Supercritical Page 14

  As he ate, Nick found his pack in the back of the truck and pulled out the ancient Motorola phone. He also found some amphetamines he’d borrowed from Briggs’ pack earlier, which he downed with a swig of water. He turned the phone on and dialed. As with the previous night, there was no ringing on the other end. A voice simply came over the line after a few seconds.

  “Ortiz-Gonzales. What’s your position?” the MSgt’s voice was hard and brusque.

  “GPS has us at 45.121 by 110.001,” Nick replied.

  “Acknowledged. Be advised that this line might not be as secure as intel thought. We are now black to comm in forty-two seconds. Sixty-second maximum until further notice.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Any problems thus far?”

  “We’re dealing. Advise command that we’re seeing major armor traffic heading north.”

  “Roger that. Check-in at twenty-two hundred tomorrow. Black to comm until.”

  “Copy.”

  “Good luck out there.”

  The connection clicked off, and Nick powered down the phone and put it back in the bag.

  “Everything all right, Nick?” Christopher asked, walking up next to him and unwrapping his own FSR.

  “Oh, peachy. Our only comm line might be compromised. Other than that, we’re good.”

  “Hey, look at the bright side. No one’s shot at us yet today.”

  “Well, there is that, I suppose.”

  Nick let his people stretch their legs for about five minutes, then gave the order to load back up. Bryce got back behind the wheel and turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened.

  “Out of gas?” Martin suggested.

  “Nope. Just put in the last five gallons,” Bryce said, shaking his head. “My guess is electrical.”

  “But you can fix it, right?” Mary said.

  “I’m sure I can. I brought a flashlight in my pack, and I saw some tools in the back earlier.”

  “Negative on that, Bryce,” Nick said. “Someone comes along that road and sees us dicking around with a flashlight in the dark, they’re gonna pull over and start asking questions.”

  “Stash it behind that hill over there? Wait for morning?” Christopher said.

  “That’s the plan. Put this thing in neutral. We’ll push it away from the road and hunker down for the night. Take watches, and everyone else can get some rest,” Nick said, nodding his head.

  With Bryce at the wheel and the other six of them pushing, it didn’t take long to move the large Mengshi out of sight. Nick, Bryce and Daniel took the first watch, as the three of them had caught at least some sleep on the drive. The other four climbed into the truck and were asleep in minutes.

  “Well, it’s pretty country, anyway. Empty, but kinda pretty,” Daniel said, sitting on the hood of the immobile vehicle.

  “Empty’s a good thing,” Bryce said. He was leaning against the driver’s door, his AK-47 slung low on his chest. “Empty means fewer people see us.”

  “Yeah, enjoy that while you can. Once we get into China, we’ll have to pass through a lot of populated areas. We’ll try to keep clear of major cities until Shanghai, but we’re going to have a lot of eyes on us regardless,” Nick said, his back pressed to the rear passenger-side door.

  “Yeah, about that—what are we saying if we get stopped? I mean, as annoying as that Russian guy’s voice is, I feel like I’m picking up the basics okay, but I still have no idea what to tell anyone if I’m asked,” Daniel said.

  “Still working out the small details there,” Nick replied. “Just play strong and silent until I indicate otherwise.”

  “Daniel? Silent? That’d be a new one,” Bryce said, chuckling.

  “Oh, quiet, you.”

  Nick paced back and forth along the length of the truck. It was chilly out, though not torturously cold, so he wasn’t moving to keep warm. He didn’t really know why he was walking around. Nervous energy, he guessed, or the need to feel like he was doing something.

  Normally, downtime on a mission was when he would go over the mission plan, but this mission had only an objective: to get to Shanghai and shut down the Chinese Defense Network. There were no real certainties on how to do that, or even how to get to Shanghai. All he had was a bunch of “maybe,” “possibly” and “theoretically.” He and his unit had been sent on missions with spotty intel before, but never this bad. He felt like they were being asked to put their lives on the line for a rumor.

  But that’s what we do, he told himself. That’s why they send a convict unit. Because they don’t want to risk experienced soldiers on something that might never work. They send us, the guys who are lucky rather than good. I just hope luck is enough to carry us through this time.

  * * *

  “Yeah. It’s all kinds of dead,” Bryce said, shaking his head and yawning.

  He’d only been awake a few minutes, but in that time, he’d crawled into the engine and made his diagnosis.

  “Nothing you can do?” Nick asked.

  “Not unless you’ve got an alternator and a starter for a Mengshi Warrior you’ve been hiding all this time. This hunk of crap isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Mary, check the maps. Are we close to anything?”

  She pulled out her netbook and booted it up. It was attached, along with several other devices, to a solar panel she’d put on top of the immobilized truck. After a moment, she nodded. “Yeah. About twelve, thirteen miles south of here is a town called Sainshand. Capital city of this province. A small town by American standards, but there should be some transport there. If nothing else, there’s the train. Looks like that runs into China.”

  “That’s if it’s still running. There’s a war on, you know,” Briggs said.

  “Only one way to find out. We need to scout it out. Which one of you is furthest along in your Russian?” Nick said.

  “I finished mine last night,” Mary said.

  Nick thought, not for the first time, how frighteningly smart Mary was. Her brain had to be operating at several times the speed of his own.

  “Right, then. You’re with me. The rest of you, stay here and stay out of sight. Channel 1-9 Victor in an emergency only. Clear?”

  “Gotcha, Nick. Don’t get shot, okay? I really, really don’t want to take command of this mission,” Christopher said. What he didn’t say, but Nick knew he was thinking, was, because this mission’s really a loser, and I’d hate to get us all killed.

  “Hey, neither did I. But it’s what we get paid for.”

  “Well, it’s what you guys get paid for,” Martin grumbled.

  * * *

  “This isn’t going well, is it?” Mary asked.

  The two of them had been walking for about fifteen minutes, carrying only Mary’s netbook, their fake IDs and their sidearms inside their coats. Nick noticed Mary waited until they were clear of the unit before asking the question.

  “As compared to?”

  “Yeah, I see your point. But we’re really out in the wind here, Nick. We get into trouble this time, and there’s no helicopter loaded with Army Rangers coming to pull us out of the fire, is there?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “I know you briefed us as much as you could, what with only you and Chris having any sort of security clearance. But from what I’ve put together, there isn’t much of a plan here.”

  Mary’s eyebrows were up, and Nick knew what she hoped he’d tell her.

  “No, I told you everything.”

  And, as her face fell, Nick knew that wasn’t the answer she was hoping for.

  “Goddamn, that’s depressing.”

  “They sent us for a very specific reason, kiddo.”

  “Right. Because we’re convicts, and we’re expendable.”

  “Sergeant Briggs isn’t a convict. It’s not just our Echo designation that landed us this gig. And it’s not because we’re the only convict Special Forces outfit, either.”

  “Those sound like the reasons command would give,” Mary sai
d.

  “It’s because we’ve shown them something that their regular military units haven’t. We’re resourceful. We come up with unconventional ways of getting the job done. On a mission like this, where we pretty much have to make it up as we go along, we’re the perfect team for the job.”

  “You really think we have a chance in hell of making it out of this alive?”

  Not really, Nick thought. Instead, he said, “Absolutely.”

  “All right, then. I trust you, boss. You’ve pulled us out of what looked like no-win situations before.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Nick felt like he’d just lied to one of his people, and he hated the feeling. Still, it was a lie she needed to hear. Hell, it was a lie Nick needed to believe if he was going to get them through to Shanghai and back to friendly territory.

  They walked for another hour and a half without seeing another human soul, and Nick was struck again by just how desolate Mongolia seemed to be. Apart from People’s Liberation Army personnel, Nick hadn’t noticed any natives but the one on horseback who had shot at him and the eight people crammed into the tiny sedan. Daniel’s question from the day before in Ulaanbaatar floated around in his mind: “Where are all the civilians?”

  Nick knew Mongolia had fallen quickly in the first days of the war. Compared to the People’s Republic of China, they didn’t have much of a military to speak of, only about 160,000 total troops compared to China’s nearly fifteen million. Early in the war, two Mongolian policemen had crossed Lake Baikal into Russia with critical intelligence. Nick had been the one to discover them, but even those two had very little information on conditions inside Mongolia. So far, the place seemed like a very large, spread-out Chinese military base.

  Finally, after almost two hours of walking, they saw movement up ahead. Two men on horseback in jeans and heavy coats, both of them wearing baseball caps, stopped about two hundred feet ahead of Nick and Mary. The two horsemen simply stared at them, and Nick and Mary stopped moving and stared back.

  They stayed still, staring at each other for several minutes, neither group moving in the slightest.

  “What’s our move, boss?” Mary finally whispered, though the Mongolian horsemen were surely out of earshot.

  “No idea,” Nick said back.

  “Do we show them our IDs?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good plan. They’ve got weapons. Can’t tell for sure from here, but looks like AK-47s. Just keep your arms at your sides and try to look as nonthreatening as possible.”

  Nick and Mary stood still for a couple more minutes until one of the horsemen finally made a move. He pulled his weapon off of his back and fired three rounds into the air. When Nick and Mary showed no reaction, he and his friend galloped off across the road and into the hills.

  “That was odd,” Mary said as they got moving again. “What do you think that was all about?”

  “If I had to guess, they’re trying just as hard to stay off the radar as we are. They shot in the air to see if we’d respond. When we didn’t, they didn’t bother wasting their time. I’ve noticed we haven’t seen many natives around.”

  “I noticed that, too. You think they’re some sort of resistance fighters?”

  “Could be. No time to worry about it now, though. We have a lot of distance to cover.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Big City

  “Good pull, guys. This is a hell of a truck,” Bryce said as Mary and Nick climbed out of the large vehicle’s cab.

  “Sarcasm?” Nick asked.

  “Truth. What you’ve got there is a GAZ-66. It’s like the Glock of troop trucks. We used to use them to pull T-5s out of the river. They’re that strong, and dependable as all hell,” Bryce answered.

  “Oh. Well, good, then. I thought we stole a piece of shit. This thing has got to be twenty years old.”

  “More than that. They stopped making ’em before the turn of the century, replaced ’em with a model that wasn’t as good. Where’d you find it?”

  “It was just sitting outside one of the buildings at the edge of town. Keys were in it. Probably didn’t expect any thieving Americans about,” Mary said.

  “And more good news. Besides plenty of room in the back, looks like it comes with four full ten-gallon fuel cans,” Christopher said as he checked out the back of the truck.

  “Right, then. Let’s get moving. We’re not really that far from China, and I prefer traveling by night when we can manage it,” Nick told them.

  “I’m rested, boss. Want me on the wheel?” Bryce asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll ride shotgun in case we get stopped and need to talk to the locals. Everyone else, plenty of room in the back. Sleep in shifts, three hours at a time. Stay rested and hydrated. Let’s move.”

  Bryce had managed to cannibalize the in-dash GPS unit from the immobile Mengshi, and with a little work, he and Nick were able to wire it to the GAZ’s cigarette lighter. It seemed to function just fine, indicating they were only about a hundred miles from the border to mainland China. As 2200 hours rolled around, the GPS showed only ten miles to the border.

  “Pull off the road for a second,” Nick said. “Gotta check in.”

  “Right.”

  Bryce piloted the large troop truck off the empty road and left its engine idling as Nick pulled out the old Motorola and dialed.

  “Evans,” the Ranger commander’s voice came over the line. “Still in a black to comm mode. What’s your position?”

  “43.811 by 111.712.”

  “Roger that. Any issues to report?”

  “Nothing significant.”

  “Good. Reconnect at twenty-two hundred tomorrow. Maintain black to comm until.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Stay alive out there. You still owe me a beer.”

  The connection terminated, and Nick put the phone back in his coat. He nodded to Bryce.

  “All right. Forward, then,” Nick said.

  Fifteen minutes later, the GPS let them know they were at the border to China, but without the device’s notification, they might never have known. They’d passed through a small village just a few moments before, but up ahead of them was only desert as far as the old truck’s headlights illuminated.

  “There. Up ahead. Big gate over the road,” Bryce said.

  Nick slipped on his TotalVis goggles and looked down the road. There was, indeed, a large archway built over both lanes of the road. He counted six Mengshi assault vehicles, two ZTZ99 tanks and more than twenty soldiers on foot posted near the arch.

  “Nice and slow. Don’t say anything unless they make you, and then speak only in Russian,” Nick said.

  “Right.”

  Nick took off his goggles, stashing them in one of the coat’s inside pockets. Bryce rolled toward the gate, stopping the huge truck when a large guard in a People’s Armed Police uniform stepped out in the middle of the road and put a hand up. Another Chinese policeman approached the driver-side window, and two more headed for the back of the truck. At the cop’s signal, Bryce rolled the window down.

  “Papers,” the policeman said without really glancing inside.

  “Here you are,” Nick said, handing his ID across Bryce to the Chinese cop.

  “MSS. Agent Li,” the guard read from his forged identification. “And the guizi?”

  “Spetsnaz 18 from our Russian allies. The whole unit is in the back. They’re carrying vital intelligence from the front. They’ve been deep-cover for months.”

  The policeman nodded and scanned Nick’s ID with a small handheld device. It beeped, and the policeman nodded again.

  “All right. Go ahead.”

  Mary’s hack worked, Nick thought as the large policeman moved out of the road and Bryce slowly started accelerating through the checkpoint. A few minutes later, they were in Erenhot, the first of the Chinese ghost cities.

  By all appearances, Erenhot looked ordinary enough for a desert town. There were plenty of low, sprawling buildings on clean, t
ree-lined streets. Lights were on in many of them, just as one might expect at 10:30 on a Tuesday night. But Nick and the others saw no cars moving, no people walking along the streets. It was quiet, and it was empty.

  Nick opened the back window of the cab and turned to his people.

  “Everyone doing all right back there?”

  “Yeah. This is creepy, Nick. Try your TotalVis on thermal,” Christopher said from the back flap of the truck, pushing his own goggles up on his forehead.

  Nick slipped on the goggles and switched them over to thermal. Everywhere he looked, the temperature was a constant light yellow. There was no red to indicate a temperature of even one human anywhere in Nick’s visual range.

  “Okay, that is fucking creepy,” Nick said, slipping off the goggles. “Mary? You picking up any signals?”

  “Nothing. Not even background noise. No Wi-Fi or Wi-Max either. This whole area’s a dead zone.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing for us, right?” Briggs asked. “No people to spot a truckload of white folks and start asking questions?”

  “I suppose. It’s just unnerving, is all. This looks like a real city, and those are real, modern buildings with power running to them…but not a single human soul past those guys back at the gate,” Christopher said.

  “What’s the point of building whole cities just to cover underground labs?” Martin asked.

  “That’s assuming they are covering underground labs,” Daniel said. “These might just be decoy cities. If a bomber slipped through the electronic frontier somehow, this is the first place that looks like it’s worth wasting munitions on.”

  “Right. And if it does get bombed, no big deal,” Christopher said. “That makes sense.”

  “Could also be there to discourage bombing,” Mary said. “In World War Two, American cities used to cover their secret labs with huge paintings of normal towns. They assumed the Japanese and Germans wouldn’t waste their time bombing nonmilitary targets.”