And I sit in the car with the engine running and my heart slamming against my ribs, waiting for the end of everything.
35
Pyotr
Boris gives the signal, and the tree line erupts.
We move in a staggered line through the birch trees, eight men fanning out across the clearing in pairs.
Eduard’s team takes the left flank, and Marat’s covers the right. Boris and I push up the middle toward the cabin’s front door with Grisha one step behind us.
Fifty meters. Forty. The snow crunches under our boots, and I keep my Makarov level with the front window, where I last saw the fourth man sitting at the table.
Thirty meters. The door swings open, and the smoker from earlier steps onto the porch with a cigarette between his lips and a pistol in his waistband. He sees us at the same moment I see him.
His hand drops to the gun, but I put a round through his kneecap before he clears the holster.
He screams and crumples sideways off the porch, and the cabin comes alive behind him. Glass shatters from the side window as someone punches a rifle barrel through. A burst of automatic fire rips across the clearing, chewing snow and frozen dirt in a line three meters to my left.
“Contact front! Rifle in the east window!” I bark.
Boris drops to a knee behind a birch trunk and returns fire. Two rounds punch through the window frame, and the rifle barrel jerks back inside.
I sprint for the porch. Grisha is right on my heels, and we flatten ourselves against the cabin wall on either side of the open door. Inside, someone is shouting something panicked and garbled in Russian. Furniture crashes. A second burst of gunfire explodes from the rear of the cabin, aimed at Eduard’s team coming through the tree line.
“Marat, cover the back!” Boris shouts into comms. “Nobody leaves through that rear door!”
I pivot around the door and sweep the front room. The man from the table is crouched behind an overturned couch with a shotgun braced against the cushions. He fires wildly. The blast tears a chunk from the doorframe six inches above my head, and splinters pepper my face.
I fire twice. Both rounds hit center mass. He drops behind the couch and doesn’t move.
Grisha pushes past me toward the hallway. A door on the left flies open, and a thick-necked man barrels out swinging a crowbar. Grisha sidesteps and drives the butt of his pistol into the man’s temple. He goes down hard.
“Front room clear!” I call out. “One down, one subdued!”
“East side, two hostiles pinned in the kitchen!” Eduard’s voice crackles through my earpiece. “They’re barricaded behind the?—”
The rest of his sentence vanishes under a volley of gunfire. I move down the hallway toward the kitchen, and that’s when the bedroom door on my right opens.
The man behind it is faster than I expect. He fires a handgun point-blank from three feet away, and the round punches through my left biceps before I can turn. The impact spins me sideways into the wall. My shoulder hits the plaster, and pain floods from my elbow to my collarbone.
I fire back with my right hand. Two shots. The first catches him in the chest. The second takes his jaw. He folds backward through the doorway and lands on the bedroom floor.
“Pyotr!” Boris’ voice is somewhere behind me.
“I’m hit. Left arm. Still moving.”
My biceps is screaming, and blood is soaking my jacket sleeve, but the fingers on my left hand still curl when I tell them to. Through-and-through, I think. No bone. I’ve taken worse damage.
The kitchen fight ends thirty seconds later. Eduard’s team breaches from the side window, and the two men behind the barricade surrender the moment they see four gun barrels pointed at their faces. Grisha zip-ties them on the kitchen tile while Boris sweeps the rest of the cabin.
“Clear!” Boris announces. Then, a beat later: “Where’s Bogdan?”
The question makes my stomach drop. I scan every face on the floor. The smoker on the porch, still moaning and clutching his knee. The man I shot in the front room. The crowbar swinger, unconscious. The one from the bedroom, dead. The two from the kitchen, zip-tied and bleeding.
None of them is Bogdan.
“Back door’s open!” Marat reports through comms. “Fresh tracks heading northwest into the forest. He rabbited during the firefight. Fuck! There are snowmobile tracks. And blood. Decent amount of it. Looks like he caught a round on his way out.”
