Of all the forward operating bases Harvath could have launched from, he ended up at one that housed some of the oldest armored personnel carriers, or APCs for short, he had ever seen.
The M113 waiting to take him, along with a group of infantrymen and supplies, up to the front looked like it had rolled on its treads straight out of the Vietnam War. It was equipped with a .50-caliber Browning M2 heavy machine gun known as a “Ma Deuce,” which wasn’t as desirable as an autocannon, but was a fine enough weapon.
For some reason, though, the gun shields—meant to protect the operator of the .50-cal—had been removed. Maybe they had been cannibalized for use on another vehicle. Maybe they had been stripped on a prior operation where every ounce of weight had been critical. There was no telling, although he would have been willing to bet that, somewhere, it involved more bureaucracy.
All Harvath knew was that whoever was standing in that hatch, running that gun, was going to be doing so with more exposure to enemy fire than should have been necessary. But as a former U.S. Secretary of Defense once said, “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish you had at a later time.” That included equipment. Some armor was better than none.
He waited for the supplies to be loaded and then walked up the rear ramp into the belly of the vehicle and took a seat. He was joined by a group of eight soldiers and their party was rounded out by two crew members—a driver and the commander, who also served as the gunner—who would be transporting them.
Within seconds, the hydraulic ramp had been raised, the turbocharged Detroit Diesel engine had roared to life, and they were moving.
The vehicle had a range of three hundred miles thanks to its twin armored fuel tanks, and could reach a top speed of forty miles per hour. It had been a long time since Harvath had ridden in one of these and he didn’t miss it. Even though this APC was probably from the 1980s or early 1990s, the U.S. military had developed a lot of other vehicles that were safer and much more comfortable.
One of the biggest things he disliked about the M113 was the lack of exterior visibility. He would have much preferred to be traveling in an MRAP or an armored Humvee. At least then he’d be able to see what was going on outside.
But since there was nothing he could do about it, he leaned back and tried to enjoy the ride.
Everything began to slow down—his thoughts, his breathing, his heart rate, even his perception of time itself. It was an enforced calm before the storm.
A lot of energy, as well as a lot of adrenaline, could be used up in anticipation of arriving at a battle. A little bit of fear was natural, even healthy, helping to sharpen your edge. If, however, you allowed it to eat you up and deplete your reserves, it was like showing up to combat with only half your ammunition.
Looking at the soldiers who were traveling with him, he saw a range of ages—from teenagers all the way to men in their fifties. None of them looked like this was their first trip to the front. They weren’t engaged in nervous chatter or cracking crude jokes. Each of them was every inch the professional soldier. Even the youngest among them had a seasoned, competent air. That said, they also looked tired. Really tired.
Ukraine had stunned the world with its ability to combat Russia’s invasion and push Moscow’s forces back. But as determined as the Ukrainians were to defend their homeland, war exacted a steep and heavy toll. You could see it on the faces of every man in the APC.
They had experienced the horrors of combat firsthand and were returning to the front, not because they wanted to—no sane person, given the choice, wanted war—but because it was a necessary requirement for them to secure freedom for themselves, their families, and the future generations of their country.
Yet again, Harvath couldn’t help but wonder how different things would have been had the West simply stood up to Peshkov when he had first sliced off a piece of Ukraine just under a decade ago. But it hadn’t.
There was nothing as provocative as weakness. Inaction was action. Autocrats, strongmen, and dictators could all smell weakness from miles away. It was an aphrodisiac to them; an open invitation to come and take what they wanted, a promise that there would be no consequences for their actions. Only when civilized nations drew a bright line and followed through with heavy consequences for crossing that line could those dictators, autocrats, and strongmen be kept in check.
The opportunity to administer an ounce of prevention in Ukraine had been ignored. Now the inevitable, bloody, costly cure was being delivered.
Harvath hoped that the world would pay attention this time, and lock the suffering and the carnage into their memory banks, but he had his doubts. He was constantly astounded by how many people either forgot history or chose to willfully ignore it.
Pay now or pay later. It was one of life’s most frequent propositions. Far too many chose to kick the can and pay later. Perhaps they were hoping someone else would pick up the bill and pay for them. But regardless of who paid, doing so later always came at a greater cost. The butchery happening across Ukraine was a perfect example.
Harvath worked on pushing the thought from his mind. He had a job to do. That needed to remain his focus.
He held little hope that Anna Royko was still alive. By all accounts, the men who had attacked the orphanage were evil personified. Had Nicholas not had photos to back up what had happened there, it would have been incredibly difficult to believe.
Difficult, but not impossible.
The world was full of incredibly malign individuals. Rarely, however, did you see them banded together in such a grotesque confederation.
The parallels between the Wagner Group’s Ravens and the Nazi Dirlewanger Brigade still struck him as uncanny. It was as if the SS unit had been brought back to life some eighty years later.
Man’s inhumanity to man was a tale as old as time, but the Ravens were taking it to the next level.
The updated intelligence that the GUR man with the briefcase had shared was the stuff of nightmares. It had also provided a possible lead. That was why Harvath and his new team were going to Kolodyazne first.
The danger of the assignment—both in relation to the men they were hunting and how they would be operating within the shadow of the front lines—had not been lost on him. They weren’t looking for a needle in a haystack; they were looking for a live hand grenade under a mountain of rusty razor blades surrounded by a sea of molten lava.
If there was one thing he knew, it was that as bad as things had started, this mission could get exponentially worse. Even the best-planned operations were subject to Murphy’s Law. And there were few places Murphy liked more to come out and play than an active war zone. It was his playground and the combatants his playthings.
Feeling his heart rate climbing, Harvath admonished himself for allowing his thoughts to get away from him. He closed his eyes and worked on his breathing. There was nothing he could do until he arrived at the front. He had to make the best of it. He was going to be stuck inside this tin can for the next two hours.
Aside from some intermittent radio traffic and the occasional communication between the driver and the gunner, the ride was long and boring. A few of the soldiers chatted quietly. Some slept. Others listened to music or played cards. One read a book.
If Harvath could have had anything, in addition to all of the burned-up equipment he had lost, he would have loved to have had a book. He’d always been a big reader, especially on deployments. Books helped take his mind off things and pass the time.
In Belarus, he had read a great thriller called Wolf Trap by an author named Connor Sullivan. He would have loved to have picked up another, but the Ukraine operation had gone into motion so quickly, he hadn’t had the time.
Listening to the treads of the APC rumbling over the road, he tried to keep his mind in a quiet, meditative state. The only thing that pulled him out of it was when the driver abruptly slowed or changed course to avoid something in their path. Russian land mines, like Russian sabotage of the Ukrainian rail lines, were a constant threat. All in all, their journey had been uneventful.
Passing through an abandoned, battle-scarred village about a half hour from the front, Harvath was rocked awake by the sound of gunfire. It was soon joined by the M113’s driver yelling something in Ukrainian.
Shaking off the fog of the trancelike state he had been in, he instantly realized what had happened. He didn’t need for the driver to yell his command again. Harvath was closest, which meant that he needed to be the one to act.
As bullets pinged off the steel skin of the APC, he reached up, pulled the dead gunner out of the hatch, and took his place.
When the driver shouted a new order in Ukrainian, Harvath yelled back for him to speak English or Russian.
“The church!” the driver yelled in English, speeding forward. “Shoot the church!”
Harvath swung the Browning M2 heavy machine gun hard left and opened up on the bell tower.
The .50-caliber rounds thundered out of the Ma Deuce and punched hole after hole in the structure.
Every fifth round was a tracer, and Harvath used them to fine-tune his fire. He tore the wooden tower to shreds and even rang the bell, twice.
He then paused his shooting, his thumbs ready to reengage the trigger, waiting for some sort of response, but there was no return fire. Either he had taken him out or the sniper had fled.
Nearing the edge of the village, Harvath could see a bridge up ahead over a small river. The driver brought the APC to a halt and seemed to be weighing what to do next.
Harvath took advantage of the pause to call for more ammo. As the men below scrambled to grab him a can, he scanned the town for additional threats. Where there was one sniper, there were likely more hostile actors. Whether it was a squad, or an entire platoon, was unknowable. They were close enough to the front that it could be anything.
Reloading the .50-cal, Harvath charged the weapon and called out to the driver, “We can’t sit out in the open like this all day. We need to get moving.”
“I know,” the Ukrainian shouted back. “I am not sure about the bridge. It could be rigged.”
Harvath gave it a quick glance. There was no way to be certain. Not without getting underneath and thoroughly checking it out, section by section. The man was right to be uneasy. Harvath was growing uneasy as well.
The sniper, or more likely one of his comrades, could be waiting for the APC to roll across before blowing whatever explosives they had hidden beneath.
Harvath assumed that the driver knew his route and that not only had he made this run before, but there had been no recent reports of enemy activity in the area.
“Forget the bridge,” said Harvath. “We’ll take a different route.”
The driver was about to respond, when he detected motion near the edge of one of the buildings. As a Russian soldier stepped into the open and the driver saw what he was carrying, he yelled, “RPG!”
Harvath swung the machine gun and began firing before he had even gotten a full sight picture. In so doing, he tore a racing stripe down the side of the building before sawing the Russian in half, just as the soldier managed to launch his weapon.
The rocket ripped through the air and sizzled right past them, missing the APC by less than two feet.
Harvath didn’t want to see what might be coming next. Thankfully, he didn’t need to tell the driver to get them to cover. The man was already moving.
He pulled down a narrow side street and stopped. Staying on the .50-cal, Harvath yelled down below for the rest of the soldiers to grab what they needed and to dismount.
Making a run for the bridge was totally out of the question. Even if it was safe to cross and hadn’t been rigged with explosives, the Russians were armed with RPGs. The APC couldn’t outrun those. What’s more, Harvath knew damn well that they had just gotten very lucky. The next Russian to materialize with an RPG wasn’t going to miss. Which meant that being anywhere near the APC right now was a bad idea.
They needed to find a good, defensible position and get their arms around what they were dealing with. How many Russian soldiers were out there? What kind of weapons and equipment did they have? And, if necessary, how quickly could the Ukrainians get reinforcements to them?
The first thing that they needed to settle was who was in charge. As the only officer, Harvath didn’t plan on holding a vote. These soldiers were under his command.
Giving a rapid series of orders, he then dropped down into the APC to grab his gear. The supplies they were being forced to leave behind, particularly the rockets, grenades, and ammunition, turned his stomach. It was destined for the men at the front. He would be damned if he was going to let the Russians have any of it. But by the same token, he thought it might make pretty good bait.
Working as quickly as he could, he manufactured a very guerrilla-style, down-and-dirty set of booby traps. Exiting the rear of the APC, he made sure the driver saw what he had done, just in case he didn’t make it back and someone else needed to disable them.
Loaded down with gear, not knowing what kind of a fight they had just driven into, Harvath directed the soldiers toward one of the nearest concrete buildings—the village school.
In addition, he wanted a sniper of their own on a roof nearby and one of the Ukrainian soldiers immediately volunteered.
After agreeing on the best location, the man performed a quick radio check and then took off as two of his colleagues covered him.
That left positioning the remaining soldiers inside the school so that they didn’t provide any weak spots that the enemy might exploit.
From a weapons standpoint, all of the men were outfitted with rifles as well as sidearms and a few grenades each. Harvath’s biggest hope had been to find a tripod for the .50-cal somewhere in the APC. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen one and neither had the driver. They would have to do without the heavy machine gun.
The other issue Harvath had to contend with was exactly when, and how, to engage the Russian soldiers. He and the Ukrainians might be able to leverage the element of surprise, but once that was gone, they would be at the mercy of whatever the Russians threw at them. If Russians decided to rain down RPGs, or worse, Harvath was going to need a very good Plan B.
That was why he was intent on quickly gathering as much intelligence as possible.
He decided he’d be the one to conduct reconnaissance, taking one other soldier with him. The best English speaker was a tall, blond-haired twenty-two-year-old from Odesa named Oleh. Harvath told him to load up on extra grenades and ammo and then went to speak to the APC driver. He was leaving him in charge of everything until he got back.
Certain that the driver knew what he wanted him to do, Harvath grabbed a few extra items and then slipped out the back of the school with Oleh.
Weapons up and at the ready, they stuck to backyards, moving swiftly but carefully from the ruins of one building to the next.
However many Russians there were in the village, it wasn’t going to take them long to locate the APC. Once they had found it abandoned, there’d be a house-to-house search for its occupants. Harvath wanted to be back at the school before that happened.
His plan was to push to the town square, loop behind it, and come up the other side. That would put him in the vicinity of where the church sniper and the Russian with the RPG had been.
Like the forest with its dachas outside of Kharkiv, this area had seen some pretty heavy fighting at some point. If not for the bullet holes and bomb craters, it might have been easy to imagine that a massive tornado had swept through, flattening almost everything in its path.
Surveying the destruction, particularly the downed power lines, torn-up streets, and uninhabitable houses, Harvath couldn’t help but wonder what had become of all the inhabitants. How many had survived? Where had they gone? How would they start over?
These had not been wealthy people. Many would have had children and grandparents and pets. Judging by the debris, they had left many of their possessions behind, probably fleeing with whatever they could carry or cram into a vehicle.
He was reminded, yet again, of images of World War II—civilians fleeing the Nazis with everything they owned in a suitcase, or piled high on a wagon, maybe balanced on the back of a bicycle. It was almost surreal thinking about this happening today—in the era of smartphones, high-speed internet, and artificial intelligence. No matter how many leaps forward we took in technology and modern conveniences, war didn’t disappear. Many human beings were still nothing more than animals at their core.
It was reality, but it still pissed Harvath off. Oleh should have been at university, dreaming of graduation, and maybe thinking of a more serious commitment with his girlfriend. Instead he was carrying a rifle, picking his way through some rubble-strewn village he had probably never heard of, risking his life to push foreign invaders out of his country. Had you told him a year ago that this was where he was going to be, he might never have believed you.
But maybe he would have. The Ukrainians knew that they had a revanchist Russia on their doorstep. When nothing happened to Peshkov after his first incursion, back when Oleh was just in grade school, why wouldn’t the young man have expected the Russians to be back?
The death. The destruction. The gruesome barbarity. It was difficult to find words for. It was even tougher to wrap your head around—especially in the twenty-first century.
Harvath’s heart broke for these people. No matter how this war ended, things were never going to be the same for them.
He felt even worse for their children. No adult, much less a child, should ever be exposed to what so many of them had been forced to suffer. He had no idea how you ever fully healed from that kind of psychological and sometimes even physical trauma.
The cost of this war would continue far beyond any hoped-for cessation of hostilities. The bill would be revisited upon many of the survivors for the rest of their lives. War, without question, absolutely was hell. The Russians deserved every bad thing that was coming to them.
Pausing near the square, Harvath had Oleh radio their sniper for a SITREP. For the moment, everything was still quiet, and so they kept moving.
Scrambling over splintered timbers, piles of broken bricks, and jagged pieces of metal roofing panels, Harvath was careful where he placed his footholds. The last thing he needed was to suffer some stupid, preventable injury that would slow him down or, worse, knock him out of the fight. He had come too far and had already been through too much to allow that to happen.
Completing their hook behind the square, they were coming up along the other side of the village when Harvath spotted something up ahead and gave Oleh the signal to halt.
Adjusting the magnifier atop his suppressed rifle, Harvath peered through his optic and assessed the situation.
“What do you see?” Oleh whispered.
“Four Russian soldiers,” Harvath replied. “And they’re headed right toward us.”
The young Ukrainian was confused. “Toward us? That doesn’t make any sense. Unless—”
“Unless they’re a flanking element and the rest of their team is already headed for our APC.”
At that moment, almost in answer to their question, the sniper’s quiet voice came over the radio and Oleh translated, “Multiple Russian soldiers, moving fast, approaching from the east.”
“How many?” asked Harvath.
“Ten, maybe twelve. At least two are carrying RPGs. What do you want to do?”
Harvath would have loved to have waited until the Ukrainians back at the school had as many fish in the barrel as possible. Then, with their shots all lined up, let them be the first to fire. But that wasn’t in the cards.
Directing Oleh behind some rubble, he told him to take up a firing position and to radio two orders to the others. First, the sniper’s primary targets were the men with the RPGs. Second, neither the sniper, nor anyone else, was allowed to shoot until Harvath gave the command.
Oleh relayed the message and then confirmed that it had been received by the others. “Now what?” the young Ukrainian asked.
Preparing his magnifier for closer combat, Harvath replied, “We get ready for one hell of a gunfight.”