Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series)

by Shawn Kupfer

  Christopher sighed and nodded.

  “Then we came to the same conclusion.”

  “Spring Break in Pyongyang. Rip the city apart looking for it, and destroy anything we find even tangentially related to the Razor ELR. Fuck, we’ll have to smash anything that rhymes with Razor.”

  “I want you to pull Martin aside and find out what we’ve got for explosives. I need to know how much damage we can do.”

  “Right. Give me a minute.”

  Peter headed for the back of the truck and shook Martin awake. Their demolitions expert had been sleeping in his chair, but there hadn’t been much for him to do since the last search had gone tits-up. Most of the team had gotten used to catching a few minutes of sleep when they could. Christopher used to, before he was in command. Now he was awake almost all the time.

  “You know, we’re all going to die out here,” Christopher heard from his left. He looked down at Carson, whose face was split in a wide, goofy grin.

  “I thought the painkillers had you flying,” Christopher said.

  “Like an eagle. But they don’t make me stupid. We’re totally fucked, Gunnery Sergeant Christopher Lee.”

  “That’s an opinion I don’t happen to share.”

  Carson started twitching on his rack, and for a second, Christopher thought he needed to call for Gabriel – the guy was having a seizure. When he looked closer, though, the grin had turned into an open-mouthed smile. Carson was laughing.

  “Bullshit. You’ve been walking around like you’re already dead since I’ve been back here.”

  “Sergeant?” Christopher said, glancing toward the back of the truck. He saw Martin digging through his duffel bags.

  “Yeah, other Sergeant?” Carson said, still laughing soundlessly.

  “You’re working very hard to ensure that I dislike you. Now shut your face before I break it.”

  “Oh, certainly. Roger that, Gunnery Sergeant.”

  Carson kept jiggling on his rack, still laughing without making any noise, but thankfully stopped speaking. Peter and Martin joined them in the center of the Razor, and Martin had a grim look on his face.

  “Forty-five pounds of C4, Chief. Some odds and ends. If we can find where they’re storing the ELR in Pyongyang and set up all my shit inside it, I might be able to kill it. The ablative armor makes everything but an implosion a no-go with what I’ve got,” Martin said.

  “But he has another idea,” Peter said, frowning.

  “And it’s one I’m gonna hate, isn’t it?” Christopher asked.

  He already knew the answer.

  Martin pulled a tablet out of his cargo pocket and turned so Christopher could see the screen. He brought up a map of the area and zoomed in to the fourth hide.

  “This is the gold mine, about a hundred and ten miles north of the Amur River,” he said, swiping the map to zoom out. “Here’s the route back to Pyongyang, as suggested by the Easton program. That’s another, oh, buck twenty-five north of Amur, give or take.”

  “Bryce showed me this already,” Christopher said.

  “Yeah. But he didn’t show you this.”

  Martin pinched an area about halfway between the two points on the map, zooming way in. It didn’t look like much to Christopher – a collection of buildings.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Novy Urgal. Work camp created in the 1970s. Coal or some shit. But we have intel stating that the North Koreans have moved in and stashed some medium-range ordinance there.”

  “Ordinance of what type?” Christopher asked.

  “Look at how excited homeboy is,” Peter said, shaking his head. “You just know what kind.”

  “Nuclear,” Christopher said before Martin could.

  “That’s correct. The intel I’ve seen suggests that the NoKo brass wants to be ready to strike at both Russia and Alaska if they think things are going south on ‘em. Novy Urgal puts them in striking distance of both.”

  “But the Chinese leadership doesn’t want it to come to that, as near as we can tell,” Peter said.

  “Also correct. Which means the installation will probably only be guarded by a token complement. We’d have a shot at getting in.”

  “I knew I wasn’t going to like this,” Christopher grumbled.

  “You get me access to one of those MRBMs, and we won’t need to locate the Razor and get inside it. We’ll be able to detonate it and every bit of city surrounding it.”

  “And kill every innocent person in Pyongyang in the process.”

  Martin shrugged.

  That’s one sick fuck, Christopher thought.

  “I don’t like to agree with him, Chief, but they did wipe out a major city of ours. Payback,” Peter said.

  Christopher looked at his second and command and blinked for a few seconds, unable to form a thought. That wasn’t a sentence he’d expected to come from Peter’s mouth, not at all. It took him a few seconds, but he finally managed to start forming coherent thoughts again.

  “All right. If we don’t find the ELR at the mine – and I have to believe we will – we’ll put that option on the table. It’s on our way back to the route anyway. We could take a look.”

  “I’ll start putting a mission profile together,” Martin said. Catching the glare Christopher shot his way, he added: “In case.”

  Christopher didn’t like the idea at all. Just thinking about it made him feel like his stomach was full of ice and nails. He wiped a small bead of sweat from his mustache, even though the air conditioning in the Razor was keeping the temperature at a comfortable 70 degrees. He knew what a panic attack felt like – a roommate of his at college had them all the time – and the sweating was a precursor. He clamped his molars tightly and forced his brain to calm down, yelled at himself to pull his shit together right now.

  The panic feeling subsided, but Christopher still didn’t feel anywhere approaching “good.” He hated Martin’s cavalier attitude towards destroying a city half-full of civilians, but the only other plan Christopher could come up with – roll into Pyongyang and shoot their way to the ELR – had a survivability matrix so low it could be measured in negative numbers. Nuking the city might be the only option.

  It would make him, Christopher Lee, responsible for around four million deaths. He’d been sentenced to life in prison for two murders – what would the punishment be for four million? Could he live with that?

  He said a silent prayer, even though he’d never believed in a God and never been inside a church he wasn’t trying to rob, that he wouldn’t have to find out.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Self Defense

  Nick hoped he hadn’t hurt the kid who used to own this dirt bike too badly. He and his pal were obviously not North Korean soldiers, but they had wheels, and Nick needed those. He’d knocked one kid off his motorcycle by punching him directly in the chest, then put several rounds from his M4 into the second kid’s bike. Without saying a word, he hopped onto the stolen bike and tore off, heading north-ish.

  The bike was really a piece of shit. He didn’t recognize the manufacturer, but it was a cheap knockoff of a motocross bike. Still, it beat walking, and if he really pushed it, he could get it up to 45 miles an hour. He would have preferred if he could have stolen a helmet, as well, but neither of the kids had them.

  He’d learned to ride motocross at a relatively young age, thanks to a couple of high school friends with indulgent parents. His sophomore-year buddy Nate had almost gone pro, and had four or five bikes on his parents’ property just outside of LA. He’d often invite friends over to tear up the moto course he’d designed behind the house.

  He was Nick’s sophomore-year buddy because he’d snapped his neck the summer before junior year trying to do the course without a helmet. Nick tried not to think about that now as he pushed the crappy little bike as fast as it would go, thankful his TotalVis goggles were keeping the bugs out of his eyes.

  He didn’t have a clue as to where he was going, but north meant toward
Russia. South was bad. East was bad. West was eventually good, but not for a while... and it would take him back into China before it got decent. North was his only option.

  The road was straight and empty, for which Nick was grateful. He wasn’t inconspicuous by a long shot, riding without a helmet, his face plastered on every computer from here to Siberia. Even if he rode by fast enough that the cameras didn’t get a look at his face – unlikely with the shitty motorbike that had become his steed – the fact that he had an M4 strapped to his back would definitely give him away. Civilians didn’t bomb around North Korea with assault rifles – and Nick didn’t look Korean. Any Asian could tell he was Chinese mixed with... something. They might guess white, they might not. But any NoKo patrols definitely wouldn’t mistake him for one of their own.

  And Ghost wouldn’t have given up. Nick wasn’t entirely sure how the alliance between China and North Korea worked, as it really didn’t impact the way he did his job day to day. Was there a jurisdiction thing going on there? Could Chinese troops enter North Korea whenever they wanted? Would there be a paperwork delay before Ghost could flat-out hunt him down in North Korea?

  Nick doubted it. Even if there was bureaucracy to deal with, Ghost would most likely circumvent or ignore it. That was the way Special Operations forces worked – they didn’t ask permission to go into other sovereign countries. They just slipped in, did their jobs, and got out. That was what his dad had done for many years, and that was what Nick and his team did all the time. Ghost wouldn’t wait to track him down. They were already here, hunting. And Nick had no ideas as to how to avoid them.

  Staying off the main road would be a good first step, if he knew which road was the main one. He might not even be on the main road now – hell, this might be the only road for hundreds of miles. Geography was one of those things that he’d never been good at. In LA, he could barely find his way to the corner without GPS.

  Any way he sliced it, Nick was exposed. Apart from a general northerly vector, he had no idea where he was going, much less where he was. Road signs here were in Korean – which he didn’t speak – and, in some places, still in Russian, which he also didn’t speak. He was less a sitting duck at this point; more a duck in a flamboyant coat walking around directly in front of a hunter, daring him to pull the trigger.

  Any confidence in his situation he’d built up during his balls-crazy escape at the border was fading away, replaced by cold blue fear that hurt his bones. As apathetic as he seemed in front of his people about the always-real, ever present likelihood of death, he at that moment realized that the thought of not existing scared the shit out of him. And the fact that he was scared pissed him off.

  Killing, on the other hand, didn’t bother him. He’d kill as many people as he needed to in order to keep breathing.

  At least he seemed to be alone, and had been for the last 20 minutes. There were no cars, no people, not even birds. Ghost must have been miles off-course in their search for him. Logically, they’d probably still be within a few miles of the border, assuming Nick hadn’t been able to sprint most of the night.

  It was as he has that thought that a black sedan pulled out of the woods a hundred yards in front of him and stopped, blocking both lanes. The driver-side door opened, and Nick cranked the bike’s throttle with his right hand as he fumbled for his pistol with his left. It was at a bad angle, tucked in his belt on his right side – he didn’t even touch the weapon before a man stepped out of the car and trained an assault rifle on him.

  Nick put the bike into a slide, intending to shoot right, either off-road or around the sedan – he didn’t know which even as he made the move. He just knew he was going away from the guy with the gun. Unfortunately, the slide exposed the bike’s entire left side, and slowed Nick down enough that he was an easy target. He heard the three quick pops and felt the bike fall apart under him. He knew without looking that the gunman had shredded the shitty motorcycle’s back wheel. He also knew that he was now on the losing end of a thirty-mile-an-hour fight with the pavement.

  He’d taken spills on motorcycles before, and knew he had to get his right leg out from under the bike before it hit the ground. He knew what he needed to do, but he wasn’t quite fast enough to get it done. The motorcycle came down between his knee and his ankle, and the whole mess – Nick, shitty knockoff bike, and all – slid into the sedan’s back tire.

  “Keeping the motion to a minimum would be your best course of action,” the man with the gun said softly as Nick yanked his leg from under the bike.

  Nick glared up at the man, only now getting a good look at him. He was older, in his late 40s, with a bit of gray in his longish black hair. He had the beginnings of a beard going, and was dressed in civilian clothes – jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt. He wasn’t a civilian, though – he had a PLA-issue Kevlar vest over his shirt, and his QBZ-95 assault rifle was standard equipment. The way he moved – knees bent, small, quick steps as he closed the distance between himself and Nick – special operations.

  Ghost.

  “Don’t think I’m going anywhere anyway,” Nick said, gesturing to his right leg. “Think I blew out my knee.”

  His knee hurt, sure, but Nick was almost certain he could stand on it. He’d taken most of the impact and short slide on the outer part of his right foot – a part of his body the U.S. Marine Corps doctors had thoughtfully replaced with black metal prosthetics a year before when the distal three toes had been blown off.

  “All the same, let’s just stay still, all right?” the man said, his gun aimed dead-center at Nick’s forehead. The gunman’s face was calm, his eyes clear and unblinking, like he’d backed an injured rattlesnake into the corner of his house and was just waiting for the right moment to swoop in, chop its head off, and throw it into the back yard.

  “Fine. Not moving,” Nick said, dropping his hands to the pavement.

  “Good man. You led my boys on quite a chase, Lieutenant Morrow. That thing back at the border? Insane.”

  “Your boys?

  “Oh, yeah. Me. Major Chen. Trenton Chen. I’m in charge of Ghost.”

  “Trenton?”

  “My parents gave me a Chinese name, but it’s embarrassing. Not too popular to go by your Westernized name these days, but better than the alternative. All right. Slowly, into the car. You’ve probably already figured out that we’re not out to kill you, but I can certainly fuck you up pretty badly. Clear?”

  “You’re going to have to help me up,” Nick said, sighing.

  “Fuck that. Crawl.”

  Nick pushed himself up onto his hands and left knee, keeping his right leg limp and useless behind him. He was still pretty sure the damage was minimal, despite the arcing jolts of pain extending from his toes to the bottom of his spine, but there was no use in letting Trenton know about that.

  “Around the car. Passenger seat. If you suddenly think about reaching for that M4 on your back, I’ll draw your attention to about ten meters back down the road,” Trenton said, jerking his head to the right.

  Nick looked, and his M4 was sitting perfectly along the centerline of the road. It was well out of reach, but he hadn’t even realized it had come off his back in the crash. His pistol was gone too, but he couldn’t see where it was. He started to crawl, slowly, around the back side of the car, dragging his right leg behind him. The blood trickling along as he crawled helped sell the leg as useless, and worried Nick slightly. He hadn’t thought he was that badly injured.

  Chen walked in front of Nick, backpedaling, keeping his QBZ-95 trained on him at all times.

  “Really, jumping out of the car and scrambling over a fucking tank. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it,” Trenton said. “That’s not something they’re teaching at Parris Island.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Nick said. He was sweating, and the jolts of pain were getting worse. He wasn’t sure he was acting like his right leg was useless anymore.

  “San Diego?”

  “Nope.”r />
  “Oh, that’s right. You’re one of the xingshi soldiers.”

  Nick didn’t say anything. Trenton had used the word “criminal” rather than “quifan” – convict. He meant it as an insult. Nick didn’t bite. He just kept crawling, rounding the back of the car and heading for the passenger door.

  “Door?” Nick said as he got closer.

  Without taking his eyes off Nick, Trenton backed up two steps and reached for the door handle. As he opened the door, Nick made his move, launching himself into the air with everything he had.

  The tackle wouldn’t impress the NFL scouts back home – Nick hit more door than he did person – but it did the job. The door slammed into Trenton, and Trenton fell back. Nick heard the Major’s head thud against the pavement, and as he got his feet under him and moved around the door, he could see Trenton was down, but not yet out. His eyes were glazed over, and he was fumbling for the pistol in his belt. Nick didn’t give him the chance to pull it.

  He dove, landing on top of the Major. He felt his left knee drive into Trenton’s rib cage, felt bones cracking underneath it. Trenton made a sound, half-cough, half-yelp, but Nick drove his right fist directly into the Major’s face.

  Punching someone in the head was a bad idea under normal circumstances. The skull was hard, full of jagged teeth and solid bone that could break every bone in one’s hand. There were only a few spots Nick could hit without doing as much damage to his fist as he did to Trenton’s face – the nose, the eyes, the area just under the eye sockets. Nick hit none of these, his punch landing on Trenton’s lower jaw. He brought his left down on the Major’s face, this time scoring a perfect hit on the left eye. His right, now streaming blood, smashed into Trenton’s nose. The Major was out, but that didn’t stop Nick from delivering another left into Trenton’s cheek.

  “Should have worn a helmet, Trenton,” Nick spat, pulling himself to his feet.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Machine

  “Burning daylight out here, Chief,” Peter’s voice floated over the comm line.