Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series) (22 page)

Staying away from a city or town was paramount. Cities meant surveillance, surveillance meant being recognized by the all-powerful PLA computer core. If he really was doing the Los Angeles to Cleveland run, the solution would have been simple – find an abandoned barn, drive right in, and sack out in the car for as long as he felt he safely could. He remembered the interstates in the States were littered with abandoned farms. Here, he was close to the coast again, and had been seeing buildings on either side – residential and commercial zones – off and on for the last hour. It looked like an abandoned farm wasn’t going to happen.

Just as he thought that, the buildings on either side vanished, and he was surrounded by farmland as far as he could see. At the next intersection, he turned left – away from the coast – and the farmland continued. The sun was coming up, and in the dawn light, he saw more and more rolling farmland, but no buildings. Nowhere to hide the car. There was, however, an area bordered by thick, leafy trees, all of them the same height and shape. They’d been planted intentionally – a windbreak, perhaps. Nick had been to one farm on an elementary-school field trip. He was a city kid, so he had no idea if these trees were there for a reason. But they provided decent cover from the road, and there was a dirt path just wide enough for his car leading into the grove.

The center of the grove was open, flat, grassy land, but he found a spot under the thick trees at the lower right corner of the grove where he was sure he couldn’t be seen from the road. There seemed to be enough cover over the car, as well, so he was reasonably certain the car wasn’t visible from the air, either. He turned off the car, closed his eyes...

And opened them again. The sky outside still looked the same – not dark, not light. Nick was entirely sure he’d blinked, not slept, especially as he still felt exhausted. Exhausted and starving. He tore into some raw kale and dumplings Feng had packed for him, and washed them down with a half-liter of water. It was only after he ate that he thought to check his watch.

He’d slept for 13 hours, and he felt like he hadn’t slept at all. It was twilight, not dawn, and now that he looked around, he could see that time had indeed passed. There were leaves and sap on the windshield that hadn’t been there when he closed his eyes. He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine turned over immediately. He pulled the car out of the grove, and as soon as he hit the pavement, he hammered the accelerator to the floor.

“Gotta make up some lost time,” he mumbled to no one.

This time, no one answered. Not his brother on another continent, not a fractured part of his own brain. Just silence. That was reassuring.

“So here’s the plan,” he told himself, mostly confident that no one would answer. “Go for as long as you can without any stimulants, but stopping again is a no-go. You’re lucky you didn’t get caught that time.”

He said that bit out loud, but the plan was already taking shape in his head. He’d try the energy drinks first, at the sign of the first yawn. That would keep him off the Dexedrine longer. But he knew he couldn’t avoid the pills, and that he’d have to take them sooner or later. He just hoped that when he made it back to American lines, he got a couple of days to sleep it off and detox.

As he jumped back onto the expressway, his mood suddenly crashed.

There’s no way you’re going to make it out.

The thought was clear in his head, unshakable, unassailable in its truth. He was fighting a hopeless battle. Even now, thanks to heading the wrong way initially and taking a circuitous route as mapped out by Jason Black’s GPS, he was no more than 50 miles from where he started more than 18 hours ago. The sketchiness of the North Korean extension of the all-powerful PLA computer network would only hold so long – it was probably back up to full strength now.

He thought of Christopher Lee as his brother, and trusted the man with his life... but without Nick there to protect his people, he got the horrible feeling that Christopher wouldn’t survive the war. None of them would. The brass would put Christopher in charge of 47 Echo for a while, but the strength of the unit was all of them together – they’d seen that in the Battle of Neryugn, when Nick had been stateside after his conviction was overturned. When one part of the machine was removed, the machine broke down. 47 Echo would be broken up, scattered to the winds... no one would be there to watch each other’s backs.

Nick realized with a start that this was the first time he’d thought about Christopher and his unit in days. He wondered where they were now, what they were doing. Colonel Ross had promised them training, but that was before the mission to take down the PLA network, before the counterattacks that had to be happening now, or at least in the mail. They were probably out on a mission, and Nick wasn’t there to shepherd them through it. He wasn’t there to keep his people safe. And that was the whole reason he’d joined the Marines after the justice system had rebooted his case and made him a free man, wasn’t it?

“There’s just no point,” Nick surprised himself by saying out loud. And as soon as the words were out of his mouth, floating around the cabin of the compact Chinese-made custom car, he felt it in his chest – the heaviness of truth. Of certainty.

He might as well just keep heading for the water, drive the F3 into it, and let himself sink right to the bottom of the East China Sea.

The radio next to him on the passenger seat, partially covered by the bag the kale had formerly occupied, crackled to life.

“Target reacquired. Moving north on the G25 Changshen Expressway, approaching Binzhou. Estimated time of arrival, less than 10 minutes,” a female voice on the radio said.

Nick checked his GPS – he was approaching Binzhou on that very expressway. They’d found him, somehow.

“Do we have assets in Binzhou?” a male voice asked after a short moment.

“Checking. There is a small detachment of the Beijing Military Region Special Forces Unit in Binzhou. Troop strength: four operators. It was their UAV that picked up the car,” the woman responded.

“Put them on alert. Advise use of nonlethals only – orders are to take him alive,” the man told her.

“Confirmed. Unit is activated and in-place. UAV is tracking.”

Well, no need to drive into the sea now,
Nick thought. But even as the thought came into his head, he felt his shoulders tighten up, his grip on the steering wheel ratcheting down.

Anger. It came on quickly, out of nowhere, and washed over him in a comforting, red haze. The anxiety, the depression of the past several minutes dissolved into the anger like sugar in hot coffee, becoming invisible, indistinguishable from the building rage. Nick smiled, aware of how fucked up a smile in that situation was and not caring. This was anger. This, he knew how to deal with.

And there was one thing he of which he was now perfectly certain. These four guys weren’t going to take him out. Fuck that. They’d need twice that many. Ten times that many. Nick was going to barrel through them and keep going, get back to his people. He pulled the car to the side of the road and grabbed his M4 from the seat next to him.

“But first, I’m going to kill that fucking UAV,” he growled, kicking the door open.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Crystal Clear

“No use, Gunny. He’s not there long enough before Daniel turns his skull into pudding,” Carson said, shaking his head.

The two of them were at Daniel’s camera station, going through the video of the incident back at the North Korean camp. Even slowed down to a frame a second, they couldn’t clearly see the man Daniel shot with any clarity. He was on the ground a half a second before Daniel’s bullet slammed into his skull from almost a half-mile away. Christopher was in awe of the kid’s reactions and aim without a scope, but now he wasn’t sure who was left in the ELR.

“Well, I mean, we know he’s black,” Christopher said, shrugging. “So it’s either Washington or Hardy. If we luck out, it’s Hardy, their tech guy.”

“Luck hasn’t really been on our side, Chief,” Gabriel said.

“You’ve got a point there,” Christopher mumbled.

“Even if we didn’t get their tech guy, the signals I’m getting means he wouldn’t have been able to fix their stealth leaks anyway,” Mary said, walking up to join the small cluster standing around the camera station. “If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say we knocked out the whole stealth station. Unless they’re rolling with a shitload of spare parts...”

“So their stealth is wonky,” Christopher said, nodding. “How are we doing with tracking them?”

“Could be worse,” Mary said, waving for Christopher to follow her back to her station. On one of her netbooks, she had a map displayed, five square miles in area. She tapped a key, and tiny green dots started to appear.

“That’s all from their stealth leaks?” Christopher asked.

“Yeah, but that’s not all from our instruments. Sergeant Richmond is listening in on the North Korean comms. They’re tracking, too. And their listening posts have better instrumentation than our truck.”

Christopher nodded.

“The NoKos are transmitting on open frequencies?”

“Nah. They’re encrypted. The guys at Carbon-4 just broke this encryption, like, two days ago. Dr. Auffrey loaded the decryption into our computers before we left. They’ll figure it out eventually, but...”

“Understood. This stuff is going up to Bryce?”

“Yep.”

“Awesome. Keep me posted,” Christopher said, standing to his full height and stretching his arms. Long stretches in the Razor reminded him of the flight from Daytona to Vegas. The seats were larger and more comfortable, slightly, but still – sitting down too long made his legs cramp up and his lower back ache.

As he walked back toward the front of the vehicle, he passed the fold-down racks. Peter, Daniel, Martin, and Anthony were crashed out. He’d decided to try and get a sleep rotation going now that the mission had gone over a couple of days – there were still at least three more days before they even got close to Pyongyang, and they couldn’t all stay up forever. Peter would run the mission while Christopher caught sleep, and vice-versa. And though it was Peter’s scheduled downtime, Christopher was suddenly exhausted. He figured he’d at least catch some rest in the passenger seat – Bryce would wake him up if anything happened.

He never made it to the front of the Razor, though. Carson, manning the comm station, put out a hand to stop him.

“What’s up, Sergeant?” Christopher asked, stifling a yawn.

“Traffic. We just passed a NoKo listening post,” he said, but Christopher could already tell this wasn’t ordinary traffic. Carson looked like someone had punched him in the gut.

“Bad news, isn’t it?”

“Afraid so. They picked up a laser transmission,” Carson started.

“Another meeting with the guys in the ELR?”

“No. This one was a simple locator signal, tripped by getting within range of a pre-programmed station.”

“So what’s the problem? That’s part of how we’re tracking them, right?”

“That’s the thing – I’m 99 percent sure this transmission didn’t come from them. They’re saying ‘Razor 2,’ and the traffic popped up right as we passed the post.”

Christopher’s instinct was to ask if Carson was sure, but he didn’t need to. He felt his stomach drop, swallowed hard to keep the bile in his throat. It didn’t even matter if Carson was sure – Christopher was.

“We don’t have one of those laser transmitters on this Razor,” Christopher said after swallowing again.

“We’re not supposed to. But before we left, we had techs from Umbra crawling all over this thing,” Carson said.

Christopher noticed then that Carson was keeping his voice down, more than he needed to keep from waking the sleeping crew. It took Christopher a second before he realized what Carson was saying without using words.

“My people are solid, Sergeant.”

“Oh, I know, I just...”

“I think I know what you ‘just.’ Just make sure you don’t do it again, yeah?”

Carson nodded, but Christopher could see his jaw move
. I wonder if my jaw moves like that when someone calls me on my shit
, he wondered. Part of him didn’t want to blame Carson for the assumption – after all, 47 Echo was technically full of criminals. But Christopher bristled at the suggestion any of his people would betray them. He knew them all too well after all these months. They weren’t his crew anymore – they were family.

“Now, how do we shut that thing down?” Christopher asked.

“Finding it is going to be the first thing,” Carson said. “They really could have put it anywhere on the truck. I’d start with having your tech girl back there run a power trace, see if it’s hooked in to the Razor’s main power grid. But I doubt it is. It’s probably running off its own power source.”

“And then?”

“We’d have to physically go through everywhere it could be on the Razor until we find it. Your guy up there, Bryce. He knows the Razors pretty well?”

“Better than most, I’d say.”

“I’ll get with him and we can start putting together a list of likely places someone could’ve installed it.”

Christopher stood and cleared his throat.

“Listen up,” he said, his voice not quite a shout. “We have a situation.”

Peter’s head popped up from his rack, and Christopher saw the others starting to stir.

“What’s up, Chief?” Peter asked, yawning.

“Our Razor is dirty, transmitting tracking signals to the North Koreans,” Christopher started.

“For real?” Gabriel asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Unfortunately. It seems that someone installed a laser comm like the one the ELR has on our truck before we left Carbon-4. We need to find it and shut it down. Mary –”

“I’ll run a trace to see if it’s pulling from the Razor’s main power,” she said.

“Good. If it isn’t, though, we’re going to have to stop somewhere and physically pull the thing off the truck.”

“Stopping is going to fuck us, Chris,” Bryce said. “We’re barely staying with these guys as it is. If they get out of range, we’re going to have to depend on the North Koreans for tracking data. And if they get too far ahead, we’ll never catch them.”