Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series) (6 page)

By the time they’d made it a few hours down the road from Firebase Zulu, he’d narrowed the list down a bit. Daniel, his sniper, was too valuable as a lone gun, so he was out. Martin, the demolitions expert, was through-the-roof brilliant, but dangerously unstable, so no go there. Mary was also a genius, but he needed her full attention as the team’s hacker and tech person, so she was out. Gabriel was not yet even 19, and still needed a lot of training to even function as the team’s medic – adding SIC duties on top of that would overwhelm the young kid. His communications tech, Anthony, was a solid enough guy, but he’d been a bit sketchy since the attack on New York, his hometown. That left Michael Riley and Peter King, his two machine gunners, and Bryce, the driver.

Problem was, each of them was outstanding at their jobs. He really didn’t want to add responsibility to any of them – it would only split focus. Christopher himself had pretty much been Nick’s right-hand man since the inception of the unit as a Special Forces group, so being second in command
was
his focus – now he needed someone else to step in and take over that responsibility.

Christopher of course knew why he needed someone to be his second. If he was killed in the field, someone would need to take over command of the unit, first of all. But more importantly, he needed a sounding board – someone who would poke holes in his plans, expose any weaknesses he hadn’t yet thought of, without undermining his authority. Any one of the three on his short list would be able to do that – he trusted each of those men implicitly.

In the end, it came down to simple duplication of duties. Bryce was their only driver, but both Michael and Peter were heavy machine gunners. Razor assault vehicles, the tool the team used most often, had two dual-50 caliber machine gun turrets, and that was where Michael and Peter lived. But they weren’t always in Razors, and they didn’t always necessarily need two gunners. In a pinch, Daniel could fill in as one of the turret gunners, so Bryce dropped off the list.

The possibilities down to two, Christopher used their criminal records to determine which he was going to choose. Michael had been a break-and-enter guy, an armed robber who had killed both a security guard and a police officer on a robbery gone bad. Peter had been a gangbanger in Detroit, but he had been a leader in his particular street gang. In the absence of everything else, leadership won out – and Peter was a relatively large, scary dude. He got people to listen to him. As they rolled through hour six of their 17-hour drive, Christopher got up and walked over to Peter, who was sleeping sitting up on the bench behind the passenger’s seat.

“‘Sup, boss?” Peter asked as Christopher shook his shoulder gently. The younger man didn’t yawn, didn’t blink – he simply woke up instantly, his hand going to the M-249 SAW sitting at his side.

They’d all started waking up that way years ago – sleeping light, ready to jump into action with zero notice. For once, though, Christopher wasn’t waking his friend to go shoot at something.

“No worries, Pete. We’re good.”

“Right on,” Peter said, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and tapping the Spetsnaz operative in the passenger seat on the shoulder. “
Mogu li ya kuritʹ zdesʹ
?”

Christopher, who’d just taken a few crash courses in Russian, was impressed by the younger man’s pronunciation.

“
Da
,” the operative said, “
Yesli vy dadite mne odnu
.”

Peter handed the pack to the operative, then lit his own smoke.

“You need one, boss?”

“Ugh. Boss. Don’t like that much. That’s what we call Nick,” Christopher said, taking the pack from the operative’s outstretched hand and pulling out a smoke.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. How about Chief? Or Gunny?”

“Or Chris. That works. My mom did go to the trouble of naming me, and all.”

“Right on, man. So, what’s the deal? I wasn’t sleeping
well
, or anything, but...”

“You know I need to pick a second in command. I’m thinking you’re the man for the job, if you want it.”

“I mean, I’ll take it. But it’s just temporary until Nick gets back, right?”

“That’s the hope.”

“You can count on me, man. I’ve got you.”

“Sergeant Lee,” the driver piped up, turning slightly to face Christopher.

“Yeah, Yuri? What’s up?”

“We’re getting a call from Bulaevo. It’s a small town in Kazakhstan, not too far off our route. They’re being attacked by Renegade forces, and their local militia is already overwhelmed.”

Russian Renegades. Christopher had hoped they wouldn’t run into any, that their trip would be nice and uneventful. It never worked out that way. When the war started in early 2019, just under half of the Russian military had sided with China and North Korea, and outside of the Chinese lines, the Renegade forces were a constant irritation.

“Any idea on how many?”

“Small force. No more than 50, but well-armed. There is another problem,” Yuri said.

“Yeah?”

“We’ve got orders to deliver this vehicle and your team to Yekaterinburg, and nothing else. We’re not supposed to stop for anything less than a direct attack. Do you have such orders, as well?”

Christopher nodded. He saw where Yuri was going with this – he really wanted to engage, to help this small town fight off these jackasses, but he couldn’t – unless 47 Echo made him divert.

“We don’t. In fact, our standing orders are to take out whatever Renegade forces we come across,” Christopher said. That was stretching the truth, but only a little.

“So, I could safely say you asked us to divert to engage?”

“You could say that, yes,” Christopher said, clapping Yuri on the shoulder and turning to his team. “All right, folks. Get on the clock.”

* * *

Now it was time for a plan. They were outnumbered at least five to one, but they’d had worse odds before and all come out alive. Then, though, Nick had been at the wheel, and Nick always seemed to have a plan. Even when Christopher knew his boss didn’t have a clue how to proceed, he never let the other people in the unit see it. Christopher didn’t know how to do any of that, how to plan or hide his lack of a plan.

The situation was made worse by the fact they would be facing off against Russian Renegades, the hardest in a group of hardcore soldiers. When the Russian Republic tore itself in half at the start of the war, the most hardline communist soldiers went over to the Chinese side. The soldiers that had survived the combined Loyalist Russians and American forces were lethal, brutal. There might as well have been three times as many as there actually were.

“Do we know anything about who we’re up against?” Christopher asked as Yuri killed the engine a mile and a half from Bulaevo.

“The man who sent the call was an old veteran,” Yuri said, standing and opening the weapons locker. “He says VDV.”

VDV – Vozdushno-Desantnye Voyska – Airborne troops. Highly trained, heavily armed. Great.

“Couldn’t have been a bunch of supply clerks, could it?” Peter asked, echoing Christopher’s thoughts.

“Unfortunately, this is not the case. But they are low on supplies. Our source reports they are not fully armed, and light on grenades and RPGs. We only have to worry about small-arms and sniper fire,” Gregor, Yuri’s partner, said.

“How’d this guy contact you, anyway?” Anthony asked. It was a good question, and one Christopher wished he’d thought of.

“An old radio unit,” Yuri said, “transmitting on a low-frequency channel the Russian military uses for Special Purpose.”

“And he told you where they’re hanging out?” Christopher asked.

“Da. They’re mostly collected in four houses on the other side of this park,” Gregor said, bringing up a satellite image of the town and pointing to a large wooded area roughly in the center.

“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Christopher said, the wheels starting to turn in his head. “We’re dealing with half a unit, low on supplies, at night. Their watch will probably be light, maybe 10, 15 guys. Two or three snipers. That sound right?”

Yuri nodded.

“And we have one sniper,” Christopher started.

“Two,” Gregor said, pulling a Druganov sniper rifle out of the weapons locker.

“Great. Two. So we set up our snipers in the trees at the edge of the woods here,” he pointed to the screen. “Then we send a small force – me, Peter, Martin, and you, Yuri – to go wire the buildings to blow under sniper cover.”

“Problem, Sergeant,” Yuri said, opening the weapons locker wide so that Christopher could see inside. “We’re light on explosives. A case of grenades.”

“Martin?” Christopher said.

“Got it handled,” Martin said, pulling a duffel from under his seat and opening it. Inside were thirty blocks of C4.

“Jesus. You really need to stop riding around with so much boom,” Peter said, shaking his head.

“It’s my security blanket,” Martin yawned, shrugging.

“And the rest of us?” Mary asked.

“You’re our cavalry. We get in trouble, you all charge in and fuck them up as much as possible with the big gun on this thing,” Christopher said, pounding the bulkhead next to him. “Bryce? You handle this thing?”

“Sure.”

“Mike?”

“Gun’s no problem.”

“Good. Sound about right, guys?”

Yuri and Gregor nodded, almost in sync.

“All right, then. Let’s move.”

Getting the snipers set up was no problem. The APC was idling just behind the forest, ready to rock out at a word from Christopher. Everything seemed to be going to plan, Christopher thought as he and his small team crept across the open park towards the lights of the small houses three football fields away. They saw no guards, no snipers in high perches. It looked like the job was going to be easy enough.

And just as he had that thought, the night exploded in gunfire.

Chapter Eight

Outlaw

“So you’re a junkie, on top of everything else.”

Nick thought Hansen had fallen asleep. His eyes had closed and he’d stopped talking, for which Nick was infinitely thankful. It didn’t last long, though, maybe five minutes before the guy’s eyes were open again and he resumed his active campaign of not-shutting-the-fuck-up. When he thought the pilot was sleeping, Nick shook out two of the stimulant pills he’d taken from his dead medic’s pack and shot them into his mouth. That was when Hansen decided to open his eyes.

“Yeah. You pilots
never
take uppers,” Nick shot back after swallowing the two pills.

“Not like you, buddy. Quick question – when was the last time you slept?”

“Approximately none of your damn business.”

Hansen shrugged.

“Your nervous system, man. Just make sure you’re not pointing your gun at me anytime soon, yeah? Hate for you to get twitchy and put one in my eye.”

“Perhaps not being an asshole would be a good way to assure I don’t draw down on you.”

Nick meant the comment to come off almost as a joke, but when he heard his own words, there was a hard edge to them. He knew he was irritated, stressed, angry – but he thought he was doing a better job of hiding it.

“Perhaps not being a Chink spy would be a good way of assuring I don’t act like an asshole,” Hansen said, but his voice was quieter now. Nick realized he’d scared the pilot a bit.

Good
, Nick thought.
Maybe he’ll shut up from time to time now.

Hansen did keep quiet for the next several minutes. In fact, it was Nick who spoke next, and he wouldn’t have if there hadn’t been a major problem.

He’d been enjoying the silence, simply piloting the Brave Warrior further north. The landscape was starting to look familiar – they were approaching the Taizhou Military Installation, where Nick had been captured and imprisoned just a few days before. As he drove, he thought he caught a small, red light flicker on and off at the top left edge of his peripheral vision. When he looked up, he saw a small camera near the truck’s driver-side sunshield, and there was, indeed, a small LED beside it. The LED, however, was dark.

As Nick watched, though, the LED flickered on again, then off. Finally, it switched on and stayed on.

“Shit. We need to ditch this car,” Nick said, swerving toward the road’s shoulder and stepping on the brakes.

“What? Why?”

“Camera just came on. And you know they’re looking for me.”

“So what? Your face is all covered up,” Hansen said, leaning back further in his seat.

“No time to explain it to you. Can you walk?”

“Doubt it.”

“Fine. I’ll carry you.”

“Uh, no, thanks. I’ll try to walk.”

Nick hopped out of the truck and crossed around to Hansen’s door, scanning the road in both directions as he moved. There weren’t any cars in sight, at least, not for the moment. He opened Hansen’s door and helped him out.

“We need to find some cover while I figure this shit out,” Nick said, hauling the young pilot out of the truck and closing the door behind him.

“Not much in the way of cover by the side of the damn highway,” Hansen bitched, pushing Nick’s arm off of his shoulder and standing shakily.

Nick surveyed the landscape around them and caught sight of an electrical substation about four hundred feet off the road. There was a small bunker in the center of the transformers – it was better than nothing.

“Power station. Think you can make it?”

“Yeah.”

Nick took off, walking fast, and looked behind him. Hansen was moving, but barely. He would take a step with his right leg, planting it squarely in front of him, then drag his left leg behind him until it met up with his right. Nick sighed, tightened the strap on his assault rifle, and covered the distance back to the young pilot in two big steps. He grabbed Hansen’s left arm and threw it over his shoulder, supporting the wounded leg with his own body weight.

“I didn’t ask for your help,” Hansen growled.

“I noticed. But the rate you’re going, it’ll be night before we get there. So I’m dragging you if I have to.”