EndWar

After ditching the ejection seat, she’d done her best to steer herself into the widest gap between trees, and that had probably saved her life, but it had also left her hanging, literally, between the big pines.

Detaching the chute line and jumping meant risking a fracture.

She undid her helmet, let it drop to the snow, thud. No, she wasn’t jumping.

“Oh,” she said aloud, breathing in the cold, crisp air. In the distance came the muffled drone of props, and she wondered how long it would take before they sent out a squad of Spetsnaz troops for her. They couldn’t have missed her chute.

The thought sent her into motion, swinging from side to side, trying to get close to the nearest trunk, where she might grab on and attempt to secure herself.

After five or six swings, she built up enough momentum to strike the trunk, bark flying as she wrapped an arm around and came to a sudden halt, her grip already faltering.

She detached the chute, let the twenty-two-pound survival kit fall away to the ground, where it broke open, scattering its contents.

Nice, Major.

Then she threw herself forward, wrapped both arms around the tree, then both legs, as lines fell away.

Repressing the morbid desire to look down, she slowly loosed arms, just a bit, and began to slide—

Just as a shattered limb from above decided to drop, missing by only six inches.

The sudden shock caused her to loose her grip even more, and she slid much too fast down the tree, bark ripping her across the legs, which were beginning to warm behind the flight suit.

She wasn’t sure if she screamed or not as she suddenly hit the ground, lost her balance, and collapsed onto her rump, sending up clouds of snow.

For just a few seconds she sat there, gingerly testing her legs, making sure she hadn’t broken or sprained anything. Then the internal voice took over, the training: All right, all right, get the gear and get the hell out!

She had a couple of meals ready to eat (MREs), a couple liters of water, a.45 with two spare magazines, a survival guide for exciting reading in case she got bored fleeing from the Russians, a fixed-blade survival knife in nylon sheath, a radio beacon (which she checked to be sure was off), a pair of high-powered binoculars with integrated digital camera, and a small emergency blanket.

She tried her helmet’s radio. Dead. Damn, it’d been smashed up in the trees on the way down. She also had her wrist-mounted GPS and a satellite phone in her breast pocket, which she now fished out, switched on.

No signal.

“Are you kidding me? The entire network’s down?”

Well, wasn’t that a bitch? She’d have to find the ejection seat, which had recently been equipped with a secondary transmitter.

But breaking radio silence would mean giving up her location, the same way the survival kit’s satellite beacon could.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

It wouldn’t hurt to at least track down the seat, and let them know in which direction she was headed, which was—

She spun around.

If the Russians were heading south, any direction but south might be good. Then again, the farther north, east, or west she traveled, the farther her rescuers would have to come — if they were planning to rescue her.

It would be all too easy to write off one pilot in an operation as massive as this would be. Did they even have the resources?

She vowed to stop feeling sorry for herself. She would find the ejection seat, send off the last transmission, then take it from there.

The sound of jet engines sent her gaze skyward, where the stars were beginning to fade, where she should be right now.

After slinging the survival kit over her shoulder, the two.45 magazines in her left hip pocket, the pistol in her gloved hand, she took one last look around to make sure she’d hadn’t left anything. Then, remembering she had been gliding northwest when she’d dumped the seat, she jogged off and headed southeast through the forest.

She got no more than a thousand yards from her landing site when she heard the sounds of multiple, somewhat high-pitched engines. The sounds left her puzzled. She crouched down, then dug through her kit, produced her binoculars.

In a clearing off to her left, a half dozen black snowmobiles had come to a halt. Climbing off them were heavily armed Spetsnaz troops.

Lowering the binoculars and placing them back into the kit, ever so gently, as though the tiniest sound might be heard by the enemy, Halverson glanced up, saw how the forest dipped down ahead, and figured there might be better cover there.

She rose, started off, wouldn’t look back, wouldn’t do a damned thing except focus on the next position.

One of the Spetsnaz cried out in Russian, loud enough for her to hear, and she understood the words: “I found the chute!”

And now they knew she was alive.

TWENTY-ONE