Supercritical Page 16

  “I bet she says a lot more than that. Nothing that can be repeated in public, of course.”

  “She’s calmed down a lot in the last year,” Nick lied. He loved his mother, of course, but she could be a bit high-strung.

  “Hey, Chief!” someone yelled as they exited the train station and walked into the California sunshine.

  It was a young man, barely older than Nick himself. Even at his young age, though, he had the same substantial build and squared-away bearing Alex Morrow had. He also had almost exactly the same Hawaiian shirt—if these guys were trying to blend in as civilians, they weren’t doing a very good job.

  “Oh, hey, Rog. Nick, this is Roger Daniels. He’s on my team.”

  “Oh, is this your boy?” Daniels asked, reaching out his hand to Nick.

  Nick shook it. The young man’s grip was terribly strong.

  “Yep. This is my younger. He’s the cool one,” his dad said, laughing.

  “Good to meet you, young man.”

  “What’re you doing out this way, Rog?” the elder Morrow asked.

  “Picking up my girlfriend. She’s on the five-twenty from L.A.,” Daniels said.

  “That was my train,” Nick said.

  “Shit. I’d better hurry, then. Chief. Nick,” the young man said, nodding to both of them as he took off for the inside of the station.

  “He seemed nice,” Nick said as they got into his dad’s Chevy Suburban.

  Somewhere in his mind, Nick knew this was not the way the scene had gone. He’d never met Roger Daniels until the older man had taught him how to HALO out of a C-17 Globemaster. Still, the rest of the dream seemed to play out as the day actually had.

  Huh. Not usually aware I’m dreaming, he thought, looking down at his hands. The prosthetic, black metal fingers were gone. It was as if he’d never lost them escaping from a Communist lab in North Korea the year before, as if he really was fourteen again. Must be the stimulants fucking with my dreams.

  “Yeah, he’s the new guy,” his dad said. “Not bad. So, you want to hear what I’ve got lined up for your first day in town?”

  “Sure.”

  “I pulled in a favor or two at the Center. How would you like to run through a few training exercises? Shoot the M4, do some hostage scenarios with one of the Teams?”

  “That would be awesome!” Nick said, his voice cracking in the middle of the sentence.

  His dream shifted then. He was back home in Los Angeles, just coming back from school. His mother was still at work, as usual. She was just opening up a restaurant and tended to work long hours. Nick had the house to himself for a couple of hours, but he usually wasted them playing video games or watching TV. He always checked the mail when he got home, however, and today was no different.

  There was the usual crap—bills, junk mail, solicitations from charities—all of which Nick chucked on the dining room table as he walked into the house. As the letters hit the oak and spread out, however, he noticed one that was different. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the return address from the Department of the Navy.

  It was addressed to Sue Morrow, his mother, but he ignored that fact as he tore open the envelope. There was only one page inside, a short, laser-printed note with the Navy Seal on the bottom.

  Nick knew what the note said before he even started reading, but he read the first lines anyway as the edges of his vision went black and his breath caught in his throat: Dear Mrs. Morrow: We regret to inform you that your ex-husband, Senior Chief Petty Officer Alexander N. Morrow, SSN 881-57-9031, was killed in action in Afghanistan yesterday.

  The dream shifted once more. This time, Nick was his actual age, thirty-one. He was sitting in the living room at the Echo Bunkhouse on Firebase Zulu, drinking a cup of coffee. Across from him sat Alex Morrow, just as fit and strong as the last time Nick saw him alive. He was dressed in desert digital BDUs with no name or rank insignia on them, and he had a cup of coffee in his hand, as well.

  “So, a Marine, huh? Gotta say, didn’t see that one coming. Would’ve thought you would run like hell from the military after, y’know. That letter when you were fifteen.”

  “I did, for a while. Circumstances kinda put me here.”

  Alex nodded and took a drink of his coffee.

  “Love that Russian java, man. Kicks you right in the goddamn ass, doesn’t it? Might just be the strongest coffee known to modern science.”

  “You’ve been to Russia?”

  “A bunch of times. You know this. So, how are you finding it? The soldiering and all. Though, y’know, you’re a fucking Marine, so it’s not like you’re in the actual military,” Alex said, smirking.

  “Well, we are Special Forces,” Nick said. It sounded, to him, like he was defending a bad grade on his eighth-grade report card.

  “Really? Well, I guess that’s a little less embarrassing. Still wish you would’ve turned out a frogman, though. You holding up all right out here, kiddo?”

  “I’m dealing. It’s not easy. I feel like I’m just making it up as I go along.”

  “Shit, kiddo. That’s all any of us ever do.”

  “Yeah, but when I make shit up now, I’m responsible for nine other lives every time I make a decision.”

  “Hey, being in command is rough. I fought it for quite a while. I’m a worker, Nick, not a thinker. I’d just rather shoot who they tell me to shoot, blow up what they tell me to blow up. But you’re different. Smarter. More inventive. You’ll do fine.”

  “I wish I had your confidence.”

  “Some part of you does. Even now, you’re aware that this isn’t real, that you’re just dreaming. That means this pep talk is you talking to yourself. Like I said, you’re smart.”

  Fucking stimulants, Nick thought, raising his coffee cup to his lips. The ring and little fingers on his left hand were gone again, replaced by the gleaming black robotic prosthetics.

  “I don’t know…this mission we’re on now is a whole new deal. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “You’re doing what you’re good at. Thinking on your feet. It’s just what I taught you.”

  “Yeah. Other kids’ dads taught them how to play football. Mine taught me how to do a sweep and clear on a strongpointed building.”

  “I taught you what I knew. Played to my strengths, just like you have to do. Do your job and bring your people home alive. That’s all you can really do, isn’t it?”

  Nick looked around the room. The walls were wrong. They were darker than the ones in his bunkhouse back at Zulu. And, as he looked at them, he noticed they were getting even darker.

  “Just remember, your people are your strength. Not your guns, or your tech, or your vehicles. Your people are your best resource. Remember that, and you’ll be fine,” Alex said. His voice, light and conversational before, was suddenly deeper, heavier. Leaden. “Here. This was mine, but I want you to have it.”

  Nick looked back over at his father, who reached up and ripped something off the shoulder of his own BDU jacket. He handed it to Nick—it was a small, gray, square patch. In block letters, it said “DEATH DEALER.” Nick looked up to thank his father but found no one sitting across from him as the room faded completely to black.

  “Wait…Dad…” Nick croaked, but his voice suddenly left him.

  * * *

  “Boss. It’s oh-six-hundred,” Nick heard.

  He opened his eyes immediately and sat up in bed. Briggs was standing crouched next to the bed, stifling a yawn. He shook his head hard to clear the dream, which hadn’t been the one he’d been dreading. The one he’d been taking measured doses of amphetamines to avoid.

  At least he hadn’t dreamed of New York.

  “What’s our situation?” Nick asked as he swung his legs to the floor and picked up his rifle.

  “Quiet. Not much to report. Christopher said to wake you up and take over your quarters. And Mary wants to talk to you before she sacks out.”

  “Right on. Catch some rest, Briggs. Shit,” Nick said.
<
br />   “What’s wrong, boss?”

  “Just realized I don’t know your first name.”

  “It’s Ben. Don’t think anyone’s asked me that in months,” Briggs said.

  “Right. Get some sleep, Ben. We’ll meet to do some planning around two this afternoon, but you’re down until then. Just keep your weapon close by,” Nick said.

  “Roger that.”

  Nick walked out into the hall and headed for the lab McPherson and his pals had torn apart. He found Mary still sitting at the same computer, just as he’d left her six hours before.

  “Mary? What’s up?”

  “Hey, boss. I’ve got so much intel downloaded it’ll take weeks to go through it all,” she said, grinning. “But I found something else you might wanna see first.”

  Mary stood from her chair and stretched her arms high above her head. Nick heard her spine pop loudly. She led him over to the corner of the room, where a black overcoat had been thrown in the corner, apparently forgotten.

  “Yeah? It’s a coat. Seen one of those before,” Nick said.

  “It is, indeed, a coat. But check this out,” Mary said, putting on the coat. It was several sizes too large for her, sweeping the floor when she stood at her full height. She held her left arm out to Nick, and he saw her hand moving inside the sleeve. The material in the center of the left forearm fell away, revealing a smaller version of the command screen Nick had on his BDU jacket back at Firebase Zulu.

  “Must be McPherson’s,” Nick said.

  “Yeah. Guess he forgot about it. But check this out,” she said, nodding to the screen.

  “I don’t think he’s the type of guy to forget anything,” Nick said as he moved to look at the screen. “He left it here on purpose.” He inspected the tiny screen in the overcoat’s sleeve. There were five dots in red on the screen, four of them clustered together and one off toward the top right edge of the screen.

  “Wait a second. I know who those four are,” Nick said. “Those are our guys. But the fifth one?”

  “The advance scout McPherson mentioned. But we didn’t send one,” Mary said, nodding. “So I ran the number.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Forty-seven Echo 1552.”

  The number clicked in Nick’s brain. It was a designation he hadn’t heard in more than a year, but he knew who those numbers belonged to. The man had gone missing at the Battle of Neryugn fifteen months before, while Nick was Stateside after his conviction had been overturned.

  “Ring a bell?” Mary asked.

  “His name is Kenneth Alan Booth,” Nick said. “And he’s a serial killer.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Loyal to No One

  Nick woke Christopher a half an hour before the rest of the team. He motioned for his friend to be quiet as he led him down the hall to the small kitchen in the research facility. Once the door was closed behind them, he nodded to one of the chairs at a small, steel four-top table in the center of the room.

  “What’s going on, brother?” Christopher asked as he sat down.

  “Kenneth.”

  “Yeah? What about him? He’s dead, right?”

  Nick shook his head.

  “Shit,” Christopher breathed. “That ‘advance scout’ signal McPherson said he picked up. Kenneth’s tracking chip?”

  “Yeah. It’s active and moving, which means Kenneth is alive.”

  “And close by, apparently?”

  “Mary found McPherson’s command screen. According to that, he’s holed up less than four miles from here. Edge of the city.”

  “Should just leave his ass there,” Christopher said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Give me one of those.”

  Christopher tossed the pack to Nick. They were Zhong Nan Hai Red Suns—Chinese smokes. Christopher must have found them somewhere in the complex. Nick shook his head and managed a short chuckle—Christopher’s skills as a scrounge never ceased to amaze him.

  He took one out of the pack and lit it. It had a faintly earthy taste to it, so Nick guessed there was ginseng in it. It immediately reminded him of when he was a kid, and his mother had smoked ginseng-laced cigarettes around the house. He chased away the memory with a long drag of the smoke and nodded to Christopher.

  “Trust me, it’s tempting to do just that. But the guy has been gone for more than a year, and presumably he’s been here in China for some of it. He might have intel we can use.”

  “I’m sorry, but we do remember the same Kenneth, don’t we? The guy who tried to kill you about a dozen times?”

  Nick nodded.

  “That’s the guy. Look, I can handle him. And if he has any sort of information that can help us, we can’t afford not to try and talk to him.”

  “I guess,” Christopher said, sighing. “How are we gonna explain this to the others? I mean, none of them were with us when Kenneth was in the unit. Gabe and Mike and Pete and Tony were, but they’re hanging with First Recon. Kenneth was before everyone else’s time.”

  “Well, Mary already knows about him. I told her. I figure you, me and her take one of the jeeps out early and see if we can find him. We don’t, no big deal. We do, and we can explain him to the rest of the unit then.”

  “Oh, sure. Bring me along when you go looking for the fucking psycho,” Christopher complained, but there was a small half-grin when he said it.

  “Hey, he never tried to kill you,” Nick said.

  “Yeah. That I know of.”

  * * *

  Just after the sun went down, Nick, Christopher and Mary took one of the two remaining Nanjing Monza 648 SUVs from the garage. Nick had told his people they were going out to have a look around, which was half-true. When they got back, he told them, they’d all get on the road for Sonid Youqi.

  It took them almost ten minutes to reach the surface through the long, serpentine tunnel system from the lab’s garage. As they popped out of the ground behind a large rock, Nick checked the command screen on McPherson’s coat.

  “He’s about six miles north of us, thanks to that long-ass tunnel. Turn this thing around,” he told Christopher.

  “Right. Anything I should be looking for? I mean, apart from a huge, pissed-off white guy?”

  “I’ll know more as we get closer,” Nick said.

  Christopher piloted the truck out of the mouth of the tunnel and back up onto the highway into Erenhot. He drove for a few minutes, and the lights of the city appeared in front of them.

  As they entered the city, Nick checked the screen again.

  “Take your next right.”

  They traveled down another empty street, this one with what looked like shops on either side. The dot indicating Kenneth’s implant was getting closer now, almost touching the dot representing Mary’s tracker.

  “Okay. He’s close. Like, within a couple hundred feet. Stop here,” Nick told Christopher.

  As the truck rolled to a stop, Nick opened the passenger door and got out.

  “You two stay with the car. Hit me on 1-9 Victor if you see him before I do.”

  “Got it, boss,” Mary said.

  Nick walked forward about half a block. The information on the screen popped up now, giving him a direction and distance on Kenneth’s tracker. Nick tapped the screen a few times and scrolled through the text: fifty feet ahead, on the right. The building in that spot looked like a small pharmacy. There was even a lit-up sign out front and products on the shelves inside, but the store bore no evidence that humans had ever been in it. With his right index finger hovering on the trigger of his sidearm, Nick slowly pushed the pharmacy’s front door open and stepped inside.

  He crept around the store, keeping his knees bent and walking on the balls of his feet. It was so silent in the brightly lit store that he could hear the leather in his boots creaking slightly with each step. He knew the noise was probably only audible to him, but it sounded extremely loud. He searched the small pharmacy one aisle at a time, finding no one. He checked the screen again and saw he was within
ten feet of Kenneth’s implant now. On his left was a solid oak door with the characters 經理—manager—on a red nameplate.

  Nick pressed his ear to the door. Inside, he heard someone moving around. Kenneth. He thought about opening the door hard and going in with his gun up, but even if Kenneth wasn’t armed, he wasn’t the type of man one wanted to surprise. Nick remembered when the serial killer had escaped from the unit back at Camp Justice. A nonlethal shotgun round to the chest hadn’t even slowed the guy down.

  Nick slowly turned the door handle, and the door slid open. He raised his gun as the door opened wider and he saw a man sitting at a workbench with his back to Nick. He wore dark blue pants and a thick, dark blue shirt, his hair long and tied in a tight ponytail. The guy was gigantic, so Nick knew it was Kenneth.

  “Hey, Kenneth,” Nick whispered.

  The big man turned around and saw him. He nodded once then turned back to whatever he was working on at the table.

  “Morrow.”

  Nick expected an attack, or at least some measure of shock from the big man. If Kenneth was at all surprised that his old commanding officer was standing behind him, he didn’t show it. Nick thought about lowering his pistol, but remembered just how hard Kenneth could hit. He kept the gun trained on Kenneth’s back.

  “So, what are you working on, there?” Nick asked.

  “Bomb. You can put your gun down, Morrow. I’m not gonna kick the shit out of you or anything,” Kenneth said without turning around. “Besides, if you shoot that thing in here, chances are the whole place will go up.”

  “I’ll hang onto it, if you don’t mind.”

  “If it makes you feel better.”

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me,” Nick said, walking a few steps closer to the big man.

  “That’s the drugs,” Kenneth said, reaching onto the workbench and holding up a pill bottle. “Haloperidol. Or at least, whatever the Chink equivalent is. Keeps me nice and clearheaded, but I don’t feel a hell of a lot.”

  “Well, I’m surprised as hell to see you. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I told you. Working on a bomb.”

  “I mean, how did you get here?”