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  In moments he was less than thirty meters from the rear truck and a little farther away from the ditch. From his position he could just barely see an AK-47 muzzle sticking out from the depression, facing in his direction. A single Russian was covering the rear flank.

  These guys are no fools, he thought. Placing a man to cover the back was smart. A lesser force would have had everyone tucked in behind the trucks and focused on the French direct assault and machine guns.

  If Apollo could just cover the distance, he might get the jump on this soldier, who had clearly not yet seen him.

  He kept his rifle’s scope centered on the nearest threat and waited for another long burst of machine-gun fire from his Dragoons. Once it came, he took off at a full sprint. Dariel and the men must have noticed him, because they all increased their volume of fire on the trucks.

  Thirty meters.

  Twenty.

  Ten.

  The Russian rear guard must have known the heavier volume meant something and he chanced a peek over the lip of the ditch. Apollo saw the AK’s barrel rising and pivoting; he kept up his sprint but pulled his SCAR to his cheek. Forgoing his scope, he looked directly down the barrel. He put his finger on the trigger and continued to close the distance. At five meters Apollo could see the man coming up to his knees and the French captain let fly a volley from his carbine. A pull of the trigger on burst mode.

  The carbine jerked up three times and Apollo tried to time the fire with his sprint.

  Three rounds caught the Russian in the chest. The Spetsnaz soldier, unlike Apollo, wore body armor. Still, the impact forced the man off his feet and down onto his back. The AK flew up, but he was disciplined enough not to let go.

  Apollo leapt into the ditch, stepped on top of the man’s chest with one booted foot, pointed his SCAR in the man’s exposed face, and pulled the trigger once more. The carbine was still in burst mode, and three rounds exploded from the muzzle, blasting the man’s head into red pulp.

  Apollo continued the advance; he was now behind the enemy’s truck. As he did so, the gunfire from his men stopped abruptly.

  He found four Russians alive behind each vehicle. Apollo dropped the nearly expended magazine and put in a fresh one. Using the lip of the ditch for a firing position, he pumped several rounds rapidly into the closest four enemy, aiming for their heads and upper torsos so he didn’t waste rounds banging their armor. It was dirty business, but part of combat involved identifying and exploiting an enemy’s weakness.

  All four men spun and died where they stood.

  The four men behind the lead truck turned to the exchange of frantic gunfire. They saw Apollo moving out of the ditch and toward the cover of the rear vehicle and then opened fire. A hail of incoming 7.62mm rounds blasted the side of the truck. Apollo dove to the ground and rolled behind the Bongo to avoid the incoming fire. About half the rounds penetrated the thin side of the truck above Apollo’s head, driving him down tighter into the dirt just behind the vehicle.

  The tires on both sides of the truck were blasted apart and the vehicle now rested on its rims, with inches of clearance from the ground. Apollo leaned under the truck, trying to get an angle on the Russians, but he couldn’t see a thing.

  Still, he emptied the rest of his magazine under the vehicle, hoping to get lucky.

  He reached to his chest and realized his load-bearing vest with the rest of his ammo, along with his body armor, was back up on the hill.

  “Merde.”

  Remembering the half-empty magazine in his drop pouch, he rolled slightly in the dirt to access it. He fished it out, ejected the spent mag, and loaded the partial into his SCAR.

  It wasn’t going to be enough. He could hear the Russians shouting to one another, which to him meant they were coming up with a plan on how to deal with him. He was caught behind a thin truck, with no body armor, less than half a magazine left in his carbine, and a brigade of armored Russians bearing down on him.

  Maybe fifteen minutes until the Russian armored reconnaissance arrives, he thought.

  “Merde,” he said again softly, with his mouth pressed into the sandy red dirt.

  Rounds cracked overhead and clanked through the thin skin of the Bongo as the Russians fired in his direction. Pieces of shrapnel and bullet fragments flew like a swarm of bees around him. He felt an impact and then a sting in his neck and two more in his upper back. His heavily muscled frame tightened as the rounds continued to penetrate the truck.

  This is it, he thought. Apollo prepared to fire his last few rounds at the first asshole who rounded the rear of the truck.

  “Mon capitaine!” came the familiar French voice of Sergent-Chef Dariel, shouting from Apollo’s left, twenty or thirty meters away at least. “Dans trois secondes, sortez en tirant!” (“In three seconds, come out shooting!”) Dariel was gambling none of the Russians spoke French, and this meant Apollo was now making the same gamble.

  “D’accord!” (“Okay!”) he yelled, then began counting to three.

  “Un . . .

  “Deux . . .

  “Trois!” Apollo rolled right, out from behind the truck, tucked the carbine against his cheek, and let loose at the Russians, who were bounding from the front truck to the rear.

  Two of them were just a few meters away, closer than he had anticipated, but a barrage of fire over and through the vehicle from Dariel and his squad caused the Russians to pivot in that direction.

  Trying to use only one round per Russian, Apollo steadied for each rapid squeeze of the trigger.

  Bang, bang, click. His magazine ran dry.

  But there were two more threats, just ahead and swiveling to engage him now.

  From his left a half dozen of his boys came around in front of the rear truck, guns blazing, spinning the last two Russians to the sand and raking the men Apollo shot with dozens more rounds, sending red mist and chunks of flesh spraying.

  Apollo was on his stomach now, and when he saw the threats eliminated, he dropped his head onto the buttstock of his FN SCAR-L and let out a long sigh.

  Sergent-Chef Dariel stepped up behind him and kicked him gently with his boot. “Mon capitaine, are you dead?”

  Apollo let out a laugh as he slowly climbed up to his feet. “No, but thanks for ‘corpse checking’ me before you asked.”

  Dariel chuckled, too, then said with a wry smile, “Mon captaine, next time you charge, I request you let me know, and at least have the courtesy to put your body armor on as an example to the young men. You know they look up to you for guidance.”

  “Trust me, I’ll put on my body armor and I won’t take it off till I’m back home on my sofa watching football.”

  Konstantine came up to the scene now and kicked a couple of dead Spetsnaz men. “Capitaine Rambo. That was an interesting tactic.”

  “Yeah . . . I don’t recommend it,” Apollo replied, checking over his carbine.

  “Do you think they were able to transmit to the main column?”

  “Not sure,” Apollo said, taking a fresh SCAR magazine from the young corporal and feeding it into his weapon. “But we’re not sticking around to find out. It’s time to run like hell.”

  “Run where, mon capitaine?”

  “South. We’re going to stay ahead of these forward units, and harass them again.”

  CHAPTER 63

  DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA

  29 DECEMBER

  The four massive Vericor Power Systems ETF40B gas turbines shrieked as they came alive on the landing craft in the Boxer’s well deck. Called an LCAC, it was a flat hovercraft that rode the waves to the beach on a cushion of air. They had already made two trips ashore and back, dropping off a platoon of four tanks and an infantry company—nearly 140 Marines.

  Pretty solid work, thought Connolly as he looked at the long line of Marines filing down the Boxer’s gangway behind him as another compa
ny prepared to go ashore along with the vehicle crewmen for four light-armored vehicles. All the Marines wore eighty-pound rucksacks and body armor and each carried either a rifle, a carbine, or a machine gun. The clatter of their boots was drowned out as the LCAC’s turbines became the only noise anyone could hear. As with jet engines, the blast of hot exhaust from the adjustable propulsion systems filled the air, knocking any unwary Marine back a step.

  The ship’s crew chief beckoned Connolly and his small contingent of 5th Marines regimental headquarters personnel to board the craft. The wood planks of the Boxer’s well deck were slippery with seawater from the LCAC’s second return from the beach, as well as with oil and grease. Connolly had spent plenty of time aboard U.S. Navy amphibs and was able to keep his feet as he moved along, but he and the men climbing aboard all watched as two headquarters guys slipped and fell, skidding toward the deck of the landing craft with the rolling of the ship, landing in a heap next to a cluster of nineteen- and twenty-year-old radio operators.

  Connolly was extra careful, because given the laughs and catcalls the young men gave to the two junior officers who fell in front of him, he gathered these Marines would just love to see a lieutenant colonel take a spill, too.

  On board the hovercraft he made his way past the two Humvees and over to the LAVs. The light-armored vehicle was the smaller and faster Marine equivalent of a Russian BTR or Bumerang. It had eight wheels, and the LAV-25s on the deck each had a 25mm cannon and carried six scouts in back trained in battlefield reconnaissance.

  Since Connolly was to ride near Colonel Caster as one of the staff, he’d be in a LAV-C2, the command-and-control variant. These vehicles were beefed up with a ton of communications equipment: they had satellite and three types of radio bands necessary to speak to the rest of the task force, along with long-range communication back to the Navy ships or to USMC aircraft overhead, and computer assets tied into the NATO global communications grid to provide them with the basic satellite uplink with classified Internet.

  Connolly found his ride, attached his pack on the side of the vehicle with a heavy steel shackle, and climbed aboard. He pushed past all the gear and tackle inside and took his seat.

  The back steel hatches closed and the LCAC’s engine shrieked to an even louder pitch. He picked up his crew helmet, pulled the built-in earphones over his ears, and settled in for the short trip to shore.

  Exhaust blasted through every crack in the hatches of the LAV. There was no way to avoid the fumes, and soon everyone inside fought nausea.

  After ten minutes the massive hovercraft began rising and falling dramatically, presumably as it rode the large waves of the shoal waters. Confirming this assumption, blasts of sand mixed with sea air came blowing through Connolly’s LAV as the landing craft crossed from the surf zone and onto Bakhresa Beach, just south of the Dar es Salaam port facility.

  There was a whoosh and one last great cloud of sand inside the LAV, and then the LCAC came to a halt.

  Connolly stuck his head up and out of the hatch. Bright light off the sandy beach filled his vision. Just beyond the yellow sand he saw thick palm trees, and farther inland he could make out the edge of Dar es Salaam’s urban sprawl.

  The beach was already packed with Marine Corps equipment and men. A large staging area contained row upon row of seven-ton trucks and aluminum pallets of supplies.

  The back hatch of the LAV opened and one of the sergeants motioned him off. “Sir, you need to head over there and grab your supplies.”

  Connolly lined up with the other Marines and picked up his MREs, enough water to fill his CamelBak, and six boxes of 5.56mm ammunition. He put it all in his pack, except for the ammo, which he took back to the LAV and loaded into his M4 carbine magazines.

  Connolly watched the sergeants in the vehicle with him as they looked over their new windfall in ammunition, cataloging it like it was Halloween candy. AT-4 anti-tank rockets, M72 LAW light anti-tank rockets, Mk 153 SMAW bunker-busting rockets, 40mm under-rifle grenades, M67 hand grenades, and lots and lots of machine-gun ammo.

  A Marine sergeant handed Connolly three grenades. Connolly took them and stuffed them in his pouch.

  “You need a refresher course on how to make it go boom, sir?”

  Connolly chuckled. “I know how to throw a grenade, Devil Dog.”

  “Check, sir. Figured you’d been behind a desk for a while.”

  Connolly sighed. It wasn’t as if he’d never been teased by the smart-alecky and headstrong sergeants the Marine Corps was famous for, but the man’s comment was a little too close to the truth these days.

  “What’s your name again, Marine?”

  “Casillas, sir. Sergeant Casillas.”

  “All right, Casillas, let’s make a deal. If I have to throw a grenade, you promise to lay down a really heavy base of fire so I get a good toss and don’t catch a round through the running lights. Deal?”

  “Sir, if you finally get me and the boys into a firefight like that, you won’t have to ask. I’ll have the hammer down so hard, the only thing you’ll have to worry about is the next paper cut you’ll get back in your office.”

  Connolly laughed. “Damn, Casillas, you got a thing for officers?”

  “No, sir, I just know who does the real work in the regiment.”

  Marine sergeants had a way of squaring up to their bosses and getting away with it. They obeyed every legal order down to the letter; it was just their way of testing their bosses to see if they could hack it, assessing their leaders for any possible weakness.

  Connolly watched a forklift shimmy down the gangplank, its operator driving a pallet over to a pool of waiting vehicles. On the side of the box was stenciled block lettering reading:

  AMMUNITION FOR CANNON WITH EXPLOSIVE PROJECTILES.

  M791, 25MM, APFSDS-T

  3,000 CARTRIDGES

  -

  WARNING: THIS BOX CONTAINS NOVEMBER ACCOUNT

  LFORM AMMUNITION

  FOR NATIONAL CONTINGENCIES ONLY

  Connolly had put the word up the Pentagon, and they’d authorized the regiment to break into the LFORM. This was short for “landing force operational reserve material,” a war stock for the Marines on board in the bottom of the naval amphibious ship’s holds that no one was allowed to touch without approval from the secretary of defense. There was definitely a “Break glass in case of war” aura around this ammunition. To the officers of the regiment, Connolly had already paid his dues when he placed a call back to the Pentagon to shorten the approval chain to use the ammo and equipment.

  Now he just needed to earn the respect of the men.

  Connolly and the rest of the 5th Marines began rolling to the north. He, Lieutenant Colonel McHale, and a unit of Force Recon would race ahead of the slower-moving equipment and meet the Russians in combat.

  These Marines were loaded for bear and, for the first time in any of their lives, they were up against the Russian bear.

  * * *

  • • •

  SOUTHEASTERN POLAND

  29 DECEMBER

  Colonel General Eduard Sabaneyev stood outside in the snow, next to the engine of his Bumerang command-and-control vehicle to keep him warm. Standing with him was Colonel Danilo Dryagin, his assault force commander. The two men had not seen each other since before the raid into Western Europe began four days earlier, but in all the chaos of the last day the colonel and the general found themselves close enough to each other’s locations to arrange a face-to-face meeting.

  It was midmorning now, the temp was below freezing, and it looked like the low gray clouds would drop sleet or snow at any moment.

  “This column of yours is a fucking mess, Dryagin,” said the general.

  “Admittedly, sir. My units exited the urban center of Wrocław via fourteen different routes. Some of them drove right into PLF dug in along the highway, and this split them into
even more groups. I fully agree with your orders to keep the convoy split up to reduce NATO’s ability to fix us to one position, but hundreds of vehicles separated by a hundred kilometers means that coordinating an effective response to each attack has become . . . a challenge.”

  “What percentage of the original attacking force has been eliminated?”

  “Forty-four percent is the latest estimation from my XO. But it is a fluid battle space, as you clearly know.”

  Sabaneyev and the company of vehicles surrounding him had been pounded by jets just an hour earlier. None of the armor had been destroyed, but some troops riding on the hull of a T-14 had been killed and a scout car was damaged and left behind along with the wounded troops riding in it.

  Sabaneyev replied with sarcasm. “Yes . . . I have noticed that our enemy continues to engage.”

  Dryagin said, “Did you receive an update about what happened to Red Blizzard 3?”

  The general rubbed the back of his neck, a show of stress, but only for a moment, and only in front of Dryagin.

  “Fucking Borbikov’s hot-shit Spetsnaz boys were supposed to send the train to the southwest. Instead, the tracks never got switched, so it rolled on to the northwest. It traveled forty kilometers before they realized what happened. Forty kilometers closer to Warsaw. They tried to stop, to reverse, and to go back to the switching station, but in that time Polish tanks arrived and destroyed the train.”

  Dryagin nodded slowly without revealing emotion to his general. “We are growing short on munitions. We had counted on the cargo train delivering us supplies, troops, and armor, and we had counted on being together to receive and disseminate them. As it is now, Comrade General, we are like sixty or seventy roving bands of marauders, plus however many Spetsnaz teams Borbikov has kept in theater. It makes things more difficult from a logistical standpoint.”

  The general said, “So we press on. Hard. No stopping now. Not even to lick our wounds. The Poles might be arrayed at the border in numbers to threaten small groups of our vehicles. They might not know where we all are right now, but they certainly know where we are all going. Tighten everyone up and we’ll punch through the border together. Mow down everything in your path. No remorse, Colonel. Do you understand? No remorse!”