggling to breathe.

“Easy,” he told her as he ripped off the Velcro flaps of her Kevlar vest. “You’re going to be okay.”

Peeling off her vest, he checked to make sure there’d been nopenetration. At any distance, much less point-blank, .357 rounds were like getting hit by a truck. She was going to be bruised. She might even have cracked or broken ribs, but the integrity of the vest had held.

“There’s no penetration,” he said, tightly clasping her hand. “You just got the wind knocked out of you. I’m going to find you some dirt, you’re going to rub it on your wounds, and then we’re going to get a coffee.”

As the air returned to her lungs, she was in too much pain to laugh. Instead, she motioned for him to come closer and when he leaned in, she said, “Fuck you.”

In this situation, Carolan didn’t mind the foul language. In fact, he was about to give her a funny, somewhat salty reply when he heard FBI agents up above cresting the hill.

“Here!” he yelled. “Suspect in custody. Agent down.”

CHAPTER 34

KHARKIVOBLAST

To be rock-solid certain that he was being told the truth, Harvath isolated each of the four Ravens and interrogated them individually. Simultaneously, he streamed the interrogations to Nicholas, a native Russian speaker, to ensure that nothing was being lost in translation. The information he gleaned from the mercenaries wasn’t good.

The Ravens’ safe house, their base of operations, was an old stone fortress less than thirty klicks away. Their commanding officer, a man they referred to as the “Colonel,” was obsessed with security—and for good reason. The Ukrainians, the Russian military, and the Wagner Group all wanted him and his Ravens dead.

The grounds surrounding the property were dotted with mines and antipersonnel devices. Machine-gun positions were set up inside the fortress, which would allow the Ravens to combat attacks from any direction. They had a stockpile of RPGs, small arms, and ammunition. In Harvath’s opinion, the only thing they were missing was a moat filled with alligators.

According to the four prisoners, Anna Royko was indeed being held there and she was still alive, but just barely. If Harvath hoped to save her life, he was going to have to move fast.

In any other scenario, he would have assembled a highly skilled and highly experienced team, they would have dropped in via helicopter, and, having had sufficient intel and time to rehearse, they would have carried out a precisely choreographed operation.

With Anna Royko in such bad shape, none of that was going to happen. He was going to have to go in tonight—with the team, the intelligence, and the equipment he had at hand. He couldn’t afford to wait.

The one item he had angled for was additional troops. He didn’t care if they were Ukrainian or International Legion. The Ravens still comprised a significant force. In addition to the two dozen that went out on raids, a contingent of ten more was always left behind to guard the fortress. Yes, Harvath and his team had captured four and had likely killed several more in the ambush on the Humvees, but they were still seriously outgunned.

Nicholas spoke to Kozar on Harvath’s behalf, but the situation hadn’t changed. Troops couldn’t be pulled from the front. They were on their own.

Harvath did, though, have a potential ace up his sleeve. The Colonel hadn’t completely boxed the Ravens into a corner. They came and went via the main gate, but the man had preserved a back door, an emergency escape from the fortress, should they ever need it.

Hundreds of years ago, when the fortress had been constructed, a series of tunnels had been built underneath. They had been used to store everything from gold and gunpowder to food and enemy soldiers. The tunnels ended at a thick, iron gate, which opened out onto a narrow footpath. It was the only part of the property that wasn’t embedded with mines.

While all the Raven prisoners had confirmed this, there was only one way to be sure. They would take one along to act as their personal mine “magnet.” The other three would be secured and left behind in the mill.

Hog-tying those men once again, Harvath used an additional length of rope to secure them to a post and each other. If they tried to move or slip free of their bonds, the knots only grew tighter.

He then put Nicholas on speakerphone to push, in Russian, for any final pieces of information the men might have held back. Nicholas explained that if it were to be discovered that the men hadn’t been completely forthright, they would be delivered back to the Wagner Group, who had become notorious for executing deserters with a sledgehammer. Harvath had also taken the men’s cell phones and Nicholas assured them that their families would be tracked down and punished as well.

The only additional piece of information handed over was that the main drive up to the fortress was flanked with hidden MON-200s, Soviet-era antipersonnel devices similar to U.S. claymore mines.

Based on what one of the prisoners recounted, it sounded like the Ravens had created a kill box similar to the one Harvath had set up for the Iranian drone instructors and their Russian FSB handlers in Belarus. Anyone foolish enough to come up that driveway uninvited would be in for a very deadly surprise.

Once the man had explained how the MON-200s were triggered, Harvath gagged and hooded him, as well as his two compatriots. He also took their boots. The likelihood of them escaping was next to nil, but just in case, he wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them.

With that taken care of, they pulled their gear together, loaded the mine magnet into the truck, and got on the road.

Normally, Harvath would have conducted a detailed mission brief. In this case, however, they didn’t have a lot of details. The tunnel system they would use to access the fortress was different from the below-grade area where Anna Royko was being kept. They would have to come up in the main building and go down another set of stairs to find her.

There was also the issue of the little twin girls the Ravens had abducted. Harvath was determined to get them out as well. His prisoners, though, were fuzzy on where they were being kept. They had heard the Colonel claim that he was going to “make women out of them” and had assumed that they were being kept in his quarters.

It was an absolutely repellent declaration. Of all the monsters Harvath had hunted in his career, the Ravens were the most abhorrent. His only regret was that he would not be able to visit upon them the equivalent amount of suffering that they had visited upon their victims. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try.

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