by Shawn Kupfer
“It’s as good a plan as any,” Carson said, nodding. “And your boy Martin and I might have come up with something to do if we can find them.”
“What’s that?” Christopher asked.
“Well, I was going over the schematics they gave us on the ELR. The ablative armor covers the front, back, sides, and top of the thing,” Martin said. “Notice what I left out?”
“The bottom,” Christopher said.
“Right. It has the standard roadside bomb protection down there, just like ours. And I know exactly how much explosive it takes to crack that,” Martin told him.
“So we blow it up from the bottom?” Gabriel asked.
“Not exactly,” Carson said. “We could do some damage there, maybe cause a leak in the stealth system, but just exploding a bunch of C4 under it –”
“– which I totally have, by the way,” Martin broke in.
“Right. But that wouldn’t necessarily stop it. Unless we could get it under the front axle. We take that out, no steering, no front suspension. It’ll dig into the ground like a lawn dart,” Carson said.
Christopher nodded.
“It’s a long shot – I mean, how do we even locate the front axle? But it’s better than nothing.”
“Hey, Martin. Lemme see the plans for that thing,” Anthony said.
Martin handed over his tablet, and Anthony swiped through the files, eventually finding what he was looking for.
“We can find the front axle if we get the squawk,” Anthony said, holding up the tablet. “This is the malfunctioning comm array. The squawk is powerful enough and unique enough that I can locate it to within, like, six inches if we’re close enough to hear it.”
Christopher thought he saw where Anthony was going for a second, but the feeling was gone almost as soon as it came. He had to admit that he had no idea what his comm specialist was getting at.
Damn these smart people, he thought.
“What I mean is,” Anthony said, noting the look of confusion on his CO’s face, “We’ll be able to get speed, location, and direction within a half a foot. Which means we can pinpoint this exact array within half a foot, even while moving.”
“Math,” Martin said. “But we can figure out from speed, direction, and the placement of the array where the front axle is going to be if they keep along a straight course.”
Again, Christopher thought he had it, and the feeling lingered a little longer this time before vanishing. He realized he didn’t need to understand every little detail, though. He had people who could.
“Mary?” he asked.
“Extremely fucking solid idea, Chief.”
“Good. Get on it. Martin, Carson, start putting a package together. We might not have much time to deploy it, if I understand anything about your plan. Which I probably don’t.”
“No, you’re right. We’ll get on it right away,” Martin said, dragging his two large duffel bags full of shit Christopher would rather not know about out of the overhead storage bins.
“Good. Bryce, I think we’ve waited here long enough. Let’s get to chasing. Speed at your best judgment.”
“You got it, Chief.”
Chapter Eighteen
Get Up and Fight
Lung was barely in the truck before Feng peeled off, as much as the big diesel could burn rubber. The police cars – three of them – crested the hill as they picked up speed, but there was no way they were going to outrun the turbocharged People’s Armed Police BYD F8 sedans, a copy of the Mercedes CLK. They weren’t as fast as the Mercedes, but they were faster than the cargo truck by a long shot. Feng was a hell of a driver, whipping the truck around long curves at 40, but the laws of physics would prevent even the best driver from losing these cars. Without help, anyway.
“Engine blocks and front axles! Shred them!” Nick yelled to the mechanic, raising his own rifle and opening fire.
His first shots went high, raking across the top of the lead car’s windshield as Feng took a hard right to get off the highway and onto the side streets. He hoped he’d hit the driver, but the car kept coming. No luck. He steadied his right shoulder against the side of the truck and fired again, squeezing the trigger and emptying the magazine into the F8’s hood. The lead police car sputtered and slowed to a stop, but the other two cars juked around it and kept coming.
Nick glanced over at the mechanic, who was pulling the trigger off and on, sending short bursts from the barrel of his QBZ-03. If it had been one of his Marines, Nick would have supported the short, controlled bursts as a way to conserve ammo, but he got the impression from the sweat forming on the mechanic’s brow that saving bullets wasn’t what was happening there. The kid had no idea what he was doing. His suspicion was confirmed a second later, as the kid dry-fired several times.
“Here!” Nick said, jamming another magazine into the kid’s hand as bullets started to ping off the truck’s tailgate. “Pull the old one out, put this one in, pull the bolt, and just hold down the trigger until you hit something!”
The kid reloaded successfully, and Nick realized he was out of ammo. He yanked the empty magazine from his own rifle, then felt around on the floor. His hand found a few bullets from the broken ammo box, and he quickly loaded them into the empty magazine. He only had five or six rounds, but with luck, that was all he’d need.
The mechanic finally managed to score, wiping out both front tires on the F8 on the left. The police car skidded and spun out, slamming sideways into the side of a brick building.
“Get the rifle from the front,” Nick told the kid, steadying himself in a crouch and aiming down the QBZ-95’s sights.
He still wasn’t used to the Chinese assault rifle, and he wasn’t nearly as accurate with it as he was with his M4, but he had to make these last shots count. A uniformed police officer was leaning out the window of the cruiser, taking aim with a QBZ-03 of his own, but Nick let one round fly and caught the cop in the chest. He didn’t know if he’d killed the man, but the cop dropped his rifle and disappeared back in through the window. Nick took a breath, aimed again, and fired two rounds through the windshield. The car swerved, but kept coming.
Three rounds, Nick. Breathe. Stop trying to take out the driver like you’re Daniel. Tires, radiator, engine. Like you told the kid.
Nick fired three more times, putting all three rounds in the F8’s hood, but it wasn’t enough. The car kept coming, kept gaining. The mechanic was scrambling over the stolen assault rifles to the cab – he wouldn’t be able to get the rifle in time, but he didn’t need to. The police car was close enough that Nick could see the driver, could make out his gaunt, angry face. Nick pulled the pistol from his waistband and unloaded it at the windshield, putting every round into the cop in the driver’s seat. The car cut left, hard, and crashed head-on into a concrete barrier.
The mechanic looked at the wreckage, then slowly handed Nick the rifle anyway.
“Uh, thanks,” Nick said, crawling over the boxes to the front of the truck. “Feng. You need to get us off the road to a cover location. Have someone come out to meet us and offload the weapons.”
“We’re supposed to take the truck to Yuan,” Feng said.
“Plan’s changed. This thing is on the road another second, we’ll have police APCs to deal with instead of just sedans. Find somewhere to hide, and do it now.”
Feng didn’t argue. The operation hadn’t gone to the sorry excuse for a plan thus far, and Feng seemed to know Nick was the only reason they were still alive. Yuan’s plan had put them into a corner, and Nick had gotten them out of it. They were parked in an underground garage minutes later, and Feng was on the phone.
A friend of his arrived twenty minutes in a pickup truck not unlike the one Nick stole from the technician back in Taizhou. With all five of them working, they had all of the stolen weapons loaded in a matter of minutes. They covered the huge pile of weapons and ammo with a tarp, and Nick placed his own assault rifle in the truck’s bed before closing the tailgate.
“Lung, take the kid and drop off the weapons. Feng and I have to see to the truck.”
“You going to be all right?” Lung asked.
“Probably, but keep your phone on. We’ll call if we need help,” Nick said before he realized Lung was talking to his brother. Feng just nodded his response.
You going to be all right on your own with this psycho?
Nick didn’t take offense to the unasked question. These guys had just seen him take out several armed police officers – it was only right for Lung to be concerned about his brother. Still, they’d need to harden the fuck up if they were seriously going to make an attempt at rebellion. Nick made a note to talk to Yuan about it – he seemed to be their leader, in as much as they had one.
As the pickup pulled away, its rear axle straining from the heavy burden, Nick climbed into the cargo truck’s passenger seat. Feng started the vehicle.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere with some space around us. How much fuel do we have?”
“Half a tank.”
“Should work.”
“You want to go that far?”
“No, not really. Closer the better.”
Feng looked confused, but piloted the huge truck out of the parking garage anyway. He took them to a city park about a mile from the garage.
“This work?”
“Yep. Drive it up into the park.”
Still confused, Feng did as he was told. He drove to the center of the park before Nick told him to stop and get out. In the back of the truck earlier, Nick saw a fuel can and a siphon hose. The fuel can was empty, but that was fine. Working fast, he drained off a full can of diesel and went to work, splashing the fuel all over in the cab and the back of the truck, making sure to get the fabric top for good measure.
“Back up,” he told Feng, who didn’t need to be told twice – he saw where this was going now.
It didn’t take much to get the truck to go up in flames, just a single burning cigarette tossed into the cab. They stood and watched the thing burn, lighting up the dark park, for a few moments. Feng turned to Nick.
“Um... how are we going to get to Yuan’s?”
“We aren’t going there. At least not right away. We have to go back to your garage and stage a break-in. Unless you want the PLA to know it was you who robbed them.”
“Right, right. Good thinking. So... how are we going to get there?”
“We walk,” Nick said.
“It’s four kilometers,” Feng told him.
“Your legs broken?”
“No.”
“That’s what we call a rhetorical question, Feng. Longer we stand here dissecting what I say, the longer it’ll take to walk back to the garage. You lead.”
Feng nodded and started walking, and Nick walked next to him.
“I’m impressed by you, Marine Nick Morrow.”
“You can just call me Nick.”
“Nick. Do you have a Chinese name?”
“Nope. I was born in Los Angeles. My older brother has one, but my mom didn’t bother when I was born.”
“All the same, you impress me. The news reports say American Marines are brutal, amoral. Animals. You didn’t kill anyone, because you didn’t have to.”
So, he must not have seen me put an entire clip into that last car’s driver, Nick thought. He considered telling Feng the reason he hadn’t killed the guard at the docks – a gunshot would have been too loud, and killing him with the choke would have taken up to three minutes, time they didn’t have. He would have just cut the guard’s throat, but Feng hadn’t given him his knife back.
And not killing the police officers was a pragmatic decision rather than a pacifist one, as well. Hitting the driver in the head from a distance on a moving platform while both vehicles were doing about 60? That was beyond Nick’s skill as a rifleman. His pal Daniel probably could have pulled it off, but not him. The engine and front axle – essentially, the whole front of the car – was a bigger target, and would stop the police from chasing them further. If he could have, Nick would have killed every one of the police and the soldier at the dock and not felt the least bit bad about it.
He almost told Feng this – the guy needed to know what he might have to do if he was going to mount any sort of real resistance against the Chinese government. But the incorrect impression Feng had about Nick’s reluctance to kill people seemed to please him, so Nick let it be. He needed Feng on his side if he was going to get out of there, back to American territory. Let the guy believe he was some sort of peaceful warrior – it would only make Feng want to help him more.
“So, what made you want to stand up to the powers that be?” Nick asked, trying to change the subject.
“It’s a wrong action they’ve taken. Getting into this war with America, with the Russians. I mean, we didn’t start this thing, but we didn’t need to rush in the second North Korea got attacked.”
“Well, North Korea started it, of course –” Nick started, but Feng cut him off.
“No. America started it when they sent special operatives into North Korea to kidnap a minor government official.”
Nick wasn’t too surprised by this attitude – the media in China was all state-controlled. Of course they’d make America look like the bad guys, not their allies in North Korea.
“So, I’m sure you didn’t hear about the nuclear bomb North Korea set off in downtown Los Angeles?”
“North Korea didn’t do that,” Feng said, shaking his head. “Your government did, then blamed it on North Korea.”
“You have to stop believing the state-controlled news if you want to fight them,” Nick told him, pulling a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lighting it.
“I didn’t get that from the state media,” Feng said. “I’m not an idiot. I got that from an American web site.”
“Probably some conspiracy nut,” Nick said, blowing out smoke. “I wouldn’t put a ton of stock in that.”
Still, something about the statement unnerved him. He’d been around when the bomb went off in Los Angeles – he lived in Burbank at the time. A few hours after the bombing, the President had come on TV and simply told the nation that North Korean extremists detonated the bomb on the sixth floor of the Aon Center in downtown LA. Since that announcement, no governmental entity had offered any evidence against North Korea that he knew of.
He shook off the thought and took another long drag of his cigarette. He seriously doubted the US government would really detonate a nuclear weapon in one of their own biggest cities, no matter what the reason.
Anyway, it was a little late to worry about it now.
Chapter Nineteen
Occurrence on the Border
There was no guard post, no sign that let 47 Echo know they were crossing into North Korean territory. Two years and change before, they would have still been in Russia, but that had all changed when the war started. When the North Koreans struck at Inchon in South Korea (with Chinese air support), none of the intelligence analysts predicted they would move north at the same time.
But they did, moving up through China and southern Siberia before Russia could mobilize any sort of defense. The Russian military was dealing with its split down the middle, as well as a Chinese offensive at the Manzhouli Sino-Russian Inter-Trade Tourist Area. By the time the Americans arrived to join the war, North Korean forces had easily taken over the towns and cities of southeastern Siberia and effectively quadrupled the size of their own country. Resources were stretched far too thin fighting with the Chinese along the Mongolian border, and the Russian military command had decided most of the captured land was strategically worthless, so very little effort went towards driving the North Koreans south.
It turned out to be a costly mistake. With the North Korean forces coming from the east and the Chinese forces coming from the south, aided by pockets of Russian Renegades all over, Russia was surrounded on two sides. The best the joint American/Russian force could hope for was to keep the Chinese
and North Koreans from advancing too far, which hadn’t gone well in the early days of the war.
In the two years since they’d annexed the huge areas of Siberia, the North Korean military had been busy, installing Army and Air Force bases, setting up listening posts, and expanding the People’s Liberation Army electronic frontier.
So the only way Christopher knew they’d crossed into North Korean territory was because Bryce told him.
“Back into the shit,” Christopher sighed. They’d been in this area before, eighteen months earlier, crawling under stealth to a lab just outside of Pyongyang. At least Mary still had some of the intel and maps from that trip – those might come in handy this time around.
“Daniel, keep an eye on those cameras. If any North Korean patrols happen to wander into our path, I’d like to know about it sooner rather than –”
“Chris!” Anthony blurted out. “I got the squawk!”
“Can you pinpoint it?”
“We’re on it,” Mary said, rushing over to Anthony’s console and taking her netbook with her. They were quiet for a moment, and Christopher knew better than to ask for a status. They needed time to work.
Nobody spoke for several long seconds. Christopher could even hear Bryce breathing next to him. Finally, Mary’s head popped up and swiveled over to Martin and Carson.
“They look to be following the path the program mapped out for them,” she said. “I’m feeding coordinates to the nav computer and your tablet now.”
“Got ‘em. You sure these calculations are right?” Martin asked, scratching idly at the scar on his face.
“Pretty damn close,” Anthony said. “They maintain this speed and direction, we can have them in five minutes.”
“Bryce?” Christopher asked, turning to see that his driver had the nav coordinates up on his screen.
