by Shawn Kupfer
Christopher tried to draw a bead on the gunfire, to pinpoint where he should aim, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere. He saw a flash out of a first-floor window on the building nearest the street, a long, two-story house, so he aimed at the flash and sent several rounds from his M4 in that direction. The others with him – Peter, Martin, and Yuri – were returning fire, as well. It took several seconds for Christopher to realize that, though he and his team were out in the open with minimal cover (he and Peter had jumped behind a park bench), none of them were getting hit. The bullets were hitting close, but whoever was shooting at them didn’t seem terribly interested in killing them.
The gunfire stopped all at once, and Christopher held up his fist to indicate to his team to stop shooting back. He wasn’t sure they were hitting anything, anyway.
“Chris? What’s going on, man?” Bryce radioed from the APC. His voice buzzed in Christopher’s helmet radio, and Christopher toggled his throat mic with his left hand.
“No clue. Stay there until I give the word.”
“Copy that.”
The silence was shattered after several seconds by a voice, amplified, speaking in Russian. Christopher turned to Yuri, who was crouched behind a steel trash can a few meters away.
“What the hell was he saying?” Christopher shouted.
“He wants us to put down our weapons and surrender,” Yuri answered.
“Might not be a bad idea,” Martin yelled – Christopher saw him crouched behind another park bench. The older man had his helmet visor down.
Christopher activated his own visor and set it to night-vision mode. From the alleys between the houses in front of them, he saw dozens of soldiers in thick winter camouflage pouring out into the streets. A quick count put their numbers north of 60.
“We’ve been had, I think,” Yuri yelled, sighing.
“What’s our move here, man?” Peter asked, his weapon still up and pointed at the advancing soldiers. Christopher could now see they were Russian Renegades, and only about half of them were armed. Still, that made the odds more than seven to one on the ground.
“I think we do like the man said,” Christopher grumbled, unclipping his M4 from its chest strap.
Yuri nodded and placed his AK-47 on the ground in front of him. Both Martin and Peter followed suit, and the four men all placed their hands on their heads and stepped back from their weapons as the soldiers advanced.
“Hey, Gregor,” Christopher heard Daniel in his helmet radio. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”
“Da,” Gregor’s voice burst in on the same channel, his radio producing more static than Daniel’s.
“Looks like 30 of them have guns. You want the 15 on the left or the 15 on the right?”
“That’s 31, my friend. Sniper up in the church bell tower.”
“Not for long.”
“Shit,” Christopher said under his breath. He moved closer to Yuri, who he realized didn’t have a helmet radio and wasn’t hearing any of the two snipers’ conversation.
“On three, guys. Try to dive for your weapons and help us out. Mary?” Daniel said.
“I have a UAV up and targeting. We can be there in 10 seconds, according to Bryce.”
“One... two... three,” Daniel said softly, his voice even through the whole count.
Christopher tackled Yuri to the ground while Peter and Martin dove for cover again. He didn’t hear the snipers picking off their targets, but he saw four men drop in the first couple of seconds. The Russian mini-UAV blazed through an instant later, firing both of its PKT coaxial machine guns as it swooped low over the mass of troops. By the time Christopher got his hand on his M4, Bryce and Michael were already using the APC’s guns to mop up the rest of the troops.
“You’re clear, Chief,” Daniel radioed. Christopher knew the young man was grinning without having to see him.
“Uh...” the amplified voice said, then cut off.
Christopher stood up and clipped his M4 back to his chest strap. He scanned the streets around him with his night vision, but apart from his own people hopping out of the APC to provide security and the mini-UAV landing back on top of the vehicle, he saw no movement.
“Got someone running, one block up, two over,” Daniel radioed. “Russian Renegade, and he’s really moving. Want me to slow him down?”
“I’d like to ask him some questions,” Yuri said, a hard edge in his voice.
“I have him,” Gregor radioed.
That shot, Christopher heard. He also heard the loud scream and the body crashing into what sounded like a trash can a few blocks away. The night had gone so quiet in the wake of their violent counterattack that Christopher suddenly realized he could hear everything, including his own people breathing a hundred feet away.
Yuri started moving almost immediately, leaving Christopher to jog to catch up. He motioned to Peter to come with him, and the three of them rapidly covered the few blocks to where Gregor had hobbled the fleeing soldier. When they arrived, they found him pulling himself along the street with his arms, his right leg almost obliterated below the knee, trailing blood behind him as he crept. Yuri used his foot to turn the soldier onto his back and immediately started yelling at him. Christopher didn’t speak much Russian at all, so he turned to Peter and raised an eyebrow.
“Uh... homeboy ain’t happy. He’s talking pretty fast. I’m only getting a little of it,” Peter said.
When Yuri gave the soldier a chance to respond, the answer was short and shouted at maximum volume.
“OK, that, I got. And it wasn’t polite at –” Peter started. A gunshot cut him off.
Christopher turned back to Yuri and the soldier to see the former putting his pistol back in its holster. The soldier was now dead on the ground, shot once through the head.
“Fuck, man!” Christopher said.
“He would not have talked. He was Chechen,” Yuri said, shrugging. He said nothing else, as if that simple sentence explained everything. Instead, he started rifling through the dead man’s pockets. He set a few items out on the street – a tablet computer, a hand-held radio, and a notepad with several pages covered in Cyrillic writing. He then gathered the items up and started walking back to the park.
“That was cold brutal, man,” Peter said under his breath as he and Christopher followed Yuri at a short distance.
“Yeah,” Christopher said. “But I don’t know why I was expecting any different.”
“Me either, just... wow, man. Yuri don’t play.”
“How good is your tech girl?” Yuri called over his shoulder as he walked.
“Pretty damned good,” Christopher yelled back.
“Good. This is encrypted,” he said, holding up the tablet briefly before stashing it in a cargo pocket. He slowed slightly to let Christopher and Peter catch up. “I did something to upset you?”
“No, just wasn’t expecting that,” Christopher said, well aware of how stupid it sounded. They’d just shot down 60 men in the park, half of whom had been unarmed.
“You would have preferred I cut his throat? Smashed his head with my boot?”
“We do things a little different. Not a criticism, Yuri. You say he wouldn’t have talked, he wouldn’t have talked. You know these guys better than I do.”
Yuri seemed satisfied at this answer, and Christopher was glad. He’d seen what the guy could be like when he was angry, and he didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that if he could help it. They were back at the park in less than a minute, by which time Gregor and Daniel had come down from the trees and were helping the rest of the crew liberate the AK-47s and AK-74s from the bodies of the Russian Renegade soldiers.
“Chechens,” Gregor said to his partner as they approached.
“Da,” Yuri said, nodding and turning to Christopher. “Chechens were only too happy to join up with the Renegade forces after our... let’s call it ‘storied past,’ shall we?”
Christopher nodded, vaguely aware of what Yuri was talking about. Some of
it had happened before he was born, some while he was in the first grade. But he’d learned working with Russians these past couple of years that they could sure hold a grudge when they wanted to. He decided the less he said about any of it, the better. Instead of joining in on the Chechen-bashing, he waved to Mary.
“Hey, wanna take a look at this tablet? Some kind of encryption,” he shouted over to her.
“On my way.”
Yuri gave her the tablet, she messed around with it for a few seconds before nodding.
“Yeah. Locked up tight. Shouldn’t be too hard to crack once I hook it up to my computer in the truck.”
Mary headed back to the truck with the tablet.
“Does she need one of us to help translate?” Gregor asked.
“Negative,” Christopher told him. “Mary speaks pretty passable Russian. Most of my guys do.”
Christopher joined Gregor and Yuri in searching through the bodies of the detachment they’d just wiped out. It wasn’t a particularly fun job, but it fell into the “one of those things that needed to be done” category – apart from taking their weapons and recycling them into the war effort, they couldn’t take the chance that these guys didn’t have some valuable intel on them. While Gregor and Yuri had their attention turned to digging through pockets and backpacks, Christopher signaled Peter to go back to the truck. If there was something on that tablet, Christopher wanted to make sure he was the first to know.
A strange feeling had come over him, especially when he’d seen Yuri flat-out execute that Chechen soldier. It was Yuri who had suggested they even stop in Bulaevo. It was Yuri who had supposedly received a call from someone in town saying that the guard would be light, and there couldn’t be more than 50 Renegade soldiers in town. He didn’t want to suspect the Spetsnaz operators, but there was still that feeling...
“So, what do you think their deal was?” Christopher asked Yuri as the two of them took apart a soldier’s pack and started pulling out clips for AK-74Ms.
“I think the transmission we received wasn’t so far off the mark,” Yuri said, “But that they wanted to take our weapons and supplies. The man transmitting the message was obviously one of the soldiers. It was a ruse.”
“I suppose that makes sense. I mean, not like we’re rolling that heavy with armament, but an extra 10 rifles and an APC goes a long way on either side.”
“Except for the Chinese,” Gregor grunted. “They have so much equipment it’s ridiculous.”
“Then why aren’t they supplying their Renegade allies?” Anthony piped up from a few bodies over.
“There are differing theories on that,” Yuri told him. “One being that it’s hard to get supplies this far into the Allied lines. Another being that a lot of these Renegade groups are autonomous – acting on their own, not under the command of the Chinese or the Koreans, or even other Renegade factions.”
“What do you think?” Christopher asked.
“I think it’s a mess,” Yuri said, shrugging and pocketing a pack of cigarettes from a dead soldier’s breast pocket.
“Well, yeah. That, I can agree with,” Christopher said, shooting him a grin.
“Hey, Chris. Find an excuse to come back to the truck, man. Mary’s got something for you,” Peter’s voice chirped in his ear.
“That 7.62 ammo you’ve got there, Gregor?” Christopher asked.
“Da.”
“Give it here. I’ll take it to one of my guys to reload the UAV’s guns.”
“Smart,” Pete radioed.
Gregor handed over the ammo box he’d just found – it was half empty. Christopher smiled at the Russian sniper, took the box, and made a beeline for the APC. Just outside, he found Michael smoking a cigarette.
“Hey, Mike. Think you can figure out how to reload the UAV with this?”
“They’re pretty simple PKs. No problem,” Michael said, grabbing the box and climbing to the top of the APC.
Christopher chanced a look over his shoulder and saw that the two Russians were still busy going through the corpses, so he ducked into the APC through the back door. Mary was sitting on one of the long bench seats, closing up her netbook and stowing it in her pack. Peter was standing across from her, the tablet in his hand.
“Figured you’d want to see this,” Peter said, handing the tablet to Christopher. The entire screen was taken up by a short dossier – though Christopher’s Russian was pretty rusty, he didn’t need to read much. He recognized the picture at the top of the file – Yuri.
“This what I think it is?” Christopher asked.
“Probably not. Check the next couple,” Mary said.
Christopher swiped the screen. Another dossier came up – Gregor’s.
“OK. This isn’t filling me with a bunch of confidence, folks,” Christopher said, looking up from the tablet at his people.
“It gets worse, Chief. Keep swiping.”
Christopher swiped the screen again, and a third dossier came up. Again, he didn’t need to read this one to recognize whose it was – his own face was staring back at him. He swiped again, and found himself looking at a screen full of Cyrillic text.
“I’m better with Chinese,” Christopher said, handing the tablet back to Peter. “What am I looking at?”
“A saved email. Orders from... well, someone. Letting them know that Yuri, Gregor, and you were rolling through here with approximately eight other people,” Peter said.
“Y’all didn’t get dossiers?”
“Convicts,” Peter said. “We’re not listed specifically in –”
“In the Marines’ mission databases. Just the CO of a convict unit is listed,” Christopher said. It was sinking in now. “Someone hacked us?”
“Hacked some pretty substantial systems at either Justice or Firebase Zulu,” Mary said, nodding. “And with the timestamp on those files – early yesterday – I’m guessing Zulu. These guys knew we were coming through here before the mission plan even made it to Justice, probably.”
“And that means we’ve got a traitor at Zulu,” Peter said. “You know, that secure special forces outpost we’ve been calling home for the past two years?”
“Shit. That’s all kinds of not good,” Christopher said. He stuck his head out of the truck and yelled. “Yuri! You need to see what’s on this tablet!”
Chapter Ten
Let’s Break The Law
Nick’s plan was to get Hansen out of the power station and on the road before the young pilot passed out from the painkillers.
A plan is a list of things that don’t happen.
Nick didn’t remember where he’d heard that, but over the past couple of years, he’d accepted it as true. An hour later, he and Hansen were still in the tiny concrete bunker, Hansen snoring quietly in a sitting position up against the wall. Nick kept an eye on the window, waiting for any cars to pass – the only ones that came by were PLA vehicles. Every time an olive-green vehicle came by, Nick clicked the safety off his assault rifle and readied himself to shoot his way out of the substation, but no one came near.
Probably taking them some time to sort through the data, or the facial recognition software didn’t come up until after the camera came on, he reasoned, still jumping every time he saw an Army vehicle or a camouflage uniform.
Just the wrong moment. It had been happening since Nick hit the ground inside Chinese lines – everything happened at the wrong moment. If he’d realized the camera was there on the ferry, or in Shanghai, it wouldn’t have been hard to lay his hands on a civilian vehicle. Now, essentially across the street from a huge military base, a non-military car was a white whale. Especially when he couldn’t move more than a couple hundred feet from Hansen, lest some patrol wander by and find the pilot passed out on the floor. They were stuck.
It was getting dark, and Nick decided to turn off the bunker’s single light. He switched his TotalVis goggles to night-vision and kept watch out the window, waiting for something – anything, really – to happen. The stimulants were makin
g him jumpy, and standing around wasn’t helping. About an hour after sundown, just as the night went full dark, Nick picked up headlights off in the distance, coming from the direction of Shanghai. He crouched low and zoomed in with the googles – it was a small vehicle, and had a traditional configuration rather than the CDM’s triangular lights in the center. It could be a civilian ride, Nick thought.
The car stopped just outside the gate and parked. As the headlights turned off, Nick got a good view – it was a regular quad-cab pickup, red and white in color. Definitely not military. The driver stepped out and grabbed a clipboard off the passenger seat. He must have been there to do a periodic inspection or something. He had no idea what was coming when he opened the door and saw Nick standing there with his rifle aimed at his chest.
“Down on the floor, now. Don’t make a sound,” Nick said.
The technician, a man in his 50s, nodded and said nothing. He moved as though this had happened to him before, and more than once, placing his hands on top of his head and sinking to his knees. It reminded Nick of his own arrest more than two years before. At that time, Nick wasn’t sure he was going to make it through the night without getting shot in the head.
He had no intention of shooting the technician, though. He was a noncombatant, a civilian. Not a threat, not an enemy. Besides, if Nick fired a shot inside the tiny room, he’d deafen everyone in it. But he didn’t want to let the technician know he was perfectly safe, lest the older man decide he could take Nick in a fight. He kept his jaw locked and made every effort to look like he was just about to open fire.
Switching clothes with the technician didn’t take long. Nick made sure to be very specific and tell the man they were switching clothes – he needed to keep the technician calm, and if the older man got to thinking he was about to be molested, calm wouldn’t be an option. The man was a bit shorter than Nick, but heavier, so the pants fit for the most part, baggy and a little short. They were stained, dirty jeans of American design, but Nick could tell by the shoddy stitching at the cuffs that they were knockoffs. The simple blue work shirt was a bit short in the arms, but Nick rolled up the sleeves. He looked more than a little ridiculous, and he knew it, but at least he was out of the PLA uniform.
