Gray Matter Splatter (A Deckard Novel Book 4) (28 page)

Barry and the non-commissioned officer looked at each other.

“He’s alive.”

Each of the four soldiers took the snow basket off one of their
ski poles and began probing the snow.

“I think I’ve got something,” the corporal said, prodding
his ski pole into the snow a few times to make sure it was hitting
something solid.

The four men bent down and begin digging. They piled the snow
behind them as they tunneled down.
After clearing a foot of
snow with their hands, they found a piece of fabric. The snow
underneath it was moving; someone was trying to push to the surface.

“I think we have an elbow here, boys,” Barry said.

As they continued digging him out, they noticed that he had at
least been smart enough to get his arms up and create a small air
bubble under the snow. Heaving armfuls of snow away, they freed his
arms and could see his face. His goggles hung around his neck, filled
with snow. Amazingly, his ski poles were still held around his wrists
by their lanyards.

“I don’t know who you guys are,” the survivor said in an
American accent. “And I’m not sure I care at this point.”

One of the sergeants held his C8 rifle at the ready.

“We care very much as to who you are,” Barry replied. “Say
something American right now.”

“Hey, wait a damn—”

“Say it!” The sergeant standing nearby with his rifle did not
look like he was messing around.

“Ah, dammit. I like titties, beer, and cheeseburgers, OK?”

“What do you think, Barry?” the sergeant asked.

“Hmm,” the warrant officer said, rubbing his chin. “OK, he
sounds legit.”

The survivor sighed as the sergeants and corporal continued
digging him out of his frozen grave. It was the second time he had
nearly met a ghastly fate since almost drowning in the arctic waters
of northern Russia just days before.

“You guys are Canadian, I take it?” he asked as his torso was
freed and his rescuers began pulling him up and out of the snow.

Barry nodded.

“JTF2?”

“CANSOF,” Barry said. Canadian special operations. The
Canadian government did not confirm nor deny JTF2 operations, and
their operators were notoriously low profile, their leader not even
willing to say the name of his unit during a combat operation.

“I’m warrant officer Cloutier. I take it you are part of the
American element that your government legitimized with a letter of
marque?”

“So you’ve heard of us?”

The survivor was finally free of the avalanche and walked
in small circles trying to warm his body up, even though he was
moving around like the Tin Man.

“Yeah, we got the brief before we jumped in.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. We saw the drop but didn’t know who
it was.”

“No way to let you know. Comms are being jammed.”

“Hey, we have incoming,” one of the sergeants warned.

Four skiers in PenCott SnowDrift camouflage cruised downhill,
rushing up to their position fast.

“It’s OK, those are my guys.”

The Canadians lowered their rifles.

“Who are you?” the warrant officer said in a low tone.

“Deckard.”

The Canadian hesitated.

“You’re the ground force commander for the friendly element
up here?”

“Yup, but you guys just cost my XO his new job before he
even knew he had it.”

“Well, I regret to inform you that this is sovereign Canadian
territory, Deckard, and as the senior ranking Canadian military
member here, I’m now in command. I’ve been instructed to link up
and work with you, but there can be no misunderstanding as to the
chain of command.”

“Your mission is my mission.”

The four skiers stopped in front of Deckard. He eyeballed Kurt,
Dag, Nate, and Maurizio.

“Jacob?”

Kurt shook his head.

“We saw him go under,” Dag informed him. “It
happened almost right away.”

“Fuck,” Deckard cursed, trying to shake from his mind the
mental image of one of his men freezing to death alone under tons of
snow.

“I’m sorry,” the senior JTF2 operator said. “I didn’t
know that you had lost one of your men.”

“We have lost a lot of men on this operation,” Deckard said
as he looked up at the mountain. “But so has the enemy.”

The nine men watched a pack of wolves begin to climb the
mountain, searching for corpses to feed on.

* * *

The JTF2 operators cheated forward of the main element, moving
out with the Samruk International recce and sniper personnel. The
Canadians simply outclassed the vast majority of Deckard’s men on
skis and seemed to float just above the snow.

Linking up with his two platoon sergeants, Deckard’s men
renewed their hunt. They had gotten the drop on Oculus with an
unexpectedly bold maneuver over the mountain ridge, but they were
unlikely to pull off another ambush. As he looked at the enemy’s
ski trails, Deckard thought that the odds were high that this time it
would actually be them getting caught in an ambush, as the enemy
button-hooked back on their own spore. The scouting elements were to
help prevent that from happening.

The Oculus skiers moved in twin files, making sure they
skied in each other’s tracks to disguise their numbers. Much of the
trail was also covered over by those dragging their ski sled,
carrying the device with them. However, Dag had taken a count when
they discovered an enemy rally point near the mountain, and estimated
that there were around 60 of them left, a large chunk of them killed
by Samruk gunfire and avalanches.

It was late in the afternoon now, but Deckard was feeling better
as his body warmed up with the exercise, especially after nearly
freezing to death a few times in the last 24 hours. He was also
gulping down water, knowing how easy it was to get dehydrated. In the
cold, you didn’t even realize you were perspiring. Warrant Officer
Cloutier came skiing over alongside Deckard, having come back from
one of the scouting parties.

“I know where they are going,” he announced as he pulled out
his topographical map. “It is nearly a one hundred kilometer
straight shot across the tundra. Then you come to a fjord that feeds
Rawlings Bay. It will be mostly frozen this time of year, giving them
easy egress to the coast.”

“Is there a Canadian military base there or something? How will
they get off of Ellesmere?”

“No idea. I heard there was some private sector work going on
around here, laying deep-water fiber optic cables, but without being
able to get a solid comms shot to headquarters, there is no way to
know where that company’s trawlers are right now.”

Deckard looked down.

He could feel it in his bones. Like the rest of his men, he was
running on fumes. The Arctic put tremendous stress on the human body
and now he was suffering from low caloric intake combined with
dehydration and sleep deprivation. He could tell himself that he
would give his boys another Leonidas speech and walk the lines
screaming about war like in
Braveheart
, but the reality was
that he was going to keel over before much longer.

“We’re going to have to make camp for the night soon,”
Deckard said wearily. “Can you help my guys scout out a suitable
location?”

“No problem,” the Canadian warrant officer replied, seeing
the look on the American’s face. The truth was that the JTF2
officer had been extensively trained in winter and Arctic warfare,
but had absolutely no idea how the mercenaries had managed to have
two full platoons scale the mountains of Ellesmere Island in such a
short amount of time.

Speeding up to link up with his men, Barry was already looking
for a place that they could lay up for the night, a location where
they could lay ambush on their own trail and hopefully avoid a
counter-ambush.

Chapter 27

Canadian Arctic

Four figures jogged through the snow as dusk arrived, but
these were no Canadian commandos.
The four Chinese nationals
had surfaced after being deployed by submarine, scuttled their two
launch vehicles, ditched their subsurface gear, and ran non-stop to
link up with the rest of the Oculus strike force. They had climbed
over a mountain on the opposite end of the valley from where the
Americans had crossed, but did so with minimal climbing equipment and
without stopping to sleep. In fact, they had hardly stopped moving
since surfacing in the Arctic Ocean.

Viktor Serov watched them approach while the rest of his men dug
into the embankment they had found, hollowing out hide sites for the
night. As detachment commander, he had watched his force of well over
100 men steadily whittled down by the foreign mercenaries in recent
days. Now they were down to just over 60 men. They had exacted a
price on the mercenaries as well, to be sure, but each day their
capabilities were weakened, their numbers diminished, and their
strength was sapped from them.

He was an older man now, without a doubt, but age had made
him more effective, more reliant on careful preparation—preparing
the operational environment for success and exercising tactical
patience. His career in GRU Spetsnaz had matured him over the years.
Despite being older than the men he commanded, Serov maintained his
physical conditioning and was proud of the fact that many of the
younger Iranians, Chinese, and fellow Russians could not outpace him.

Now the mage had dispatched a new team, the old man, Zhongnanhai,
having grown impatient as an expensive and intricately planned
operation continued to come apart at the seams. The former Russian
colonel took a deep breath, but otherwise showed no outward signs of
stress over what he knew to be true: The old men were losing
confidence in his leadership.

The four men were getting closer, their snowshoes kicking up white
clouds with each step as their boots pounded the snow.

Serov would not let his men see his concern as they continued to
dig in. This was far from his first operation. He had taken part in
both Chechen civil wars, seen action in Dagestan and Georgia, and
waged nasty war-by-proxy in Nagorno-Karabakh. He had led covert
operations in Iraq, Syria, and most recently, in Ukraine, making him
one of the Kremlin’s most experienced paramilitary operatives. That
had brought him to the attention of a former mentor, one of the old
men in the castle who had recruited him into Oculus.

The Chinese operatives stopped at the edge of the embankment,
just in front of Serov.

“Are you Dragon Caster?” one of them asked as he threw back
his hood. The Chinese operative was younger than the Russian would
have expected, but also bigger, more muscular and taller than any
other Chinese soldier he had ever seen. That much was clear, even
under the bulky parka he wore.

“I am,” Serov responded. The code name was to maintain
compartmentalization. None of them knew each other’s real names.

The Russian colonel never saw the pistol, just the flash from the
weapon that materialized in the Chinese operative’s hand at an
impossible speed. The suppressed shot sounded like a cough, and
Serov’s head kicked back in a spray of blood, a third eye appearing
on his forehead. The Oculus commander was dead before his body hit
the ground. It rolled to a stop at the bottom of the embankment,
leaking a swirling trail of dark red in its wake.

The body came to rest next to a refrigerator-sized box
sitting on top of a sled with a white camouflage net tossed over it.
The device was surrounded by four guards, standing by with Tavor
assault rifles at the ready. All three nationalities of operatives
set their shovels down and looked up at their new leader. The young
Chinese man stepped forward.

“My name is Iron Hammer. I’ve been sent to take control of
this element and get this mission back on track. That starts
tonight.”

His smile left the men of Oculus with an unsettled feeling; it
wasn’t that they had any particular loyalty to Serov, but they all
feared what their new commander had in store for them.

* * *

Tampa, Florida

“Anything new from the Global Hawk feed?” Craig asked.

“Nothing yet,” Gary answered.

With communications being jammed off and on, it was hit or miss.
At the moment, they had the feed live on the flatscreen but had been
unable to locate any personnel.

“From the bodies we’ve seen we can at least tell that they
are heading in a generally eastern direction,” Will offered. “We
should make contact with the captain of the Carrickfergus and
instruct him to head to the other side of Ellesmere Island. It is
going to take him a few days anyway.”

SCOPE had not had contact with Deckard or his men in over
24 hours, but knew there was a pitched and running gunfight underway
as their eye in the sky would sometimes spot a dead body, red
splotches in the snow, or ski tracks. On one grisly occasion they had
seen a pack of Arctic wolves tearing into a corpse at the foot of a
mountain, but had been unable to tell if the body was that of a
friendly or an enemy.

Meanwhile, the national security complex was slowly
getting back on its feet. ISIS was officially taking the blame, but
the media was still in a frenzy of contradictory narratives, blaming
attacks on Iran, Black Bloc anarchists, white supremacists, Islamic
terrorists, and even drug cartels. The media had been the ultimate
force multiplier for the recent terrorist attacks, taking a dire
situation and then churning it up into a full-on frenzy as citizens
expected to wake up the next morning to find mothers cannibalizing
their own children for sustenance in a post-apocalyptic world.

Will stood to go take a smoke break.

He knew what he was seeing was a concerted effort by Iranian,
Russian, and Chinese elements working together to counter American
influence. Thanks to Deckard, he could finally prove it rather than
be the laughing stock of the intelligence community. This
three-nation alliance was the inevitable consequence of America’s
creation of post-World War Two global order. The Iranians, Russians,
and Chinese were not evil people, simply self-interested actors
pushing back against a world order they had no say in crafting.