Triplecross

Janwari’s eyes widened in horror. He looked to Gola. Gola took his hand away from his stomach.

Gola’s palm was covered in blood.

As the other two men watched, crimson spread across the white winter camouflage of Gola’s uniform. He pitched forward into the can of Sterno, spilling the rest of his soup. The entry wound in his back was small, almost unnoticeable.

“Get down!” Janwari screamed.

Hooth was too late. As Janwari flattened himself to the floor of the tent, automatic gunfire pierced the tent from two directions, shredding the fabric, spraying Hooth’s blood across Gola’s corpse. The thick, warm liquid specked Janwari’s face and back and as he waited for the fusillade to subside.

Snow blew through the tattered shelter freely now. Janwari crawled to Hooth’s body and put two fingers against the man’s neck. There was no sign of life. Gola, too, was dead. Janwari crawled to his pack, ripped it open and removed the heavy radio.

There was a bullet hole in its face.

Janwari cursed his poor fortune. Scrambling to drag on his goggles, he threw his face wrap haphazardly around him and took up his Type 56 assault rifle. Then he was plunging outside into the heavy snow, into the driving wind, as another barrage of automatic gunfire raked the shelter behind him. Gola and Hooth were each ripped from boots to skull by the merciless bullets. If they had not been dead already, they surely could not have survived that.

It took Janwari precious seconds to realize he had lost his bearings in the snowstorm. What could he do? He had no means to call for help, no idea who was attacking and no idea from which direction the invaders had come. He saw only the shelter beginning already to blow away in pieces, and the bloody corpses of the two men whom he had counted as friends.

“Damn you!” Janwari screamed into the wind. “Damn you all!”

Only when he brought up his Type 56, felt the cold bite of the metal and wood of the rifle on his skin, did he realize he had forgotten his gloves. Screaming, he brought the rifle to his shoulder anyway, bracing himself on one knee as he sought targets in the snow-swept darkness.

Suddenly the night was bright with harsh, green-white luminescence. The flares that drifted down from the sky now were not those of Janwari’s unit. These were more powerful, clustered for effect. They were meant to reveal, not to signal. They were meant to cast powerful light on what was now a killing field.

Janwari braced himself. He had not noticed the first salvo of flares, not within the circle of light in his shelter, but that had to be why the enemy gunfire had died down. They had fired flares, done their horrible work while the flares came down, then waited to fire another salvo. That meant the killing would resume any moment—

There! The yellow-orange blossoms of muzzle-flashes were unmistakable in the partial darkness. In the wind and the snow he could not hear the blasts. The icy gales of the glacier swallowed the sounds of war, smothering any hope he had of warning the others. He could see the other shelters dotting the camp area. Several of these had been shot apart. The snow around them was dark red with blood. Janwari’s heart leaped into his throat at the sight of it.

Feeling the ache of the cold radiate from the grip of his rifle through his palm and into his wrist, he triggered the Type 56, squeezing one shot at a time from the weapon. He could not see what he was aiming at; he could see only the muzzle-flashes of the enemy guns. He hoped his rounds would have some effect.

To his relief he saw several more blooms of fire from among the bloodied shelters. More of his unit were responding, were returning fire, were fighting for their lives. He took a step forward in snow that was now up to his calves. His legs were so warm he could barely feel them. He did not care.

A hot shell from his Type 56 struck him in the face and snaked down inside his parka. He felt the sting on his neck. In his mind he was counting; soon he would be out of ammunition. When his rifle ran empty he would have only the well-worn Tokarev pistol in the flap holster on his belt. The weapon was buried deep under his parka in attempt to keep it from freezing up completely.

Think, he told himself. What will you do when you run out of ammo? What is your plan?

Janwari forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, plowing his way through the snow like an icebreaker in frozen seas. Slowly, dimly, he became aware of disturbances in the snow around him. Pocks in the snow cover were left as fist-size mounds were churned up all around him.

He was taking fire.

He threw himself into the snow, desperate for something to use as cover, anything behind which to hide. The white expanse felt like razor blades where it touched the exposed skin of his face. He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger back, spraying out the last of his magazine, knowing the gesture was futile.

Through the wind he heard the engine of the Type 88. The tank was moving, however slowly, through the storm. He changed course for it, letting his rifle fall. It was too heavy and he had no ammunition. His Tokarev would have to do.

Numbed fingers found the butt of the pistol. The metal of the weapon, even taken from under his parka, should have made him scream from the cold. He didn’t feel it. His left hand felt like deadweight as he struggled to drag back the slide of the pistol.

He stumbled and fell. When he finally managed to struggle to his feet, he was completely disoriented. Where was the tank? He did not know why he hadn’t thought of it before. The tank had a radio unit he could use. He just needed to get to it. It was possible the tank commander had already used it, but he couldn’t be sure.

The light from the flares above began to die. The flares were descending into the snow, where they were extinguished. In the darkness, he could see more weapons discharges. But now he could not remember in which direction the enemy lay. He pointed his pistol into the screaming winds but didn’t fire it. In the darkness everything was shadows.

One of the shadows moved.

He heard the rumble of the tank’s bogeys, heard the rattle of its poorly maintained engine. Crawling now, he forced himself to stand, plunging forward, staggering, falling.

He collided with the tank.

The armor was slick with ice. He smelled smoke and something worse, something oily and vile. As he tore flesh from his frozen hands scrambling up the side of the war machine, he realized that black smoke was pouring from a crater in its flank. It had been hit with an antiarmor weapon of some kind. He thought the Type 88 was supposed to have reactive explosive plates...but he wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter. He found the hatch and threw it open.

The tank commander was dead. Janwari didn’t climb inside as much as fall to the floor of the chamber within. The commander was the only body there; the rest of his crew had not made it inside. There was a great deal of blood pooled around the dead man. He had been shot, probably more than once, before reaching the relative safety of the machine.

The enemy could fire another antitank missile at any moment. The tank was an obvious target. Janwari thought about taking control of the turret, trying to swing it around to bring the Type 88’s main gun into play. He knew the basic procedure. Every man in the unit did.

Fighting was not as important as alerting the rest of the military to what was taking place here. He reached for the radio, which was intact and, as far as he could tell, powered and ready.

His hand struck the console.

Janwari looked down at his arms. Only then did he realize that he couldn’t feel his hands, couldn’t feel his fingers. He tried to grip the console and could not. He kept striking it instead, his hand a block of frozen, swollen meat that would not obey his mind’s commands. No! He had waited too long in the cold without gloves. He could not manage the dexterity required to switch on the radio.

The hatch above him opened again.

Janwari looked up. The circle of sky above was once more illuminated in the harsh green glow of the enemy’s flares. He could see faces above him, could see the uniforms his enemy wore. They looked down at him, dispassionate, almost bored.

They wore the uniform of the Indian army.

Janwari wanted to raise his Tokarev and fire at them, but his pistol was gone. His hand was a frozen, useless claw. He screamed at the soldiers staring at him.

One of the Indian men dropped a grenade inside the tank and threw the hatch closed.

The grenade rolled across the deck near Janwari’s feet. He tried to grab it, tried to scoop it up, thought of carrying it back to the hatch, forcing the hatch open and throwing the deadly bomb back toward the Indians.

But of course he could not. His hands wouldn’t work. He had just long enough to wonder how long the fuse on the grenade might last.

He had time to think the words, I don’t want to die. Not like this.

And then he was finally warm, for just a moment, before he was nothing ever again.

CHAPTER ONE

Indian-held Kashmir

“Does this place have a name?” Calvin James asked.

David McCarter, the lean, fox-faced Briton and former SAS operator who was leader of Phoenix Force, gulped the last of a can of Coca-Cola, crushed it and tossed the can behind the passenger seat of the MRAP. From the driver’s seat, James shot him a disapproving look, which McCarter met with a measured stare. Finally the lanky black man from Chicago’s South Side allowed a wide grin to split his features.

“According to the chart,” Rafael Encizo said from the rear of the MRAP, “it doesn’t. This village isn’t even supposed to be here.” He checked his satellite phone again, which was patched to a feed from thermal imaging satellites overhead. The delay was considerable, but what the stocky Cuban-born guerrilla fighter was observing was essentially a real-time top-down image of the target coordinates. “I’m showing a huge drop-off near one corner of the village, though. Probably part of the natural mountain formation.”

“Got it,” James said. “I’ll try not to drive us over any edges.”

Phoenix Force, the covert international counterterrorist team headquartered at the top-secret Stony Man Farm, had split its five members between the Farm’s two prototype MRAP vehicles.