Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series)

by Shawn Kupfer

  The ELR was completely invisible again now that the door was closed, but from the way his people dove to the side of the road, Christopher figured it was moving. Dammit. Missed them again, he thought. He saw his people get up and run back toward their own Razor, and Daniel took up a firing position again. He let a few rounds fly, and Christopher saw advancing North Korean soldiers drop. He felt the tap on his leg again as Daniel reloaded, so Christopher fired more rounds downrange, doing his best to keep clear of his team. They vanished back into the Razor, and Daniel tapped Christopher’s leg again – the young man was reloaded and ready to fire.

  Christopher saw the Storm Tiger tank suddenly explode into flames – Bryce must have gotten the Razor’s missile pods locked on to the larger vehicle. The APC was in bad shape, too, riddled with .50 caliber bullets, all eight tires shredded. The APC’s main gun had been battered all to hell, and there was no way it was a threat anymore.

  Daniel casually rolled over on his back and started putting the scope back on his rifle. He turned his head to the side and spit out a mouthful of water, what was left of the snow that had been masking his breath, and laid his rifle on his chest. He grabbed Christopher’s M4 and held his hand out for the scope, which he had reattached in two seconds after Christopher handed it over.

  “OK. They should be coming for us soon,” Daniel said. “Until then... well, if anyone comes at us, we’re going to know about it. They have a big, empty field to cross, and we’re not going to have any trouble picking them off.”

  “What about the lens reflections? The vapor?” Christopher asked.

  “If they had a sniper at the base, he would have shot us already,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “None of their other shots even got close. We’re probably clear.”

  “Probably?”

  “No use worrying about it now if we’re not,” Daniel said, handing back the M4 and rolling back onto his stomach.

  “That’s comforting,” Christopher muttered, looking through his scope at the North Korean camp.

  “We put a good 25, 30 rounds downrange. Any decent sniper would have zeroed in on us after that many. If they have one, and he’s still alive, then he sucks,” Daniel said, sighting and firing. Through his scope, Christopher saw a North Korean soldier who had been setting up a machine gun drop to the snow. Another soldier rushed up to take his place, but Daniel dropped him, too.

  Christopher saw a door on one of the temporary buildings open, saw a soldier with an RPG rush out. He had him in his sights, and he let a couple of rounds go. He saw the snow kick up next to the man, then saw him go down. He fired a couple more rounds, but the soldier wasn’t moving.

  “Nice shooting, Chief,” Daniel commented.

  “You shot him for me, didn’t you?”

  “Nah. Really, all you,” Daniel said, but Christopher could see a grin on one side of the man’s face.

  “Gunny, we’re swinging back to pick you up. Request you be on the road in 3-0 seconds,” Carson radioed.

  “Roger that,” Christopher said.

  Daniel was up and moving before Christopher even gave the order. As one, the two of them sprinted for the road, both firing rounds at the North Korean camp as they ran. A few bullets flew in their general direction, but the fire was inaccurate. As soon as Christopher’s boots hit the pavement, the Razor’s back hatch opened up, and he and Daniel scrambled inside. The hatch slammed shut behind them, and Christopher tossed his M4 to Gabriel and started stripping off the parka and shell pants as he made his way to the front of the vehicle.

  “We fucking missed them again,” he growled as he threw the parka on the floor behind him.

  “That’s affirmative, Gunny,” Carson said, shaking his head.

  “I don’t think they’re gonna get too far,” Martin told him, standing up from his chair and crossing over to Mary’s station. “You guys managed to take out one of them, and I got a frag in through the door before they took off.”

  “Obviously someone was still alive enough to drive the thing away,” Christopher said.

  “Correct. But a frag grenade going off inside a Razor is sure to fuck up their day,” Carson said. “If it didn’t kill anyone else, it at least damaged some of their equipment. If we’re lucky...”

  “Oh, we’re lucky,” Mary said, looking up from her computer and punching Martin in the shoulder.

  “Ow,” Martin muttered.

  “Mary? What do you have?” Christopher asked.

  “Looks like Martin’s grenade rolled to the back of the truck. Their stealth – not the adaptive camouflage, but the electronic counterinterference – is leaking.”

  “Leaking?” Gabriel asked. “What does that mean?”

  “It means they’re sending out some signals intermittently,” Martin explained. “And if the frag really did fuck up their stealth station...”

  “Then they have no idea we can track them,” Carson said, smiling.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Depression

  When Nick started having conversations with people who weren’t there, he reluctantly had to admit it was time to ease off on the Dextroamphetamine.

  He’d been motoring along for the last hour or so, not really noticing anything amiss, when he’d heard his brother Stan ask him a question. Not a deep, philosophical question about the meaning of life, nothing personal about their shared childhood bouncing back and forth between the homes of divorced parents. Nope. Stan had simply asked him where he’d left the keys to his 1996 Jaguar XJS.

  “Ask Cedric. I gave the car to him when he turns 16, remember?” Nick said, not taking his eyes off the road.

  “Right. Thanks, bro. Will do,” Stan said from what Nick guessed was the passenger seat. When he turned his head slightly to the right, though, he saw the chair was empty.

  And that was when the logical part of his brain kicked in and realized, clearly and without surprise, that he’d just had an auditory hallucination. It presented this realization to Nick calmly, as if it was reminding him to make sure the lights were off in his apartment before he left.

  Hey, Nick. You’re cracking up, it would have said if he could have heard it. But he didn’t, not like he’d clearly heard his brother, currently somewhere in New Jersey, asking him a stupid question about a stupid set of keys.

  “OK. Here’s where I’m at,” Nick said to the logical part of his brain that he couldn’t hear. “Yeah, I just had a hallucination. And that’s not good. But I’m driving just fine. I’m alert, awake, doing my job. Stopping right now would not be a good idea.”

  Come on, man, the logical part of his brain chided. A hallucination is something of a red flag, don’t you think? It’s not like your situation is going to get better from here.

  “So I should just pull over and find a place to sack out? With the entirety of the People’s Liberation Army on my tail?”

  Well, you’re now having a conversation – out loud – with your own brain, to which you seem to have assigned a distinct, separate personality. What do you think?

  “All right, you have a point there,” Nick almost said, but didn’t. He thought it instead, which seemed slightly less crazy than continuing to talk to himself out loud.

  The sun was rising out his passenger window as he rolled along the long, desolate highway. He’d seen more cars on the road in the past several hours, so it looked like traffic was going to start ramping up soon. If he could find a place to stash his car away from public view, maybe he could catch a few hours of sleep before continuing on. He knew that the last double-dose of Dexedrine he took would be losing its effect soon, and if he didn’t take another one, he’d be dead tired within the hour.

  The hallucination, he knew, was just emblematic of a larger problem. If he took another pill on top of the – three? four? five? – days of constant dosing, he was risking a heart attack. If he didn’t take one, he’d fall asleep at the wheel and die in a fiery wreck when that extra fuel at the back of the car decided to blow. Really, it was just choosing whic
h way he wanted to die if he kept driving. And the fact that he couldn’t remember how many days he’d been up cemented the decision for him.

  Staying away from a city or town was paramount. Cities meant surveillance, surveillance meant being recognized by the all-powerful PLA computer core. If he really was doing the Los Angeles to Cleveland run, the solution would have been simple – find an abandoned barn, drive right in, and sack out in the car for as long as he felt he safely could. He remembered the interstates in the States were littered with abandoned farms. Here, he was close to the coast again, and had been seeing buildings on either side – residential and commercial zones – off and on for the last hour. It looked like an abandoned farm wasn’t going to happen.

  Just as he thought that, the buildings on either side vanished, and he was surrounded by farmland as far as he could see. At the next intersection, he turned left – away from the coast – and the farmland continued. The sun was coming up, and in the dawn light, he saw more and more rolling farmland, but no buildings. Nowhere to hide the car. There was, however, an area bordered by thick, leafy trees, all of them the same height and shape. They’d been planted intentionally – a windbreak, perhaps. Nick had been to one farm on an elementary-school field trip. He was a city kid, so he had no idea if these trees were there for a reason. But they provided decent cover from the road, and there was a dirt path just wide enough for his car leading into the grove.

  The center of the grove was open, flat, grassy land, but he found a spot under the thick trees at the lower right corner of the grove where he was sure he couldn’t be seen from the road. There seemed to be enough cover over the car, as well, so he was reasonably certain the car wasn’t visible from the air, either. He turned off the car, closed his eyes...

  And opened them again. The sky outside still looked the same – not dark, not light. Nick was entirely sure he’d blinked, not slept, especially as he still felt exhausted. Exhausted and starving. He tore into some raw kale and dumplings Feng had packed for him, and washed them down with a half-liter of water. It was only after he ate that he thought to check his watch.

  He’d slept for 13 hours, and he felt like he hadn’t slept at all. It was twilight, not dawn, and now that he looked around, he could see that time had indeed passed. There were leaves and sap on the windshield that hadn’t been there when he closed his eyes. He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine turned over immediately. He pulled the car out of the grove, and as soon as he hit the pavement, he hammered the accelerator to the floor.

  “Gotta make up some lost time,” he mumbled to no one.

  This time, no one answered. Not his brother on another continent, not a fractured part of his own brain. Just silence. That was reassuring.

  “So here’s the plan,” he told himself, mostly confident that no one would answer. “Go for as long as you can without any stimulants, but stopping again is a no-go. You’re lucky you didn’t get caught that time.”

  He said that bit out loud, but the plan was already taking shape in his head. He’d try the energy drinks first, at the sign of the first yawn. That would keep him off the Dexedrine longer. But he knew he couldn’t avoid the pills, and that he’d have to take them sooner or later. He just hoped that when he made it back to American lines, he got a couple of days to sleep it off and detox.

  As he jumped back onto the expressway, his mood suddenly crashed.

  There’s no way you’re going to make it out.

  The thought was clear in his head, unshakable, unassailable in its truth. He was fighting a hopeless battle. Even now, thanks to heading the wrong way initially and taking a circuitous route as mapped out by Jason Black’s GPS, he was no more than 50 miles from where he started more than 18 hours ago. The sketchiness of the North Korean extension of the all-powerful PLA computer network would only hold so long – it was probably back up to full strength now.

  He thought of Christopher Lee as his brother, and trusted the man with his life... but without Nick there to protect his people, he got the horrible feeling that Christopher wouldn’t survive the war. None of them would. The brass would put Christopher in charge of 47 Echo for a while, but the strength of the unit was all of them together – they’d seen that in the Battle of Neryugn, when Nick had been stateside after his conviction was overturned. When one part of the machine was removed, the machine broke down. 47 Echo would be broken up, scattered to the winds... no one would be there to watch each other’s backs.

  Nick realized with a start that this was the first time he’d thought about Christopher and his unit in days. He wondered where they were now, what they were doing. Colonel Ross had promised them training, but that was before the mission to take down the PLA network, before the counterattacks that had to be happening now, or at least in the mail. They were probably out on a mission, and Nick wasn’t there to shepherd them through it. He wasn’t there to keep his people safe. And that was the whole reason he’d joined the Marines after the justice system had rebooted his case and made him a free man, wasn’t it?

  “There’s just no point,” Nick surprised himself by saying out loud. And as soon as the words were out of his mouth, floating around the cabin of the compact Chinese-made custom car, he felt it in his chest – the heaviness of truth. Of certainty.

  He might as well just keep heading for the water, drive the F3 into it, and let himself sink right to the bottom of the East China Sea.

  The radio next to him on the passenger seat, partially covered by the bag the kale had formerly occupied, crackled to life.

  “Target reacquired. Moving north on the G25 Changshen Expressway, approaching Binzhou. Estimated time of arrival, less than 10 minutes,” a female voice on the radio said.

  Nick checked his GPS – he was approaching Binzhou on that very expressway. They’d found him, somehow.

  “Do we have assets in Binzhou?” a male voice asked after a short moment.

  “Checking. There is a small detachment of the Beijing Military Region Special Forces Unit in Binzhou. Troop strength: four operators. It was their UAV that picked up the car,” the woman responded.

  “Put them on alert. Advise use of nonlethals only – orders are to take him alive,” the man told her.

  “Confirmed. Unit is activated and in-place. UAV is tracking.”

  Well, no need to drive into the sea now, Nick thought. But even as the thought came into his head, he felt his shoulders tighten up, his grip on the steering wheel ratcheting down.

  Anger. It came on quickly, out of nowhere, and washed over him in a comforting, red haze. The anxiety, the depression of the past several minutes dissolved into the anger like sugar in hot coffee, becoming invisible, indistinguishable from the building rage. Nick smiled, aware of how fucked up a smile in that situation was and not caring. This was anger. This, he knew how to deal with.

  And there was one thing he of which he was now perfectly certain. These four guys weren’t going to take him out. Fuck that. They’d need twice that many. Ten times that many. Nick was going to barrel through them and keep going, get back to his people. He pulled the car to the side of the road and grabbed his M4 from the seat next to him.

  “But first, I’m going to kill that fucking UAV,” he growled, kicking the door open.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Crystal Clear

  “No use, Gunny. He’s not there long enough before Daniel turns his skull into pudding,” Carson said, shaking his head.

  The two of them were at Daniel’s camera station, going through the video of the incident back at the North Korean camp. Even slowed down to a frame a second, they couldn’t clearly see the man Daniel shot with any clarity. He was on the ground a half a second before Daniel’s bullet slammed into his skull from almost a half-mile away. Christopher was in awe of the kid’s reactions and aim without a scope, but now he wasn’t sure who was left in the ELR.

  “Well, I mean, we know he’s black,” Christopher said, shrugging. “So it’s either Washington or Hardy. If w
e luck out, it’s Hardy, their tech guy.”

  “Luck hasn’t really been on our side, Chief,” Gabriel said.

  “You’ve got a point there,” Christopher mumbled.

  “Even if we didn’t get their tech guy, the signals I’m getting means he wouldn’t have been able to fix their stealth leaks anyway,” Mary said, walking up to join the small cluster standing around the camera station. “If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say we knocked out the whole stealth station. Unless they’re rolling with a shitload of spare parts...”

  “So their stealth is wonky,” Christopher said, nodding. “How are we doing with tracking them?”

  “Could be worse,” Mary said, waving for Christopher to follow her back to her station. On one of her netbooks, she had a map displayed, five square miles in area. She tapped a key, and tiny green dots started to appear.

  “That’s all from their stealth leaks?” Christopher asked.

  “Yeah, but that’s not all from our instruments. Sergeant Richmond is listening in on the North Korean comms. They’re tracking, too. And their listening posts have better instrumentation than our truck.”

  Christopher nodded.

  “The NoKos are transmitting on open frequencies?”

  “Nah. They’re encrypted. The guys at Carbon-4 just broke this encryption, like, two days ago. Dr. Auffrey loaded the decryption into our computers before we left. They’ll figure it out eventually, but...”

  “Understood. This stuff is going up to Bryce?”

  “Yep.”

  “Awesome. Keep me posted,” Christopher said, standing to his full height and stretching his arms. Long stretches in the Razor reminded him of the flight from Daytona to Vegas. The seats were larger and more comfortable, slightly, but still – sitting down too long made his legs cramp up and his lower back ache.

  As he walked back toward the front of the vehicle, he passed the fold-down racks. Peter, Daniel, Martin, and Anthony were crashed out. He’d decided to try and get a sleep rotation going now that the mission had gone over a couple of days – there were still at least three more days before they even got close to Pyongyang, and they couldn’t all stay up forever. Peter would run the mission while Christopher caught sleep, and vice-versa. And though it was Peter’s scheduled downtime, Christopher was suddenly exhausted. He figured he’d at least catch some rest in the passenger seat – Bryce would wake him up if anything happened.