Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series) (31 page)

“I’m on it, Chief,” Mary said, heading back to her station.

“Martin,” Christopher said.

“Yeah?”

“Load up everything you have into one package. I’m going to get you inside that thing, and if we can’t take it over, you’re going to wreck the living shit out of it.”

“You got it.”

“Pete, I want you and Mike to put together a breach plan. We might need to do it in-motion. Work with Bryce, and get Mary in on the plan when she gets our speed up. They know the Razor ELR as well as anyone.”

“Right on. Come on, Mike. Let’s take a look at the specs.”

“Second anything changes, Anthony, just yell out...”

Anthony nodded, then slipped on his headphones and turned back to his station.

“Daniel, you’re with me. We’re loading up every weapon we’ve got. Fifties, ARs, everything down to Glocks. I want every magazine full and every round available. We might have to burn a lot of ammo, so let’s make sure we’re ready.”

“I’ll set up near the racks. Grab the extra 5.56 and meet me there,” Daniel said.

Christopher went to the back of the Razor and grabbed their ammo crates. There were only three boxes of 5.56 ammo left for the M4s, and only one box of .40 for their pistols. He hefted the load easily, much more easily than he thought he could.

Adrenaline
, he realized.
Five minutes ago, you were a fucking zombie. Now you might be able to kick through the Razor’s armor and tear apart everyone inside with your bare hands
.

But it was more than adrenaline, Christopher knew. The adrenaline was making the muscles strong, making the ammo boxes feel light... but the thing that made him feel awake, the thing that made his mind sharp? That was hope. Hope and relief.

He hadn’t failed.

At least, not yet.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Automatic Man

“Now, what the hell is this,
Trenton
?” Nick asked the unconscious Major.

He’d been checking Chen for anything he could use – a Ghost Unit radio would do him nicely. But when he checked the Major’s sleeves, he found a hard, smooth plastic square on his arm. On closer inspection, it was a tiny screen, and it was blinking.

“Left wrist,” Nick realized. “Bio-monitor.”

With the next-level, balls-crazy tech and tracking he’d encountered over the last couple of weeks, Nick guessed Chen’s people were monitoring his vitals, and were aware of his position even now. That could be a problem, or it could be his ticket out.

Lifting the Major wasn’t easy – the guy was heavier than he looked, and Nick’s knee and foot were shot. On the upside, though, the ankle he’d sprained the night before didn’t hurt anymore. Still, Nick managed to dump him in the trunk of the car. He checked for an inside release latch, found it, and ripped it out.

“Wow. That’s some shitty manufacturing,” Nick said, shaking his head and looking at the release latch in his hand. He tossed the defective part to the side of the road, slammed the trunk lid shut on his unconscious captive, and limped around to the open driver-side door. The keys were still in the ignition, and the engine was running.

“Beats walking. Or dragging a useless goddamn leg behind me,” Nick told himself, hobbling around the car and picking up the Major’s dropped assault rifle. He considered walking up the road for his own, but his leg was already throbbing. Easier just to leave it – a gun was a gun at this point.

He got into the car, and found that it was, thankfully, an automatic. He’d have made it work somehow if it had been a stick shift, but for now, he was just happy he didn’t have to work the clutch with his wrecked foot and wrenched knee.

He knew he should stop for a minute and assess his injuries, or find out where the blood was coming from at the very least. But Nick knew he’d already eaten up a huge chunk of time searching the Major and dumping him in the trunk – if his team was monitoring him, and thought he was stationary for any real length of time, they’d probably come running. That was an eventuality Nick would prefer to avoid, so he’d just have to hope the bleeding would stop itself. He closed the door and put the car into Drive, spun the tires, and tore off down the road.

The Major’s car had a radio in-dash, and as Nick turned it on, he found it was set to the Ghost frequency. The chatter was mostly quiet, but every once in a while, a short report would come across the airwaves.

“Team Four. Heilongjiang North Section Seven clear. Dogs found nothing.”

Nick wasn’t sure, but he thought he remembered that Heilongjiang was what the Chinese called the Amur River, the former border between China and Russia. If they were still down there looking for him, they were almost a hundred miles away.

“This is Eight. Nothing in Border Four.”

That second report tore it. At least two of the teams were way off. He could only hope that most of them were covering the area around the border – it would make his life a lot easier.

Strangely, no one called asking for the Major. Over the course of the next hour, Nick heard three Lieutenants and two Captains mentioned, and heard them respond. But no one tried to contact the boss.

“He’s OFP,” Nick realized. The acronym meant
own fucking program
. He was the boss, and he did what he wanted. He’d call his men for backup, but the guys under him would never dare ask him where he was or what he was up to. The Major did what the Major wanted.

And he was also the best hunter of the group, if the evidence Nick had seen thus far was any indication. He had no idea how the Major had been able to find him, but Chen had made it look easy. He considered for a brief moment that someone had been able to get some sort of tracking device on him, but dismissed the thought almost immediately. If that was the case, then he would have had to deal with a lot more than just one middle-aged PLA officer.

“Chaoxian Listening Post 14 reports contact with possible American vehicle,” the radio streamed. “We sent a recon flight over; unable to confirm. Coordinates 52.402419, 129.682507. No electronic intercepts. Probably nothing, but when a team becomes available, might want to send them that way.”

Nick’s eyes widened at that report. Chaoxian meant North Korean, and intel said the PLA usually didn’t place much credence in their surveillance. Chinese soldiers largely saw the NoKos as incompetent, but Nick remembered that some of the listening posts had been able to detect vibrations from Razors under stealth, even though they didn’t seem to know what it was they were detecting. Could there be a Razor rolling around out there somewhere?

He plugged the coordinates into the dashboard GPS and found that they were only about 20 minutes away.

“Guess I’ll find out soon enough,” Nick said, hitting the “go” button on the screen.

* * *

For the next fifteen minutes, Nick’s brain ran at hyper-speed. Part of him knew it was adrenaline combined with Dexedrine and whatever the hell the Chinese were putting in their energy drinks, but he felt there was another component to the sudden burst of energy: hope. If this NoKo signal intercept
was
an American Razor, that meant friendlies. The minimum crew complement for a Razor, at least in his experience, was five, and that was a skeleton crew.

Strength in numbers. He had no illusions that he was a one-man army – he’d never have made it this far without help from Feng and the insurgents, or Jason Black, or even Hansen. And he wasn’t likely to make it much further without help, especially injured and exhausted. A Razor meant a Razor crew, and even if they were convicts, that meant allies.

And they’d most likely be convicts this deep inside North Korean territory. Real Military didn’t often pull shit jobs like that. They’d probably be some poor sad-sacks sent off to gather intel from one of the most hostile places on Earth, guys who were expendable. Guys who had a self-destruct wired into their Razor, set to go off the second they failed their mission. Nick knew because he’d been one of those sad-sacks more than once.

It was during the last five minutes of the drive that the realization hit: he might not be headed for help after all. He might be headed for a Razor full of dead soldiers. A stationary Razor in the middle of the day was pretty normal – their adaptive camouflage worked much better at night – but any kind of signal leak from a stationary Razor was a bad sign. It either meant something was wrong or the crew was incompetent, and Command generally didn’t put incompetent convicts in charge of multimillion dollar equipment.

I guess I’ll know soon enough
, he reasoned, glancing at the GPS. Four minutes, and he’d know if he had backup or not. Even if the Razor had a dead crew, at least it was an upgrade in the vehicle department. He knew he could drive the Razor by himself, but he wasn’t sure he could get all the other essential systems chained to the front control panel. There’d only be one way to find out, and he’d cross that bridge when and if he came to it.

He wasn’t sure if he just knew what to look for or if the Razor was badly concealed, but he saw it a few seconds before the GPS informed him he’d reached the designated coordinates. The Razor was in a day hide – parked in an area of dense Siberian Larch. Fallen boughs were arranged haphazardly around the Razor to further cover the wonky adaptive camouflage panel near the rear passenger side; Nick could see the dull-gray radar-absorbing paint between the yellowish, dying leaves. The panel was about three feet square, and was probably the reason the Razor was stopped. If it was moving, a gray three-foot square of metal floating five feet off the ground would definitely draw unwanted attention.

Nick had no idea what his plan was. If there was no one inside, the Razor might be in lockdown, or the door might be unlocked. Odds were against an unoccupied truck, though – someone had to have parked it there and arranged the branches just so. He should prepare to deal with people, and that was more of a problem than he’d initially considered. He knew he looked Chinese to most Americans, and that would cause an issue. If someone who looked like him came up and banged on his Razor’s door, Nick would probably have a hard time not shooting first and asking questions never.

He needed a way of showing he was American right off the bat, and shouting at them in English wouldn’t do it. Most PLA soldiers his age spoke English just as well as anyone in Texas or Iowa. The barcode tattoo on his wrist would scan as an Echo convict, but he didn’t want to count on that alone not to get him shot. Even his thumbprint would probably identify him to the Razor’s computer systems – the problem would be convincing whoever was aboard to let him scan that thumbprint before he got shot in the head.

While he was sitting stopped in his car considering how to approach the Razor, the point quickly became moot. He felt more than saw the dark figure creep up next to the driver’s side window from the rear, and definitely heard the tapping of the M16 barrel against the window.

“Hands on the wheel, Slick. Nice and slow,” he heard the deep voice from right next to him.

Nick blamed the stress of the last couple of days and the overdose of stimulants for dulling his focus. He’d like to think that, under normal circumstances, he never would have let the compact, muscular black man in convict-gray BDUs sneak up on him so easily. Still, the guy had him dead to rights, and hadn’t opened fire
yet
, so Nick slowly brought his hands to the ten-and-two position on the wheel of his stolen sedan.

“Good. You speak English,” the convict said, backing up a few steps. Nick got a better look at him – he was about Nick’s age, black hair cropped close to his skull. He’d ditched his BDU jacket, and Nick saw that both arms were covered in dark, flowing tattoos. He was wearing a pair of Chinese knock-off Ray-Bans and had empty pockets on his belt where spare clips should have been.

“Been speaking it since I could talk,” Nick said, attempting a friendly smile. He felt it came out more nervous than friendly, but at least that was honest.

“So Chinese, then. Not North Korean. Slowly, both hands in front of you, open the door and step out of the car. Your hands move in a way I don’t like, and this conversation is over, dig me?”

“American, actually,” Nick said, opening the driver’s door exactly as he was told. He raised his hands, palm out, to his shoulders as he stepped out of the car.

“No shit? That’s a tactic I haven’t much heard before. Chinese soldiers claiming to be American,” the convict said, shaking his head.

“Lieutenant Nick Morrow, USMC, 47 Echo SRF.”

“Right. Lemme guess, you’re from New York City, too, right?”

“Los Angeles, actually.”

“Yeah? So you know the best way from Burbank to Santa Monica is Ventura Freeway to the 405, then.”

Nick smiled.

“Not if you want to get there anywhere close to this year. I take the 5 to downtown, then 110 to 10. You skip that awful I-10 to I-5 backup that way.”

The convict cocked his head to the side for a moment, considering Nick. He kept his weapon trained on Nick’s head, but gestured over to the camouflaged Razor with a nod.

“Well, if you’re a PLA solider, you’re a pretty damn well-studied one. I’m not 100% sold on you, but the computer in the Razor will clear this whole thing up right quick. Start walking.”

“Thumbprint scanner?” Nick asked as he started walking, the convict at his back.

“Man, I hope you’re American. Otherwise, Chinese intel is way more hardcore than we thought,” he heard from behind him.

The door opened out of nowhere, and Nick stepped into the Razor. The smell hit him before he even realized it
was
a smell – thick and powerful, he gagged before he could process what he was smelling. He’d smelled it before, but never in such close quarters. It was death, canned and overheated death. He looked to his left and saw a mangled body laid out on the bottom left rack. The body – Nick couldn’t tell if it had been a man or a woman – was dressed in convict grays. He held the bile back in his throat and tried not to breathe.