The explosion threw her backward. She hit snow hard. Ears ringing.
Vision white. Scrambled to her feet. Disoriented.
Where was the rifle? Where was… there. Three meters away.
Half buried in snow. She grabbed it. Cleared the action.
Checked for damage. Functional. Good.
Behind her, men were screaming. Rebecca didn’t look back. Didn’t need to.
Fire didn’t take prisoners. She moved into the blizzard. Counting.
Three at range. Three in fire. That was six.
Twenty-six to go. The storm was her ally now. Rebecca understood that.
While the enemy tried to organize, tried to maintain formation, tried to do everything their training told them to do, she let the blizzard turn her into a ghost. She knew terrain better than they did.
Had studied the maps before the convoy left. Knew there was a creek bed forty meters north of the road. Knew the tree line curved around it in a C-shape.
Knew snow drifted deep in the low ground but stayed thin on the ridges. Knew that men making noise died first. She found the creek bed by memory.
Dropped into it. Followed it west. Ice cracked under her boots.
Water soaked through. Shockingly cold even through insulation. Didn’t matter.
Cold killed slow. Bullets killed fast. She’d take cold.
Voices ahead. Two men, searching together. Smart.
Never search alone in a blizzard. But two men meant two targets close together. Rebecca waited in the creek bed.
Let them come to her. Let them walk right past her position. Focused on the ground ahead.
Thinking threats came from distance. She rose from the ice like something birthed from winter itself. The knife went into the first man’s kidney.
He gasped. Tried to turn. Couldn’t.
She held him until he stopped. Lowered him quietly into the snow. The second man heard something.
Started to turn. Started to raise his weapon. Rebecca’s rifle spoke once.
He dropped. Two more. She dragged both bodies into the creek.
Covered them with snow. Not perfect. But in this storm, perfect didn’t matter.
«Good enough» did. The radio on one corpse crackled. Foreign words.
Urgent tone. They were reporting in. Checking positions.
She took the radio. Clipped it to her belt. Set it to monitor.
Now she could hear them coordinate. Could hear them call out positions. Could know where they were before they knew where she was.
Intelligence decided battles. Not bullets. Rebecca climbed out of the creek, oriented by sound.
The enemy was contracting their search pattern, pulling in tighter around the burning vehicles. Looking for her in the last place she’d been seen. She was already behind them.
The next three died without seeing her face. One shot, one kill, disappear before anyone could react. They started firing at shadows.
At each other. At nothing. She let them waste ammunition on fear.
By the time they stopped shooting, she’d moved again. The radio chatter had changed tone. Not confident anymore.
Not victorious. Confused. Angry.
Someone was demanding explanations. How many enemies were they facing? Where was the responding fire coming from?
Nobody had good answers. Rebecca allowed herself a cold smile. They still thought there were multiple hostiles.
Still thought they were fighting a unit. The truth was worse. They were being hunted by one woman with a rifle, and a complete understanding of how men died in snow.
She found a position on high ground, near the tree line. Good sight lines despite the storm. From here she could see the general area where most of them had consolidated.
Maybe fifteen still moving, maybe fewer. Hard to count in darkness and snow. But they’d made a mistake.
They’d built a fire. Warmth in cold, comfort in chaos. The oldest human instinct.
Gather together, make light, push back the dark. Fire also destroyed night vision, made everyone within ten meters visible, made them targets. Rebecca settled prone, braced against a tree.
Scoped to her eye. Took slow breaths. Let her heart rate drop.
This was just like Montana, just like hunting elk in November snow. Wait for the right moment. Make the shot count.
The first shot extinguished their fire, hit the fuel canister they’d been using. Burning liquid spread; men scrambled away, shouting, trying to save gear. The second shot dropped whoever was shouting orders.
After that, it wasn’t combat. It was harvesting. The enemy force fragmented.
Without leadership, without light, without any idea how many hostiles they faced. Training gave way to survival instinct. Men scattered into the blizzard.
Some tried to maintain formation. Others ran. Rebecca hunted the ones who ran first.
Easier targets, panicked movement, no tactical awareness. She’d learned patience from her father. Learned that you didn’t chase prey.
You let prey come to you. You found the paths they’d take—game trails, creek crossings, gaps in ridgelines—and you waited. In Montana, that meant elk trails.
Here, it meant anywhere with slight cover from the storm. She found a cluster of rocks where three men had taken shelter, huddled together against the wind. They weren’t watching their surroundings, just trying to stay warm.
Radio in the center, someone trying to raise headquarters, voice desperate. Rebecca fired from thirty meters. Three shots.
Three seconds. Then gone before the bodies finished falling. The radio kept transmitting.
She could hear whoever was on the other end, demanding a response, getting silence. She imagined what headquarters was thinking. The ambush should have been over an hour ago.
Clean sweep, no complications. Now they weren’t getting updates, weren’t getting confirmation. Were probably considering sending another team.
Let them. More targets. The snow had started to let up.
Not much, but visibility was improving from impossible to merely terrible. Double-edged sword. She could see better.
So could they. Rebecca moved faster, using the last of the heavy storm as cover. Found two more fighters trying to navigate back to wherever they’d staged from.
Neither heard her approach. Both went down before they understood what was happening. She’d lost count now.
Didn’t matter. The radio told her everything she needed to know. Fewer voices calling out.
Longer gaps between transmissions. Fear creeping into professional soldiers’ voices. They were starting to understand.
Whatever had hit them wasn’t a unit, wasn’t reinforcements, wasn’t anything they’d trained for. It was one person who decided they weren’t leaving this storm alive. Rebecca found what looked like a rally point.
Four men, backs together, weapons out, scanning every direction. Smart, disciplined, harder to approach without being seen. She didn’t approach.
Found a tree with a good angle. Climbed. Snow made bark slippery, but she’d climbed worse.
Found a branch that would hold her weight. Settled in. From fifteen feet up, she could see over their defensive circle.
Four shots. Four bodies in snow. She stayed in the tree, watching, waiting for movement.
None came. Climbed down. Checked bodies.
Took ammunition. Left the rest. The radio had gone quiet.
Rebecca keyed it. Spoke one word in English.
«Run.»
Then threw the radio into the snow and kept hunting. The last group knew they were going to die. Rebecca could tell from how they moved.
No more tactical discipline. No more trying to maintain formation. Just five men, clumped together, weapons pointing every direction, jumping at every sound.
She’d herded them here deliberately. Pushed them away from the road, away from any vehicles they might use to escape, into a shallow ravine where snow had drifted deep. Now they were trapped.
Exhausted. Running low on ammunition. And she was above them.
Rebecca checked her rifle. Four rounds left in the magazine. One spare mag.
Call it twenty-four bullets for five men. Overkill. Except she was tired too.
Hands shaking from adrenaline and cold, vision starting to blur at the edges. Pain in her shoulder from the explosion earlier. End this fast.
End this clean. She took position on the ravine’s edge, prone in snow, rifle braced. Five targets.
All grouped together. Panicked. Firing at shadows.
Too easy. She put her crosshairs on the first man. Remembered Torres falling.
Remembered Chen’s daughter who’d never see her father. Remembered Mitchell’s face when he understood everyone was dead. Her finger tightened on the trigger.
The first man dropped. The others spun, trying to find her position. She’d already moved, rolling left, coming up behind different cover.
Second shot, second body. Three left. They were running now, trying to climb out of the ravine.
Snow collapsed under them. One slipped, fell hard. Rebecca’s bullet found him before he could stand.
Two. These two were smart. Separated.
Moving different directions, making themselves hard targets. One had a rifle. One had something automatic.
The automatic weapon opened up. Snow exploded around her position. She stayed flat, face pressed into ice, listening to bullets tear through space she’d occupied seconds ago.