Toxic Terrain Read online

  The colonel felt the sat phone in his hand vibrate again, he slid it into the drop pouch attached to his right leg. Chen wanted an update on the operations against Cooper. Once Liang reported what he knew, which admittedly was just that things seemed to have gone horribly wrong again, Chen would order him back to the Ag Con facilities. But Liang wasn’t about to accept failure. At this point he knew that bringing back the lifeless bodies of Cooper and Kemp would be the only thing that would redeem him in Chen’s eyes.

  Liang and the three men who’d been in his patrol careened down the oil-field road that passed closest to the location in which Kolodziej had located Cooper and Kemp. Liang drove the cumbersome SUV as fast as the oversize truck could go without sliding off the rough, dusty road. Another SUV filled with more men followed him, but the driver could not maintain the pace that Liang set and it gradually receded in Liang’s rearview mirror.

  He approached the trail that led to the pasture and drove right through the barbed-wire gate, which snapped in an explosion of stretched barbed wire. Liang followed the trail as far as was possible in a full-size vehicle, stopping a little more than a kilometer south of the GPS coordinates that Kolodziej had sent him after the man had identified Cooper’s campsite. Liang’s men were out of the vehicle and had donned their gear by the time the second SUV pulled up.

  “Quickly,” Liang ordered the men in the second vehicle, “prepare to move out.”

  The colonel studied the topographic map of the area on his GPS unit and plotted his course of action. A creek had carved out a small canyon, the bottom of which opened up a bit just north of their location to form a small meadow. That was where Cooper had encountered Kolodziej’s and Liang’s men in the helicopter. The western side of the canyon ended in a steep cliff that rose to give way to approximately six miles of some of the most rugged Badlands in the entire region. The eastern edge of the meadow ended in steep hills covered with sage and juniper, Liang knew. That was where Kolodziej had left the sharpshooters, who would probably still be in position, if Cooper hadn’t managed to kill them, too. He had no way of contacting them, since all their communications were filtered through Kolodziej. The best possible outcome right now would be for the sharpshooters to kill Cooper and Kemp and bring this travesty of an operation to an end.

  The snipers should be able to kill their quarry, or at the very least keep the cursed pair boxed in the canyon while they awaited reinforcements, but the events of the past several days had taught Liang the danger of assuming anything when it came to Cooper. After studying the topography, he decided the best course of action would be to leave half his forces to guard the bottleneck at the south end of the canyon where the only way to get out was a seventy-yard stretch of grassland through which the creek ran. Liang and the other three men would make their way along the eastern edge of the canyon and try to make contact with the sharpshooters. What the colonel did after that would be determined by what he learned from the snipers—if they were still alive.

  6

  Bolan knew Kemp’s plan was a long shot at best, but he couldn’t think of a better one. They’d crept along the edge of the wooded draw and hid behind an outcropping where the ravine gave way to the meadow. The large rocks provided cover from the sniper, or snipers, in the trees on the other side of the meadow, but their position could quickly become as much of a trap as a refuge. Bolan chanced a peek through the ATN scope and made out the edges of a heat signature among what had to have been juniper trees.

  As he looked at the figure on the other side of the creek bed, trying to estimate the distance, Bolan saw a bright flare from the heat signature across the meadow. Before he heard the report, he saw sod fly up where the bullet hit the ground several feet in front of their position. The sniper had seen his heat signature through his identical scope and had taken a shot at Bolan, forcing the soldier to take cover behind the rocks. Judging from the amount of bullet drop, Bolan estimated that the sniper was at least four hundred yards away from their position, though probably closer to five hundred yards. It would be difficult for the sniper to get a fix on Bolan and Kemp’s position, but not impossible, and given that the sniper had a better estimate of the distance between them, he would be able to get an accurate shot at them before Bolan could get an accurate shot at him.

  The cattle had been closing in on the meadow in front of the wooded draw. When the sniper fired, he’d startled the animals, but the report of the round hadn’t been loud enough to scatter the herd, as had happened when Bolan had fought with Kolodziej’s forces. “You think you can get these animals to cooperate with us?” Bolan asked Kemp.

  “I can get Earl to cooperate with me when I harvest his semen,” Kemp said.

  “Well, I guess if you can get Earl to go along with that, you can probably get these heifers to work with us,” he said. “But we have to wait until they get right up to the edge of the draw. If we try to move from here without cover, we’re dead.”

  “What do we do until then?” Kemp asked.

  “Make ourselves as comfortable as possible behind these rocks. When the time comes, we’re going to have to move, and move fast. You’ll want as much blood circulating in your limbs as possible.” There wasn’t much space to stretch out behind the cover of the rocks. Kemp and Bolan shifted around until they were in a position that could best be described as “spooning.”

  “If I liked men, this might seem romantic,” Kemp said, commenting on the intimate nature of their position.

  “Hiding from someone who’s trying to kill you would sort of dampen a person’s ardor,” Bolan said.

  “Good point.”

  “THESE HEIFERS MIGHT be a problem,” Kemp said after twenty minutes had passed. The herd grazing in the meadow consisted of heifers and their calves, which appeared to be just about ready for weaning. “For most of them, it looks like these are their first calves. Heifers can get a little crazy and overprotective with their first calves.”

  Bolan looked at the heifers. They probably weighed at least six hundred pounds each, if not more. He could see where an animal that size getting “a little crazy” might cause a problem. “So how do we do this?” he asked.

  “When they get close enough to block our heat signatures from our friend over there—” Kemp nodded toward the sniper’s position “—we crawl out and mingle in with the herd.”

  “Then what?” Bolan asked.

  “That’s a good question. I suppose we can try one of two things. We can attempt to coax the entire herd to move toward the south, where we can make it to the trail we came in on.”

  “What’s the other option?” Bolan asked.

  “You can shoot that son of a bitch, but that presents its own set of problems. First off, it will make the heifers scatter, so we’ll lose our cover and be sitting ducks. Second, if there’re more of them out there, it will let them know exactly where we are.”

  “Maybe we can try a combination of the two plans,” Bolan said. “We mix in with the herd, keeping close to the animals so that the sniper can’t distinguish our heat signals from theirs, but instead of trying to coax them all the way out of the meadow, we try to get them to move to the east, where I can maybe see if there are other shooters out there and get a better shot at them.”

  “If I had a better idea,” Kemp said, “I’d say you were insane, but I don’t see a lot of options.”

  ANDREJ ZAJAC HAD watched the firefight in the wooded draw, never doubting that Kolodziej and the rest of the squad would defeat the man and woman hiding in the brush. But Zajac could see that the battle hadn’t gone as planned for his comrades—some of them had already been killed. But he could still see Kolodziej and another man standing just outside the entrance to the ravine. When the gunfire started to die down, he watched as Kolodziej and the other man moved forward, but then Zajac lost sight of them among the boulders strewed around at the mouth of the ravine.

  Seconds later Zajac heard the report from two rounds fired by the large-caliber hunting rifles carried
by their prey—the sound of their guns was easy to distinguish from the 5.56 mm NATO rounds his comrades fired. After that Zajac heard and saw nothing, but from the silence of his handheld radio, he guessed that the last two shots had taken out Kolodziej and the other man.

  This was just the contingency for which Kolodziej had placed Zajac and his partner in their sniping positions. He regretted that Kolodziej had apparently been killed because the man had been a strong leader, but he felt little on a personal level. Theirs was a business in which it was best not to develop close friendships and personal relationships. Kolodziej had given Zajac a task to do in case Kolodziej and his men failed to kill the Americans, and now that they had indeed failed, Zajac would perform his task as directed.

  But when Zajac heard the helicopter coming, he thought he would no longer have to perform the task of eliminating the Americans. Liang’s men would certainly overwhelm the Americans, though Zajac was surprised to see just one helicopter arrive on the scene. He would have expected Liang to come after the Americans with all the forces he could marshal.

  The sun was setting when the helicopter flew in. Twilight was the time when the optics on his rifle were the least useful. During the bright hours of the day he kept a pinhole shade over the lens to keep the night-vision circuitry from being overwhelmed by too much light, and at night he removed the shade for full night-vision capabilities. The dim light available when the sun set or rose was too bright to allow Zajac to remove the pinhole shade, but it did not provide enough light to adequately illuminate the images through the pinhole.

  Since his scope was virtually useless when the helicopter arrived, Zajac watched the events unfold with his naked eyes. But he could barely believe what he saw when he watched the helicopter crash into the ravine.

  Regardless of how shocking the turn of events was, it didn’t change Zajac’s assignment. He looked over at Kazmierz Grabowski, his partner to the south. Grabowski’s job was to kill the Americans if they made it past Zajac and attempted to leave the canyon via the trail that ran along the creek bed. Grabowski appeared to be trying to see what had happened, but from his position he couldn’t have seen anything after the helicopter dipped into the ravine.

  After the helicopter crashed, Zajac waited and watched for anyone trying to escape from the ravine. The fact that he hadn’t heard anything over his radio meant that if anyone was alive in the ravine, it could only be the Americans, which in turn meant that it was his job to shoot anyone trying to escape. Zajac had been trained as a sniper for Grupa Reagowania Operacyjno-Manewrowego— GROM—Poland’s version of the U.S. SOCOM forces. He had waited for days for a target to appear in his sights. He knew that the Americans hiding in the cliffs across from his position did not have days to wait. He knew that Liang and his Chinese troops would eventually arrive to finish what Kolodziej and his men had started.

  Zajac’s waiting eventually paid off. After watching the entrance to the ravine for approximately half an hour after the helicopter crashed, he saw a faint heat signature appear from behind a boulder at the edge of the ravine. Before the sun had set he’d estimated the distance to the center of the ravine, where the campsite was located, and he’d also gauged the distance to the entrance of the ravine. But it was difficult to measure the exact distance to the boulders just inside the mouth of the ravine. He made his best guess, adjusted his aim to compensate and fired at the heat signature. His bullet hit about a meter in front of the target, which meant he would have to aim a bit higher the next time the target appeared.

  With the proper gear, Zajac would have made short work of the Americans, but the optics on his rifle were far from ideal for this sort of sniping work, as was the rifle itself. The bullpup design made it a compact and maneuverable combat rifle, but the long link between the trigger and the sear made the trigger break with a spongy feel that impeded accuracy. When equipped with a night scope like the ATN, the QBZ was ideal for close-quarters combat, but far from ideal for sniping.

  Still, Zajac had been trained to work with the equipment he had available, and the next time his targets presented themselves, he felt he stood a much better chance of scoring a hit. He was preparing for such a shot when the cattle began to move into his field of fire. He watched closely to see if any two-legged creatures moved among the animals, but it was difficult to distinguish between their heat signatures and any human signatures moving among them.

  When the cattle became too much of an impediment to watching his prey, Zajac decided to take drastic action; he picked out an animal in the midst of the herd and shot it, hoping to scatter the animals.

  BOLAN AND KEMP had just crept in among the heifers when the sniper fired a shot. Bolan looked to see if Kemp, who was about fifteen feet to the soldier’s right, had been hit, but she appeared unharmed. A heifer about thirty yards to the soldier’s left wasn’t so lucky. Bolan watched the animal stagger, then drop to its front knees and roll onto its side. The cattle immediately surrounding it appeared startled, but the herd didn’t panic.

  Kemp stood up and crouched beside a heifer, startling it a bit, but her manner and familiarity with cattle calmed the animal. She motioned for Bolan to do the same. Instead of standing, the soldier remained on his belly, looking between the legs of the heifer in front of him to see what the sniper was doing. It appeared that the sniper was scanning the area, looking for targets. The shot had to have been designed to get the animals to clear out from the area so that the man could get a better view of the wooded draw.

  Then Bolan took Kemp’s cue and stood up. Kemp was using her body language to manipulate the heifer. She clearly had a lot of experience working with these animals, moving slowly and smoothly, not fast enough or aggressively enough to startle the heifer she was using for cover, but with sufficient presence to command the animal to walk slowly away from her. Bolan recognized her movements as a variation of the tactic border collies used to herd cattle. Kemp moved at the same pace as the heifer, using it as a shield to block her heat signature from the sniper. Bolan copied her movements and the heifer in front of him began to slowly move away from him, but he quickly figured out how to control the direction of the heifer through the positioning of his own body.

  The system worked fairly well for a while, and he and Kemp were able to make the animals they were using for cover move nearly one hundred yards closer to the sniper’s position before the man once again fired into the herd. The report was considerably louder this much closer to its source, and the noise startled the cattle in the vicinity, including the two heifers Bolan and Kemp used for cover. Kemp dived to the ground, and Bolan dropped to a shooting position and found the sniper in the crosshairs of his scope. The sniper’s attention was still focused on the region in front of the draw, and Bolan was able to get off a shot before the shooter realized that his prey was much closer than he’d anticipated.

  Bolan could see that he’d scored a hit, but it wasn’t a killing shot. The sniper returned fire, though his injuries seemed to affect his aim. Bolan and Kemp were within yards of the creek bed, which was mostly dry, except for a trickle of water running along the bottom.

  “Run for the creek!” Bolan shouted to Kemp. The woman was closer to the creek and reached it first. The sniper squeezed off a few more shots at the pair as they ran, but again his aim was off and he was unable to connect with the moving targets.

  The soldier jumped into the creek bed and found Kemp already there. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  Bolan crept to the bank and chanced a peek over the top—he was rewarded with a shot from the sniper. This one missed the soldier’s head by inches, indicating that the sniper had regained his composure, at least to some degree.

  There wasn’t much for cover in the meadow, but about one hundred yards to the south stood a large outcropping that rose at least six feet above the meadow grass. Beyond that the terrain became increasingly rugged, until it gave way to the hills in the east where the sniper was located.
/>   “Follow me,” Bolan said. He ran in a crouch along the creek bed until the outcropping was directly between them and the sniper. The man had to have seen that they were moving, maybe catching a glimpse of their heat signatures, because he fired a few shots. They went wild.

  Bolan again inched up to the edge of the creek bed. He couldn’t see the shooter, and hoped that meant that the man couldn’t see them, either. He scanned the area, and for the first time caught sight of a second sniper. The man appeared to be looking at his partner through his night-vision scope, probably trying to see how severely the first man had been wounded. Bolan took the opportunity to take a shot at the second sharpshooter. This time Bolan’s shot appeared to be more effective—the man lay on the ground, not moving. The Executioner scanned the area looking for another shooter, but found nothing.

  “Stay here,” he told Kemp and crept to the rocks rising up from the grass. He crawled around the edge of the stones, until he got a glimpse of the sniper through his night-vision scope. The man was still scanning the creek bed and appeared to be having difficulty moving. Bolan was much closer this time, and when he fired, his bullet hit the target directly in his center of mass. The sniper slumped against the tree he’d been using as a hide and didn’t move.

  Bolan scanned the area to the south, looking for more snipers. Just when he thought they were going to make it out of the canyon alive, he saw the heat signatures of four men coming through the narrow opening of the canyon.

  “Are we safe?” Kemp asked when the soldier came back to her position in the creek bed.

  “No. We’re getting company from the south. I think you should round up some manure?”

  LIANG AND HIS MEN were just about ready to leave the vehicles when they heard the first shot. “Hurry!” he ordered them. When he was positioning the squad at the entrance of the canyon, he heard a second shot.