by Scott Blade
What if they caught a Navy SEAL helping aliens extract through their territory?
Widow did not want to think about what would happen then.
They crossed around a frozen, overturned boat. Left in the river, probably because it was abandoned. The ice twisted it and overturned it and captured it until the spring.
They followed a path beyond it the rest of the way. It wound and twisted until they stepped over the last patch of ice.
Widow saw Kweon breathe out. The breath came out cold and frosted and smoky.
“We’re almost there,” he said.
Kweon nodded and smiled.
They approached the road, which was half covered in snow and ice. Plenty of areas were shoved away from car traffic over the course of the day.
Widow looked both ways, a habit and a precaution.
He saw nothing in the gloom. No traffic. No headlights. Nothing but drifting fog. And yellow vapor lights. He could see them for a long distance in both directions. They were above the low mist.
The lights shone hazy and bleak and high in the air. Most of them were on. Some spots where he expected lights were black. Many of them flickered and gleamed like extinguishing firebugs in the dark.
The air was growing wet, like the rain might come at any moment, or the snow.
He motioned for Kweon and his family to follow. And he led them across the dark highway. Everything was still.
Widow saw the girl with the volcanic eyes look around. Not with fear in her eyes but a kind of bravery. He recognized it. He had seen it countless times in the eyes of sailors and Marines. Common among the military. Rare for a little girl.
The highway was like a road out of a post-apocalyptic future. The last road made by man to survive the inevitable nuclear war.
Huge sections of concrete, exposed in the snow and ice, were cracked and broken.
The trees on the other side were white and dead. They climbed up over rugged hills and down into valleys.
Widow took a look in Lyn’s direction. The highest of a clutter of abandoned structures. He couldn’t see Lyn in the dark. But he knew he was there with the sniper rifle.
Widow looked back at Kweon’s face, which was frozen. His body was frozen. The boy had stopped. The girl with the volcanic eyes had stopped.
Lyn came back on Widow’s ear receiver.
“Truck! Truck!”
“Where?”
“From the north!”
Widow froze in place, looked north. He saw faint headlights in the mist. But they were coming on. Fast.
“Got eyes on the driver?”
“Affirmative.”
“A passerby?”
But Widow knew the answer right then and there. Lyn didn’t need to answer.
Widow knew because after he saw the headlights, he saw blue and red lights rotating from a police light bar.
CHAPTER 15
“MILITARY!” LYN SAID.
Widow put a hand signal up to the Kweon family to stop in their tracks.
He stayed quiet.
They stayed quiet.
No one moved. They were frozen in place like the countless dead people in frozen waters behind them.
Widow waited.
The vehicle was headed right for them. Maybe it was two or three klicks away.
“Head count?”
Lyn said, “Can’t tell. More than one.”
“Okay.”
“Back! Get Back!”
Widow waved the family back to the snow and ice.
They may or may not have understood the words, but they understood the urgency.
The son took the mother and helped move her away. The father and the daughter followed close behind. Widow stayed in the back. He waited till they were out in the darkness, then he waited behind five meters. Out of earshot.
“We can’t get compromised here,” Lyn said.
“I know.”
“I should take them out. If they stop.”
“No. Sit on it. I repeat, observe only.”
Silence for a moment, and then Lyn said, “Affirmative, Lieutenant.”
Widow looked back at the family. They were behind a snow bank. He turned and ran toward them. He dipped down behind a dead tree stump. Frozen over, like everything else.
He sat back, his back against the icy, lifeless wood.
He watched the lights. The blue and red grew huge in the mist. The beams vapored and washed over the road.
The vehicle was coming on fast. The slipstream echoed and cracked in the wind. The tires rolled and crunched on the pavement. The engine thumbed in the silence.
“Ten seconds.”
Widow clicked the MP5SD to full auto. He pulled the bandana up over his mouth and nose. In case he was spotted. A white man in northern China on a guarded border would be more easily identifiable than the abominable snowman.
He waited.
Took slow breaths.
The vehicle approached.
“Five seconds.”
Silence.
“They’re slowing.”
“Shit.”
“They’re stopping. Side of the road. One on the dial.”
Widow stayed quiet. He pushed off the stump and faced the direction of the headlights. Peeked around the stump.
The vehicle was a Chinese police SUV. It was ancient, but well maintained. Some kind of Mitsubishi, Widow figured.
The engine idled. He didn’t hear the driver slip the gear into park. But he heard the passenger door open. He heard voices. Speaking Chinese. It was too far from his throat mic for Lyn to pick up what they were saying.
It didn’t matter anyway.
Widow understood the context. They were suspicious of something in that vicinity.
Maybe thirty miles of abandoned highway. On a frozen river. In the early hours of the morning. It didn’t take a nuclear scientist to figure out they were there to search for the defectors.
Did the North Koreans call them?
Widow had no idea.
“Two. Three. Four guys,” Lyn said.
Widow stayed quiet.
“Three on foot. The fourth is still in the cab. Behind the wheel.”
Widow looked over at the Kweons. He saw the volcanic eyes peering from over the snow bank. She looked right at him. Pleading. Afraid.
Then her father appeared behind her. Low down. He put a hand on her shoulder and whispered to her. A comforting word from a concerned father.
Widow was struck with wonderment about what it must’ve been like to live under North Korean conditions.
Horrifying.
He imagined.
Widow pulled the MP5SD up. Slipped his finger into the trigger housing. Readied himself.
“Lieutenant, they’re drawing weapons.”
He heard it. Right then. All sidearms. Wait. One of them just took out a rifle.”
“What kind?” Widow asked. Not that it mattered.
Chinese police have numbers on their side. But they have ancient ordinance. Some of their rifles and weapons were the same ones they had carried for five decades or more. Unless these guys were special units. Which was why Widow had asked about their weapons.
“Looks like a QZB-95.”
Not the ideal answer, but better than something else. The QZB-95 was a bullpup-style assault rifle. It was effective in the right hands. Widow assumed that if only one guy had it, then he was the right guy for it.
“What else?”
“The sidearms are all revolvers.”
Widow breathed a sigh of relief. Not intentional. Just by instinct. Chinese police with revolvers meant they were what were called frontmen or beat cops. Basically. Although, these guys might’ve been a little higher than foot patrol. They were assigned to the border. But then again, they could’ve been some kind of highway patrol equivalent.
Better than special units.
Widow said, “Keep eyes on them.”
“Roger.”
How did they see the Kweons? All the way out here
?
They had crossed the frozen river. In the dark. In the thick mist.
Widow looked back out over the river. He saw faint lights. Maybe two miles away. Nothing coming their way. Not a truck or a helicopter or snowmobile. Widow could recall the same lights being on for most of the night.
He assumed they were border security lights.
“Widow?”
“Yeah?”
“The SUV is backing up without the three guys.”
Widow waited. He scooted up to the stump and peered an eye through a crack in the top. Saw the SUV. Saw the three men. They stood out in a triangle formation. The front man had the QBZ-95. They looked in all directions. They were definitely searching for something.
The men were thirty-five yards. The SUV was ten yards behind them.
Suddenly, the point man called back to the driver. An order. Clearly.
He was the leader.
Which could’ve been good or bad. Chinese military and police were notoriously corrupted. If he was the group leader, Widow could conclude two reasons for him to have the assault rifle. One, he was the best with it. And the best in combat, in general. Which was why he was designated with the better weapon.
Second, he possessed the superior weapon because he was the guy in charge. A simple case of outranking the other three, and therefore, he got to pick the deadliest weapon.
Widow took a peek at the revolvers. They were basic. Nine-millimeter. Small. Almost dainty. He couldn’t recall their designation. A fact he would want to admit to Lyn.
He knew they were manufactured by Norinco. They were Chinese-made and cheap. Not an opinion. A fact. They were terrible weapons.
But they fired bullets effectively enough. That was all that mattered.
Widow couldn’t help but wonder if they would work in the extreme cold.
He wasn’t planning to find out.
Just then the orders that the leader barked at the driver became clear.
The SUV had a standard door-mounted spotlight on it.
The light came on. A bright beam coned and spotlighted a big area. It was a small light. In the vast flatness of the frozen river’s surface and emptiness, the spotlight might as well have been mounted on a Black Hawk and been ten times the size.
The beam was everywhere. Even in the morning hours, it did the job that the sun couldn’t against the mist.
The point man called out into the gloom.
It was Chinese.
Widow pressed his throat mic. Let Lyn listen in.
He listened for a long minute until he realized the guy was repeating words. Widow picked up that he was repeating the same commands over and over.
Widow asked, “What’s he saying?”
Lyn came on over his ear mic and said, “He’s calling out to them. Wants them to come out. Slow. Turn themselves in. Then he promises that they will be safe.”
“That’s what we didn’t want to hear.”
“It gets worse.”
“How?”
“He said their names.”
Widow was quiet for a long second. He listened to the repeated Chinese commands. Then he heard it. Right at the end of the transcript. The commander said, “Kweon.”
Right there.
“Oh shit.”
Lyn said, “Yeah. Shit. Lieutenant, they know who they are.”
Widow stayed quiet.
“Think they know about us?”
“No way. We’d be surrounded by Chinese paramilitary by now.”
“They could be on their way. Maybe they got a warning about the escape from the North Koreans.”
Widow took another look back. The frozen river. The snow. The gloom. The far-off lights.
Maybe.
Lyn said, “What do you want to do?”
Widow didn’t know. The second to last thing he wanted to do was engage with members of the Chinese military. But the last thing he wanted to do was get captured by them. Surely, they’d be imprisoned for espionage and never seen or heard from ever again.
Giving up wasn’t an option. And they weren’t going to outrun them. Not out here on the ice.
“Widow, they’re moving in.”
Shit.
Dr. Kweon looked up over the bank at Widow.
Widow signaled for him to get down.
“I can take them. Should we engage?”
“Not yet.”
Widow backed onto his feet and stayed low. He looked back. Looked right. Looked left.
No choice. They would have to take them down. The only other choice was to make them give up. Not likely.
If they engaged, maybe they could wound them. Leave them alive. But even that seemed unlikely. In the special operators world, one dead foreign adversary was as good as ten or twenty or five or four. If they killed one, they had already crossed the line of engagement. It didn’t matter to the Chinese government how many they shot.
The thing that mattered at that point was leaving witnesses.
“Lieutenant?”
“You got clean kills?”
“Affirmative.”
“Take out the point man first. Then light up the others. I’ll go for the driver.”
“I’ve got them.”
“Go.”
There was a loud CRACK! It was muffled. The suppressor. Even without the gunshot, the shot echoed over the trees and the snow and the ice. It must’ve carried on to the edge of North Korea. Beyond.
Widow leapt out from the side of the stump just in time to see the point man’s head explode into a red cloud of brain and skull and bone. He saw an eyeball clop forward like it had been flung out of a slung from a slingshot.
The body crumbled forward and slid down the snow. Blood sprayed everywhere.
The two standing soldiers looked stunned.
Shock and awe.
They looked at each other. Fast.
Widow had expected them to turn around. Stare at the trees or the abandoned structure. He expected them to try and pinpoint the origin of the sniper that killed their leader. A natural thing to do for any person, soldier or otherwise.
But they didn’t look. They didn’t search for the sniper. Not in the first and last seconds of their lives.
They didn’t look at him. They must’ve sensed he was there. The light was bright. It shone on him like it was waiting for him to leap out.
They did not look at him. Instead, they stared at each other.
Widow knew what they were doing. They were looking at the other guy to see if they both agreed with what to do next. They were thinking about giving up.
Against their training. Against their SOP. Obviously.
Widow hated to shoot unarmed men. No reason to try and take them prisoner. No witnesses had been an SOP for covert engagement. That was clear. They had to go.
Better to do that now, rather than give them false hope of survival.
Widow aimed the MP5SD at the SUV.
He squeezed the trigger, took out the spotlight. The light exploded. Glasses shattered and sprayed in tiny fragments across the Mitsubishi’s hood.
He saw the driver react. He raised his hands to cover his face. He knew what came next.
Widow shot him in the face.
A look down the iron sights. A brace in his feet. A held breath. And a squeeze of the trigger. Three rounds sprayed out. One after the other. Fast. Like a three-round burst, only not. It stopped right at three when Widow released the trigger.
The windshield exploded in three gaping holes. Glass spiderwebbed in cracks around all three. And red mist and blood filled the space in the vehicle where the guy’s head used to be. He was dead. Instantly. No question.
The two remaining men turned fast to Widow. Raised their revolvers.
They realized that they weren’t going to get the chance to surrender. They realized it was a take-no-prisoners kind of situation.
They aimed at Widow.
They had no time to squeeze the triggers because right then the head of the guy standing on th
e north side exploded. Less than a second later, maybe a half a second later, the next guy’s neck exploded. Both were thrown forward off their feet.
One.
Two.
The same muffled CRACK! echoed and rattled and rang out over the trees, over the snow, over the ice. The echo chambered off somewhere behind Widow.
The north guy’s head was pretty much gone. But the revolver was still gripped tight in his lifeless hand. Index finger on the trigger. A fraction of a second away from squeezing it.
Widow had a split-second fear that he still might fire it.
The south guy wasn’t as lucky. He had let go of the revolver. It slid down the snow, and stopped on a patch of ice.
He was gripping his neck.
Widow walked up to him. Stared down at him.
Terror hadn’t filled his eyes yet. Mostly he still looked like he was in the shock and awe phase.
Widow readied his weapon for a mercy shot to the head. No reason to let him suffer. But it was unnecessary because the guy stopped staring at Widow. He stopped clutching the huge bloody hole in his neck.
He was dead.
Lyn spoke into his ear.
“Better check the driver.”
Widow looked up. The driver’s side door was still closed. The red mist was still clouding over the headrest.
He looked back at the Kweon family. They stayed hidden. Then he turned to the SUV.
He walked back up the river banks and up the hill and onto the highway. Looked both ways. North and south. No new headlights. No new sirens. No flashing light bars.
He checked the misty horizon. Both north and south. No signs of helicopter lights. He looked east and west. Same thing. No sign of any kind of backup. Not yet.
He stared into the SUV driver seat. Then he gripped the throat mic.
“The driver’s dead.”
“We’re all clear from up here. I see nothing. And there’s no radio chatter.”
“Come on down. Meet us. Bring the gear. We gotta get out of here.”
“Affirmative.”
Widow dropped the MP5SD to let it rest in the sling behind his back. He opened the SUV’s door and reached in and grabbed two handfuls of the dead driver’s police uniform. He hauled him out. All the way. The legs came out last.
