Night Strike

by Chris Ryan

Thirty metres above the underground city.

  BOOM!

  Bald first felt the explosion in his bones. It shuddered through his body, shockwaved through his jaw and echoed in the shoulder he’d busted in his fight with the road sweeper. The pain seemed to shake the loose parts of the bone a little fucking looser, like stones in a paper bag. Except each jangle felt like someone was twisting a kitchen knife into his shoulder. And then the first boom was superseded by a deep and thunderous whoooshhh. Successive booms sounded out in the background as the rest of the propane canisters exploded and ignited the diesel fuel. The lift growled. Bald lost his footing. Fell flat onto the floor and felt the metal beneath him heating up. The whoooshhh kept on coming, like a wind gusting across a churning sea. Bald’s fingers blistered. His eyebrows singed.

  Bald felt his brain thumping inside his skull. The beat of the booms channelled along his jawbone. He scraped himself off the floor. His skin was hot like warm dough. Noxious smoke and fumes belched out of corners of the metal box. Gardner had fallen over too. The two men didn’t so much as look at each other. What if the explosion busted the lift?

  They stood up and waited, letting the shudders play themselves out in their bones. There was a grinding noise, as if something had jammed and was trying to churn itself free. The lift had stalled. It shook for three long, stubborn seconds. Then it stopped shaking. The grinding lifted into an optimistic whirr. And now the lift made one last tremble and shook itself free, heading upwards once more. Heat was still rising from the floor. And now Bald and Gardner dared to look at each other.

  The deed was done.

  Xia was dead.

  Intelligent Dust was history.

  Bald was going to be cunting rich.

  The lift reached the bunker level as the clock ticked to 2132 hours. Gardner wrapped his right hand inside the sleeve of his overalls and shunted the door back. Bald said, ‘Good thinking, Joe. Don’t want to lose your wanking hand too.’

  Bald felt chilled air washing over his face as they debussed from the lift and emerged into a room so small you’d have to leave it just to change your mind. Gardner heaved open the door opposite them, which took them into the bunker. All the guys in white coats and black suits had fucking legged it. The test range was abandoned. Which gave Bald an idea. And Bald was never one to let an opportunity slip by. He raced over to the thirty-six-barrelled machine-gun and lifted it off the rack, surprised how light it was. This ‘36’, he figured, was probably constructed from some kind of hi-tech carbon fibre, the same stuff they build F1 cars from.

  Something else caught his eye. A projectile grenade launcher shaped like a bloated Tommy gun, jet-black, with a six-cylinder chamber. An M32 grenade launcher. Bald tried it for size. It was impossibly light: under 4kg. There was an optic target range-finder mounted onto the rear of the weapon. The grenades loaded into the chambers were 40mm High Explosive variants with a kill radius of ten metres and an effective range of more than three football pitches. Bald slung the M32 over his shoulder and quietly congratulated himself on finding this treasure trove. The M32 was already on the market but the 36 was still only an idea in the heads of most defence officials. When he was out of here he’d hawk the 36 on the black market, no questions asked. It should fetch him a tidy sum – perhaps a couple of hundred thousand. More, if he sold the technologies to the Russians so they could pick apart the designs. If he did that, he could be looking at millions.

  Gardner frowned at the M32 over Bald’s shoulder and the prototype 36 in his hands.

  ‘What are they?’ he said.

  Bald grinned. ‘Beer money.’

  The door connecting the bunker to the staircase that led up to the memorial hall was open. Whoever had been last to leave had forgotten to haul it shut. Now Bald followed Gardner as he charged up the stairs and into the hall. A small door on the left took them out into a lavishly decorated courtyard. There, concealed behind a morass of ginkgo biloba trees and lilac shrubs and corroded statues of dragons, stood an ornate metal gate. Gardner pulled it open; the hinges creaked like old hip joints.

  They emerged at the rear of the hall. Night had sucked what little colour there was out of the land, turned everything a greyish brown, like decaying fruit. The sky was pleated with purples and blues. A full moon. No stars. Bald scanned the landscape left to right. A ribbon of desert stretched out for a couple of hundred metres. At the far end it sloped down to a river bank above water that flowed bright yellow, like someone had coloured it with a highlighter pen. Bald briefly wondered what kind of fucking toxic shit had been dumped in there. The river swerved through the land, slithering this way and that. It was widest at a point to Bald’s ten o’clock, a hundred and fifty metres or so, and approximately half that width at his two o’clock. Beyond the river lay five hundred metres of lonely, knuckled terrain peppered with weeds and rocks. That slab of land appeared to Bald the loneliest place in the world. It rose on a fifteen per cent incline before plateauing out into a gentle green forest. In the far distance Bald spotted molar-shaped mountains capped with iridescent snow.

  ‘Kazakhstan,’ said Gardner.

  ‘A shithole never looked so fucking good. How far to the RV?’

  ‘Two kilometres the other side of the border. Kargol is at the base of the mountain range,’ said Gardner, referencing a handheld GPS navigator he’d stashed in his overalls pocket. ‘I put us at exactly a kilometre east of the border.’

  ‘Pissing distance,’ said Bald. ‘How’s it feel to be rich, Joe?’

  But Gardner didn’t answer. Something had caught his attention at his six o’clock. Bald chased his line of sight. He was looking back towards the square, four hundred metres east of their position. The area was coated in a treacle-like blackness, and for a few seconds Bald failed to see what had spooked Gardner. Then the darkness resolved itself into murky outlines and dull shapes, like a poorly developed photograph.

  And now Bald saw it too.

  A neat line of lights glowed at the front of the square, near the spot where Bald had arrived in the police Jetta, some way from the memorial hall and from Bald’s and Gardner’s present position. Small and white, like pills. Twenty, thirty of them. The pill-lights were travelling at a hell of a speed because soon they had crossed the square and were heading towards the memorial hall. At three hundred metres from Bald and Gardner, the shapes around the lights came into focus. Camouflaged Beijing BJ-212 four-wheel-drives. They looked similar to the old-school Land Rover Defenders. The BJ-212s illuminated bulkier, much slower vehicles swarming the area to the south of the hall. The turbocharged diesel engines of these slower vehicles droned and sputtered as their dual-rubber road wheels and track rollers loped over the rugged terrain. Each had a periscope eye scouring the land ahead of it. Above the small hatch on the front of each hull there was a 12.7mm cannon and, either side of these, four 76mm smoke-grenade dischargers. Type 89 armoured personnel carriers. A double-dozen of them in a single row. Two hundred and fifty metres away now: they were closing in on the two operators. The APCs halted abruptly.

  Ramps lowered. Soldiers disgorged.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ said Bald. ‘There’s a shitload of them.’

  fifty-four

  2144 hours.

  More soldiers debussed from the APCs. Bald quickly gave up trying to assess the enemy strength. Each Type 89, Bald knew, had a two-man crew and was capable of carrying thirteen additional personnel. So twenty-four APCs equated to a maximum of 360 pairs of boots on the ground. Three hundred and sixty soldiers plus armoured support versus two ex-Blades, one of them with a migraine buzzing inside his head like an angry hornet and a shoulder joint turned to mush, and the other with only one good hand.

  The People’s Liberation Army soldiers were lit up by the headlights of the BJ-212s v. Bald could now see that they were decked out in four-colour woodland-camo uniforms with field caps and spit-polished boots, and they were wielding assault rifles. At two hundred metres it was impossible to make out design features, but Bald reckoned t
hey were QBZ-95s. The PLA had one style of rifle for their soldiers and they either liked it or lumped it. The QBZ-95 was chambered for the 5.8x42mm Chinese-manufactured cartridge, and its box mag held thirty rounds. It was effective up to a maximum range of four hundred metres from shooter to target.

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Bald.

  The soldiers didn’t divide into groups or try to out-flank Bald and Gardner. They saw no need. When your force outnumbered the opposition by over 150-1, you didn’t need to worry about complicated tactics or elaborate pincer movements. You could win the battle simply by steaming in directly and applying rapid, overwhelming force. A reasonable battle strategy, perhaps, based on the principles of sound logic and safety first. Just two men: it would be easy to overpower them.

  But these weren’t just two soldiers. They were ex-SAS, and the Regiment was unlike any other military unit in the world. Regiment operators specialized in overcoming vastly superior enemy forces and weaponry. They were trained in the way of the guerrilla, in the code of the spy and the philosophy of the survivalist. Bald and Gardner, and Blades like them, had been outnumbered and outgunned more times than either of them could remember.

  Bald and Gardner broke west. They headed towards the river, and the Kazakh border. Away from the Chinese army, and the APCs and the BJ-212s. Away from the flare of the gunfire and the headlamps lighting up the desert floor. Bald willed his body on. His muscles no longer hurt; they were dead. The pain had jumped ship. Two hundred metres from the small army on their tail. A hundred to the river. He shut out the pain the only way he knew, by focusing on the positive. Told himself, get to the river. That’s your first RV point. Forget about everything else. Look, you’re just seventy metres from the river – fucking nothing. A few more strides and you’ll be in the water.

  Then the 12.7mm cannons on the APCs pissed all over Bald’s optimism. Several of them opened fire simultaneously, their repetitive tumm-tumm-tumm banging at his six o’clock like a din of a ceremonial drum roll. Bald glanced back across his shoulder. Fist-sized clumps of earth were flung up into the air. Rocks the size of footballs were being flipped like coins. The world suddenly reeked of burnt gunpowder. The first wave of rounds had landed short and now Bald and Gardner were thirty metres from the river. Twenty metres and the second wave fired. This time the 12.7mm rounds landed wide. Bald caught sight of them in his peripheral vision. A couple thudded into the soil three uncomfortable metres from Bald. The APCs were finding their range and it would only take them a second more to get an accurate bearing on Bald and Gardner.

  Fifteen metres from the river and Bald heard the ground erupt behind him, and heat pressing against his back and neck, and he heard the ca-racks of massed assault rifles. Bald instinctively dropped his head and tucked in his arms, presenting as small a target as possible. The night sky cracked and popped with the incessant rattle of gunfire. Bald knew he was in the shit, big time. Now he was ten metres from the river, 5.8x42mm brass breathing down both men’s backs.

  There was a sharp, two-metre drop where the land fell away to the water. The river bank gave Bald and Gardner precious cover against the rounds unloading at their six. But it would only keep them protected for as long as they were concealed below it and the PLA forces remained topside. Gardner edged backwards towards the river, until he could see the advancing soldiers and vehicles, while Bald canvassed the area on the other side of the water. Rounds were spattering into the soil just above their heads.

  ‘What’s the situation?’ Bald shouted.

  ‘Ninety metres,’ Gardner shouted back. ‘Moving this way – and fast.’

  Bald examined the 36 prototype in his hands. ‘Let’s give them something to think about. I’ll put down rounds on the fuckers.’

  ‘Fire and move,’ said Gardner.

  Bald pointed out a scrape on bumpy land midway between their position and the border. It was a hundred metres up on the other side of the river, fully two hundred metres from them. ‘See that scrape? That’s our next RV point. Once I put rounds down, you break for the RV. Then you return the favour.’

  ‘Then you’re gonna have to sort me out with some kit,’ Gardner said, pointing with his eyeballs to the M32. ‘I can’t cover you with the Five-Seven. Not against these pricks.’

  Gardner had a point. The effective range on the FN Five-Seven was fifty metres. Anything over that, you might as well be throwing matchsticks at the bad guys. Bald grudgingly parted company with the M32. Gardner tucked the Five-Seven into his overalls and inspected the M32. There wasn’t much to inspect. Firing the M32 was like operating a personal computer: all you had to do was point and click.

  Rounds skipped and flitted above Bald, bolting like shards of light over the bank and striking the gradient on the opposite bank. That confirmed what he had already suspected. The elevated ground at the Kazakh border was exposed to the line of fire from the PLA soldiers. Before they could leg it to Kazakhstan, they’d need to put them down, and make them stay down. The RV scrape was just three hundred metres from the border on an incline. Bald reckoned he and Gardner, going at a fast stride, would need a solid minute and a half to reach Kazakh soil.

  He rolled back onto his front. Lifted his head over the parapet just enough to establish a bearing on the soldiers coming at them from the east. A group of ten had powered ahead of their mates. Now they were seventy metres away, the stocks of their QBZ-95s tucked tight to their shoulders, their eyes lining up Bald and Gardner in the NV optics. Tracer rounds were barking out of the spouts and lighting up the desert in reds and yellows and greens. They spat furiously into the ground in front of Bald, flinging hot dirt into his face.

  He hoisted the 36 so that the barrel ends were resting flat on the lip of the bank. The weapon had a hooded-post front sight and an aperture rear sight that looked as though they had been copied straight from the QBZ-95. They didn’t feel properly lined up to Bald. Some engineer had probably welded the fucking things on. Bald used the sights anyway, figuring that bad sights were better than none at all, and lined up the ten nearest soldiers as best he could. Their shit training was betraying them. They were sticking close together. Safety in numbers, but a bad fucking mistake in a firefight. That close together, if a round missed one target it could just as easily strike the next guy.

  Bald tensed his finger on the trigger mechanism.

  The soldiers were fifty-five metres from Bald. Rounds split the ground an inch in front of his face. He depressed the trigger, but only for a moment.

  The 36 made a sound like a buzz-saw firing up. It lasted for perhaps half a second, then it phased out. Bald spent the next half-second wondering if the weapon had jammed, or there had been some kind of misfire, as is common with prototype designs. The gun hadn’t jumped in his hands. Nor had he felt even the slightest recoil from the discharge. But then he clocked smoke fluting out of the thirty-six barrels and he lifted his eyes and saw the group of soldiers crumpling, nine of them folding inwards, their arms and legs and heads splintered like they were made of cheap wood. All kinds of shit was oozing out of their bodies. Bowels and innards and organs splashed to the ground. The tenth guy staggered on. His left arm finished brutally at the elbow. Half of his skull had been blown away. He somehow managed to scream with no jaw.

  A light pop came from Bald’s nine o’clock: Gardner discharging a 40mm grenade from the M32. The round tunnelled through the air and detonated on impact with the ground, spitting out a backcharge of smoke and flames that engulfed a dozen soldiers, and following it up with a jet stream of molten metal and fragmentation that detached limb from pulverized limb. The soldiers weren’t just slotted. They were chop fucking suey.

  Twenty more guys were speeding past their decimated mates. Fifty metres. Forty-five.

  ‘These bastards just don’t give in,’ Gardner growled. He unloaded a second 40mm grenade. Pop–thud–scream. Three sounds that were music to Bald’s ears. The round vaporized half a dozen more soldiers.

  ‘Fucking run, Joe!’ he boomed.


  Gardner pulled back from his firing position to Bald’s nine and scooted down the river bank. He broke the water and began wading across as fast as he could go. But the water was sludgy and waist-deep and Gardner was clearing just a metre a second. He held the M32 and the Five-Seven above his head to keep water out of the chambers. A hundred metres to cross before he’d hit dry land. A hundred metres of exposure to incoming rounds, a hundred seconds in which he might take a round in the back. Bald needed Gardner alive if he was ever to get out of the shit. He spun round and faced the soldiers rushing at him from the river bank. He targeted the twenty guys pounding towards him. They were forty metres away, surging past the tangle of body parts and patches of burnt flesh scattered across the ground and spraying wild single-round bursts at Bald.

  Another terse depression on the trigger of the 36. Another flash of noise. Another puff of smoke. The rounds whacked through the line of soldiers, wrenching limbs from torsos, punching fist-sized holes in chests and blasting kneecaps to white dust. All twenty dropped. Forty-two KIAs total, no survivors. Bald was amazed by the stopping power of the 36.

  Seven more soldiers had manoeuvred into a thin line behind their mates in the hope that the guys ahead of them would take the brunt of the impact. But the 36’s rounds lost none of their stopping power after punching holes through the first line of soldiers. They passed through flesh and muscle and carried on out the other side, penetrating the soldier immediately behind with as much force and violence. One guy dropped to his knees, squealing like a fucking pig. A neat circle of rounds had smashed into his groin and torn him a makeshift vagina. First his bowels hit the ground. Then the rest of him flushed out too. Another guy had a puncture in his neck wide and long, like a slashed tyre. He had his hands on his mucker’s shoulders, silently begging for help and inadvertently spraying blood into his eyes.

  Make that forty-nine enemy slotted. We might just make it, Bald allowed himself to think.