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  “Hang tight. Friendlies on the way in,” he said in Chinese.

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  “We’re in a green ZIL-131. And we’re coming to assist. Just don’t shoot at us, all right?” While Bryce hammered the accelerator, Nick opened the window behind him and yelled back to his crew, “On your feet, guys! We’re about to get into some shit!”

  Nick heard his people scrambling, heard magazines being jammed into assault rifles.

  “Good to go!” Christopher yelled back.

  Nick turned back around and saw gunfire off in the distance. As they got closer, he spotted four people crouched behind a bullet-ridden Mercedes sedan. They were taking fire from a Chinese Army Mengshi and several PLA soldiers on foot.

  “Bryce, how tough is this thing?” Nick asked, raising his voice over the gunfire.

  “Tough enough.”

  “Everybody get down!” Nick yelled.

  Bryce shot past the disabled Mercedes, heading straight for the Mengshi.

  The soldiers crouched in front of the assault vehicle scattered as Bryce rammed their truck directly into the smaller vehicle. Nick popped up and started firing straight through the ZIL’s windshield, aiming for the soldier manning the Mengshi’s top-mounted 50-caliber machine gun.

  “Take ’em down!” he heard Christopher yell.

  Everyone in the truck started firing as Bryce kept on the accelerator, pushing the Mengshi off the road. Nick burned through a clip shooting at the machine gunner, and when the man fell, he jammed another magazine into his rifle, took aim at one of the soldiers running toward the truck on foot and fired. His first two bullets caught the man in the throat. When that soldier dropped, another hopped out of the Mengshi, but Nick took him down him before he could raise his weapon. Nick’s rifle clicked empty again, and he reached to pull the magazine.

  “Right side! Down!” he heard Mary yell from his left, and he immediately ducked as low as he could.

  He heard her firing over him, felt one of her spent cartridges hitting the back of his neck. It burned, and he quickly brushed it away. His ears were ringing, but he still heard her yell, “Clear.”

  Nick sat up. His men were now running around in front of the truck, their weapons up, but no one was firing. It looked to him like they’d taken out everyone.

  “Got one running on foot!” Christopher yelled, but Nick could barely hear him. “Damn, he’s fucking fast!”

  Nick looked down the road and caught sight of the soldier sprinting at an impressive clip. He was almost just a dot on the horizon now. Suddenly the man pitched forward and hit the pavement. He didn’t get up. Nick looked to his left, past Mary and Bryce, and saw Daniel laying flat on the street, his rifle pointed down the road. The younger man smiled and got up, saying something Nick couldn’t hear.

  Nick got out of the truck and shook his head violently.

  “Chris! Go down the road and pick that guy up. We need to get this mess out of sight,” he said.

  “Why are you yelling?” Christopher asked. His voice sounded dull, muted, barely below a whisper.

  “My fault,” he barely heard Mary say. “I had to fire right next to his ear.”

  “Boss? Can you hear me?” Briggs said.

  Nick could tell by the look on his medic’s face that the man was yelling. He nodded.

  “Do you hear ringing?” Briggs yelled.

  Nick nodded again.

  “Okay. You’ll probably be fine in a couple of minutes.”

  As his unit moved to clear the vehicles and bodies off the road, Nick headed back toward the wrecked Mercedes, his hands out at his sides and his rifle slung over his back. “Don’t shoot!” he yelled in Chinese. “We’re friends!”

  Two men popped up from behind the old sedan, their AK-47s pointed directly at him.

  “Stop there!” another yelled, coming around to the front of the sedan, a Tokarev pistol trained on Nick.

  Nick did as he was told, keeping his arms out at his sides. The man with the pistol walked toward him, slowly, cautiously.

  “Look, man. I’m obviously on your side,” Nick said.

  “Your people—Russian?” the man said, creeping closer and jerking his head toward Nick’s crew.

  Nick shook his head.

  “No fucking way,” the guy said in perfect English, his face breaking into a wide, toothy smile. “You boys are Americans!”

  Nick nodded.

  The guy lowered his pistol and stuck out his hand.

  “Eric Leong, Madison, Wisconsin,” he said, laughing.

  “Nick Morrow. Los Angeles,” Nick said, shaking Eric’s hand.

  “Happy as hell to see you, Nick. Come on, we’ve gotta shag ass out of here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Live Fast Die Young

  “You can put your gear down over there,” Eric said as they walked into a clearing in the woods. Nick saw six tents, an improvised lean-to and an old, rusting Toyota pickup truck. Eric had pointed to one of the tents, and Nick and his men dropped their packs next to it.

  “So, this is home base?” Nick asked.

  “Home base keeps moving, just like us,” Eric told him.

  His three friends, all men around twenty-five years old, went into another tent and returned a moment later with their arms full of water bottles. They started passing them out to Nick and his people.

  “Xiexie,” Nick said as he took one of the bottles, uncapped it, and took a long drink.

  “Man. I thought I’d never see another American again,” Eric said, still smiling. “And now I got a whole bunch of ’em.”

  “So, what are you doing here?” Christopher asked.

  Nick noticed that his hearing was getting much better now. Christopher no longer sounded muted.

  “Dude. Wrong place, wrong time,” Eric said. The young man was thin, his face drawn but animated. “I was doing that whole ‘find your roots’ thing, you know? Go visit the Old Country, or some shit. I was out in the mountains, away from the news and everything, when the government ordered all Americans out of China. By the time I surfaced again, we’d been at war for months.”

  “So you, what? Decided to pick up a machine gun and start a resistance?” Nick asked.

  “Not exactly. Tried to stay hidden, see if I could ride it out. That totally didn’t work. Chinese cops found me, were gonna take me to a POW camp. This crazy motherfucker,” Eric said, grabbing one of his friends by the shoulder and shaking him playfully, “hit the prison truck with a couple of his buddies. I just stayed with them from then on.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Were six of us. Two guys supposed to back us up. Gotta assume it’s just us four now.”

  “No, I meant in the resistance,” Nick said.

  Eric looked at him for a moment and blinked.

  “Um…no idea. We’ve met a few other people doing hit and runs, like us, but not many. Some guys we worked with gave us the secure radio frequency you had, but apart from them, we’re it as far as I know.”

  Well, that’s not what I wanted to hear. Nick looked around their camp. The place was pretty bare. He saw Bryce had the hood up on their ZIL-131.

  “Bryce? How’s our ride?”

  “Looks like shit, but it’s still running.”

  “What about you guys? What are you doing out this way?” Eric asked, taking a long drink of his own water.

  “We’re on a mission. Headed to Shanghai.”

  “Really?”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Not surprised, I guess, so much as…man. That’s a really bad idea.”

  “Not mine, trust me. But it’s what we’ve got to do.”

  “Shanghai’s a fortress. No one I know will go within a hundred miles of it,” Eric said, shaking his head.

  “So I guess you don’t have some special way to get in there?” Christopher asked.

  “That would be a no, big guy. But I might know a way to get you to Hefei without getting caught. That’s jus
t over a hundred miles west of Shanghai.”

  “How?” Nick asked.

  “After we eat, man. I’m starving. Any of you guys know how to hunt?”

  Daniel smiled and raised his hand.

  * * *

  “So here’s the thing, man. There’s a town about twenty miles away from here called Datong,” Eric started, finishing off the last bit of the deer Daniel had shot, cleaned and cooked. With as polished and put-together as the young man appeared, Nick often forgot Daniel had been raised in the back woods of North Carolina, but every so often, he’d pull out some redneck skills like he had with the deer.

  Mary brought up the map on her netbook and nodded.

  “Yeah. Found it.”

  “Oh, cool. So, there’s this supply base there—Reserves, I think. Not sure. Anyway, they’re running a cargo train twice a week from Datong right to Hefei.”

  “What are they shipping?” Nick asked.

  “Beats me. Lots of stuff. We’ve seen weapons go out of there. Gear. Lots of stuff in big crates. Your guess is as good as mine as to what’s in ’em.”

  “So you’re thinking we can get on that train somehow and ride it all the way to Hefei.”

  “Right. Far as I know, the thing doesn’t stop once on the way. It’s a direct ride.”

  “Okay. How do you plan to get us on the train?” Christopher asked.

  “That’s easy enough. We create a diversion by attacking the station. You guys jump on one of the cars in the commotion. And we can make a hell of a commotion.”

  “There’s only four of you,” Bryce said, accepting a cigarette from one of the insurgents and lighting it. “And I’m sure there’s a hell of a lot more than four of them. They’ll cut you down.”

  Eric shrugged.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ve hit the base before for supplies and been pretty successful. It’s not staffed with the cream of the crop, that place.”

  “Still, that’s a hell of a risk,” Nick told him.

  “Hey, man. What you’re doing could put an end to the war, right? That’s what we want, too. Any risk is worth it if it gives you guys a shot.”

  Nick pulled out his pack of cigarettes and shook one out. He noticed it was his last. He lit it and took a long drag, tossing the empty pack into the fire in front of him.

  “You sure that’s something you want to do?”

  “Hey, you bailed us out back there. And trust me, man. We’re a scrappy bunch. We’ll be fine on our own. You’re just gonna have to be quick. They’ll want to get that train moving the second they think it’s in trouble, so you won’t have a lot of time to get your people on there.”

  Eric and his men looked solid. Tired and thin, sure, but Nick had just seen them holding off an entire PLA unit, and they appeared to be full of energy still. Nick had taken twice the safe dosage of amphetamines out of Briggs’ pack, and he was still much more tired than they looked. Their ragged, castoff clothing reminded Nick of the rags he’d turned in back at the helicopter base, but he could still see hope in their eyes. They weren’t beaten by a long shot. Not yet.

  Nick looked over at their truck and decided they certainly weren’t going to make it to Shanghai in that. Despite Bryce’s assurance that the thing would run, it stuck out horribly. It was riddled with bullet holes, the front end was smashed, and the windshield and windows had been shot out.

  “What time does the train leave?”

  “Six a.m. Which means we strike at five minutes to. They’ll be almost loaded and ready to go. All you’ll have to do is hop on the last car without anyone seeing you. We’ll set up on a building across the street, throw a bunch of bullets at ’em and get the fuck out as soon as you’re aboard.”

  Nick didn’t like the plan. He knew these guys were used to putting themselves in harm’s way but it felt wrong to ask them to risk their lives for him and his crew. He tried to talk Eric out of it more than once, but the young man wouldn’t be dissuaded. And Nick had to admit that it had a chance of success.

  That night, he got Michael on the phone. He filled his communications tech in on the plan.

  “Just be careful, boss. MSgt. Ortiz is all right, and her SIC is kinda hot, but I’d really rather not join their unit full-time,” Michael told him.

  “I will be. With any luck, the next time you hear from us will be when we’re in Hefei. And that’ll be the time you and Johnny’s crew roll out.”

  “All right, Nick. Good luck.”

  * * *

  Nick and his men had made it to the train station in Datong without much incident. Eric’s people had salvaged a lot from the Mengshi the day before, including eight helmets from the troops Nick and his crew had mowed down. Nick’s unit kept their heads down as they walked in the early-morning darkness, and no one gave them a second look as they approached the train. They held up near the loading platform.

  Just as Eric had told them, a crew of soldiers in People’s Liberation Army uniforms were loading the last two cars. Nick checked his watch. It was six minutes to six. He looked back at Christopher, who nodded. They were ready to move.

  The gunfire started right on time, bullets bouncing off the pavement near the workers loading the last two containers. As they hit the ground and looked around to find the source of the gunfire, Nick and his men charged at the last car, covering the distance in a matter of seconds and cramming themselves in behind a stack of crates at the front of the car. The gunfire continued, and someone outside slammed the loading door closed.

  Nick took a quick count of his people. Everyone was there, crouching down behind crates just in case someone decided to pop his head in and check the cargo before the train pulled away from the station. He looked out through the slats in the side of the car as the train slowly started to move. It was too dark out still to see much, so he slipped on his TotalVis goggles and toggled their night-vision mode. In green and black tones, he saw gunfire coming from the top of a two-story building just across from the train station, but that wasn’t all he saw.

  Floating behind the building was one of the huge helicopters he and his crew had seen the night before. It made almost no noise as it took up a position right behind Eric and his guys…then it made a lot of noise as it rained an impossible amount of gunfire on the rooftops. Huge chunks of the building broke away almost instantly and a few seconds later, the entire building was rubble. The angry rat in Nick’s stomach returned, thrashing around in an acid bath and forcing Nick to cough, forcing his eyes to water.

  “Fuck,” Christopher breathed next to Nick.

  Nick took off his TotalVis goggles and stashed them in a cargo pocket.

  “Nick,” Christopher started, “there’s no way they survived that.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, a lump forming in his throat. “Yeah. I know.”

  He looked at his people. In the low light, he could only make out facial expressions on those closest to him—Christopher, Mary and Briggs. All three of them looked devastated. He knew he probably had the same look on his face. Nick knew he should say something, but as he opened his mouth, nothing would come out.

  “All right, people,” he finally croaked after a long silence. His crew turned to him, but again, he didn’t know what to say.

  Another few seconds passed. The train picked up speed, the rails clicking faster and faster below them.

  “Four good men just gave their lives to make sure we do our job,” Nick said, forcing the words out. “They sacrificed everything they had for us. Let’s make sure we don’t fuck it up now.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Made In Hell

  They had picked the right car to hide out in, as it turned out. About an hour into the long train ride, Martin suggested they take a look in the crates stacked all around them. They found several full of ammo, more stocked with brand-new assault rifles, and still more packed full of C4 charges and Claymore mines. Nick ordered his people to grab as much as they could carry.

  Mary used her netbook’s GPS chip to track their progress.
The train was moving at about sixty miles an hour on a straight course for Hefei. That meant they had just less than ten hours to kill, so Nick told everyone but Christopher and Mary to sack out and get as much rest as they could. He doubted many of them would be able to sleep well, considering what they’d seen back at the train station in Datong, but they had to at least try to stay rested.

  “So we’ll get there at, what, three-thirty in the afternoon?” Christopher said. “Broad daylight. Even with the helmets and uniforms, don’t love that.”

  “Yeah, it’s not ideal. But nothing on this mission is,” Nick said. “I’d prefer to sneak off the train, but the truth is we have no idea what kind of situation we’re walking into in Hefei. Mary? You got anything on the place?”

  “Stuff from before the war. Manufacturing town, everything from computers to cigarettes. Nowadays? No idea. But manufacturing facilities probably means they’re cranking out something for the war machine.”

  “It would make sense,” Christopher agreed. “We might be sitting in a train full of components for whatever they’re making, in addition to ammo and resupply for the Army units stationed there.”

  “None of which helps us sneak off the train. I mean, we can try the whole ‘MSS escorting a Spetsnaz unit’ story if we get stopped, but there’s a lot of explaining there. Like why a government agent and valuable intel assets are riding the rails like hobos,” Nick said, sighing.

  “The only real way we’re going to be able to see what we’re up against is on-the-ground recon. Stick our heads out when we get there and hope they’re gonna unload the train front-first,” Christopher said.

  “I suppose you’re right. Assuming we get through Hefei, Mary, I want you to work up a path-of-least resistance through to Shanghai.”

  “On it, boss.”

  “Good. Then get some sleep, both of you. I’ll take first watch and wake someone up to relieve me in a couple of hours.”

  But Nick didn’t wake anyone up. He sat on a cargo crate, legs crossed, and stripped and cleaned both his M4 and the QBZ-97 assault rifle the Chinese Intelligence officer had given him. He taped magazines together, upside-down to each other, to enable a quick reload just as his father had once shown him. He borrowed Mary’s netbook and studied the old Google Maps satellite images of Hefei. He did everything he could not to think about the four men he’d just gotten killed so he could sneak onto a fucking train.