Fear and Anger (The 47 Echo Series) Page 13

  “We’re still faster than they are,” Bryce said. “Less weight. I can get us there to set up the charges in two minutes.”

  “Pedal to the metal, then,” Christopher said. “Carson? You guys ready to do this?”

  “Shit yeah,” Carson said, grinning and hefting one of Martin’s duffel bags on his shoulder. “We put some extra explosives and any junk we had lying around – shell casings, a few bullets, some keys and coins – in the package. Frag damage. Might get lucky and shred a tire or two while we’re at it.”

  “They’re travelling along this road,” Martin said, running to the front of the cabin and pointing at a narrow path on the nav screen. “It’s dark enough out that we should be able to jump out, plant the explosive right in the center, and detonate it from inside the Razor when Anthony and Mary give the word.”

  “Great. Who’s on trap duty?” Christopher said.

  “I’ve got it, Gunnery Sergeant,” Carson said. “I’ve done this kind of thing before.”

  “ETA, Bryce?”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Roger that. Carson, get ready to jump. The faster you can do this, the better.”

  “Be back before you know I’m gone,” Carson said, running to the Razor’s back hatch with the duffel slung over his shoulder.

  “At the location, Chief. I’ve parked the Razor so the back door is directly in front of the coordinates Mary gave me,” Bryce said.

  Carson was out the back hatch before Christopher had to say a word. All of the lights in the Razor cut out as he jumped.

  Good thinking, Bryce, Christopher thought. Under stealth, the machine only had low-power red lights inside the cabin, but the ELR might still be able to see them from a couple miles off in the pitch-black night. Carson was back inside before Christopher could even finish the thought.

  “Side of the road, Bryce. Martin, stand ready to detonate as soon as Anthony gives the word,” Christopher ordered as the rear hatch clanged shut and the red lights turned back on.

  Bryce hit the gas and juked the huge assault vehicle off the road. Again, it was silent inside the Razor – all Christopher could hear was his friends breathing. Now, instead of just Bryce, he could hear Carson breathing slightly heavily – he’d really pushed himself to move as fast as humanly possible, and the bomb package Martin put together wasn’t exactly light. Christopher hoped it would be worth it. He kept his eye on his Soviet-era watch.

  A minute passed. Nothing.

  A minute and twenty seconds. Still no sound other than breathing.

  A minute fifty. Christopher looked across the cabin at Mary, who shook her head. She didn’t say it, but Christopher felt he could almost read her thoughts.

  Not yet.

  He looked over at Daniel’s screens. The sniper had his cameras locked in on the area where the duffel was placed, obscured from the front side by branches and leaves. Carson had done a great job.

  Two minutes, ten seconds. Christopher was starting to sweat, even though the blast of cold air from the temporarily-open back hatch had not yet subsided.

  “Now, Martin.”

  Mary didn’t yell, didn’t raise her voice above a whisper. She just calmly told the demolitions expert it was time and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  Martin, too, said nothing. He simply tapped his tablet, and the ground shook. Christopher could feel the Razor roll slightly on its suspension, even a good fifty feet away from the bomb. It had been a hell of a package, indeed.

  “Daniel?”

  “Saw the bomb flash, but it was definitely under something,” the sniper said, bringing up a playback of the explosion on several of the screens around the vehicle. Christopher watched on the large plasma just behind his chair – the bomb had definitely gone off under the Razor.

  “Bryce, turn us around so the missiles are facing the ELR. Mike, Pete, on the fifties. Everyone else, grab a rifle and go out with me,” Christopher said, shrugging into his body armor and slapping on his helmet as he moved to the Razor’s side hatch. His people got ready quickly, and Gabriel handed him an M4 as the hatch opened.

  “What’s the plan, Chief?” Gabriel asked.

  “We go over there and try to get them to give up. They start shooting, go for cover and let Mike and Pete pound on them with the big guns for a while. See if that changes their mind.”

  “Works for me,” Carson said, pulling the bolt back on his own M4 and joining them at the door.

  “On my three, kids. One... two... three!” Christopher said, and he and his crew jumped out of the Razor and ran across the road to where the bomb had gone off. As they ran, Gabriel caught his foot on the side of the road and fell, landing right where the ELR should have stopped. He fell straight through to the ground.

  “Gabe! You OK?” Christopher asked.

  “Fine,” Gabriel said, popping up and going into a defensive crouch, his M4 trained in front of him.

  “Wait... where the fuck is this thing?” Carson asked, taking big steps along the still-smoking blast zone, sweeping his rifle back and forth in front of him and hitting only air.

  “Fuck. We missed it,” Daniel said, picking up a rock from the side of the road and chucking it as far as he could. It clattered to the pavement a good hundred yards away.

  “We hit something,” Mary said, still keeping her rifle up and at the ready. “Maybe it managed to make it off the road?”

  “Everybody grab a rock,” Christopher said, sighing and letting his M4 fall to his chest. “Throw in every direction and see if we hit anything.”

  It was a low-tech solution, but it was the best one he could think of. Everyone threw, but no one hit anything. Christopher even grabbed a handful of the cooling gravel from the blast zone and chucked it in a wide arc – nothing.

  “If we hit it, it was better armored on the bottom than the specs made out,” he said. “Everyone back on the truck. We’ll have to come up with a new plan.”

  He led his team back into the Razor, and as the side hatch closed, he took a look at their faces. The expressions he saw ranged from depressed to downright angry.

  Good job, Chris. You let them down. Nick would have figured out a way to accomplish this mission hours ago, a voice at the back of his mind said.

  Christopher shook his head violently, as if that would silence the nagging criticism inside his skull. It didn’t. All it did was give him a headache.

  “Gunny, we got a problem,” Carson said. He’d joined Anthony at his station, and had a set of headphones pressed up to his ear. “I just picked up something from a nearby NoKo listening station. They registered the explosion and they’re sending a team out to investigate.”

  “Time to get moving, then. Bryce, follow the course. It’s our only bet at this point,” Christopher said, sighing and taking off his helmet. “Best not to be here when the NoKo patrol arrives, anyway.”

  “We’re rolling, Chief.”

  “Daniel, let’s you and me take a look at that camera footage again. See if we can’t figure out what happened,” Christopher said, crossing over to stand behind his sniper’s station. Daniel brought up the footage of the explosion and ran it again.

  “Yeah, it definitely exploded under something running in adaptive camouflage,” Daniel said, pointing to the flat, low top of the explosion. “See? Didn’t get much more than a foot and a half off the ground before it hit.”

  “So the calculations Mary and Anthony did were right,” Christopher said, running his hands through his hair. “Why didn’t it stop them?”

  “One second, Convict,” Carson said, looking up from the comm station. “Run that frame by frame.”

  Daniel glared at the Ranger.

  “We don’t use the c-word around here, Carson,” Christopher said.

  “Oh, shit. My bad. Daniel, right? Sorry, man. Could you run that frame by frame? I think I see the problem.”

  Daniel grinned, the slight forgotten, then re-ran the video in slow motion. As the explosion flashed, Carson stood and pointed.
<
br />   “There. Pause it there. Put that up on the big mission screen, will you?”

  Daniel kicked the frozen image over to the large plasma screen behind the passenger seat. Carson crossed over and pointed to the extreme right side of the flash.

  “See it?” Carson asked.

  “Yeah, I do,” Daniel said. “Good eye, Sergeant.”

  “What?” Christopher asked, squinting at the image – but he saw it before Carson or Daniel had a chance to answer. “Oh, yeah.”

  At the right edge of the frame, the flash and fire from the explosion suddenly curved upwards. A silhouette formed – the back end of a Razor.

  “We hit them after the rear axle,” Mary said.

  “Yep. Didn’t even slow them down,” Christopher grumbled.

  “We might have done one better,” Bryce said, not taking his eyes off the road in front of him. Christopher noticed the driver had a copy of the image up next to his nav screen.

  “Bryce?”

  “Look at where we hit ‘em. According to the schematics Dr. Auffrey ran through with me, that’s right where their extra power comes from,” Bryce said. “We might have just made it so they’ll have to drop stealth sooner rather than later.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Going Sideways

  The car, Feng told him, would take two days to complete. That was fine, though – the train wouldn’t leave for at least another eight days.

  In the fall of 2018, Nick spent four months in jail awaiting trial for five counts of murder in the first degree. His first cellmate was a huge, overmuscled White Supremacist named Colin Bluth, but that roommate situation hadn’t lasted long. On the first day in the cell, Bluth tried to assert his dominance over what he thought was a little Chinese kid, and Nick broke his nose, jaw, right elbow, left kneecap, and most of his ribs. While the guards initially put Nick in a cell block with mostly supremacists for their own amusement, the warden realized he was going to have to deal with a lot of paperwork if Nick kept kicking the shit out of every cellmate he had, so he was quietly transferred to a room with a black gangbanger and armed robber named Antonio Wade.

  Wade was a pretty good guy for a criminal, and he and Nick got along fine. Before he’d gotten caught, Wade managed to stay on the run from police for eight and a half months, and he often told Nick stories about how he’d done it. What stuck with Nick now – two and a half years later on the other side of the world – was Antonio Wade in a friend’s apartment three blocks from the police station.

  “I couldn’t even leave to go get smokes, I was so paranoid,” Wade told him, grinning as he remembered. “I stayed in that one apartment for two months. No TV, no internet, and a busted damn radio.”

  “How did you pass the time?” Nick asked.

  “Same way I pass the time in here, man. Sleep a lot. Try to get my hands on something to read. Count the hours, do some sit-ups. Break everything up into half-hour blocks, because those are less intimidating than whole hours. You find a way to spend a couple of blocks without leaving the room, then you find a way to waste another couple. When the alternative is getting caught, you don’t even mind the boredom after a while.”

  Staying in the tiny room with Hansen in the back of the auto garage didn’t bother Nick much. Boredom, downtime – that stuff was crushing to him these day. But when the alternative was getting caught... well, he’d deal. He’d catch up on sleep, do sit-ups, smoke cigarettes. Eight days definitely wasn’t four months, and it certainly wasn’t however long he was to have been on death row before the Convict Conscript Act passed.

  It wasn’t that easy, though. It never was for Nick.

  After he and Feng got back from torching the truck, they’d easily cut the padlocks off the front door and left enough evidence around to make it look like someone else had stolen the truck. Feng lived above the garage, and he invited Nick upstairs for something to eat before they went to check in on Hansen and bring him some food.

  Hansen was still on the couch, laying on his right side to keep pressure off his left leg. But as soon as Nick walked in, he could see the young pilot was in bad shape. He’d only left Hansen for about eight hours, but his condition had slid off the tracks since then. Nick first noticed the cushions near the young pilot’s head – they were soaked with sweat.

  “Hansen? How are you feeling?” Nick asked, crouching down next to the couch.

  “Fuck you, Chink,” Hansen growled, his words slurred.

  Nick ignored the slurred slur and placed the back of his left hand on Hansen’s forehead. The young pilot immediately threw a wild left-handed punch at Nick’s head, but Nick was expecting it, and blocked it easily with his right hand. The punch was weak, and the pilot’s hand was clammy.

  “His temperature is through the roof,” Nick said to Feng. “Grab me that medical kit over there, will you?”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Feng asked as he set the kit down by Nick, not wanting to get too close to the flailing white guy on the couch.

  “My guess – infection. That’s where the fever is coming from. I have some antibiotics in here somewhere...” Nick rummaged around in the kit and came up with a pill bottle. “There we go. Not a whole ton left.”

  He opened the bottle, and he could see there were only a few pills. Nick’s own fault – he’d taken them for a bullet graze after a blood transfusion the week before. He and his sniper Daniel had both been on them, per the orders of their recently deceased medic. There wouldn’t be enough for a ten-day course, which Nick remembered was standard for antibiotics. Still, something was better than nothing.

  Forcing Hansen’s mouth open wasn’t hard, and Nick tossed one of the horse pills inside and grabbed a bottle of water. He made Hansen take a few gulps. Just like giving meds to the family dog.

  “You want some more painkillers, Hansen?” Nick said, holding up the bottle of Hydrocodone.

  Hansen responded with a middle finger, but took the bottle and tried to open it anyway. He couldn’t get the top off, but Nick let him struggle with it as he pulled Feng to the side and spoke to him in a low voice.

  “You have a doctor you can trust?” Nick asked.

  “I have a guy I trust, personally. But if we show him two wanted American fugitives? No, I don’t trust him with that.”

  “Anything. Medic, nurse, veterinarian?”

  Feng shook his head. Nick wanted to tell him, again, about how shoddily this resistance cell was organized, but that could wait for another time. He’d need to do something about Hansen, and do it soon. He didn’t know if the antibiotics he had were strong enough, and even if they were, he knew he didn’t have anywhere near enough of them to keep Hansen alive until the train was a viable escape option. He didn’t even know if the antibiotics would keep Hansen alive.

  “I need to get some sort of medical attention for him. Work with me, here,” Nick said.

  “Let me ask around. Yuan might know someone. But we might have to deal with the fact that a doctor simply won’t happen. So what else can I do to help?”

  “Those computers – can you get past the GFOC with them?”

  Feng raised an eyebrow.

  “Sorry. American expression. Great Firewall of China. The government censorship system?”

  “Yeah. I can get most anything off the Web.”

  “Good. Get me a connection, and I’ll see what else we can do for him. I’ll do some research.”

  Feng nodded, and crossed over to the table with the computers. He brought one of them up, unlocked it, and motioned Nick over.

  “I have to go open up the shop,” Feng said. “Can you keep him quiet? The room’s isolated, but it’s not soundproof, and I know the PLA will be poking around about their missing truck today.”

  “Yeah, Feng. Thanks.”

  The information Nick found wasn’t promising. The first thing the internet suggested was that he change the bandage and clean the area, which he did. He noticed that the gash on Hansen’s leg was swollen, with red lines spreading out from th
e initial wound. Another bad sign, and definitely an infection, according to the Internet. That combined with a fever all added up to “seek medical attention immediately” at every site Nick visited. One site agreed with him that antibiotics were key, but they should have been started days before when Hansen got the initial injury. Apart from bandaging his leg and spraying it with antiseptic, Hansen hadn’t taken any action to address the leg wound, not even changing the bandage. From all the data Nick got on the Web, he knew the infection was in very bad shape. All he could do now was keep it clean, keep Hansen on the antibiotics, and hope it didn’t get any worse until they could get him to a doctor.

  The lethargy and weakness was definitely a bad sign, though, as was the general disgusting condition of the wound. Hansen had already been fighting the infection for days, and he was losing. Fortunately, Hansen was passed out for the moment. Nick did some research into natural antibiotics, but didn’t get far with that – his findings told him that most non-prescription items with antibiotic properties would do as much good for Hansen’s infection as shouting at it.

  Feng returned almost ten hours later. He looked exhausted, but Nick knew he hadn’t slept. Neither had Nick, but he had the advantage of stimulants.

  “How’s your friend?” Feng asked.

  “Not good,” Nick said. “We really need to get him to a doctor.”

  “Yuan is coming by soon. We’ll ask him.”

  Yuan was not at all helpful. He met Nick and Feng out in the garage. When he’d heard Hansen was sick, he refused to go into the back room with him, as if the infection could spread to him. As he walked out into the garage, Nick noticed a BYD F3 compact car half-assembled in one corner – his ride, he guessed.

  “Shoot him in the head.”

  That was Yuan’s suggestion.

  “Then we dump his body in the water and hope it doesn’t get traced back to us,” Yuan continued.

  Before Nick could speak – and it was obvious to everyone in the garage that he was about to lay into the older man – Feng stepped in.

  “Nick was thinking more along the lines of a doctor, or medicine,” he said, placing a hand on Nick’s arm as if that would keep him from pouncing on the older man.