by Shawn Kupfer
Acknowledgements
This book – hell, this publishing company – wouldn’t have come together without the efforts of a lot of very special people. First of all, my wife Lisa, my partner in life and in Eddington Press. Big thanks also go out to Nate Hoppe, holder of the sacred Editing Hammer; Christopher Gronlund, my podcasting partner and fellow word-nerd; and Joe Peacock, who, whether he realizes it or not, inspired me to take my destiny into my own hands. Last, but never least, thanks go out to you, the person who is now holding this book in its Internet-Ghost form on your ereader. If you weren’t reading it, I wouldn’t have been able to write it.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright
Chapter One
Letter from Uncle Sam
“Hold on tight, because I’m going to have to crash this goddamn thing,” were the last words Christopher Lee wanted to hear.
So, of course, those were the words that woke him from a light sleep in his chair just behind the pilot’s seat of the stolen Chinese Z-9 Haitun helicopter.
“Please tell me I dreamed you saying you were going to have to crash,” Christopher groaned, unstrapping his safety harness and stepping forward to stand between the two front seats of the chopper.
“Sorry, Sergeant. You heard correct,” the muscular female Marine, Master Sergeant Ortiz-Gonzales, said from the pilot’s seat. “We’re out of fuel in about thirty seconds. You really shouldn’t be out of your seat.”
“How far are we from the carriers?” Christopher asked, sitting back down and strapping himself back in. He looked around the cabin to see the rest of his team doing the same.
“Good forty miles,” the slight, dark-haired Marine in the co-pilot’s chair answered. Her name was Sergeant Matsuda – Christopher had never caught her first name.
“Lovely,” Daniel Voyer, the team’s sniper, grumbled from his seat next to Christopher. “Did we at least –”
Daniel never got to finish his question. In what seemed like an instant, the helicopter’s rotors stopped dead, and the vehicle started falling out of the sky. Ortiz-Gonzales had managed to get them down a couple of thousand feet, close to the surface of the East China Sea, but the impact still hurt like hell when it came. Christopher had never been in a helicopter crash before, on land or into the water, but it felt to him like the chopper had simply smacked into the ground rather than the much softer H2O.
Initially, Christopher wondered if they hadn’t crashed into an island rather than the sea. The impact just seemed too solid to him, too much like they had hit land and hit it hard. One thing was for sure, though – they certainly weren’t flying anymore.
He knew they were in the water soon enough. The chopper’s large passenger area quickly filled with the stuff, and it was much warmer than Christopher had expected – it had been chilly out when they left Shanghai a little more than an hour before. In the time it took him to have that thought, the water was already up to his knees. Christopher felt the chopper start tilting to one side as he reached for the four-point harness that held him in his seat. The tilt went the wrong way, tipping the side with the large passenger door into the ocean. Suddenly the water started coming into the chopper twice as fast.
In less than a minute, the entire chopper was underwater. Christopher struggled with his harness and finally got himself free. He floated up out of his seat and banged his head on something, but the impact wasn’t terrible. In the murky water, he caught the outline of the chopper’s open side door, and swam through it, kicked down and away, then up around the rapidly sinking machine. He kicked as hard as he could, pushing himself toward the light of the surface.
When his head broke the water, he saw most of his team had already beat him to daylight. He made a quick headcount – Mary Wells, their computer expert. Check. Daniel, Ortiz-Gonzales, and Matsuda. Check. Martin Chase, their demolitions guy. Gabriel, the medic. Check. Only Bryce, the team’s driver, was missing, and he popped up a few seconds after Christopher. Bryce was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, but Christopher suspected that the injury looked worse than it was. Head wounds bled like a bitch, and the water only made it look like there was even more blood. Bryce’s eyes were clear and alert, and he seemed calm as he treaded water next to Martin. Gabriel saw the wound, too, and swam over to his colleague.
“Everyone OK?” Christopher yelled, spitting water out of his mouth.
“That sucked,” Martin complained, “But I think I’m OK.”
“Like I started to say back in the chopper,” Daniel said, calm and level as if they hadn’t just crashed and almost drowned, “did we manage to get in touch with the carrier before we went down?”
“Yeah. They know about where we are. All we gotta do is tread water and wait for them to pick our asses up,” Ortiz-Gonzales replied, pushing a clump of wet hair out of her eyes.
“Just a leisurely swim until our ride gets here,” Bryce said. “At least the water’s waking me up some. That, and the salt is nicely stinging this little cut.”
“You’re OK, bro. Just a scrape,” Gabriel said quietly.
“Uh, guys? Anyone know if there are sharks in this pond?” Martin asked, his voice shaking slightly.
* * *
“Staff Sergeant. How are you feeling?” Captain Rush, commanding officer of the carrier Enterprise, asked Christopher. “I only ask because you look like hammered shit.”
“I’m good to go, sir,” Christopher lied, hopping off his bed in the ship’s sickbay. He landed solidly on both feet, which surprised him – he felt like he wanted to crash to the deck. His entire body was tired from treading water for the better part of two hours. “Ready to go back out there and get my Lieutenant, sir.”
“Not happening, Sergeant,” Rush said, shaking his head. “Chinese defense grid – that one you and your team were so polite to take down for us – went back up an hour ago. Nothing’s getting into mainland China without getting shot to shit first.”
“Captain... our boss stayed behind so we’d have enough power to make it here,” Christopher started.
“Yeah. How’d that work out for you?” Rush said.
Christopher fought the urge to drive a fist right into the superior officer’s face. The man was bigger and stronger than he was, and outranked Christopher by a mile, so it shouldn’t have been
a struggle to keep his right hand from balling into a fist, but it was harder than Christopher expected. He put his hands behind his back just to be safe.
“I told him we’d be coming back for him,” he finished, grinding his teeth together to keep from adding the word “motherfucker” to the end of the sentence.
“Gonna have to make a liar out of you, Sergeant. Look, I understand the situation. Master Sergeant Ortiz-Gonzales was... rather vocal about going back, as well. To the point of insubordination,” Rush said, his sharp features tightening into a scowl. “And believe me, I’d send you right back out if it would make a damn bit of difference. But even in our best stealth chopper, you wouldn’t make it within 50 miles of the Chinese coastline. Their Air Force is on hyper-alert.”
“Sir, with all due respect – give me a fucking rubber raft and a gun, and I’ll go alone,” Christopher said.
Rush’s scowl fell from his face, and he nodded slightly.
“Goddamn, Sergeant. I do respect your loyalty to your CO. Not to mention that you’ve got balls the size of meteors. And I feel for you – I lost a couple of my pilots inside Shanghai when the grid went back up,” he said. “But I’ve got orders to put you and your team on the first thing smoking back to Firebase Zulu. Orders from well above both of our pay grades, you get me?”
Christopher said nothing. He wanted to reply to the Captain, but his brain and his mouth suddenly decided not to work together to form human speech. Instead, he just nodded, his jaw tightly set.
“Good man. I’ve cleared a convict area for your crew. You can sack out for a few hours in the NCO quarters, if you like.”
“I’ll stay with my people.”
“Your choice. You’ve got about two hours before we get close enough to Nagasaki to chopper you ashore. Air Force boys will handle you from there. I’m trying to scrounge up some convict BDUs for your people now.”
“Blacks work fine if you have them, sir. We’re Special Forces, so we usually don’t wear convict grays.”
“Right. Special Forces. Convicts on my ship wear convict BDUs, Sergeant.”
Christopher again had to fight the urge to punch the senior officer. He clenched his fists tightly behind his back and said nothing. His molars felt like they were going to grind down to powder, but he kept his jaw tightly shut.
“Get some rest, Sergeant. You look like you haven’t slept in a couple of days. Corpsman here will show you to your team.”
Christopher nodded again, and the Captain seemed satisfied by his minimal response. Satisfied enough, anyway, to leave.
The walk to the convict quarters wasn’t long, and Christopher was still unsure of how he was going to tell his team that their boss and friend, Nick Morrow, who had saved all of their lives a dozen times by now, was on his own in enemy territory.
Chapter Two
Alone and Forsaken
“Well, that’s it. I’m dead,” Nick Morrow said to no one in particular, folding the ancient cell phone closed and sticking it into the cargo pocket of his stolen People’s Liberation Army uniform.
Of course, this realization wasn’t a surprise to him. When the helicopter holding his team took off an hour and a half before, he’d pretty much known they weren’t coming back for him. Still, though, he’d hoped there was a chance, so he’d stayed in the same abandoned factory where they’d left him until the call came in.
It had at least been from a reassuring source, from a friend – Lt. Colonel Johnny Evans, an Army Ranger commander, had been the one to tell him he was on his own. Nick had been positive on the phone, the very picture of Marine bravado and bravery. He’d said some stupid bullshit about how he’d be fine on his own, how he’d see the Colonel soon.
Yeah. Just as soon as you fight your way out of a country with a billion and a half pissed-off people, most of whom are armed, he thought as he laid out his equipment on the workbench in front of him.
Nick wasn’t hurting for weapons at all. When his team piled into the helicopter, they dropped everything they didn’t absolutely need. That left him with a half-dozen AK-47s, a few Chinese Type 95 assault rifles, and three Type 77 pistols. Ammo was slightly more of a problem, though. They’d burned through a lot of that just that morning, and Nick had to scrounge to put together a full magazine for one of the Type 95s. He was fine on pistol ammo, though – three clips. It wasn’t as if he was going to be able to shoot his way out, but being armed... that was reassuring.
“OK, chief. Target on your back. Your face was all over the place before the power went out. What’s your move?” Nick mumbled as he slung the Type 95 over his shoulder.
There were three possibilities, as near as he could figure. One: surrender. With the meltdown they’d caused at Shanghai’s nuclear plant, he doubted the local authorities would treat him nicely. The Geneva Convention would be out the window. They’d torture him – to death if he was lucky. No go.
Two: break for the water. Try and get a boat, get to Japan. Japan was neutral in this particular conflict, politically anyway. Nick had heard rumors they were allowing Americans to use a few coastal cities as airbases, all on the down-low, of course. But that was their first escape plan from Shanghai that morning, and the ports had all been insanely guarded. He’d most likely be captured, which was essentially surrendering. Nope.
Three: overland. The long way. Walk out the same way he’d walked in, through all of mainland China and Outer Mongolia. While the toughest of the three options, it was probably also the one that offered the most success. If he could make it out of the city, he could disappear. China was a big country, and Nick looked Chinese. He spoke Mandarin and Cantonese. It would take a while – it had taken them weeks to get into Shanghai working as a team – but it was also his best chance of making it out alive.
No better time to move than now, Nick reasoned, cracking the warehouse door nearest the street and taking a peek outside. There would still be a fair amount of chaos in the streets. The power outage, the American fighters dropping bombs on the city... if he could keep his head down and find a ride, he actually had a shot.
The street outside the warehouse was calm, but that was why he and his team had picked this area in the first place – it was deserted. Nick walked outside, keeping his hand on the pistol in his hip holster as he walked, eyes scanning for any other human beings in uniforms. He also kept an eye out for any cars he could steal, though they’d pretty much have to be running with the keys in them. He’d started out the war as a convict, but he never learned how to steal a car. He’d just learned how to kill.
As he came out of the warehouse district, he heard voices. Shouts. Sirens. A cacophony of emergency sounds, the closest a city could get to screaming. His right hand gripped the pistol tighter as he walked, ready to pull it and start firing in a quarter of a second if the need arose.
It didn’t. As he approached the first major intersection, a bank building on one corner and a smoking pile of rubble on the opposite corner, he could see that no one was paying attention to his shit. They had their own problems to deal with, mainly those of the victims of the building reduced to concrete dust. Several Chinese Army medics were on scene, but they were overwhelmed with the amount of bloody casualties volunteers were pulling from the rubble.
Must’ve been the F-35s, Nick thought, remembering seeing the Navy jets streak across the skies hours before. They said they were only going to bomb military targets. This looks like it used to be an office building.
One of the medics looked up at him as he passed, but said nothing. Nick nodded to the young man, who returned the nod – a short, cursory head bob – before returning to the 20-year-old kid in a shirt and tie now missing most of his left arm. Nick just kept walking. There was nothing he could do here, nothing except get himself caught. And if the Navy had started bombing civilian targets... well, the torture thing was all but a certainty now.
“We’ve got the pilot!” Nick heard someone yell from the other side of the rubble pile. As he walked around the building, h
e could see that it hadn’t been bombed – the remains of a Navy F-35 Lightning II, part of the rear stabilizers and single engine, was sticking out of the pile of rubble. Not bombed, then – the building was hit when the F-35 had gone down. That made Nick feel slightly less horrible about being in the American military.
“Is he alive?” someone else yelled, but before the original voice could respond, Nick heard something he hadn’t expected to hear again – a Southern drawl.
“Get your goddamn hands off me, asshole!”
It was a male voice, strong, deep, but panicked. Nick knew the feeling – being on your own in enemy territory was no picnic. He moved towards the sound of the drawl, his hand still heavy on the Type 77 on his hip.
He caught sight of the pilot as he rounded the wreck of the F-35. The man in the flight suit was almost a block away, being marched toward the demolished office building at the end of an assault rifle. The soldier holding him at gunpoint couldn’t be more than 19 years old, but his jaw was set and his shoulders were squared. He was angry, and Nick could see it from down the street.
He could also see that the pilot’s flight suit was stained with blood from the right knee down, and he was hobbling badly. The kid with the assault rifle didn’t seem to care about the severity of the pilot’s injuries – he kept pushing the man forward with the barrel, and when the pilot fell, the soldier leveled the rifle at his head.
“Agent Chen, MSS!” Nick yelled, jogging to meet the young soldier and his downed captive. He held his faked credentials high as he ran – they said his name was Agent Li, but that cover was well past burned. He only hoped the kid wouldn’t look too closely.
The kid looked up at him, glaring into Nick’s eyes. He didn’t have any intention of studying Nick’s faked ID. He just wanted to shoot this guizi – this foreigner – in the head and hang his corpse from a streetlight. His rifle didn’t move a centimeter, its barrel still deadshot-aimed at the side of the pilot’s skull.
He caught a glimpse of the pilot as he approached – young guy, pale skin, blond hair. The wrecked leg wasn’t his only wound – there was a large, oozing laceration on the left side of his temple. Even as messed up as he was, the kid looked alert, and just as angry as the soldier who was about to ventilate his skull.
