Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series) (7 page)

Hansen muttered something under his breath, something so quiet that Nick, inches away from the man’s head, couldn’t quite make it out. He brushed it off as probably another racial slur and hauled the pilot along with him to the power substation. The gate was unlocked, and Nick kicked it open with his left foot. He dragged Hansen quickly to the bunker – it wasn’t tough, as the pilot didn’t weigh much – and tried the door. It was unlocked as well. He opened the door and set Hansen down in the small, featureless concrete room, then went back to close the gate.

When he joined Hansen back in the room, he noticed that the young man was sweating profusely. It wasn’t hot out at all.

“You wanna let me take a look at that leg now?”

“Just toss me the medical kit. I’ll do it myself.”

The medical kit. Nick realized he’d left it back on the Brave Warrior’s back seat. He’d have to go back for it.

“Wait here. I’ll go get it, and get the truck off the road somewhere,” Nick told him.

“I’d argue with you, but I don’t think I’m going anywhere,” Hansen said, his eyes shutting as he spoke.

Jesus. He must be in agony
, Nick realized. He didn’t know how badly the pilot’s left leg was injured, but it couldn’t have been minor. Fifteen seconds of putting weight on the injured limb had turned Hansen from a combative asshole to a compliant, quiet little kid. But at least it shut him up.

Nick hopped back into the truck and grabbed the medical kit, a nondescript beige messenger bag, from the back seat. He started the engine and scanned the area around him for somewhere to stash the vehicle. There was still no one on the roads, but up ahead, near the Taizhou Military Installation, he saw a fenced-in parking lot with a couple of other Brave Warriors in it. It was maybe half a mile away. Perfect.

The gate was open, and there was no one wandering about in the parking lot. Nick found that odd, then realized it wasn’t. With the aftermath of the computer network shutdown and subsequent bombing runs by American forces, everyone was probably inside at their desks, busy as hell. Either that, or they were out in the field prepping for a counterattack. If such a thing had happened at Firebase Zulu, where he and his team were stationed, Nick knew he and the rest of 47 Echo would have rolled out on some harebrained, half-planned mission or another within hours. No reason to suspect the People’s Liberation Army worked that much differently, especially in high-adrenaline reaction mode.

Nick found a parking space near the middle of the lot, around a few more Brave Warriors. In addition to the Brave Warriors, there were some armored personnel carriers, Mengshi light assault vehicles, and huge, eight-ton troop trucks in the lot. Nick considered just switching his Brave Warrior for another, but that wouldn’t solve the problem that forced him to ditch their ride in the first place.

It was a problem he explained when he got back to the substation and tossed the medical kit over to Hansen. The pilot dug through the kit, laying out gauze, compression bandages, and medical tape.

“So why are we sitting in a fucking concrete shack rather than riding in relative comfort in an air-conditioned truck?” Hansen asked.

“There was a camera on in the cabin.”

“Yeah, you said that. So what? It’s not like you don’t look like a guy who should be driving that truck.”

“Remember those wanted posters on every building in downtown Shanghai? They know my face.”

“Your face is all messed up with the blood and stuff,” Hansen said, rolling up the left leg of his flight suit. “The guy at the ferry let you pass no problem.”

“Jesus, man. That looks really bad,” Nick said, swallowing to keep the bile down. Throwing up a little wouldn’t help the situation any, but that was what he wanted to do – he was sure he could see Hansen’s shin bone through a huge gash that ran from just below his knee halfway to his ankle.

“It isn’t good,” Hansen said with a sigh, shaking his head and digging in the messenger bag. He came out with a bottle of antiseptic spray and liberally dosed the area with it, wincing as the medicine hit the wound. “You went to lengths to disguise your face. Why worry about the camera now?”

“Fooling a guy working a checkpoint is one thing. He’s human. But the camera coming back on means the PLA computer network is coming back up to full strength. Disguising my face won’t mean shit to the computer. You can’t fool facial-recognition software.”

“How do you even know the Chinks are running it?”

“Wanna cool it with the Chink shit?”

“Not especially.”

“I know they’re running it because surveillance here makes a Las Vegas casino look like a gas station security camera setup. And Vegas has been running facial recognition software since about the time you were in middle school. Hell, Chinese programmers probably
wrote
the software Vegas used back then.”

“So we switch seats. You let me drive. Thing was an automatic. Not like I have to use the clutch,” Hansen said, shoving gauze into the wound and biting his lower lip to keep from shouting.

“Yeah, because a blond-haired, blue-eyed guy driving one of their trucks certainly wouldn’t trip any alarms,” Nick said, frowning. “Sure you don’t need any help with that?”

“You know anything about trauma wound care?”

“A little.”

“Well, I know a lot. They teach it to you for just such an occasion. So just give me space and get out of my light.”

Nick moved so his back was against the door of the tiny bunker, which moved his head out of the path of the single overhead light. Hansen sprayed the wound again, then wrapped the entire thing in gauze, then wrapped the gauze with a compression bandage.

“Now, what’d you do with those painkillers?”

Nick pulled the bottle of Hydrocodone from his cargo pocket and tossed it to Hansen. Though he’d already seen the English label back in the truck, he studied the bottle before opening it. He shook out two pills, then studied one of them up against the light. Shrugging, he put both large pills into his mouth and swallowed.

“I’m probably gonna get pretty sleepy in about a half an hour here,” he said. “My bet is this isn’t a very secure place for me to sack out.”

Nick had the same thought. It was less than half a kilometer from where they’d bailed out of the truck, and it would be the first place anyone looking for them would check. But with Hansen’s leg shredded below the knee, it wasn’t like they were going to get much further. Stealing another military vehicle was out, because they’d logically all have the same cameras connected to the PLA core, and Nick had no idea how to turn them off. And if there were cameras, there were probably other trackers he couldn’t even find or identify.

“We need to go low-profile from here on out,” Nick said. “Find civilian transportation, civilian clothes. Me impersonating a PLA officer is just going to get us into more trouble than we want. There are a billion and a half people in this country, and most of them aren’t in the army – we need to blend in with them if we’re getting out of here.”

“Great plan,” Hansen said, yawning. “We haven’t seen a non-military car in hours. How do you plan to do that?”

“No idea. But I don’t have much time to figure it out.”

Chapter Nine

Gun Fury

Christopher tried to draw a bead on the gunfire, to pinpoint where he should aim, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere. He saw a flash out of a first-floor window on the building nearest the street, a long, two-story house, so he aimed at the flash and sent several rounds from his M4 in that direction. The others with him – Peter, Martin, and Yuri – were returning fire, as well. It took several seconds for Christopher to realize that, though he and his team were out in the open with minimal cover (he and Peter had jumped behind a park bench), none of them were getting hit. The bullets were hitting
close
, but whoever was shooting at them didn’t seem terribly interested in killing them.

The gunfire stopped all at once, and Christopher held up his fist to indicate to his team to stop shooting back. He wasn’t sure they were hitting anything, anyway.

“Chris? What’s going on, man?” Bryce radioed from the APC. His voice buzzed in Christopher’s helmet radio, and Christopher toggled his throat mic with his left hand.

“No clue. Stay there until I give the word.”

“Copy that.”

The silence was shattered after several seconds by a voice, amplified, speaking in Russian. Christopher turned to Yuri, who was crouched behind a steel trash can a few meters away.

“What the hell was he saying?” Christopher shouted.

“He wants us to put down our weapons and surrender,” Yuri answered.

“Might not be a bad idea,” Martin yelled – Christopher saw him crouched behind another park bench. The older man had his helmet visor down.

Christopher activated his own visor and set it to night-vision mode. From the alleys between the houses in front of them, he saw dozens of soldiers in thick winter camouflage pouring out into the streets. A quick count put their numbers north of 60.

“We’ve been had, I think,” Yuri yelled, sighing.

“What’s our move here, man?” Peter asked, his weapon still up and pointed at the advancing soldiers. Christopher could now see they were Russian Renegades, and only about half of them were armed. Still, that made the odds more than seven to one on the ground.

“I think we do like the man said,” Christopher grumbled, unclipping his M4 from its chest strap.

Yuri nodded and placed his AK-47 on the ground in front of him. Both Martin and Peter followed suit, and the four men all placed their hands on their heads and stepped back from their weapons as the soldiers advanced.

“Hey, Gregor,” Christopher heard Daniel in his helmet radio. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

“
Da
,” Gregor’s voice burst in on the same channel, his radio producing more static than Daniel’s.

“Looks like 30 of them have guns. You want the 15 on the left or the 15 on the right?”

“That’s 31, my friend. Sniper up in the church bell tower.”

“Not for long.”

“Shit,” Christopher said under his breath. He moved closer to Yuri, who he realized didn’t have a helmet radio and wasn’t hearing any of the two snipers’ conversation.

“On three, guys. Try to dive for your weapons and help us out. Mary?” Daniel said.

“I have a UAV up and targeting. We can be there in 10 seconds, according to Bryce.”

“One... two... three,” Daniel said softly, his voice even through the whole count.

Christopher tackled Yuri to the ground while Peter and Martin dove for cover again. He didn’t hear the snipers picking off their targets, but he saw four men drop in the first couple of seconds. The Russian mini-UAV blazed through an instant later, firing both of its PKT coaxial machine guns as it swooped low over the mass of troops. By the time Christopher got his hand on his M4, Bryce and Michael were already using the APC’s guns to mop up the rest of the troops.

“You’re clear, Chief,” Daniel radioed. Christopher knew the young man was grinning without having to see him.

“Uh...” the amplified voice said, then cut off.

Christopher stood up and clipped his M4 back to his chest strap. He scanned the streets around him with his night vision, but apart from his own people hopping out of the APC to provide security and the mini-UAV landing back on top of the vehicle, he saw no movement.

“Got someone running, one block up, two over,” Daniel radioed. “Russian Renegade, and he’s really moving. Want me to slow him down?”

“I’d like to ask him some questions,” Yuri said, a hard edge in his voice.

“I have him,” Gregor radioed.

That shot, Christopher heard. He also heard the loud scream and the body crashing into what sounded like a trash can a few blocks away. The night had gone so quiet in the wake of their violent counterattack that Christopher suddenly realized he could hear everything, including his own people breathing a hundred feet away.

Yuri started moving almost immediately, leaving Christopher to jog to catch up. He motioned to Peter to come with him, and the three of them rapidly covered the few blocks to where Gregor had hobbled the fleeing soldier. When they arrived, they found him pulling himself along the street with his arms, his right leg almost obliterated below the knee, trailing blood behind him as he crept. Yuri used his foot to turn the soldier onto his back and immediately started yelling at him. Christopher didn’t speak much Russian at all, so he turned to Peter and raised an eyebrow.

“Uh... homeboy ain’t happy. He’s talking pretty fast. I’m only getting a little of it,” Peter said.

When Yuri gave the soldier a chance to respond, the answer was short and shouted at maximum volume.

“OK, that, I got. And it wasn’t polite at –” Peter started. A gunshot cut him off.

Christopher turned back to Yuri and the soldier to see the former putting his pistol back in its holster. The soldier was now dead on the ground, shot once through the head.

“Fuck, man!” Christopher said.

“He would not have talked. He was Chechen,” Yuri said, shrugging. He said nothing else, as if that simple sentence explained everything. Instead, he started rifling through the dead man’s pockets. He set a few items out on the street – a tablet computer, a hand-held radio, and a notepad with several pages covered in Cyrillic writing. He then gathered the items up and started walking back to the park.

“That was cold brutal, man,” Peter said under his breath as he and Christopher followed Yuri at a short distance.

“Yeah,” Christopher said. “But I don’t know why I was expecting any different.”

“Me either, just... wow, man. Yuri don’t play.”

“How good is your tech girl?” Yuri called over his shoulder as he walked.

“Pretty damned good,” Christopher yelled back.

“Good. This is encrypted,” he said, holding up the tablet briefly before stashing it in a cargo pocket. He slowed slightly to let Christopher and Peter catch up. “I did something to upset you?”

“No, just wasn’t expecting that,” Christopher said, well aware of how stupid it sounded. They’d just shot down 60 men in the park, half of whom had been unarmed.