by Shawn Kupfer
He never made it to the front of the Razor, though. Carson, manning the comm station, put out a hand to stop him.
“What’s up, Sergeant?” Christopher asked, stifling a yawn.
“Traffic. We just passed a NoKo listening post,” he said, but Christopher could already tell this wasn’t ordinary traffic. Carson looked like someone had punched him in the gut.
“Bad news, isn’t it?”
“Afraid so. They picked up a laser transmission,” Carson started.
“Another meeting with the guys in the ELR?”
“No. This one was a simple locator signal, tripped by getting within range of a pre-programmed station.”
“So what’s the problem? That’s part of how we’re tracking them, right?”
“That’s the thing – I’m 99 percent sure this transmission didn’t come from them. They’re saying ‘Razor 2,’ and the traffic popped up right as we passed the post.”
Christopher’s instinct was to ask if Carson was sure, but he didn’t need to. He felt his stomach drop, swallowed hard to keep the bile in his throat. It didn’t even matter if Carson was sure – Christopher was.
“We don’t have one of those laser transmitters on this Razor,” Christopher said after swallowing again.
“We’re not supposed to. But before we left, we had techs from Umbra crawling all over this thing,” Carson said.
Christopher noticed then that Carson was keeping his voice down, more than he needed to keep from waking the sleeping crew. It took Christopher a second before he realized what Carson was saying without using words.
“My people are solid, Sergeant.”
“Oh, I know, I just...”
“I think I know what you ‘just.’ Just make sure you don’t do it again, yeah?”
Carson nodded, but Christopher could see his jaw move. I wonder if my jaw moves like that when someone calls me on my shit, he wondered. Part of him didn’t want to blame Carson for the assumption – after all, 47 Echo was technically full of criminals. But Christopher bristled at the suggestion any of his people would betray them. He knew them all too well after all these months. They weren’t his crew anymore – they were family.
“Now, how do we shut that thing down?” Christopher asked.
“Finding it is going to be the first thing,” Carson said. “They really could have put it anywhere on the truck. I’d start with having your tech girl back there run a power trace, see if it’s hooked in to the Razor’s main power grid. But I doubt it is. It’s probably running off its own power source.”
“And then?”
“We’d have to physically go through everywhere it could be on the Razor until we find it. Your guy up there, Bryce. He knows the Razors pretty well?”
“Better than most, I’d say.”
“I’ll get with him and we can start putting together a list of likely places someone could’ve installed it.”
Christopher stood and cleared his throat.
“Listen up,” he said, his voice not quite a shout. “We have a situation.”
Peter’s head popped up from his rack, and Christopher saw the others starting to stir.
“What’s up, Chief?” Peter asked, yawning.
“Our Razor is dirty, transmitting tracking signals to the North Koreans,” Christopher started.
“For real?” Gabriel asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Unfortunately. It seems that someone installed a laser comm like the one the ELR has on our truck before we left Carbon-4. We need to find it and shut it down. Mary –”
“I’ll run a trace to see if it’s pulling from the Razor’s main power,” she said.
“Good. If it isn’t, though, we’re going to have to stop somewhere and physically pull the thing off the truck.”
“Stopping is going to fuck us, Chris,” Bryce said. “We’re barely staying with these guys as it is. If they get out of range, we’re going to have to depend on the North Koreans for tracking data. And if they get too far ahead, we’ll never catch them.”
“Well, then we’d better do this quick. Mary, let me know the second you have an answer on the power question. I’m going to get on with Captain Neal and let him know we have someone dirty at Carbon-4.”
“Two minutes,” Mary said.
Christopher nodded and pulled out the old iPhone. It still had a decent charge, so he brought up the texting interface and tapped in a message. Our Razor compromised. Someone at Carbon-4 put a laser comm system onboard. It’s in contact with NoKos.
The return message took only seconds: Have you found and disabled the laser?
Not yet, Christopher typed. Working on it. Will advise.
I’ll start looking around here, see what I can find out, Neal responded.
Christopher stashed the phone back in his pocket and walked back to Mary’s station. She had data up on four screens, and seemed to be reading them all simultaneously. After a few seconds, she looked over at Christopher.
“Nothing. Power grid is clean.”
“That’s not what I wanted to hear,” Christopher said, sighing.
“Yeah. Especially since it means we’ll have to find a cover spot and shut down the adaptive camouflage. Can’t find a laser diode on the outside of the truck when we can’t see the outside of the truck.”
Christopher hadn’t thought of that. It was four in the afternoon, local time, which meant the sun was out. Even running under adaptive camouflage, they weren’t entirely invisible – the motion stutter problem – but dropping the camouflage in the daylight wasn’t going to happen unless they could find a large, abandoned building in which to park the Razor.
“All right. Start looking for a cover spot. Let Bryce know where he’s going.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
The phone buzzed in Christopher’s pocket as he headed back toward the passenger seat – the chair he’d been trying to get to for what felt like hours now. He pulled it from his cargo pocket without breaking stride, plopping down in the chair before he checked the message.
This Dr. Auffrey. He cool? the text from Neal read.
Seemed to be. He just wants his truck back, Christopher texted back.
That’s my read. I need him to help me shake down his techs. We’ll find some answers for you soon.
“You look awful, Chief,” Bryce commented without looking over at him.
“Yeah, I could use a nap. I’m about to get all fussy,” Christopher replied, shooting him a halfhearted grin.
“Take a nap. Mary’ll be a few minutes finding me somewhere to stash this thing. Ten, fifteen minutes won’t fix the problem, but it’ll make you feel a hell of a lot better.”
“You’re like that cop-out character in movies,” Christopher said, his grin slightly less halfhearted now.
“Eh?”
“You know. The guy who comes in and gives the main character the exact advice he needs at the exact moment he needs it.”
“So, by your logic, you’re the main character?”
Before Christopher could come up with a decent response, Mary interrupted them, calling from the back of the Razor.
“Think I’ve found us a spot,” she yelled.
“How close?” Christopher yelled back over his shoulder.
“A couple miles off the road. Good news – we’ll only have to sneak by a fully staffed NoKo military base in broad daylight to get there.”
“I’m not sure in what universe that qualifies as ‘good’ news,” Christopher muttered as the coordinates popped up on the screen in front of him.
“Got it. No worries, boss,” Bryce said, glancing at the screen between them. “We’ll be as quiet as a mouse.”
“Sure. A 24-ton, off-roading mouse.”
At 40 miles an hour, it only took three minutes before Christopher caught sight of the base. Where the small outpost before had one tank and one APC, this one had a row of Storm Tigers. In the afternoon sunshine, though, Christopher saw that the tanks wouldn’t be much of a threat – so
ldiers were crawling all over them with tools and diagnostic devices. Only one of the tanks even had a turret, but that one was missing its treads on both sides.
“It’s a repair depot,” Daniel said from the camera station. “A little over one klik out.”
“Slow it way, way down, Bryce,” Christopher ordered. “Below 10, the hybrid engine switches to all electric. Let’s not make any noise we don’t have to.”
“Roger that. I think I can squeeze us in behind those trees there. Should help cut the motion blur,” Bryce said, nodding at a thin line of dead trees to their left.
“Do it. Mike, Pete, ready on the fifties. I hope they don’t see us, but if they do –”
“Yep. Kill ‘em all,” Peter said, shooting Christopher a thumbs-up before climbing into his turret.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Just Another Soldier
Nick got lucky. The UAV tracking him was an older model, powered by turboprops rather than a jet engine. It was flying low and slow, keeping pace with his car. When he hopped out and turned on his TotalVis goggles, targeting it was easy enough. A few well-placed rounds from the M4 along the UAV’s body and rear-mounted propeller sent the thing crashing into the street.
“Let that be a lesson,” he grumbled to himself as he got back into the car. “Never stop the car again.”
He was sure that was what had screwed him. His vehicle had been motionless for 10, 11 hours – quite long enough for a UAV on a random search pattern to pick it up, and for the computers in the PLA network to tag his car as a likely match. In motion, he was much less likely to be spotted by random UAV flyovers. But though the UAV was dealt with, he had another problem to worry about. Namely, four elite PLA soldiers who were waiting for him somewhere around Binzhou.
He considered going straight through the center of the city – they might not expect that – but quickly nixed that idea in his own head. Inside the city, he’d have to not only deal with the four Special Forces guys, but any random civilians or military that happened to be floating around. If he went around Binzhou, they’d probably still find him. Hell, they’d probably expect it. But at least the odds were more likely to be four-on-one outside of the city than the unknown odds inside Binzhou.
He guessed the four Special Forces guys would come without backup. They had been tasked with taking him in by another secret, elite group – they probably wouldn’t risk bringing random grunts in on the job. And they probably figured that four of them could take one misplaced American Marine. Nick hoped they were wrong about that. He had one advantage he could think of: they were ordered to take him alive, and he had no such restriction.
There were two main roads that would take him around Binzhou, according to Black’s GPS – one to the west, one to the east. The eastern route was shorter, and thus, Nick reasoned, more likely to be covered by the Special Forces guys. The western route would add another half hour or more to his total drive time, but was probably less heavily guarded for that very reason – they’d assume he’d want to blow past the city quickly. They knew he was coming, as he’d shot down their UAV, so they’d probably already be in place at both roads. Perhaps one of them would be stationed at the main road through the city, as well, so Nick guessed two guys on the eastern bypass, one on the western, and one inside Binzhou.
Two-on-one. Totally acceptable odds, and he didn’t want to add the extra time to his trip. East it was.
Nick realized that he was humming as he drove along the eastern bypass. He couldn’t place the tune, but he wasn’t worried about it. He wasn’t worried about anything, actually – he was calm. Comfortable. Ready to face two, three, four guys who wanted to bonk him over the head and drag him off to an interrogation room, then to a Chinese prison camp. Sneaking around, driving along back roads trying not to get caught? That caused no small amount of anxiety. Knowing he was driving directly into an odds-off fight? Calm and humming some forgettable pop song.
Someone’s going to have to make an appointment with the Navy shrink when he gets back to base, Nick’s brain chided.
If I’m acting crazy, but I’m aware of how fucked up my thoughts and actions are, that means I’m not really crazy, right? Nick asked his brain.
I wouldn’t know. Oh, look out.
A monster APC, of a design Nick hadn’t yet encountered, was blocking both lanes in front of him, and he was speeding directly towards it. Nick slammed on the brakes, locking up the wheels and skidding to a stop about ten feet in front of the eight-wheeled monstrosity guarding the narrow eastern bypass. It looked like... well, almost like a Chinese knockoff version of a Razor.
There were three soldiers, not two, standing in front of the vehicle. They didn’t flinch, even when Nick’s car came within feet of crushing the one in the middle. He could see they were all armed, but not with standard assault rifles. Each of them had a shotgun in his hand.
Probably rubber slugs, Nick thought. He’d seen them in action before. He’d even fired them once. If he took one to the head, he was done, but he doubted these guys would do that – one of those rounds to the head could possibly kill him, and they wouldn’t want to take that chance. One to the chest would definitely slow him down, maybe even drop him. He’d have to play this one carefully.
Nick rolled down his window and put both of his hands outside the car.
“I won’t resist!” he shouted, trying hard to keep a grin from creeping onto his face.
“Step out of the car. Hands high,” the guard he’d nearly crushed said, his voice flat and hard.
Nick did as he was told, raising his hands above his head as he exited the vehicle and stood next to the open door on the pavement. Time slowed down for him. He was suddenly aware of everything, of the slight breeze coming from his left, the footsteps of the two other soldiers closing ranks toward the center. They were moving in fast, but Nick felt like it took forever.
“Are you armed?” the guard in the extreme right of his vision asked, coming towards the car with his shotgun held high.
“Assault rifle, passenger seat.”
The soldier slung his shotgun over his shoulder and reached for the door handle just as the other two soldiers got within arm’s length. Bad move, Nick thought, and suddenly, he was moving.
His right leg shot out low, catching the center soldier in his right kneecap. The cracking of bone as the soldier’s leg snapped back on itself barely had time to register before Nick crouched, avoiding the left-hand soldier’s sweep at him with the butt of his shotgun. As Nick popped back up and the center guard collapsed to the pavement screaming, Nick took advantage of the left-hand soldier’s off-balance position, wrapping his right arm around the man’s neck, locking it in place with his left, and spinning him to face the car just as the right-hand soldier got his shotgun up and fired.
Nick could feel the round hit through the man he held in front of him, smacking into the soldier’s chest dead-center. He hated to think how it would have felt if the round hit him – he could feel the soldier in the choke-hold go slack. Nick raised his right knee into the soldier’s back and pushed hard, simultaneously tightening the choke hold and putting pressure on the vertebrae. The man was unconscious in seconds.
That left one soldier of the elite Beijing Special Forces unit still standing. Nick had no intention of giving up his unconscious human shield, and as long as the guy was in front of him, they were at a stalemate.
“Put him down!” the last soldier yelled, coming around the back of the car, hoping to catch Nick exposed on his right side. Nick pivoted, keeping the human shield between him and the soldier. As he moved, he realized his right foot was now close to the kneecapped soldier, who was still screaming in agony. Nick fired a quick, low kick into the side of his head, knocking him out. At least he stopped screaming.
“Drop him right now,” the final soldier threatened, a growl rising in his throat.
“Or what? You’ll shoot him again?”
“Let him go,” the soldier responded. He was creeping clo
ser, hoping to make a move. Nick loosened his grip with his left hand, then suddenly let go of the soldier, kicking him hard in the back at the same time. The unconscious soldier flew into his compatriot, knocking him to the ground, and Nick pounced on both of them, landing on top of the heap and firing five quick, vicious punches into the final soldier’s face. He went out, but not without a fair amount of blood, a broken nose, and some broken teeth.
“Special forces my ass,” Nick spat, standing up and looking around him. No more soldiers came running out from the side of the road to kick his ass. No one hopped out of the APC with a gun pointed at him. Just him, three motionless soldiers, his car, and a monster APC.
From too much time spent in gyms and kung-fu kwoons in his youth, Nick knew he’d put quite a hurt on these three. They wouldn’t be conscious in the next minute or so, and their APC might have some gear he could use. He tried the side door and found it open, so he climbed inside and took a quick look around.
The APC’s loadout was pretty typical, much as he expected – guns, helmets, radios, body armor. He could use some of that last one, so Nick helped himself to a Kevlar vest that fit him pretty well. He also grabbed a helmet – never knew when that could come in handy – and one of their hand radios. The more he could keep an ear on traffic, the better. He also found a box of grenades, a backpack, and a long, serrated survival knife. His arms full of stolen gear, he hopped out of the APC, dumped his new toys in the car, and peeled off around the APC and the three unconscious Special Forces operators.
“One more guy,” Nick told himself as he slammed the accelerator to the floor and got back on the road.
