Supercritical Page 12

  “Hey, Lieutenant.”

  “Nick. Especially when I’m out of uniform.” Nick wanted to smile at her but found himself unable to make his mouth make the shape.

  “Right. Nick. Didn’t expect to see you again so soon. I know you’re about to roll out, but I just wanted to thank you for getting me on this mission. We do this, I’m off disciplinary and back into the regular Marines three years early.”

  “No problem.”

  Kirstin leaned in and kissed Nick on the cheek.

  “That was for luck,” she said, smirking. “Wait, you’re not married, are you?”

  “No,” Nick said, shaking his head.

  “Okay. Then this one’s for luck.” Kirstin grabbed Nick by the shoulders and kissed him on the lips, long and hard.

  His entire body stiffened up, and he just stood there, frozen. He felt like he should have done something, at least kissed back, but his body suddenly didn’t want to respond to any commands. Kirstin tossed him a wink and ran off, grinning.

  “Smooth. Very smooth, boss,” Bryce said.

  “Shut up.”

  * * *

  “I can’t believe that this piece of shit is our ride,” Daniel groaned as they unloaded from the Cougar.

  The plane did look old, Nick thought, but a lot of Russian machines looked old to him. It was something about the design; this particular plane reminded him of something from the 1940s. The machine was large, angular and had two huge turboprops on each wing.

  “I assure you, this is one of the finest aircraft you will ever have the pleasure of riding in,” a middle-aged man in a dark blue flight suit said, dragging from a cigarette as he walked over to meet them.

  “You sure about that, man? This thing looks older than my dad,” Daniel said.

  “The design is from nineteen fifty-nine, but the aircraft was produced in nineteen seventy-three,” the man in the flight suit replied. “It works as well now as the day it rolled off the Soviet production lines. I am Major Yuri Roschenko. Pilot.”

  “Shit. It is older than my dad,” Daniel muttered.

  “Major. Lieutenant Nick Morrow. This is my crew. Glad to be aboard,” Nick said.

  “Your pressure suits and parachutes are already onboard. Once the hotshots take off, we’ll be airborne.”

  “Hotshots?” Bryce asked.

  “Our advance guard. Two fighter pilots from Zhukovsky Air Base,” Yuri said, nodding down the runway at two MiG-29 fighter jets. “They will fly ahead of us, scanning for problems. As soon as they have enemy contact, your team will jump.”

  “And you?” Nick asked.

  Yuri sighed and looked up at the sky. For a second, Nick thought he caught a flash of sorrow cross the man’s face, but before he could be sure, it was gone.

  “I will most likely be shot down, as will they. We have cloned Renegade transponders, but I do not expect the subterfuge to hold after we cross the electronic frontier. Now, load up, please. We are short on time.”

  Nick and his people moved to board the huge old plane. He was a bit shocked by how calm the aging pilot was, especially as he was expecting to die tonight. Though, of course, Nick himself was trying his best to appear calm on the outside. Perhaps Yuri Roshenko was doing the same.

  His seven-person team was loaded up in minutes. They put on their pressure suits over their clothes as the huge rear hatch slowly closed.

  “We are about to take off,” Yuri’s voice boomed over a speaker somewhere in the back of the plane. “I am expecting turbulence, so please stay seated.”

  Nick had done the math while he was waiting around to use the phone earlier in the day. The border with Mongolia was almost six hundred miles away. It would take about an hour and a half to reach it in the plane, which cruised at about 415 mph. He set his watch to count down from ninety minutes as the plane lifted off the runway. Every minute past that would make their journey to Shanghai that much shorter.

  “All right, guys. Plug into your iPods. Might as well use the time to get a jump on the Russian language primer Captain Dyuzhev put together for you,” Nick told his people.

  “Aw, man. That guy’s voice bugs me,” Daniel bitched. He was smirking though as he put in his earbuds and turned on his iPod.

  Nick used the first hour or so to go through his mission briefing in his head. He’d memorized it all, but there wasn’t much to memorize. Intel from inside the Chinese electronic frontier was more than five years old, and even that was sketchy. They knew where Shanghai was, but not much more than that.

  The mission parameters were similarly freeform as a result. They’d be on their own the second they stepped out of the airplane at 45,000 feet. As soon as they hit the ground, they’d have to find their own transport, plan their own route and reach Shanghai without any help. Command’s projections expected it to take two weeks to get close to Shanghai, but even Ross admitted that was just a number someone had pulled out of his ass.

  Martin had asked Nick after the initial briefing why they didn’t just use a stealth Razor to go in and travel by night. Nick had the same question but figured out the answer himself. They had no intel on what the interior of China looked like these days, and therefore no way to scout daytime cover locations for the huge assault vehicle. Also, the Razor’s stealth mode was the one technology the American forces had that the Chinese didn’t. They couldn’t allow a vehicle like that to fall into enemy hands. Teams Two and Three would be close enough to ride in and back out again under cover of darkness, so their Razors were relatively safe.

  Among their gear was a ten-year-old cellular phone. It was a simple, rugged Motorola flip that the eggheads in Air Force Intelligence had modified to contact only two other phones, identical models carried by Teams Two and Three. At 2200 hours every day, Nick was supposed to dial the only number in the phone’s memory, which would connect it to the other two teams’ phones. The phone would automatically switch frequencies and service providers several times during each call, sending encrypted signals that only the other two phones could decode. The hope was that if the cells were used for less than five minutes, the signals would be untraceable.

  At a week and a half into their mission, assuming Nick and his crew were close to the made-up two-week schedule, Teams Two and Three would leave for their objectives. Nick was to keep them updated and, at the moment they shut the Chinese core down, call the other two teams and let them know to take out their data centers, as well.

  And that was it. That was all the direction they had to go on. The plan didn’t leave a great taste in Nick’s mouth, and as he ran through it, he thought the flavor showed on his face.

  “We are about to breach the Mongolian border and the electronic frontier,” Yuri’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “It might be a good idea to get your parachutes and gear on.”

  Nick stood up and motioned to his crew to take off their earbuds. As they did, Nick repeated what Yuri had said. All of them strapped their packs to their chests and their parachutes to their backs.

  “Helmets too, boss?” Martin asked.

  “Probably a good idea,” Nick said, putting on his TotalVis goggles and then his helmet. “We’ll wait on the oxygen until we hear from the Major.”

  “Crossing the frontier,” Yuri told them. “Be ready to jump any time now.”

  Nick looked around at his crew, but he couldn’t tell much from their faces, half covered by their helmets. If they were feeling anything like he was, they were trying like hell to keep their heart rates down and the sweat from clouding up their goggles. It wasn’t the jump, though that was scary enough, especially at night.

  It was not knowing where they’d land, or what they would find when they hit the ground. It was not knowing how they were going to make it to Shanghai, or how they were going to find and disable the Chinese Army Network. It was the fact that for all the intelligence capabilities the U.S. Armed Forces had at its disposal, they really knew nothing. There was no plan, not even anything resembling one.

  “Our
escorts have been engaged,” Yuri told them. “Jump in thirty seconds.”

  “All right! Big hit of oxygen, then on my go!” Nick yelled as the back hatch started to open. He took two deep breaths of oxygen and stowed the mask.

  “Jump!” Yuri said.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Nick yelled.

  Mary was the first out the hatch, followed closely by Briggs—they’d been the closest to the door. Daniel, Bryce, Chris and Martin followed them out, and Nick took a running leap as soon as they cleared the airplane.

  This jump wasn’t like the last one. His mind wasn’t talking to him now, wasn’t producing any words. All he could hear was the wind zooming by him as he fell. It was dark, but thanks to the TotalVis goggles, he could see all six of his people below him. They read as blue dots on his lenses.

  His right lens turned yellow, and Nick breathed in. Still, he had no thoughts. No words came to mind. His brain had overdosed on fear and shut down except for the most basic functions. Numbers, colors, those still made sense. The numbers on his altimeter were getting smaller. The blue dots and the yellow lens meant his people were still there and he couldn’t yet pull his ripcord. But beyond that—nothing. Nothing but a cold sweat all over his body and a cold, steel chunk of terror in his gut.

  The dots below him started to turn white a split-second before his lens turned green. Nick pulled his ripcord and felt his chute catch, and he was floating down, looking for any sign of terrain below him. The TotalVis goggles’ night-vision turned on, illuminating a large valley devoid of buildings or people. The ground was coming up fast, so Nick prepared himself to roll. His boots hit soft, wet earth and he let his legs fall out from under him, rolling onto his shoulder and ending up in a sitting position.

  Nick looked around and saw his people on the ground, pulling in and packing their chutes. He did the same, then stripped off his pressure suit and bundled it up with his parachute. He opened the side pocket on his pack and pulled out the Motorola cell phone. There was no ring after he dialed—a voice simply came on the line.

  “Dyuzhev,” the voice said.

  “Captain. It’s Morrow. We’re down.”

  “All intact?”

  “Team is seven strong.”

  “Good to hear. We were worried—last we heard was that your escorts were encountering resistance. The transponders have all gone dead.”

  Nick’s stomach dropped.

  “That means—”

  “Da. The planes were all destroyed. Good luck, 4-7 Echo. Make sure the same doesn’t happen to you.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hellnation

  “Mary. Got a location?”

  “Working on it. We’re in a bit of a dead zone, looks like.”

  “Perimeter secure, boss. Not even any animals moving,” Daniel’s voice buzzed in Nick’s ear.

  “Thanks, Daniel. Chris? Got anything on the radio?”

  “Not even the AM hits of the seventies,” Christopher said, shaking his head.

  Christopher was sitting cross-legged near the pile of parachutes and pressure suits. Just behind him, Bryce, Martin and Briggs were digging a large hole.

  Christopher fiddled some more with his radio then stowed it back in his vest.

  “Nothing. Dropped in the middle of nowhere, looks like.”

  “Better than jumping in on a city,” Nick said, shrugging. “At least we can be pretty sure no one saw us.”

  “Got us. Nearest town of any size is Orkhon, about ten kliks southeast,” Mary said. “That puts us about one hundred fifty miles from Ulaanbaatar.”

  “Well, that’s better than expected, slightly,” Nick said. “What’re our chances of finding a vehicle in…what’d you call it? Orkhon?”

  “No clue. Database doesn’t have much on it. But Darkhan is only fifteen or so miles south of that. Second biggest city in Mongolia, or at least it was before the War. Good bet on a car there.”

  “Right. Once we get the chutes and pressure suits buried, we start for Orkhon. Make it as close as we can before sunrise, and then I’ll go in on foot and see what I can get us, if anything. I’d really prefer not to leg it twenty-odd miles if we don’t have to,” Nick said.

  “You and me both, brother. I’ll help the guys dig. Sooner we get moving, the better,” Christopher said, standing up and stretching out his legs.

  “Yeah, me too. Mary, try to find us a good walking route. Something with nice scenery,” Nick said.

  “On it.”

  Working together, the five men had the parachutes and pressure suits buried in less than fifteen minutes. Mary packed up her netbook, and they all hefted their packs on their backs and started walking east, heading up the hill where Daniel had posted himself.

  “Daniel. On the move,” Nick said into his radio.

  “Got you. Falling in,” Daniel radioed back.

  He didn’t see the young man approach, but a few seconds later, Daniel seemingly appeared out of thin air next to Chris. He gave Nick a thumbs-up and a smirk. For a bigger guy, Daniel could move like a ghost.

  “Jesus, it’s cold,” Christopher said as they trudged forward.

  “It’s not that bad,” Bryce said, readjusting the straps on his backpack. “Weather’s actually warming up. Just be glad it’s turning spring.”

  “Your opinion on cold doesn’t count. You’re from Minnesota,” Daniel said. “If your face can still move, it’s not cold to you.”

  “Y’all are from the coasts. You don’t know from cold,” Bryce said. “Back me up here, Mary.”

  “It could be warmer,” she said. “But there’s no snow or ice, so I’ll take it.”

  “Once we get moving a bit, you’ll warm up,” Nick said, scanning ahead of him with the TotalVis’ night-vision mode.

  They were cresting the hill and walking out of the valley when the gunfire started. Without Nick saying a word, his people all instantly dropped to the ground and went for their weapons.

  Wasn’t expecting to be shot at this soon, Nick thought. This is already going badly.

  “They must’ve seen us land,” Christopher said, sweeping the area with his scope.

  “He. It’s just one guy,” Nick said. He only heard one weapon, an automatic. He guessed AK-47.

  “Got him. One guy, horseback, three hundred meters. Looks like a farmer or something. AK-47,” Daniel said.

  “How the hell can he see us? It’s pitch-black out here,” Martin said.

  “No idea. He’s not wearing night-vision or anything. Nick, I have him between the eyes. Say the word and he’s history,” Daniel said, making a small adjustment to the scope on his Druganov sniper rifle.

  Nick finally located the shooter with his own scope. It was a thin man on a malnourished horse, firing in their general direction with a battered AK-47. His clothes were torn and dirty, and he wore an old baseball cap. There was no way this guy was People’s Liberation Army. More likely, he was just a man trying to protect his land.

  “Negative. Back off, folks. We’re going around. I think we just wandered onto this guy’s homestead. Let’s be quiet and move. He probably heard us chattering like teenage girls,” Nick whispered, leading his crew back down the hill.

  They walked in near-silence for the next two hours until they saw lights off in the distance. There were only five lights, and Nick saw four low buildings and the outlines of three trucks through his TotalVis goggles.

  “Is that Orkhon?” Martin whispered.

  “Nope. We’re still a couple of kliks away from there,” Mary replied.

  “PLA listening post,” Daniel said.

  “How do you know?” Christopher asked.

  “See that tree?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Check out the very top.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Christopher said. “That’s clever.”

  At the top of the tree, Nick had noticed a small aerial. He looked at his people, who were all focused on the tiny, blinking light at the top.

  “Good eye, Daniel. Whole tree
’s likely fake, just put there to hide the antenna array. Probably set up to try and monitor our traffic in Southern Russia. You guys wait here. I’ll get us one of those trucks. If you hear me say anything in English—”

  “Take down the building. Got it,” Christopher said.

  Nick quickly took off his backpack and M4, setting them down next to Christopher. He checked the pistol he’d brought with him, a Chinese Army Type 54 pistol that a Charlie unit had picked up on the battlefield. They’d tried to lay hands on a Chinese assault rifle, but the units that had them were hanging onto them, as they were miles better than the cast-offs they had. The other members of his team carried AK-47s and Tokarev pistols supplied by their Russian allies.

  “Thermal’s only reading four people inside the base. We’ve got ’em outnumbered. Sure you just don’t want to take them down and steal all of their vehicles?” Christopher said.

  “Nah. A listening post goes dark, and there’ll be questions. An investigation. We tip our hand way earlier than we need to. Just chill here.”

  Without waiting for any further discussion, Nick started walking toward the listening post. He had his hand on the Ministry of State Security ID in his right coat pocket. Before he’d left Firebase Zulu, he’d read everything the Defense Intelligence Agency had on the MSS. It was one paragraph.

  “The Ministry of State Security functions in an analogous capacity to the American Central Intelligence Agency,” the brief had said. “Their areas of responsibility include deep cover intelligence gathering and managing foreign intel assets. They are headquartered in Beijing.”

  Nick guessed the listening post was under the MSS’s command, or that they would at least recognize the authority of an MSS agent. That was the hope, anyway, but he’d already worked out a signal with Daniel and Christopher for them to take the building down if things went wrong. They’d be watching on thermals, and if they saw Nick hit the ground, they’d level the place.

  Nick walked up to the door to the largest building, took a deep breath and banged on the door. He heard shuffling inside. A few seconds later, the door opened. A young, surprised-looking NCO 2nd Class stood there, his uniform jacket open and hat pushed back on his head. Nick quickly flashed his fake ID.