Gray Matter Splatter (A Deckard Novel Book 4) (19 page)

“They sure have,” Otter confirmed. “You can see them
kicking up a wake behind them as they try to speed up, but this
channel jackknifes left and right so often that they will get nowhere
fast.”

Sure enough, Deckard watched as the black ship alternated between
lifting out of the water for a hundred meters and then sinking back
down before repeating the process. They were bottlenecked by the ice.
Deckard laughed.

The Arctic was a bitch like that.

* * *

Nikita watched through the 10-power scope on his HK417. Behind
him, Aslan, his sniper partner and spotter, was assembling one of
their .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles. The second Samruk sniper
team was also getting into position on the other side of the ship,
climbing to the roof over their living quarters. Looking over at the
other team setting up in the open, Nikita clicked his radio to talk
to the other sniper team leader.

“Find some cover,” he said in Russian and then again in
English. The sniper team had dual nationalities. One of them was a
Kazakh and the other was an American who had served as a sniper in a
Ranger battalion. “We had some guys blinded on the last mission.”

Finding cover would help, but the reality was that they
didn’t have any real countermeasures to deal with the laser weapons
or the seizure grenade that had taken out Deckard and his entry team.

The other sniper team scooted under the lifeboat attached to the
roof and set up shop. Nikita and Aslan used the actual control tower
of the ship as cover, just barely poking out from the side to glass
their target. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing. For
concealment, they had taped a tarp around the metal railing on the
deck and cut a hole in it to shoot through.

Their firing position had been built little by little as each
sniper rotated on and off guard duty. One of the chairs that had been
torn out of the living area belowdecks was used to sit on, and the
railing in front had been lined with foam padding to rest the rifle
on. Between the two, it was hoped that much of the vibration from the
ship would be eliminated while trying to acquire and kill targets.
Life was filled with sub-optimal decisions, especially in combat. You
chose the least of two evils and rolled with what you had. They were
close to the centerline of the ship, which would help mitigate the
movement of the vessel on the water and was far away from the
vibrations caused by the engines. That was about as good as it was
going to get.

Aslan slid up next to Nikita with the Barrett. Handing him the
HK417, he hefted the weight of the anti-material rifle and began
settling into a steady firing position. Turning the adjustment ring
on the Night Force scope, he dialed it down from 10 power to 3.5
power. At high magnification, it was too easy to lose sight of his
target on the rolling ocean. The .50-caliber round of the Barrett had
some ass behind it, something they would need in high winds. The
lighter 7.62mm rounds would be easily blown off target as
high-pressure systems collapsed into low-pressure systems, causing
gusts of wind around the Carrickfergus. The .50 caliber was primarily
used for destroying equipment, but in this case, it wasn’t as if
they had to worry about blasting through bulkheads and hurting
friendlies. They were in combat.

Nikita looked over the enemy ship, prioritizing his
targets. Four crewmen were on the deck moving around. They looked to
be preparing some kind of hard points. Then a hatch opened and two
more enemies wearing black uniforms emerged carrying a long tube. It
looked like a recoilless rifle. Sweeping across the deck, he spotted
several antennae, a small radar dome, and he could see the wash
created by the rudder and prop. He needed to take them all out as
fast as possible, if possible.

“Range?” Nikita asked.

Aslan sat next to him with the HK417 at his feet and sighted in
with his laser rangefinder.

“Two thousand three hundred meters,” he answered. “Two
thousand two hundred. Closing fast.” The Carrickfergus would be on
top of the enemy soon. Meanwhile, the enemy was getting the
recoilless rifle mounted on a tripod on the deck.

Nikita changed channels on his radio and called down to Otter on
the bridge.

“Wind check.”

“OK, I have twenty knots of relative wind and fifteen knots of
true wind, moving from west to east.”

The ballistic solution for this shot was already
complicated, and the difficulties in making a wind call only made it
that much harder. As the numbers ticked down in Nikita’s head, and
as the ships grew closer to one another, he realized this would be
the most difficult shot of his sniper career.

Thankfully, the ship had an anemometer and wind vane, which
allowed him to separate relative wind from true wind. Relative wind
was the actual wind plus that created by the forward movement of the
Carrickfergus. Relative wind would affect the ballistics of his rifle
when he fired, but become less relevant as the bullet continued along
its trajectory toward his targets. Beyond that, unlike on land, there
were no trees or mountains to interfere with wind speed. Fifteen
knots put him at a 17 miles per hour crosswind from left to right.

With both vessels constantly moving and adjusting course through
the channel in the ice, there would be no perfect ballistic solution.
The ballistic computer in his brain would never have been able to
keep up with the constantly shifting variables at play. Nikita dialed
the range into the ring on the top of his scope and used a hold-off
for wind using the Mil-Dot reticle in his scope.

On top of adjusting for the wind, range, and the constant
movement of both ships, Nikita also had to compensate for the
up-and-down pitch of the waves that were lapping up against the sides
the Carrickfergus. The Kazakh sniper breathed evenly, preparing to
squeeze the trigger. If he pulled the trigger when his crosshairs
were perfectly aligned with the target, his bullet would miss because
his crosshairs would be off the target by the time the bullet left
the barrel. The Carrickfergus continued moving up and down with the
waves.

Air humidity had already been accounted for in their
previous engagements in the Arctic, so Nikita simply compensated for
one minute of angle, or one inch at a hundred meters, as he had last
time.
The same went for temperature. A 20-degree decrease in
temperature would cause a bullet to drop by one inch at 100
meters...or 10 inches at 1,000 meters. The Arctic temperature was
relatively stable, but the temperature of the water sometimes
changed, affecting that of the air.

“Wait until we are within AK range,” Deckard said to
Nikita over the radio. “I want everyone to open up on them at
once.”

Nikita looked at the three enemies setting up an SPG-9 recoilless
rifle on the deck. Wearing black uniforms, they scurried around,
preparing the crew-served weapon. He knew he had them dead to rights.
There was no reason to wait and risk lives, hoping that they would
not get a shot off at the Carrickfergus.

“Did you hear me?” Deckard asked.

Nikita did not acknowledge the order.

He breathed out, timing his breath with the harmonics of the
waves that rocked their ship up and down. Having made his corrections
for windage, distance, and atmosphere, he now had to time his shot
perfectly, anticipating where his crosshairs would land a split
second after he squeezed the Barrett’s trigger so that the bullet
hit its target. Shooting from one moving vessel to another would be
anything but easy.

Chatter kept coming over the radio, but Nikita ignored it. He
knew he had the shot and nothing was going to stop him now. The enemy
had the SPG-9 tube on a tripod they’d bolted to the deck, and were
making some final adjustments. The bow of the Carrickfergus dipped
down over a swell. Nikita let out his breath as the ship began to
rise over the next wave. His sights drifted across the hull of the
semi-submersible ship in the distance, gently gliding toward one of
the recoilless rifle crew members. The .50 caliber sniper rifle
bucked hard into Nikita’s shoulder.

It was the longest two seconds of Nikita’s entire sniper career
as he stared through the scope, waiting to see a splash.

“What the fuck—”

Deckard’s angry voice came over the radio just as the shoulder
of the crewmen Nikita had shot at exploded into a red mist. Spun
around by the massive .50 caliber bullet, he fell backwards, bounced
off the deck, and then rolled off the side and splashed into the
ocean.

“I said hold your fire. We can't mass our fires yet!”

Deckard was pissed.

Nevermind. Nikita sighted on the next target and fired. Knowing
that his rifle was sighted in correctly, he only had to time his
shots correctly. Without waiting to see if he had a hit, the sniper
transitioned from target to target, indexing them with the correct
hold-off and then squeezing the trigger.

“Another hit!” Aslan cried out as he glassed the target with
his laser rangefinder binoculars.

The second crew member was nearly cut in half as the second shot
tore through him, spilling intestines across the deck. The third
turned toward the carnage just as Nikita’s third shot drilled right
through his knee, severing his leg. The next order of business was
taking out the SPG-9 itself, then the radar and any other sensors he
could spot.

Getting his sights on target, Nikita was about the empty the rest
of his magazine on the recoilless rifle. With a grin on his face, he
was just about to pull the trigger when the curtains fell and
everything went black.

* * *

“I’m hit!” Nikita’s voice came over the radio.

“Son of a bitch,” Deckard cursed. “That fucking idiot.”

“I don't see the wound,” Nikita’s spotter said over the net
in Russian. “He is holding his eyes.”

The gears in Deckard’s brain cranked for a hot second as he
mentally transitioned from English to Russian. He had learned the
language from spending so much time around the Kazakhs, but he was
far from being completely fluent. Then it dawned on him.

“Get down,” he blurted as he reached out and pulled Otter
down behind the wheel of the ship.

Shooting a look over his shoulder at Squirrel, he repeated the
command.

“Duck!”

Squirrel dropped the triangle he was using to measure his
sea charts and disappeared behind his desk. Deckard wore an ear bud
and had a small microphone clipped to his shirt that connected to his
MBITR radio. Clicking the push-to-talk, he transmitted over the
assault net.

“Everyone get down behind cover. No eyes directly on the
target vessel. They’re deploying visual-disruption lasers. We’ve
got one friendly blinded already.”

“This is Shooter-Three,” the second sniper team
reported in. “Make that two. My spotter just got tagged and is
flailing around like Helen Keller.”

Once again, the enemy was turning the tables on the Samruk
mercenaries.

“Get below deck,” Deckard ordered the sniper teams before
turning toward the ship’s captain. In the distance, a cannon
boomed.

“Must be that smoothbore they were mounting on the deck,”
Otter said with wide eyes.

Deckard crawled past him to look out a side window where he would
not have visuals with the enemy ship. Sure enough, a spray of white
foam splashed down in the water just 30 meters off the
Carrickfergus’s starboard side. Another blast sounded, and this
time the 73mm recoilless rifle round slammed into the ice surrounding
the channel, cracking it before the round exploded, creating a geyser
of ice and water like that of a fat kid doing a cannonball off of a
diving board.

Out of the corner of his eye, Deckard saw the screen of
his laptop. He had left it open while playing Infinity Blade and he
could see that someone had opened a shard right in front of his blade
master. Crawling on all fours, he slid the laptop off the table and
set it in his lap. Pressing the forward arrow, he moved his character
into the shard.

He was immediately transported into the castle up on the
mountain. The old mage was smiling at him.

“Busy?” the mage mocked him.

“Wait one,” Deckard typed. “It’s surf and turf night down
in the galley.”

Setting down the laptop Deckard moved to the door. “Otter, back
us off. We’ve closed the distance to about a kilometer, which keeps
us out of their maximum effective range with that SPG-9, but not out
of their maximum range. They can’t place accurate fire, but they
are going to score a lucky shot—”

No sooner had the words left his mouth when Deckard winced, a
hole suddenly blown through the ramp folded vertically upward for
travel on the barge deck below. A 73mm anti-tank round carved right
through the metal and was only stopped by the front end of one of
their assault trucks. With the round slowed down, it still lifted the
two front tires off the deck before blasting open the vehicle. A
fireball burst into the air as the fuel tank went up, turning their
world yellow and red.

Otter throttled down the engine while simultaneously yanking the
hand mic off the wall and speaking over the ship’s PA system.

“Fire crew on the deck! We just took a direct hit!”

Chapter 19

A squad from Shatayeva’s platoon was out on deck with a hose
and chemical fire extinguishers, quickly getting the blaze under
control. Deckard was impressed. He hadn’t been paying much
attention to the fire drills that Otter had insisted they perform
during down time, but now it was paying off.

While a cloud of fire extinguishing dust was being carried away
by the sea breeze, another SPG-9 round fell short, splashing into the
arctic water just in front of their ship. Another landed right off
their port side. Otter had slowed them down, keeping them at a
distance of about two kilometers from the semi-submersible ship,
which of course was exactly what the enemy wanted.