EndWar

And it was all delivered to Vatz in the grainy green of night vision as operators suddenly appeared from the cloud, on fire and tumbling hopelessly toward the earth.

The voices finally came over the radio, burred with anger, tight with exertion, high-pitched in agony. He listened to his brothers try to save each other, listened to some gasp their last breaths…

As he floated there with a front-row seat, his pulse increasing, his breath growing shallow, every muscle in his body beginning to tense.

Until suddenly someone struck him with a terrible thud, knocking him around into an uncontrollable barrel roll.

Flames flashed by.

He’d been hit by one of the dead guys.

He had to recover and fast. The longer he rolled, the longer it’d take to recover.

He arched his back, extended his arms, but kept rolling. Someone called his name.

Part of him thought it was no good. He should’ve died back in Moscow with the rest of them. He’d been living on borrowed time.

Then he heard Rakken telling him how lucky he was, having escaped death twice. Why not make it a hat trick?

Hell, he could’ve been blown up with the plane. Giving up now would be a terrible waste.

And then he thought about his dead brothers. They needed him to carry on. He remembered the last few lines of the Special Forces Creed:

I am a member of my nation’s chosen soldiery. God grant that I may not be found wanting, that I will not fail this sacred trust.

A sacred trust.

Damn it, he would not let them down.

He arched his back again, thrust out his arms, and screamed to regain control.

The roll slowed, and he was disoriented, the altimeter’s digital readout ticking off his descent, the ground still spinning a little, but he was on his belly, and his detachment commander was calling him on the radio.

He took a deep breath, about to answer, when he spotted the long column of smoke in the distance…

Where the C-130 had once been.

NINETEEN

Rearmed and refueled, Major Stephanie Halverson streaked down the runway, engine roaring, her gear just leaving the ground as dozens of Russian bombs finally hit Igloo Base.

She pulled up and away, banked left, and came around to witness a chilling sight.

The snow-covered Quonset huts housing the enlisted soldiers’ bunks, the offices, and the officers’ quarters burst apart, ragged pieces of metal flying everywhere as chutes of fire swept through them and ignited the stands of lodgepole pines behind the base.

Barely two seconds later, the refueling trucks went up like dominoes, their crews trying to evacuate in HMMWVs but caught in the blast.

Those explosions triggered several more among the smaller vehicles parked nearby, just outside the two hangar facilities that stood only a moment more before two bombs suddenly obliterated them.

Inevitably, the small, five-story tower and adjacent command center took one, two, three direct hits from thousand-pound bombs and were lost in mushroom clouds that rose and collided with each other, throwing up a black wall of fire-filled smoke.

Halverson was exhausted, overtired, her thoughts consumed by horror and disbelief.

From her vantage point, the devastation below was silent and seemingly less significant.

But she’d met nearly everyone at that base, and she realized now that there would be no survivors.

“Oh, God, Siren, you see that?” asked Sapphire.

She could barely answer. “Yeah.”

They had one job left, one last sortie.

There was nowhere to refuel. Nowhere to rearm. And the last orders they’d received from Igloo were to engage the enemy.

So they would.

She and Lisa Johansson were the only two left. Had their refueling gone a minute longer, they, of course, would already be dead.

Dozens of Russian cargo ships soared through the sky, their escort fighters engaging the squadrons from Alaska.

“Where are the Canadians?” Sapphire asked.

“I don’t know, but I have a feeling they won’t watch this happen for very long.”

“Roger that.”

Halverson took a long breath to steady her nerves. “This is it, girl. You ready?”

“Ready.”

“Let’s go get ’em!” With that, she engaged the afterburner, accelerating with a force that was hard to describe to someone who’d never sat in a cockpit.

Just as she hit Mach 1, the Prandtl-Glauert singularity occurred, a vapor cone caused by a sudden drop in air pressure that extended from the wings to her tail. She left the cone behind in her exhaust trail.

They held their steady course, ascending over the enemy aircraft, bound for coordinates seventy-five kilometers northwest of Behchoko, where dozens of AN-130s had landed and were off-loading their BMP-3s.