Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series) (19 page)

“Hey. We miss the train or something?” Nick heard Hansen say from the back seat. It was the first time he’d heard the man speak in more than 24 hours.

“Couldn’t wait on it,” Nick said back. “How are you feeling?”

“Like hammered shit. How long have I been asleep?”

“Most of yesterday and today. You remember much?”

“Nah, man.”

There was silence in the car for a few moments.

“It’s infected, isn’t it?” Hansen asked. Not only was this the most he’d talked in two days, but it was the most lucid he’d been.

“Yeah. I’ve been feeding you antibiotics, and we’ve tried to keep the wound clean and dressed, but... well, it looks fairly horrible.”

“Yeah, I can smell it. Sepsis, probably. Gangrene if I’m really unlucky.”

Nick didn’t know what to say to the guy, so he simply said nothing. He drained off the rest of his energy drink and grabbed for the pack of Zhong Nan Hai Red Sun cigarettes on the dashboard.

“Hand me one of those.”

“You gonna stay conscious long enough to smoke it?”

“I’ll keep talking. I stop talking, you know I’ve fallen asleep.”

Nick passed the pack and the lighter back to Hansen. He heard the flick of the steel on flint, heard Hansen take a drag. He felt the pilot place the pack and lighter back in his hand, and Nick fished out a smoke for himself and lit it.

“So what’s our plan? Back on our own, driving out into hostile territory again?”

“Pretty much. Won’t have to stop this time, though. Feng built a huge gas tank into the trunk. We’re blazing straight through to Kazakhstan.”

There was another moment of quiet, and Nick’s eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror to make sure his passenger hadn’t passed out. He saw the lit tip of the cigarette flare in the darkness, heard Hansen cough slightly.

“This car sucks,” Hansen finally said.

“Price was right.”

“I think the seats were made of old hobo clothes. Chinese engineering at its finest.”

“Not for nothing, Hansen, but your hate for the Chinese seems to go way beyond ‘they’re the enemy.’ I thought you pilots were trained to think in objects, not people.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Simple,” Nick said, taking a deep drag and cracking his window to vent some of the smoke from the rapidly-filling passenger area. “All the pilots I’ve known are like ‘I kill tanks,’ or ‘I destroy bridges.’ None of them seem to have a hate on for the people in those tanks, the people under those bridges.”

“They’re trained not to think of the people at all,” Hansen said. “But that’s early on, man. Get yourself in a dogfight with some Chink – sorry,
Chinese
pilots. Lose three wingmen in a week. See if you don’t start to hate everything those motherfuckers do, everything they stand for.”

“I’ve been on the ground here two years, Hansen. I’ve lost friends. I’ve seen kids I was responsible for shredded to pieces. And I’ve had to do the same to them. Doesn’t mean I’m about to go join up with Storm Front when I get back.”

“You’re one of them, man,” Hansen said, blowing out smoke. “Sorry if that pisses you off, but look in a goddamn mirror. You can’t truly see them for what they are.”

“I’m not even going to ask what you think that is.”

“Good, ‘cause you definitely don’t want to hear that.”

“Here’s the thing, Hansen – I was, up until a couple of years ago, essentially white. You remember before the war? You hate Asians that much then?”

“You really don’t see it, do you, Morrow?” Hansen coughed. “You don’t think the Chinese and the Koreans have been planning this shit for years? How they want to wipe out all of us?”

Nick shook his head and tried to write off the simmering feeling in his stomach as the effects of the energy drinks mixed with the Dexedrine, not a harbinger of the fact that he wanted to slam on the brakes and smack the seriously ill man in the back of the car.

“Of course you don’t see it. Just because you got an American last name don’t make you one of us. So what, your daddy was half-white. You’re still more one of them.”

“First off, my
father
was just plain white. Second, the first time I ever set foot in China was three weeks ago. How does that make me one of them?”

You can’t hit him. He’s near death. You can’t hit him.

“It’s bred in, from an early age. You speak the language. You eat the food. I bet you know Kung Fu or some shit like that, don’t you?”

“I do. My dad taught me. You know, the guy from Los Angeles.”

“That’s exactly my point. Your dad married your mother –”

“Be very careful about what you say next, Hansen. This conversation is already making me reconsider the fucking
Herculean
effort I’ve been making to save your goddamn life. You go all White-Power on me now, and there isn’t anything to stop me from burying you at the side of the road.”

“‘Cept that car coming up behind us,” Hansen said.

Nick checked the rearview mirror, and saw two tiny pinpoints of light far behind them.

Damn. That little racist asshole does have eagle eyes
, he thought.

“Let’s table this argument – you know, the one where you’re clearly wrong – until we figure out what that guy’s story is.”

“Agreed,” Hansen said, rolling down his window and flicking the cigarette out. “I need a weapon.”

Nick passed his pistol back over the seat, felt Hansen take it out of his hand. He would have normally argued the point, or told the pilot to shut the fuck up, but he was more than a little paranoid. What would another car be doing on this same stretch of rural highway in the middle of the night?

The car was coming up fast. It didn’t even take a full minute for the thing to get within a few car-lengths of the F3.

“Keep cool. But if I say so, just unload out the window at him,” Nick said.

“Roger that.”

The car sped up and changed lanes, coming up beside the F3. It was an impressive, odd-looking vehicle – a two-door sports car in primer gray, all odd, harsh angles and aggressive lines. The headlights were only a few inches off the road, and the whole thing looked... stealth.

The other car’s passenger window rolled down, and a red light flipped on inside. Nick could see the driver through his tinted window – even at 60 miles an hour, he could tell he was looking at a white guy. The driver of the other car made a rolling motion with his right hand –
roll down your window
.

“Shoot if I say, Hansen.”

“You’re fuckin’ right.”

Nick rolled down the window, and now that the dark tint was out of the way, he recognized the man almost instantly.

“Hey! Wanna race?” Captain Jason Black yelled over the road noise.

Chapter Twenty-Three

You See The Flaws

There were only so many times Christopher could look over the mission profile before it all blurred together. Technical schematics, profile on Harlan, whatever details the tech team at Lakota had been able to figure out about the hack... if he looked at it too long, the words stopped making sense, like repeating the same phrase over and over until it sounded alien.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot else for him to do. Everyone was monitoring their positions. As the CO, he had no real position to monitor. If it came to a firefight, he could control the Razor’s rocket pods from his console, and he had computer access to status reports from the other stations. There was no reason to start firing off missiles, and if the status changed at one of the other stations, he was sure someone would tell him about it. Even Gabriel, whose job was to sit around until someone got injured and then keep that person from dying as best he could, had more to do than him. The 19-year-old medic-in-training had snagged an e-reader with some EMT training materials on it before they’d left for the mission, and he was doing his best to train up as they rolled.

Instead, all Christopher could do was sit and worry. Despite Bryce’s assurances, he was terrified of fucking up the mission and getting everyone killed. He’d been deep into North Korea before – probably travelled a very similar route, if not this same road – but then, Nick had been in charge. And one thing about Nick was that the guy seemed to be able to come up with plans on the fly. Plans that
worked
. Unlike the plans Christopher had tried out so far, which somehow managed to miss blowing up a large object.

Catching a nap would have been a good option, but after the news from Jason Black, and telling his crew the story of how he and Colonel Evans had sent the intel agent into China, he wasn’t tired anymore. He tried to close his eyes, but all that did was make him slightly motion sick. He could try one of the fold-down racks in the back, but they weren’t really that much more comfortable than his chair. He thought about asking Gabriel for a mild sedative, but before he could, Mary walked up behind his chair and tapped him on the shoulder.

“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” she asked.

“No. What’s up?”

“The location was in that message, buried deep in code. I have it now. It looks like the guy on their crew arrested for computer crimes – Hardy – he must be a hell of a hacker.”

“Better than you?” Bryce asked.

“You know such an animal doesn’t exist,” Mary said. “I’m transferring the coordinates to you now, Bryce.”

Mary tapped the screen on her sleeve, and Bryce’s nav computer chirped a second later. He glanced over at the numbers as they ran by – 51.379710 by 129.263077.

“What’s there?” he asked.

“Whole lot of nothing. There’s some farmland not far away on the satellite images, but you can guess the buildings there are either abandoned or repurposed as NoKo outposts,” she said. “We just won’t know until we get close.”

“I can get us there in about an hour and a half,” Bryce said.

“Their meeting’s in an hour fifteen.”

Christopher bit his lower lip as he considered that. He couldn’t risk letting the ELR make it to any North Korean personnel. If the convicts inside figured out someone was after them, they might want to just turn the thing over to the first NoKo officer they saw, get their payout and their reward as North Korean citizens. Both Razors had to be going flat-out, and the ELR was obviously at least fifteen minutes ahead of them. He didn’t know how he would close the gap and jump ahead of them, unless...

“Bryce. How long would we have to go without stealth to get there fifteen minutes before they do?”

There was a long moment of silence in the cabin.

“Not when you get around to it, Bryce,” Christopher prompted, letting a measured edge creep into his voice. “Now.”

“Uh... about half an hour?” Bryce said, turning his head towards Mary. “That sound right?”

“Pretty close,” Mary said. “Chief, that’s really not a good –”

“Find me another solution, then. And be quick about it, because we can’t let that ELR get to any North Korean personnel.”

More silence.

“That’s what I thought. Look, it’s still dark for another hour, hour and a half. We go off-road, stay clear of anything that looks like it might be civilized,” Christopher said. “A little bit of luck, and we’ll get there unseen.”

“I’ll go make it happen,” Mary said, sighing and heading back to the stealth station.

“Mike, Pete, keep your eyes open up there. If we have to get into a firefight, we’re going to have to run and gun. I want you to kill the shit out of any threat before it can make a move,” Christopher said.

“On it, Chief,” Peter’s voice wafted down.

“The rest of you, load up. We’re going to get one chance to take the Razor. They’re going to have to open the door to make their meet – that’s when we’ll take them.”

“I suggest getting out and setting up early,” Daniel said. “I can drop back a half-mile and still have eyes on them.”

“Good man, Daniel.”

“Stealth is down, boss. We’re visible,” Bryce said.

“Then kick this big bitch in the ass,” Christopher said, strapping in and bringing the rockets online.

* * *

The half-hour outside of stealth meant they could double their speed, and the eight-wheel drive meant they didn’t have to be careful what they drove through or over. Bryce found a more direct, off-road route to the meeting point. They’d tried to stay on the road as often as possible – while the Razor was functionally invisible at night, especially under stealth, it was still heavy, which meant tire tracks. In the interests of speed, they were making a mess of the countryside, leaving tracks in the snow and mud, crashing through small trees and brush.

“So now we’re more than visual, we’re conspicuous,” Mary muttered from her station at the back of the Razor. She must have thought Christopher couldn’t hear her.

“I asked for a better solution,” he reminded her, keeping his voice even.

“Sorry, Chief,” she said at a normal volume.

“Daniel? You seeing anything on the cameras?” Christopher asked, turning in his seat.

“We just scared the shit out of a bear,” Daniel said. “Nothing human or mechanical, so far.”

“Listening stations aren’t picking us up, or at least they’re not mentioning it if they are,” Carson reported.

“Good. Bryce, how much longer?”

“We’ll link back up with the main road in six minutes or so. I suggest hitting the stealth before we do. It’ll still put us there a little more than 15 minutes before the meet time.”

“Mary, the second Bryce gives the word, fire up the stealth mode,” Christopher said. “Daniel, take a look at the sat maps and let me know where we should drop you.”

“Already done,” Daniel said. “There isn’t a hell of a lot to cover behind. I’ll throw on one of the parkas and shells and just cover in the snow. But I could really use another decent shooter to back me up. We’ll only get one chance, I’m guessing.”

Christopher didn’t need to ask who the best shot was in the group – he knew it was Michael, but he was also needed on the Razor. He and Peter were magicians with the 50 caliber guns, and if things went south, they’d need both of those guns up and firing.