Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series)

by Shawn Kupfer

  Neal was tagging along for the first part of the journey, from the airfield to Carbon-4. He informed Christopher that he’d been assigned as combat controller for the mission, thanks to a combination of his history in Marine Intel and his familiarity with the team.

  “More specifically, though, it’s my familiarity with you,” Neal had told him. “They want someone on the line with you who you know, who can’t be impersonated. We have history, so that ended up being me.”

  Neal would stay at Carbon-4, be their point of contact if anything went wrong. They’d be using a similar cell-phone scheme to the one they’d used on the last mission – this one was even more secure, though, as it dealt exclusively with text messages. Text could be encoded, encrypted between two devices. Anyone intercepting the transmission would just get gibberish.

  “Just don’t break this thing,” Neal said, handing him a 10-year-old iPhone. “It’s so obsolete that the message protocols have a low chance of being picked up, and even then, almost no chance of being decrypted.”

  Carbon-4 was apparently just across the narrow bridge Christopher saw from the plane, so he had Bryce drive them there.

  “That bridge looks like it’s made out of construction paper, Chief,” Peter commented. “We sure it’s gonna hold us?”

  “Soviet construction,” Neal said. “It’s probably been there since the 40s, and they’ve been driving bigger trucks than this across it since. It’ll be fine.”

  “GPS shows a town on the other side,” Bryce said, his voice flat and even, as always. “Verkhnezeysk.”

  “That’s Carbon-4,” Neal told them.

  “All right, then. Everybody hold your breath,” Bryce said as he eased them onto the metal-span bridge.

  “What happens if the bridge doesn’t hold?” Anthony asked.

  “We fall through ice and die horribly,” Martin told him. “It’ll be a race between drowning and freezing to death. My money would be on freezing.”

  “Is there ever a time when you’re not... you know... creepy, Martin?” Christopher asked over his shoulder.

  “Once. When I was a kid.”

  The Razor made it across the bridge. Neal was right about the solid construction, and the road didn’t shudder or sway beneath them in the slightest as they crossed. When they got to the other side, a collection of buildings seemingly appeared out of nowhere. They weren’t intentionally hidden or camouflaged – they were just white and gray, like everything else in sight.

  There weren’t many buildings. Four rows of houses neatly arranged into four streets, with one long, wood-sided building at the top of the order. Tall, thin, scraggly trees lined the edges of the town, if one could call the quiet, uniform collection of nearly identical buildings a town.

  “Jesus. How long ago was this place abandoned?” Christopher asked.

  “Not abandoned. Evacuated when the North Koreans got close, little less than two years ago,” Neal told him, not looking up from the command screen on his sleeve.

  “You mean people used to live here? Like, recently?” Christopher said.

  Neal didn’t answer him. It was hard to believe – this place looked like a ghost town, like Chernobyl after the blast. Nothing moved on the streets, except when the light wind decided to shake one of the thinner trees. Christopher started to wonder if they’d walk into one of those buildings only to find a pile of dead Cobalt Consulting contractors, but Neale’s command screen beeped and turned green.

  “We’re all set,” Neale said, nodding to the long, low building, the largest one in town. The wall nearest them slid to the side, revealing a steel-walled room with vehicles inside. “Convict Bryce, find us a parking space.”

  Bryce nodded and drove the Razor into the open building. It was a tight fit, only a few feet of clearance on each side, but Bryce parked them perfectly as the door slid shut behind them.

  That was when Christopher met his first Carbon PMC. A young woman in her 20s, more muscular than Gabriel or Peter, walked up to the Razor’s passenger-side door. She was dressed in dark green cargo pants, a black thermal shirt, body armor, and a black parka. Her long, red hair was tied back in a tight ponytail at the base of her skull, and she had a Beretta ARX-160 assault rifle slung in front of her. She also had two pistols, one on each thigh, and a small earpiece/microphone combo in her left ear. She smiled at Christopher as he opened the door.

  “Welcome to Carbon-4, folks. You’re Gunnery Sergeant Lee?” she said, her light, casual tone at odds with her head-to-toe weaponry.

  “That’s me,” Christopher said, hopping out of the truck. She was shorter than him, but not by much.

  “I’m Karen Roth, assistant supervisory agent. Follow me, folks. It’s cold as balls up here.”

  “That’s a cool gun,” Peter said, falling into step behind Karen, Christopher, and Neal.

  “ARX-160. Does the trick. We got a good deal on ‘em from the Italians.”

  Karen led them to a hole cut in the floor, one that had a metal staircase leading down far enough that Christopher couldn’t see where it ended.

  “Stairs are steep, so watch your step, OK?” Karen said, her voice still polite and conversational. If Christopher closed his eyes – a bad idea on the steep metal staircase – he could imagine her as a tour guide in a museum, one of those fun museums that had more gift shop than history.

  They were fifteen steps down (he counted) before he could see the floor below them. A long, well-lit hallway led off to the left, which meant that the bulk of the Carbon outpost was under the town itself. Karen led them down the hallway for several hundred feet before she stopped at a door. She swiped her left wrist over a sensor next to the door handle, and when the door beeped, she opened it.

  Christopher had never worked a straight, legal job in his life, but he once had a girlfriend who did, at a tech-support call center on the outskirts of Daytona Beach. He’d gone to visit her there at lunch once or twice, and the room Karen led them into now looked to him almost exactly like the company break room he’d seen back then. The only difference was that here, there weren’t vending machines lining the walls. Instead, there were gun lockers.

  Gun lockers aside, this place felt normal, like any old office building. And it feeling normal, civilized, was what made Christopher uneasy. He’d been in office buildings since the war started, but they’d been abandoned, bombed-out, or filled with angry soldiers at the time. Here, there were no bullets flying at him, no one shouting at him in Russian or Mandarin or Korean, only the subtle hum of the heating system and the sounds of his people shuffling into the room.

  “Just have a seat,” Karen said. “Dr. Auffrey will be along any moment now.”

  “You know this guy?” Christopher asked. “The bio I have on him is pretty limited.”

  “Yeah, work with him every day. He’s the head of the Umbra Dynamics team here at Carbon-4.”

  “One of the heads,” came a voice from the doorway. Christopher hadn’t even heard it open.

  The man who came into the room was dressed similarly enough to Karen – khaki cargo pants rather than green, black thermal shirt, body armor, sidearm, black combat boots. He was a large guy, a head taller than Christopher, with wide shoulders that he had to turn to fit into the door. Christopher guessed the guy was in his mid-30s. Probably another Carbon Consulting hired gun.

  “Hey, Richard. We were just talking about you,” Karen said.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” Richard said, smiling at her. “Hi, Dr. Auffrey. Call me Richard.”

  He stuck his hand out to Christopher, who stood from his chair and shook it.

  “Christopher Lee.”

  “You in charge?”

  “Of the team going out to get your truck back, yes, sir.”

  “OK. We have a lot of work to do and not much time to do it. I need you, your communications person, and whoever knows the systems in the Razor best. I’m told you’ve spent more time in them than most, correct?”

  “Yeah. Anthony Rice, communications,”
Christopher said, nodding at Anthony, “And Mary Wells and John Bryce. Mary’s our tech person, Bryce is on the wheel.”

  “Great. You four, with me up to the Razor.”

  “And the rest?” Neal asked.

  “No reason for them to go upstairs and freeze their asses off. They can get some coffee or... something. Kare, you want to take care of these kids?”

  “No problem.”

  “I’ll stay here and keep an eye on them,” Neal said, though no one had asked.

  Right, Christopher thought. He still thinks of us as convicts. Still thinks we need watching. Christopher hadn’t thought of his team – his friends – as convicts for quite some time. It was easy to forget that most of them were in for some pretty heavy crimes, like murder, manslaughter, and arson.

  “Sure. Yeah. Do that,” Richard said, already heading out the door.

  He moved fast, and Christopher, Anthony, Bryce, and Mary scrambled to catch him. He seemed unaware that they were still ten feet behind him – he was talking a mile a minute.

  “Once we get upstairs, I’m afraid it’s going to become apparent how truly fucked we are here,” Richard said, double-timing to the staircase. “I mean, a regular Razor going missing would be bad enough, but the ELR – that means extreme long range – that’s our best shit in there.”

  By the middle of the staircase, Christopher finally caught up to Richard.

  “You sure you’re a scientist? You don’t talk or look like one,” Christopher said, finally matching the larger man’s stride and keeping up.

  “Hope so. Otherwise MIT owes me some serious cash back,” Richard said, taking the steps two at a time.

  He reached the top and kept up his brisk pace to the Razor parked at the end of the long building.

  “Mark II. I worked on this truck a little bit, too,” Richard said, opening the passenger door and climbing in. “Not as much as I worked on the ELR. That one’s pretty much all mine.”

  “What did you do on this one?” Mary asked, climbing in through the rear hatch.

  “Systems integration. You know, make the comm system work with the stealth system, make the stealth system work with the engine, make the weapons work with the everything else.”

  “But this new one, you designed?” Bryce asked. Christopher could tell his driver wanted to take his regular seat at the wheel, and was standing awkwardly in the middle of the cabin.

  “No, not really. Redesigned parts. Improved parts. Like the adaptive camouflage,” Auffrey said, sliding into the passenger seat and turning on the Razor’s systems one by one. “You remember how the AC on this one works? Why it’s best to drive it at night?”

  “Shudder,” Christopher said.

  “Right. In the daylight, it’s pretty easy to spot a big thing moving, even if it is functionally invisible. Images in the AC get minorly distorted, seem to move along with the truck. I fixed that.”

  “You could drive the ELR in the day?”

  “Hell, we drove it into North Korea six, seven times during testing. High noon, full sunlight. Right past patrols. No one saw shit,” Richard said.

  Christopher started to understand what the engineer meant about them being fucked.

  “So how would we track the thing?”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it? I mean, normally, there are command codes you can send to a Razor in the field – open the doors, shut down the engine, that kind of stuff.”

  “Not on this one?” Anthony asked.

  “Well, yes and no. It’s a prototype. We hadn’t added them yet.”

  “So we have to wait for it to hold up somewhere and recharge,” Mary guessed.

  “Sadly, not as easy as you think. The new adaptive camo, in addition to being almost undetectable, is 80% more energy-efficient,” Richard said, suddenly getting out of the passenger seat and moving over to the comm station. “‘Scuse me.”

  Anthony moved out of the way, and Richard sat down and pulled a set of small screwdrivers from his cargo pocket. He started removing one of the plates from the control panel.

  “So how long can it go before recharging?”

  “Technically, we don’t know the exact upper limit,” Richard said, setting the plate aside and rooting through the wires underneath. “We also gave it more solar batteries and more solid fuel capacity, in addition to reducing the number of engine cylinders. We had it completely under stealth for six days once. Batteries were at about 20%, solid fuel at about a quarter.”

  “I’m not hearing much good news here,” Christopher said, checking the status screens on the passenger side of the dashboard.

  “Afraid there ain’t much to give you. Even if you do find it, you’re not going to be able to kill it,” Richard said, pulling a small box from his other cargo pocket and setting it on the console next to him. “Ablative armor on the thing redirects the energy from most conventional weapons. Tires are reinforced with Kevlar and carbon fiber webbing. You’d need 20 pounds of C4 to make a dent.”

  Richard took the small, black box and pushed it into the console, then started attaching wires to it.

  “So... what are you doing there, then?” Mary asked.

  “OK, here’s the thing. When the ELR came back from the first mission, the crew reported some screw-ups with the comm system. Thing burned out on them, but apparently, it would randomly send out a low-frequency pulse. A squawk, but the same squawk every time. This device will scan for the anomaly and triangulate on it when it finds it,” Richard said, finishing up and reattaching the panel. “Shit part of it, though, is you have to be within half a mile to pick it up. Which will be tough when you have almost no idea of the route it’ll take.”

  “Almost no idea?” Bryce asked.

  I didn’t even pick up on that “almost,” Christopher thought. Nice job, Bryce.

  “Yeah. We’re assuming the guys who stole it aren’t fully trained on the systems, so they’re probably gonna use the onboard nav system. It’s an adaptive system, based on intel, troop movements, and a shit-ton of math.”

  “Henry Eaton’s program?” Mary asked.

  Richard stopped moving – something Christopher hadn’t seen him do since he met the man – and stared at Mary.

  “How do you know that?”

  “We were the team who extracted him a couple months back.”

  “Oh. OK, cool. So you know the program.”

  “We used it once. It was crap.”

  Richard smiled and laughed as he stood up and walked over to the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah, and the guy who made it is a dick, too. But we’ll clone the system into your computers. Should give you some idea of the route they’re taking, though if they deviate from it, we’re in pretty bad shape.”

  He tapped a few times on the touchscreen between the driver and passenger seats, bringing up a power schematic.

  “OK, systems girl, engine guy. Let’s see what we can do to increase your power rating.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Irrelevant Battles

  Nick Morrow always knew when he was walking into a bad situation. It was a skill he’d had far longer than the two years he’d been in the war – it came from much earlier than that. The first time he could remember having that situational awareness was when he was nine, and waiting for the bus on his first day of school in Killeen, Texas. He got a nagging suspicion deep in the back of his mind he was in for a rough day, and that turned out to be correct – he’d gotten in two fistfights at school. In the 22 years since then, he’d learned to listen to that feeling when he got it.

  And he had it in spades now. Yuan’s plan was ambitious – no, that’s a polite way of putting it. It’s balls-out insane. But the reward he was offering up for completing his plan of action was substantial enough that Nick felt he had to take the risk.

  Yuan promised that if Nick pulled off the job, Feng’s people would put together a car for him that didn’t exist as far as the People’s Liberation Army computer network was concerned. Not only that, but
he’d get them all – Nick, Hansen, and the car – on the cargo train from Lianyungang all the way to the Dzungarian Gate, the mountain pass between China and Kazakhstan. From there, it would be up to Nick to get them into Kazakh territory, about half of which was still under Chinese control... but it was a lot easier than driving through the bulk of China.

  Pulling off the job wouldn’t be easy, though. The plan sounded simple enough – take one of the big cargo trucks sitting in the garage and drive it over to the military cargo area over at Lianyungang Port. The information they’d picked up from their unsuspecting Chinese Army moles – the guys whose day job consisted of driving the same truck Nick was about to borrow – said that there were forty crates of QBZ-03 assault rifles sitting out on the dock, to be loaded onto a North-Korea bound ship in the morning. Nick and his team were to drive down there, steal as many of them as the EQ2081 truck could carry, and drive them to Yuan’s holding warehouse in Jinpingzhen, just south of Lianyungang.

  “Simple. In and out, nobody knows we were there,” Feng had told him.

  But there were problems, and Nick didn’t think “simple” would be the word to describe what he was being asked to do. First, there was his team: Feng, his brother Lung, and a mechanic from Feng’s shop. None of them were combat-trained in the slightest, and while they were strong physically, Nick had no idea how they’d react if bullets started flying.

  And the bullets would mostly be flying at them, thanks to their available weapons. Apart from the assault rifle and handgun Nick carried with him, they had a Vietnam-era Type 63 semi-automatic rifle. Three guns, one that was in any way modern, for four guys. They had enough ammo to reload the Type 63 twice, plus the one spare magazine Nick salvaged from his team’s equipment, so if it came to a firefight, they wouldn’t last long.

  Further complicating the plan was the level of surveillance not just at the dock, but less than a mile across the water at Lian Island. It had once been a government-run tourist resort, but in the last couple of years had become a huge military outpost strictly designed to defend the port. If by some miracle they managed to avoid the patrols at the dock, the cameras on the island would certainly pick them up. And they’d definitely stand out – they were all wearing their street clothes. PLA uniforms weren’t easy to come by, apparently.