Arctic Storm Rising by Dale Brown (readera ebook reader .TXT) 📗

dragging out a mix of Soviet-eraAK-47s and AKMs. One of them yelled an order, waving his arm wildly toward the grounded American helicopter.

Oh my God, Flynn realized. That smart bastard wanted to just overrun them. It was a good plan. If the attackers got in close enoughto overwhelm them with superior numbers, it was all over. So he needed to stop their assault before it started. He droppedto one knee, brought his sights onto the shouting tribesman, and squeezed off three quick shots. Bright red splotches blossomedacross the man’s white robes, and he went down hard.

The enemy doesn’t have body armor, Flynn thought, fighting to stay in control. Score one for the good guys.

For a second or so, the white-robed men stared down at the body of their leader in shocked surprise, but then they threw themselves prone and started firing downhill. Most of their 7.62mm rounds went high and smacked into the helicopter’s bullet-resistant armor panels, ricocheting off in all directions. One hit Bill Wade in the stomach as he scrambled out through the door. The combination of Kevlar and ceramic plates stopped the bullet from penetrating, but the impact knocked the flight engineer down. Another round ripped through his leg as he fell. More AK rounds tore up sand around where Dykstra and Kasper had already gone prone.

The two pilots shot back. Neither was an expert marksman, but they both had enough training to avoid the rookie mistake ofaiming too high when firing up a slope. One more tribesman slumped over, drilled through the head. His assault rifle fellfrom his lifeless hands.

Suddenly, a blinding flash—brighter than the red-tinged afternoon sun—lit up the crash site.

WHAMMM.

And a huge shock wave slammed Flynn face-first into the ground with enormous force.

Blearily, he spat out blood and grit and raised his head just high enough to see a fire-laced cloud of oily black smoke risingbeyond the wrecked C-130. Someone, probably another suicide bomber, had just blown the hell out of the black ops Mi-17.

Trailing smoke, a rocket-propelled grenade skimmed just over the downed Super Hercules and arrowed on to impact a couple ofhundred yards beyond the HH-60W. It went off in an orange flash and a fountain of sand. The sight dragged Flynn out of hisdaze. Somebody out there on the other flank had an RPG launcher. And if they scored a hit on this last intact helicopter,he and the other Americans still alive at the crash site were royally screwed. Their enemies weren’t going to sit on theirasses and wait while the Air Force flew another search-and-rescue helicopter all the way from Egypt.

His hearing was coming back a bit, just enough to let him pick up the harsh, staccato rattle of automatic-weapons fire comingfrom the other side of the downed cargo aircraft. Some friendlies over there must have survived the suicide bomber’s detonation.

On this side, the surviving white-robed attackers were also starting to stir, recovering from their own daze. Another fewseconds and they’d be back in action.

Flynn scowled. The longer this fight went on, the worse it was going to get. It was time to end this—at least here. Rollingover, he tugged a ball-shaped M67 fragmentation grenade from one of his equipment pouches. Quickly, he flicked its safetyclip away with his left thumb, twisted the pull ring, and yanked it out to release the pin. One swift glance over his shouldershowed him his target. Without hesitating, he reared back and lobbed the grenade high into the air, rolling back onto hisstomach with the same fluid motion.

“Frag out!” he screamed, hoping like hell that Dykstra and Kasper could hear him through their own blast-deafened eardrums.

As soon as the grenade left his hand, its safety lever flipped open and fell away. The grenade itself soared on through asmooth arc until it thudded down high up on the dune, several yards above and beyond the little knot of prone tribesmen. Thengravity took over and it rolled downhill, right into their midst.

Flynn buried his face in the sand again.

Craaack! The grenade exploded, sending lethal, razor-edged fragments sleeting through a fifty-foot radius.

Flynn looked up. Through a small puff of dirty gray smoke drifting downwind, he saw the results. Three of the five remainingattackers were motionless—ripped into blood-soaked corpses by dozens of pieces of steel. Two staggered upright. Scarlet streaksdown their faces and shredded robes showed that they hadn’t escaped the blast unscathed, but they still clutched AK-47s intheir hands.

He grabbed his M4 again. “‘Iisqat al’aslihat alkhasat bik! Drop your weapons!” he shouted.

Instead, they whirled toward him, apparently still determined to carry on this fight.

“Assholes,” Flynn muttered. Gritting his teeth, he squeezed off six more rounds. Hit multiple times, the two white-robed men crumpled to the sand and lay still. They were either dead or dying, he decided. Painfully, he scrambled back to his feet.

The sound of gunfire from the other side of the C-130 seemed to be trailing away—fading from a near-continuous crackle ofshots to isolated pop-pop-pops. With his carbine up and ready to fire, he moved warily off in that direction.

Greasy black smoke from the burning Mi-17 made it difficult to see much. Bodies, some in white robes, others in camouflageuniforms, were scattered in all directions. He spotted White’s gray-haired, skeletal form lying huddled near the shrapnel-torntail section of the wrecked Super Hercules. Whether the man was dead or simply unconscious wasn’t clear, and Flynn wasn’tinclined to go check . . . not just yet.

At least one of the former Special Forces contractors was still alive, though seriously wounded and pretty clearly in shock.He was trying to apply a combat tourniquet to his own mangled right thigh . . . but his blood-soaked hands were shaking toobadly.

“Hang on, trooper,” Flynn murmured, kneeling beside him. He set his M4A1 down. “I’ve got this.” Quickly, he slipped the tourniquetband through the buckle, pulled it tight, and wrapped it around the man’s leg. Then he carefully twisted the tourniquet rod,further tightening everything down until the blood pulsing out through gashed flesh slowed and then stopped.

“Thanks, man,” the wounded man said weakly. “Thought I was fucked.”