Later that Day
23 Nov 2012 (Friday)
1715 hours local time
Near the Alma Mountain Lodge
Summit County, Colorado
Shepard’s team had chosen a spot just south of Breckenridge because they’d done a lot of training there during routine maneuvers. They knew the terrain and the local law enforcement dynamics, and the site was remote enough to be able to do what they needed to do without a lot of eyes observing, but close enough to facilitate an easy extraction point outside of Fairplay to the south.
Shepard watched as Collins checked into the Alma Mountain Lodge, a run-down fiftyish-room motel on the north edge of town just off the highway. He suspected it was a favorite of people who wanted to ski on the cheap, and when Collins relayed via radio that he had secured a $67 room for the night, they all gave Alexander a few more minutes to figure out what he was going to do.
Shepard looked at his watch, then over at Cooper, who shook his head. He touched his throat mike. “All units, sitrep.”
There was a slight pause. “East side is clear. I have no visuals, no tails.”
“West side is bingo, nothing here either. Visibility is worsening.”
Shepard thought for a long moment, then closed his eyes. “Eagle, this is Gold Leader. We are negative on tangos—please advise.”
This was your damn idea, Alonso… I hope you have some ideas on what to do next…
In the panel van, Alonso watched the cameras pointed at the Alexander boy’s Subaru, and they could see him inside the car, trying to figure out what to do. “Tangent, this is Eagle. Your package is waiting for you outside. Do you want it delivered or do you want to pick it up?”
Collins was clearly offended by the suggestion. “Negative, Eagle, stand down!” he hissed.
Shepard listened and looked over at Cooper, who was munching on a protein bar. “Open for ideas, Sarge. We don’t have any follow teams yet, so it’s not like”—
— “Gold Leader,” the radio squawked, “this is Green One! Our subject is oscar mike.”
Shepard pulled the tablet out of his jacket and opened the app, streaming the video feed. He frowned, watching as Alexander got out of his car, grabbed his navy blue backpack, and then began walking into the lodge.
“Subject appears to be talking to the innkeeper…” The channel was still open as Green One commented, “Nice hair, lady, geeeez.”
“Any idea what they’re saying?” Shepard asked tersely.
“Negative, Gold—his back is to us. He’s now coming back outside—making a call on his phone.”
…and none of us cloned his phone… too many distractions…
“Hang on, we got this.” Shepard listened to the audio from the parabolic microphone as it was patched into the channel. It was Greg Alexander.
“Room 14, please.” There was a pause and then he spoke, clearly confused and frightened as he looked down the side of the lodge in both directions.
Shepard watched as the kid screwed his eyes shut and took the jump. “I’m looking for Ray.”
…interesting move there, kid… I did not see that one coming …
Lyman Collins held the hotel room phone up to his ear in Room 14 in complete disbelief, doing his best to recover quickly. “Ray isn’t here yet. Is this Paul?”
There was silence as the graduate student from Edmonton, clearly conflicted and without a plan, thought of his next move. “I want to talk to Ray or Paul—it’s about the girl. I’ll be there in thirty minutes and you better have some answers.”
“Who is this?” Collins demanded, hoping to engage the kid longer. He swore quietly as the line was already dead.
Shepard had to hand it to the kid. He hadn’t done a single thing yet to initiate, but he could appreciate that he was now tired of being messed with and was going to start acting himself. “Charlie Leader… subject is moving up the hill to our 4 o’clock, now four zero yards from our position. Please advise.”
We did this your way, now we’re doing it mine before someone gets killed…
“Eagle, this is Gold Leader.”
“Go ahead Gold,” Alonso’s voice crackled over the radio.
“Strongly suggesting we revert to protocols,” Shepard said quietly.
There was a long pause on the comm channel and then he heard Alonso’s voice. “Roger that, Gold Leader, you are cleared to revert to protocols.”
Shepard could visualize Collins throwing something across his room as he heard what was going on outside. He wasn’t far off, but he didn’t much care.
“Green Leader,” he said quietly into his throat mike. “I want a unit on either flank, and I want eyes on the subject at all times—with video. Move!”
So now it’s dusk and we’ve decided to take this outside…
…we have a playbook for this…
“All units, this is Gold Leader. We are winding up tactical Montrose 1-4, repeat, prepare to execute Montrose 1-4.”
It was a standard tactical formation they used for tracking and observing semi-static targets in high terrain, and a drill they had run dozens of times in similar terrain nearby. He looked over at Cooper and muttered, “our house, our rules.”
“Damn straight,” Cooper muttered quietly, climbing out to get his loadout kit.
“Gold, this is Green Two. Linking video now, you should have eyes.”
Shepard stared at the feed in disbelief as he saw Greg Alexander find a spot more than two hundred yards up the hill on a small ledge inside the tree line, digging out a flat spot and setting up an observation hide.
The kid’s clearly done some hunting…
…he knows exactly what he’s doing…
…he’s even figured out the right sightlines to watch and learn…
“Gold, you have Green Two and Green Three engaging flanks.”
“Roger that, all units take positions,” Shepard said tersely, pulling his gearbag out of the trunk and moving with Cooper toward the north side of the motel.
It looks like we’re doing this in the woods tonight…
Four Hours Later
2145 hours local time
Alma Mountain Lodge
Summit County, Colorado
When Shepard’s team had first arrived and set up onsite, there was less than a foot of snow on the ground, mostly drifted up near the glades, protected from the late autumn sunshine. Over nearly four hours of waiting, the conditions had deteriorated rapidly, burying all of them in their hides as a violent snowstorm swept through the valley, dumping more than a foot and a half of new snow on them. While the winds had finally died away, the much colder arctic air had settled in to stay, making it all that much more uncomfortable.
Inside their hides, the team had erected low profile snow covers and tarps, each searching the surrounding area with thermal scopes, and reporting in periodically. “Green to Gold Leader,” the radio chirped.
Shepard pressed his throat mike transducers. “Go ahead, Green.”
“I’ve been taking thermals on the subject, and he’s slowly turning blue. I’m not getting much lighter color outside of his core, but I’d say just from his core readings that he’s in the danger zone already.”
“Roger that, Green.” Shepard looked across the hillside again, shaking his head quietly as he swept the valley nearby for any movement. He turned as he heard the whistling of a white parka sleeve, and saw Westbrook drop into the snow next to his hide.
“Sir,” he nodded. Shepard gave him the raised eyebrow indication of a greeting in the dark, then handed him the scope he’d been using to watch Alexander.
“You know,” Westbrook muttered, “we keep calling him a ‘kid.’ Psych started calling him the Colorado Kid—you know, Steven King,” he stopped. “According to Collins, that kid is like 24, which makes him a couple years younger than our Bartlett,” he said, smiling as he handed the scope back.
Shepard didn’t say anything in response: he had that mid-distance squint that told Westbrook he was lost in thought, working his jaw like he was chewing something. “You’re still sorting it out, aren’t you?” Shepard nodded silently. “You’re wondering if we’re wasting our time here.”
I don’t have the heart to tell you this…
… but all of this started with an English guy in the john…
He looked over at Westbrook quietly. “These guys that are supposed to be abducting this kid, Alexander. They could have killed him twenty times just since we’ve been watching him, so where the hell are they? We move him like 150 miles away, and still no sign of them…” he looked over at Westbrook with a blank face. “What if he’s just a grad student from Edmonton who’s had a really crappy week?”
Chief Westbrook knew the drill. “You’ve got a kid that’s pretty rattled. The roomie took a bullet a few days ago, and now the girl is missing. FBI says two hits on Russian nationals in the area in the last month or so. You’re the pattern guy—you’re telling me this is just a coincidence?” He took out a piece of beef jerky and tore off a piece, offering it to Shepard.
“We still don’t know jack about what happened in Edinburgh,” Shepard said, chewing the jerky. “We don’t know jack about this kid either, except we dragged him out here to freeze his balls…” his voice trailed off as he said this, his eyes darting back and forth as his brain started firing a different direction.
Westbrook stared at him for along moment. “Aw hell, man. I hate when you do that…”
Shepard shook his head, pulling the hood of his camouflaged ghillie suit. “Chief, you have one job, you know that. I know you’re from New York, but you got one job—to keep your CO from stepping in dog crap.”
Westbrook smiled slightly. “Doing the best I can considering the material, sir.”
Shepard acknowledged this, then held up his hands for a second, the ‘work with me on this’ gesture. “What if we’re looking at this wrong?”
“Wrong how?”
“We’ve been waiting for them… we’re trying to figure out why they aren’t moving in. True?” Westbrook nodded. “Alexander comes here because of Collins, he decides to wait for whoever Collins is waiting for. We know Collins’ guys will never show, they don’t exist—but he doesn’t, so he’s waiting.”
“Yup,” Westbrook nodded.
“We all come up here and we’re watching the kid, the front door and the parking lot. Then the storm moves in. It’s lousy for tracking, really good for covering tracks. We spent a lot of time making sure we didn’t lose the kid during the storm.”
“Still batting 1.000,” Westbrook confirmed.
“What if they’re already here?” Shepard said, looking away at the front of the motel, the lights from the parking lot now shining brightly in the cold crisp night air.
“Like here — here?” Westbrook frowned.
“Somewhere around the area, yeah,” Shepard stared at him trying to see if it registered.
“How? You think they knew we were coming? How’d they get here before us? Or were they here all the time and we walked into it? I’m not following, sir.” Shepard shook his head. “How would that be possible? We know they didn’t follow us, we had overlapping surveillance teams.”
Shepard handed him the tablet and turned it on. “They don’t have to follow us, Chief, they can follow him… Ramsey’s rules,” Shepard was still looking through the thermal scope but he was mentally kicking himself, shaking his head. “My first assignment was at Ft. Riley with the Big Red One—1st ID. I told you about my CO—Captain Ramsey—Mr. Tactical Planner, he was a dude that studied history and tactical warfare like a clinical psychologist.”
“My first week there he hands me this book—says it’s required reading. I take the book and I read it… it’s about partisan warfare, the Southern colonies during the Revolutionary War, a bunch of back country guys who lived in the swamps taking on the greatest military superpower of their time—real asymmetric guys.”
“Right up my alley,” Westbrook admitted, smiling.
Shepard snickered. “Francis Marion—‘the most dangerous assumption a man can make is to underestimate his opponent.’ That’s how people get killed. So, I started thinking a few minutes ago—I’m a little slower than the average bear sometimes, but I can get there with some focus, I ask myself ‘what Ramsey would do’—'what would Marion do’ right now?”
Westbrook smiled and decided not to say anything.
“Let’s assume the roommate Petrovich was a protector, so they took him out—but now there’s too much heat around the kid. They’re doing what we did in Moscow.”
Westbrook stared at him as he began to realize what he was saying, then looked down at the tablet with the icons marking the locations of the team. “They’re marking him so they can watch him, and they’ll move in whenever they want without blowing a really expensive cover operation,” Westbrook added.
Shepard nodded silently. “Then we show up out of nowhere. Lots of close-cropped hair, straight backs, broad shoulders. Too much testosterone for a hippie commune like Boulder. They smell Speed Stick or soap at least. Then what?”
“They sit back and wait,” Westbrook muttered, wagging his head back and forth as he thought through the options.
Shepard nodded. “We know they made Collins—if Greg saw him, so did they—he wasn’t exactly being discrete, we didn’t have time. We made a couple of their guys, they probably made a few of us,” he stated matter-of-factly.
“You think they tagged him.”
Shepard shrugged. “We would have—I mean, we tagged his car. What if they got here during the storm and set up: there’s a dozen ways they could do that and we would never know unless we bumped into them at the ice machine in the lobby.”
Westbrook whistled quietly as the thought of it. “Line of sight, that would explain why we have no infrared signals. You think they’re over the side of the ridge, just waiting…”
They both turned abruptly as Crabtree rustled over to the hide. “Conference on the mound? What’s the plan?” he asked, catching his breath.
“We’re not sure, but we think they probably tagged the kid and they’re waiting us out,” Westbrook blurted.
Crabtree looked at them both for a second and then nodded, conceding the possibility. “Probably watching our thermals right now, wondering how many more of us there are, or they know they’re outnumbered. They can see our tactical formations and fire teams, it would be hard to miss.”
Cooper smiled and nodded again, understanding what he was implying. “Assume you’re right—you see us up here, when do you make your move?”
“Not until I have to,” Westbrook said.
Cooper agreed. “So, no direct engagements, but you’re setting up a few surprises, maybe even some bear traps for your guests. If that’s us, we’re doing a wide flank around our current position and setting up to come at Alexander from up top.”
Westbrook stopped to think about it and made up his mind. “We gotta go get the kid either way. He’s no use to anyone if he’s a popsicle.”
Shepard nodded, looking at Westbrook, and then over at Cooper. “We take the initiative, we make them play this our way wherever they are. Either way, we gotta go get him unless I’m missing something?”
They both shook their heads and Shepard nodded.
“Alright.” He pressed his throat mike. “All units, this is Papa Bear. We are repositioning on my mark to the following locations. Green Team, you will go 8-0 yards from target at his nine o’clock. Red Team, 8-0 yards at his six o’clock, and Blue Team, you will go same gap at his three o’clock. Each team keeps one unit long to secure their flanks. Gold will approach from the target’s six. Questions?”
He heard none.
“Let’s move.” Shepard looked at his topo map and grabbed Westbrook’s arm. “Blue Team needs to be right here, and ready to move in on my mark.”
“On it,” Westbrook said, hustling back to his hide some forty yards away.
Shepard spoke quietly into his mike. “Gold Team, form up on me.” As he looked into the night, he saw Rydell and Crabtree crouch-sprint through the drifted snow to where he was tearing down his hide, then waited until they were within earshot before he whispered. “We’re relocating to that ridgeline right there, and we’re covering Blue Team as they reset.”
Rydell nodded, Crabtree smiled and nodded, and Shepard slapped them both on the shoulder as he moved past them, leading the fire team up the slope in the snow, checking the safety on his rifle and pulling on his FLIR goggles as they moved out.
Shepard pressed his throat mike again. “All units, expect company. Look sharp.”
They had all relocated and Shepard pulled the canvas flap back over his head and extracted the ruggedized tablet from his tactical vest pouch. He powered it on, looking at the terrain map and the RFID indicators for his men.
“Gold, this is Green Long. I have visual on three unidentified, repeat, three tangos, range is 2-1-5 to target and closing. FLIR indicates they are armed and moving, approaching position Blue from their twelve.”
Westbrook swung his scope around to his rear, realizing what the perimeter post was saying, and that his own perimeter post wouldn’t be able to see them if they were over the ridgeline. He made a mental note: they’d already found a blind spot and had attempted to exploit it.
“Roger that, Green Long.”
He heard Crabtree huffing as he scrambled up to the top of the ridgeline. “Blue Leader, this is Blue Long, I have visual, they’re spreading out, reading is now 1-9-0 yards from our position.”
Flanked from the north side closest to the ridge…
“Roger that—all units stand by.” Shepard needed to think for a moment, watching the markers on his tablet as Rydell and Bartlett came over to join him, Bartlett sweeping the area with his thermal scope and M4 as they spoke.
“Any ideas?” Shepard asked.
Rydell spoke first. “Infantry School, week one. We’re moving in on the objective and so are they. I don’t send one team, I send at least two, maybe more, depending on how many I have. If they can see we have four teams moving in, they have more than one. We got more company on the way.”
“I agree, we have at least one more team coming,” Bartlett said matter-of-factly.
Shepard heard the radio again. “Gold, your tangos are now 1-6-0 from target’s position and approximately 9-0 from position Blue. My guess is they’re trying to thread the needle.” It was Westbrook this time, and everyone knew that he was making this call looking through the crosshairs in his scope.
“Roger that, Blue,” Shepard said stoically. “Give them something to think about—we need answers so be gentle if you can.”
“Copy that, Gold.” There was a brief spitting sound as a suppressor muffled a rifle shot. “Tango 2 is down, Tangos 1 and 3 are dragging him into the tree line. They have stopped their advance and are assuming defensive posture,” Westbrook said into the mike, and then began giving positional instructions to Aguirre and Resnik to spread out.
Shepard touched his throat mike. “Roger that. Green Leader, I want audio on those tangos ASAP yesterday.”
“Green Three, I’m on it,” Novotny said.
Shepard thought for a moment. “All units sweep your six, we’ll have company coming shortly and they can see us now. Red Long, I need you on overwatch. What’s your -20?”
“Quarter klick from Position Delta.” It was SSG Gautier, one of the new guys.
“Roger that, find a perch and settle in. These guys are trying to thread our gaps and I want some eyes on the field.”
“Copy that,” Gautier said crisply, already running in the snow to the ridgeline.
Shepard was trying to sort out the next five steps when the radio squawked again. “Gold, this is Green Three, patching parabolic through now.”
They all heard a series of squawks and hums as the parabolic mike acquired the right vector to amplify the sound coming from the men on the ground. Several minutes before, Shepard wondered if these guys had seen them on the mountain trying to sort out who they were and why they were there; their presence was no longer theoretical.
As of now, everyone on the field knew the score, and they all knew where the other party was located. It was no longer a game of cat and mouse, hunter and hunted; the first shot had been fired, and it was probably not the last to be fired before the night was over.
Based on the suppressed 77-grain copper-alloy jacketed 5.56mm NATO-round-sized mess in their comrade’s leg that Westbrook had just delivered, and the crimson patch of blood that would be growing around where he’d fallen in the snow, they weren’t guessing anymore about who the other team was either. He’d prepared himself for it, but the sounds coming through the audio feed still made his blood run cold.
There was no mistaking they were cursing at each other in Russian. The taller one said, “Set him down right there—give me your medical kid. A tourniquet, yes. Come on!” Then, “What are you doing!”
The shorter one replied, “Looking for the shooter—it came from over there.”
Shepard watched through his FLIR scope as the two men duked it out, and then saw in real-time as the taller one raised a handheld radio to his mouth to communicate with someone named Josef, presumably inside the lodge. His head was turned away from them so they couldn’t pick it all up, but it sounded like he was asking for instructions.
They’re not regulars—no one’s army uses names during a field operation. These guys are contractors… and not very disciplined…that could be very useful.
Greg Alexander blew into his gloves again, the fourth time in the past few minutes, his mind riddled with darkening thoughts. He’d followed the man with the cane from campus, looking for some answers after a bizarre and unsettling week. That guy was in the lodge right now waiting for his friends, one of whom probably had some answers about where Rhonda Fleming was.
Who are you, and why were you following me?
He’d spent his early years on a farm outside of Edmonton, Alberta, and he knew what cold was: this was different. No matter how many memories of hot porridge, beef stew, shepherd’s pie, warm bread, crackling fires or tropical beaches he mustered from his archives, it wasn’t helping. His legs had started twitching an hour ago, and now the uncontrollable shivering subverted his best cold weather coping skills.
He knew what was happening, but he had no idea what else to do. For a brief second, he saw the face of Donnie Wiseman back in Grade 10 after they pulled him from the ice, and remembered how it had been playing hockey after that. It was the look on Donnie’s face…
Focus, Greg…
He blinked hard, smacking his cheek with a glove, then shook his head and adjusted the binoculars. Still no movement—nothing. He looked at his watch again: nearly 10:15pm. The police detectives had been very specific; he was a suspect, and if he hadn’t been on a foreign student visa, they probably would have already locked him up.
Even though he had an alibi and a thousand reasons not to kill Sergei, they still liked him for it. He didn’t realize it, but he was still processing the fact that Sergei was gone for good…
You said ‘don’t leave town,’ but you dragged me to Denver…
and I live in Boulder…
what the hell, bro, I’m already out of town…
The whole thing was a bloody mess. He raised the binoculars to his eyes again—unsure why—just sort of willing something to happen behind the cold metal and glass lenses. No one in or out, and whoever Ray and Paul were, he’d probably scared them off.
You’re stalling, Greg…
He realized he was giving himself a pep talk. He scanned the terrain again, sweeping from left at about nine o’clock to his right at about three o’clock. To the left led uphill to an escarpment and a thicket of pine trees: to the right the ground fell away into a boulder field, an outcropping, then a steep plunge down the side of a hill.
Risk of exposure, uphill climb away from his car to the left…
…better cover, closer to getting back to his car to the right.
He reached for the gearbag, and for a brief second panicked when it wasn’t where he’d put it. He began groping the area, muttering to himself, then walked around the entire area where he had been hiding, kicking the snow with his foot, trying to find it.
What the…
He cursed again, this time not silently, finally remembering that he had sculpted a spot in the snow so the bag wouldn’t be seen from the road. He’d picked that specific spot because he’d be close enough to the front of the lodge to get a picture of whoever he was meeting, and now he was beginning to think the whole thing was a really bad idea.
Shepard’s earpiece hissed at him. “Gold—Blue Leader. Are you seeing this?”
Shepard watched as the kid was now fully exposed, walking around, and appeared to be looking for something. “Roger that, Blue. All units hold position.”
Greg Alexander had taken the pictures of the guy with his iPhone, and as he pulled it out again he began to look at the guy’s face, the glasses, the goatee, the cane, and the tweed jacket. Two days on campus asking everyone Greg knew—same jacket…that’s funny—the eyes were cold and distant… disconnected.
Who are you, man?
In a more lucid moment, Greg the Graduate Student would have admitted his plan was ill-conceived and poorly thought-through, not at all a rational response to the stimuli provided. The Dean tells him about Sergei’s death…that’s when this guy with the cane shows up asking lots of questions. Following him here was, admittedly, an act of desperation, and now he was violating every rule they’d told him about leaving town, and making the situation infinitely worse as a fugitive.
Not your brightest idea, Greg…
By now, every cop in the state of Colorado would be looking for him, and no matter that he’d shaved his beard and bleached his hair, it would be a very short time before he would find himself back in the custody of the Denver Police Department, this time in handcuffs or inside a holding cell.
He dropped to the snowbank and began digging the gearbag out again. A strap first, then the shoulder straps, now then the rest of the pack, right where he’d left it—buried under the new powder. He realized he couldn’t feel his hands anymore.
A strange sound whistled over the head of Waylon Cooper, who pressed the transmit button. “Gold—Green! We have inbound—from our three o’clock.”
“Inbound what, Green?” Shepard frowned as he asked.
“Unknown! Sounded like a 2-2-4 round but the trajectory’s too low. It can’t be more than a few feet from the kid.”
‘The kid’? SFC Waylon Cooper had abandoned radio protocol—he was rattled, or something was very wrong.
Had Greg Alexander not been wrestling with the gearbag to dig it out of the snow, he probably would have missed the sound of the shiny metallic cylinder as it landed less than three feet to his left with a soft swoosh and a muffled clunking sound as it struck something solid. There was no other sound than the whisper of the blowing wind through the pines above: he stared, blinked, and shook his head to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. He squinted again.
Still there…
His brain half-frozen, he stared at the object, wondering if it was piece of a tree branch, or part of an airplane or a chair lift, or any other event that might explain the existence of an object that had landed so close to him. He squinted hard to clear his brain in the cold, then looked closer.
It looked nothing like a tree branch, and he made frozen-brain connections that tree branches and chair lifts don’t have tiny green LED lights on them. He squinted again, then pulled out his flashlight and turned it on.
Still there—shiny, about the size of a thermos bottle, only longer…
In the course of the next few microseconds, his emotions went from relief at not being hit by some falling object to curiosity as to what it was, and lots of questions about how it had gotten there—to disbelief that he might be imagining the entire episode. His body was indeed shutting down, and it took a good second for the nagging feeling to register comprehension: something was very wrong. The cylinder had landed only after he started wrestling to get his pack, and it had come out of nowhere.
Maybe he was just being paranoid… He knew somewhere in his semiconscious mind his body that he should be preparing to run, but he was stuck between his brain and his body.
What is… how…
And then a sense of frustration and despair struck him. After all the waiting and hiding—had they found him before he found them? And as he pondered all of it in muddled curiosity, the little green light on the side of the canister began blinking rapidly, and then turned solid red, removing all doubt.
With one gloved hand he grabbed the frosted strap of his gearbag and tried to get to his feet to run down the slope on his right. His frozen feet were unprepared to move, pushing him face first into the cold white powder on top of his bag, sliding and rolling down the hill just as the device detonated.
The cold made the moment that much more bizarre: he felt the heat and the shockwave from the explosion even before he heard it, and for the briefest of moments, he had the strangest sensation that the world had slowed even as he felt himself being lifted from the snow and propelled into the air. His brain captured a snapshot of his body hurling through space, his eyes capturing the moment as air around him ignited.
Locked in a moment, he remarked at the strange sensation of burning and freezing, of dark night and bright amber, and of the bizarre and beautiful sight of flaming shards of splinters and bark showering around him like ashes from some titanic bonfire. Small mountains of snow, fire, heat, cold, darkness, and bright hot light mesmerized and confused him, and as he surrendered himself to his inevitable death, he saw little avalanches of snow falling from the tree branches against the night sky as the shock wave spread.
His reverie was broken violently as his flying body collided with a massive boulder outcropping. Like a partially frozen human missile, his feet hit the rock first, collapsing his feet and ankles, and then his knees and hips, and then his torso, shoulders, and neck, throwing him like a whipsaw into the wall and knocking every remaining ounce of oxygen from his lungs.
Just as violently as it had started, he fell like a heap onto the ground, the sky dark now, the snow extinguishing all the burning ashes, and the icy cold air returning to a bizarre and eerie calm. For a tiny moment, everything was deathly quiet.
In the painful silence, Greg Alexander lay stunned and experiencing a whole new era of pain, unable to feel his feet or his hands now. He looked up at the sky, unable to even whimper as he wheezed, sucking air into his lungs, hot tears of agony pouring from his eyes, every nerve ending that was alive and well now screaming at him.
He was badly hurt and he knew it: he was already losing focus as his body went into shock. He winced hard and bit his tongue, screaming quietly, praying to any god who would listen for someone to find his frozen body. His last memory was of a sense of something massive moving above him, and he let go, surrendering to the tragic end of his short life, smiling and giving in to the cold wet sensation of death.
A split second later his smile was replaced by absolute darkness as he realized the mass was an avalanche of loose new snow, crashing down on him from the trees up above. He was buried alive.
“Blue Team—move out!” was all Westbrook could bark at the top of his lungs as the ball of fire lit up the sky. They were several hundred feet from Greg Alexander and they needed to close the gap fast. He looked back out of the corner of his eye and saw Aguirre and Resnik following him as they raced, barely two paces apart.
And then he saw the silhouettes—three of them—approaching from the west nearly fifty feet away. “Gold—Blue Leader. We have contact--tangos at your 9 o’clock!”
“All units, engage!” Shepard said. “Green Leader, get us an ambulance and I don’t care how you get it. Gold Team—we’re getting him out of there. Move out!”
Moments later, all that was visible was the shadow of three men in white ghillie suits hopping through the blanket of snow at a near sprint as burning debris and pine needles fell through the cold night all around them. They were a hundred feet away now and closing fast; Shepard just prayed that it was fast enough.