Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series) (28 page)

“See? Told you you made a good boss.”

Peter was the second person who’d told him that today, but Christopher wasn’t any closer to believing it.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Under The Skyline

Nick knew he couldn’t run forever, but despite the throbbing in his legs, he could still go for a while yet. When his hands started to shake, that’s when he knew he had to stop.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been tearing through the woods, but the search lights from the helicopters weren’t flashing around anymore. He didn’t hear Ghost Unit soldiers tromping around behind him, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. He wasn’t out of the woods, literally or figuratively. The actual woods were getting thicker, and if he hadn’t already been wearing his TotalVis goggles when he jumped out of the car, he would have smacked into a tree and knocked himself out ages ago.

He wasn’t unscathed, but he was still combat-effective. A branch smacked him in the face, and he could feel that he was bleeding, but there was no pain. He thought he might have twisted his left ankle on a tree stump, but he ignored it and kept right on plowing. It hadn’t slowed him down, anyway. That was good news.

He had no idea what kind of training members of Unit Ghost went through in the area of Wilderness Survival or Tracking, but Nick was in his element here. Wilderness Survival was an area where he had real, actual training – not from the Marines, or even from his Navy SEAL father. He’d been trained as early as the second grade. In Day Camp.

Other kids had gone to day camp and learned useless shit like making leather wallets, or shooting target-pointed arrows at hay bales with yellow plastic recurve bows. When Nick was in elementary school, his father was posted to Fort Hood in Texas in some sort of advisory capacity to one of the Army commands there. The military had multiple summer camp programs, but they weren’t like civilian camps – everything had a decidedly military bent to it, just like most of the schools Nick attended up until high school. There was an undercurrent of “get ‘em while they’re young,” and the camp programs Nick landed in definitely reflected that attitude.

His first day-camp instructor had looked, to young Nick, like a broken-down old man, a 65-year-old with a horrible smoker’s cough and a pronounced limp. His father would later tell him that the guy was a former SERE instructor, and had taken a retirement job with Army Morale, Welfare, and Recreation, which ran all of the children’s programs where busy military parents could dump their kids in the summer.

What was supposed to be a few months of going to the rec center during summer weekdays and maybe learning to fish turned into a modified Survive, Escape, Resist, Evade class. The broken-down old man was anything but – he saw these kids as his new recruits, and pushed them hard. Nick and his fellow day-campers did five-mile hikes in the woods. They learned to identify and treat water sources for consumption. They learned to survive off pine gum and squirrels for days, if necessary. They learned orienteering, how to build shelters, how to make improvised weapons and animal traps. At age 7, his dad could have dropped him off in the deepest woods, and Nick would still be alive days later when he finally stumbled into the nearest town.

He went to summer camp for four years. The same guy was there every summer, and Nick became one of his favorite students. By 11, he could build a camouflage suit out of weeds and branches. He could make a fire with whatever the forest left lying around. He could even make a solar still out in the desert out of a plastic bag and a twist-tie. He’d killed a rattlesnake with his boot and eaten it for lunch... and it wasn’t bad.

He’d kept up, going camping once a year for most of the rest of his life. He’d go out into the woods, alone, for at least three days with nothing but a knife.

Unit Ghost might have impressive field training, but he doubted they’d been doing it from when they were three feet tall.

Survival training would come in handy later. Right now, he just needed to
survive
. And that meant running until he physically couldn’t. He’d cover himself in enough dirt and leaves to fool the thermals later. He’d rest his throbbing legs when they gave out. But right now, his only directive was
keep running
.

When he bailed out of the car, it had just gone full dark. The sun had set maybe an hour and a half before he first saw the helicopters, so Nick was surprised when the sky started to lighten while he was still running. It couldn’t have been getting close to daybreak already, as that would mean he had been running without break for more than six hours. No human could do that, no matter how jacked up on speed and adrenaline. Lightening skies in the dead of night meant something else. Something bad.

The moon wasn’t full, so Nick knew that wasn’t the reason for the extra light. He paused for a moment, leaning heavily against a tree and sliding his TotalVis goggles up onto his forehead. As he sucked in lungfuls of air, he checked the sky – definitely lighter. The air was heavier here, too, more humid. He could smell the imminent storm, but that was only half of the problem. The lights reflecting off the rainclouds, brightening the night almost enough for him to see clearly in the dark woods without his night vision – light pollution. He was near a town, or possibly an outpost. Town meant people. People was what he was trying to avoid.

A warm rain – and judging by the air temperature, that was what this was going to be – was good news for him. He’d have an easier time messing with thermal and night-vision sensors once he covered himself with enough crap from the forest floor. Rain also meant generally drinkable water, and he’d only have to worry about keeping his lighter and his pills dry.

But light pollution was terrible news. He didn’t know the area at all, but with the density of the woods thus far, he hadn’t expected to come across civilization anytime soon. And now that he’d stopped, his legs were insistent about the fact that they were done for the night. He could try to make his way deeper back into the woods, but that was probably heading back towards the people who were still looking for him. And he’d be moving much slower now, which meant a greater chance of being picked up on helicopter cameras. He’d have to make do.

He couldn’t see the town or outpost or whatever from where he was, and as he forced himself to calm his panting breath, he couldn’t hear any signs of population. The lights could be miles off, just lighting up a large storm system. Stopping here and covering for a while was pretty much the only option he had at the moment, so he set about scouring the immediate area for shelter materials.

He was rusty, but only a little. Within about fifteen minutes, he had a small debris hut, just long and wide enough to fit his entire body into, covered in branches and moss in a small ditch among a crop of large trees. As he stepped back, he could still see the hooch, but he knew what to look for. Someone who didn’t probably wouldn’t see it – it just looked like a pile of crap among the bushes.

Nick was confident enough that it would keep out most of the rain, but he’d sleep on his side anyway to minimize the chance of drowning. He crawled into the debris, covered the entry with branches, and curled into a fetal position. The rain started not long after, and the design held, mostly. Water ran from a few weak spots, but it would be fine. He’d get wet, but not excessively, and he’d already stashed his lighter in the pill bottle. Nick thumbed the safety off of his M4 and fell asleep with it in his hands.

He woke a couple of times for a few minutes at a time, convinced he’d heard something definitely un-forest-like, but after listening for a few minutes with his finger hovering over the trigger, he calmed down enough to go back to sleep.

When he woke up for good, the sky was definitely lighter, and the rain had slowed to a drizzle. It was morning, and he estimated he’d caught about four hours of interrupted sleep. It wasn’t much, but it was more than he needed. He breakfasted on two Dexedrines and crawled out of his shelter.

Upon standing, he noticed that his legs felt better than he’d feared they would. They still ached, but they hadn’t blown out on his psychotic run through the woods. His left ankle was another story, though. The second he put weight on it, he knew he’d done more than twisted it. He wasn’t a medic, but he’d played enough sports in his youth to know that it was at least sprained.

“Not that it matters,” he mumbled under his breath, standing on his right foot and slowly rotating his left ankle in a circle. It still had some range of motion, so it probably wasn’t broken. Even if it was, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He’d try to keep as much weight off it as he could, but it was time to get moving again.

There wasn’t much noise – a few birds, the light rain falling on leaves. Nick tilted his head up and caught a bit of rain dripping off the tree above him. It tasted off, but he drank it anyway. He’d left all of his food and water back in the car, so he’d have to survive on what he could find from here on out.

He did a quick check of what he still had – his M4, his pistol, his knife, his pills, his lighter, and a pack of Red Suns. The cell phone Black had given him was still, amazingly, in a cargo pocket, but it was probably too wet to work. He also had somehow managed to hang onto his unit hand radio, which was weatherproof. He switched it on, keeping the volume low, and heard static on channel 1-9 Victor. It still seemed to work, but the battery was low.

He was in much better shape, equipment-wise, than most of his camping trips as a kid. Ankle aside, he’d be fine as long as he kept to the woods.

“Of course, you don’t know how big these woods are, or how far they go,” he mumbled to himself, limping north, away from the lights he’d seen the night before. “So you might just walk into a major city in the next twenty minutes.”

His ankle was shooting pain up his leg and into his spine, but he did his best to put it out of his mind.
Just sprained
, he reassured himself
. It’ll be fine. Keep walking
.

He moved slowly, carefully, keeping his ears open for any human sounds. He wasn’t covering much distance, but he was covering his tracks in the mud as best he could, kicking debris over his footprints as he went. By the brightening sky, he figured he’d been moving for about two hours when the woods started to thin out. He heard noises, faint at first, but growing louder. They weren’t human noises.

Machines. Engines.

Nick crept forward, trying to keep his steps light, his movements small, trying not to brush against any foliage loud enough to make a sound. After a few more minutes, he caught a flash of color – yellow, moving fast. He crouched down behind a tree trunk and poked his head out quickly.

It wasn’t Unit Ghost. It wasn’t the entirety of the North Korean Army. What he saw was two kids, maybe fifteen years old, tearing through mud and puddles with dirt bikes.

“Oh, look,” Nick whispered to himself. “Free motorcycles.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Stop the World

The third site was a bust, but it took them longer to search than Christopher had originally planned, thanks to a heavy rainstorm that came out of nowhere. It only poured for about an hour or so, then continued on its way south, but it slowed them down enough. They were going to be pretty close to daylight by the time they hit the fourth hide.

The hide where it has to be
, Christopher told himself. Even he didn’t buy it. Part of him – no,
most
of him – knew they’d already missed their chance, already let these fuckers escape with a war-ending piece of technology. They had some mechanical wizard on their truck, someone who’d been able to fix a stealth system Christopher didn’t even pretend to understand. For a bunch of rejects, misfits, and criminals, they sure had done a bang-up job of fucking with the system so far.

Which, Christopher realized, was exactly what someone could have once said about his unit. Up until now, of course. Now all they could say was the rejects, misfits, and criminals part, maybe adding “with a fuck-up for a commander” for good measure.

He knew he couldn’t let his people see any of that, though. They couldn’t see any of what he was thinking, what he was feeling. He couldn’t let them see he was defeated. They needed to see this mission through to the end, because if there was even a chance they could still catch these assholes, they had to take it. There were no other options.

“Ranger’s awake,” Gabriel said, coming up behind Christopher like a ghost.

Christopher tried not to jump, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded.

“I expected more noise when that happened,” Christopher told him, looking over his shoulder and catching a glimpse of Carson sprawled out on his rack.

“Yeah. Homeboy’s on six of morphine,” Gabriel said, attempting to smile but not quite pulling it off. “He’s probably in a better mood than anyone on this bus.”

“That’s not saying a lot,” Peter said from behind Bryce’s chair.

Christopher’s second-in-command had been standing in the front area of the Razor for a few minutes now, not saying much of anything. He simply leaned his elbows on the back of Bryce’s chair and watched the woods roll by on either side – Christopher guessed it was for lack of anything better to do. When the North Koreans had taken over this part of Russia, they sure hadn’t done much with it. It was just woods and a single, unpaved road that seemed to lead nowhere, except to an abandoned gold mine that his team had picked as the least-likely (but still possible) hide point.

It had some advantages as a hiding spot. The mine and its surrounding buildings had been abandoned since 1917, and no one had seemed particularly interested in setting up shop there in the hundred-plus years that followed, according to the data they had. It would be quiet, and it was just far enough away from the Chinese-North Korean border that patrols from either side would be unlikely to give it much attention. The large, empty buildings and heavy tree cover would be a decent place to stop and make repairs, and the area was worthless enough that even UAVs would probably pass it up.