Kneeling, he took aim and tossed the hood toward the buckle. It landed right on top of it. Slowly, he retracted the oxygen tube and pulled it in.
With the buckle in hand, he began gathering up the strap, which turned out to be much longer than he needed.
He had reeled most of it in when he noticed something else. The opposite end was stuck.
“Damn it,” he repeated.
When the strap went taut, he began yanking on it, twisting and pulling from every possible angle. When that didn’t work, he started flipping it like a whip.
“Let loose, motherfucker,” he cursed as he cracked the strap, sending a ripple down its length, and then yanked it backward with all of his might.
It turned out to be the right combination, as the buckle on the opposite end was freed from its entrapment and came screaming backward like a bullet. If Harvath hadn’t ducked, it would have hit him right in the face.
Realigning himself, he pitched the strap into the aisle and pulled back the keys the loadmaster had thrown.
Finding the one he needed, he unlocked his wrists and then bent down and unlocked his feet. He was almost free.
Removing the remaining chains, he made his way over to where the loadmaster was pinned. But before he could even think about helping him, he needed to make sure the soldier lying next to him was dead.
Harvath placed two fingers where the man’s jaw met his neck. There was no pulse.
In his holster, the soldier carried a nine-millimeter Grach pistol. It now belonged to Harvath. After checking to make sure a round was chambered, he put his shoulder against the cargo container and pushed.
The metal box barely budged. He was going to need a fulcrum and a lever of some sort to lift it. And judging by how much the loadmaster’s left leg was bleeding, he was going to need to find a tourniquet as well.
But before he could help him, he had to sweep the rest of the wreckage. If there were any threats remaining, those would need to be dealt with first.
Grabbing a thick rag, he folded it several times and pressed down on the wound. He was searching his mind for the correct words to say to the man in Russian about keeping the pressure on, when he saw a flash of movement outside.
CHAPTER 5
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Harvath only had time to react. Bringing the pistol up, he applied pressure to the trigger and fired three shots, just as he had been trained—two to the chest, one to the head. The Spetsnaz operative outside fell dead in the snow.
Sliding behind the cargo container, Harvath took cover. The loadmaster stared at him, wide-eyed. Harvath didn’t know if it was from the shock of the gunfire or from the blood loss—probably both.
Ejecting the Grach’s magazine, he looked to see how many more rounds he had. There were fifteen, plus one in the chamber.
Leaning over, he pulled a spare magazine and a flashlight from the dead soldier next to the loadmaster. Dressed in hospital-style scrubs, he didn’t have any pockets, nor did he have a tight-enough waistband to tuck them into. He would have to carry them in his hand.
If any of the other operatives had survived, and were even partially ambulatory, the sound of the gunshots was going to draw them in like a tractor beam. There was only one thing Russians liked more than drinking or fucking, and that was fighting.
Harvath had gotten lucky. Seeing the operative outside first had been a gift. He didn’t expect to get another one. He needed to go on the offensive. But to be successful, he needed information.
Looking down at the loadmaster, he asked, “How many men?”
The man’s condition was worsening. “Four crew,” he replied weakly in Russian. “Six passengers.”
That sounded right. A pilot, a copilot, the loadmaster, and maybe a navigator or flight officer of some sort would have composed the crew. As for the six passengers, Harvath had been traveling with the same group since being taken. There were four Special Forces soldiers accompanying him, plus one intelligence officer—Josef.
At the thought of the man’s name, his rage again began to build. It was like acid eating away at him. He wanted to let it loose, to vomit it out in every direction and kill every Russian in sight. But instead, he warned himself, Not now. Keep your shit together.
Laboring to remain calm, he focused on the situation and ran a count. Two of the soldiers were down—one had died in the crash and the other he had just shot outside. The loadmaster was pinned beneath the container. That meant six potential threats remained. Each had to be accounted for and, if necessary, neutralized. Raising his pistol, he slipped out from behind the container.
The fuselage was difficult to traverse. It was on its side and strewn with debris. There were sharp, jagged pieces of metal everywhere.
As he picked his way through, he kept his eyes peeled for survivors, as well as warm pieces of clothing. He found neither.
At the front of the tail section, he had to step outside to get to the next portion of the plane. Carefully, he leaped down onto the ground.
Immediately, he was hit with a blast of razor-sharp snow. It was driven by one of the coldest, bitterest winds he had ever felt.
As the crystals raked his exposed skin, he knew he would have only minutes in this temperature—five tops—before numbness would commence and the cold would begin to overtake him.
In the fading light, the crash wreckage was scattered as far as the eye could see. It looked to Harvath as if they were in the middle of a snow-covered field, surrounded by forest. He could make out where the plane had torn through the trees. A long scar of burning debris and snapped pines led back into the woods.
Hip-deep in the snow, he crossed to the next section of fuselage and climbed inside. Because this section faced upwind, the freezing air blew through with a vengeance.
With the spare magazine clenched between his teeth, he held the flashlight away from his body in case anyone saw the beam and wanted to take a shot at him. A few moments later, he found another Spetsnaz operative.
The motionless man was still strapped into his seat. His head hung at an obscene angle, his neck probably broken. Harvath grabbed him by the hair and lifted up his head so he could look into his face.
He didn’t know the soldiers’ names. They had only used call signs around him—words in Russian he didn’t understand. What he did understand, though, was what they had done.
After handcuffing him at the house on Governors Island, this Spetsnaz operative had delivered a searing blow to his kidney. Harvath’s knees had buckled. No sooner had he hit the floor than the Russian had grabbed a fistful of hair. Yanking his head up, he had forced him to watch as Josef had murdered Lara, Lydia, Reed, and the Navy Corpsman.
Harvath had thought they were going to kill him, too. And for a moment, he had wanted to die—right there with Lara, whom he loved more than anything in the world. But then he had been jabbed with a needle and everything went black.
When they brought him back around, it was obvious that he had been moved. They were in a dank, cold basement someplace. He didn’t know where, or how long he had been out.
He had a splitting headache, his clothes had been removed, and he had been tied to a chair. A video camera had been set up. Half an hour later, Josef had come down the stairs and the interrogation had begun.
Whenever he hesitated, whenever he refused to answer a question, it was the man with the broken neck who had struck him. In the beginning, Josef was playing good cop; trying to build rapport. It wasn’t until they boarded a private jet that things had gotten really ugly.