Supercritical Read online

  “Tank! Tank!” Mary yelled from the front seat, and the van took a sudden, violent left turn.

  Nick felt his feet leave the van’s floor, felt himself falling out into the street. He never hit the ground, though. His M4 clattered to the pavement behind him, but his feet hung just above the street. He hadn’t even realized he was still clinging onto the door handle, but as the van straightened out, the door slammed closed, throwing him back into the van. He crashed into the side wall, and all of the air rushed out of his body. His entire torso exploded in pain.

  “Shit! Nick, you okay?” Daniel yelled.

  “Yeah,” Nick coughed, trying to catch his breath.

  “We’re not losing anybody in this town, boss,” Bryce said from the front seat. His voice was still flat, as if he’d just told Nick it looked like it might rain outside.

  “He’s right, Nick. They’ve got so many damn UAVs in the air, they can track us wherever we go,” Mary yelled. Her voice was nowhere near as calm as Bryce’s.

  “See what you can do to get us clear, Bryce,” Nick groaned, struggling to his feet. “Mary, can you do anything about the UAVs?”

  Mary said nothing, just started working furiously on her computer.

  “I need your help making sense of this shit,” she said after a moment.

  “Guys, keep on it back there. Shoot the shit out of anything that tries to stop us,” Nick said, holding on to the back of Mary’s chair and looking over her shoulder.

  “What’s that say?” she asked, pointing to the screen.

  “Main test control.”

  “And that?”

  “Test inputs.”

  “That’s the one.”

  Mary and Nick worked in concert for almost a full minute, their communication in quick, staccato bursts. In that time, Christopher, Daniel and Martin emptied three clips out of the back of the van, and Bryce swerved violently to avoid a huge armored personnel carrier headed their way.

  “And that one?” Mary finally asked, pointing to a button that had just appeared on her screen.

  “Execute,” Nick told her, and she clicked the button.

  Mary had several of the camera feeds up on her screen. As one, they all shifted down hard and started dropping to the ground. All around them, UAVs fell out of the sky, hitting buildings, taking out cars, smashing into the street and, in some cases, exploding violently. Bryce swerved around a small UAV that hit the street in front of them, and Nick slammed into the side of the van, his right shoulder impacting hard enough to make it crunch. He winced, but clamped his jaw tight to stop the yell rising in his throat from escaping.

  “All right, Bryce. Mary’s just given you one hell of a diversion. Get us as far away from here as you can,” Nick said, rubbing his shoulder as Bryce stood on the accelerator.

  As the UAVs kept nose-diving into the city all around them, Bryce hammered the ancient van as fast as it would go. Nick heard his men firing out the back windows of the van in short bursts. He looked and saw that the glass in both windows was gone, and daylight streamed in through several holes in the sides of the van.

  “Anyone hit?” he yelled.

  “My helmet took one, but I’m cool,” Christopher said.

  “Martin took two in the chest, but his armor stopped ’em,” Briggs said. “I got grazed in the leg. Nothing major. We’re okay so far.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, wincing again as he tried to move his right arm. “So far.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Arrested in Shanghai

  “Car’s on fire, boss,” Martin said, yawning.

  “Good,” Nick said, lighting a cigarette with his left hand. His right arm was still killing him.

  “Hey, where’d you get smokes?” Christopher asked.

  “There was a pack on the van’s dashboard.” Nick handed the pack to his SIC.

  Bryce was a hell of a driver. He’d managed to get them out of Hefei and clear of their pursuers in the confusion Mary caused, and they’d taken their van all the way to the foot of Hancun Mountain. Nick instructed Martin to dispose of the van, and he and his men had gone into the woods as night fell. They’d find another vehicle soon enough, Nick figured, but they needed to lay low for a bit.

  “Let me take a look at that shoulder, Nick,” Briggs said.

  “It’s fine,” Nick told him, attempting to wave his right hand dismissively. He grimaced.

  “Right. It’s fine,” Briggs said, rolling his eyes. “It’s fucking dislocated, and you and I both know it. I can fix it in like two seconds if you’ll just stop being a bitch.”

  “Careful, Ben. I do outrank you.”

  “Then stop being a bitch, sir.”

  “Better,” Nick said, attempting a smile. That came out as a wince, too.

  “Stand still,” Briggs said, sighing and taking hold of Nick’s right arm.

  Briggs was stronger than he looked. He straightened out Nick’s arm, twisted and pushed hard. Nick heard another crunch but felt his shoulder slip back into place. He tried his arm experimentally. It still hurt a bit, but it actually worked now, which was nice.

  “Better?” Briggs asked.

  “Yeah. Thanks,” Nick said, actually achieving the smile this time.

  “Ribs? I noticed you were holding your side a bit, too.”

  “Cracked. They hurt, but I’ve done it before. I’ll be fine.”

  “Good. Here, take this,” Briggs said, handing Nick a small ampule of clear fluid.

  “What am I taking?”

  “Epinephrine. Clear up your airways from that crap we were breathing. And it’ll give you a nice energy rush, so you can stop stealing my uppers.”

  “Can’t bitch about that,” Nick said, knocking the top off the ampule and drinking the fluid inside.

  “We burned about half our ammo back there, but we’re still sitting pretty good,” Christopher told him, smoking his cigarette. “Mary says a little less than eighty miles to Shanghai.”

  Nick checked his watch.

  “About time to get on the phone. Let the other teams know it’s about time to get going. Ben, see if everyone else is five by five. Any problems, let me know.”

  “Right on. Back in a minute.”

  Nick dialed the old cell phone and got MSgt. Ortiz-Gonzales and Captain Dyuzhev. He let them know his unit’s position, filling them in on the firefight in Hefei.

  “How badly is your cover compromised?” Dyuzhev asked.

  “Not terribly,” Nick said. “We were all wearing masks and PLA uniforms, just like everyone else in town. I doubt anyone could get an ID on us, and we’ve already destroyed the vehicle we escaped in.”

  Except I didn’t wear one, not originally. They probably know my face. He didn’t mention it, though. They had come so far already—there was no way he’d let Command scrub the mission just because one paramedic saw his face.

  “Then I believe we are still a go. We will be leaving from Rally Point Indigo in thirty minutes,” Dyuzhev said.

  Rally Point Indigo was Chita, Southern Russia. They’d already started and were well behind enemy lines, moving fast. The reality of the situation suddenly hit home hard. Not only were the six people with him depending on him, every soul fighting on his side of the war—convicts, real military and Russian loyalists alike—were counting on him to do his part. To deal a crippling blow to the Chinese and North Korean forces.

  Yeah, like you weren’t under enough pressure before, he thought to himself. He now detected a note of sarcasm in his thoughts. His inner voice was starting to annoy him.

  Nick signed off and hung up the phone. Christopher was still standing near him, looking at Nick with one eyebrow raised.

  “They’re on their way,” Nick answered the question he knew Christopher was going to ask.

  “Right, then. It’s on.”

  “I’m hitting the head,” Nick said with a sigh, heading deeper into the woods after Christopher nodded in confirmation.

  He found a tree away from the rest of the group,
successfully navigated the PLA uniform pants’ zipper and nearly pissed all over his boots when the phone in his pack rang.

  Nick didn’t even know the phone could ring. It made sense, of course, but he’d only ever used it to dial out. And he’d just gotten off the phone with the only people who were supposed to know the phone even existed. Nick grabbed the phone and flipped it open.

  “Lieutenant Morrow?” a voice asked. Nick didn’t recognize it, but it was American, or a Chinese man doing a very good impersonation of an American accent.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hold one for JSOC Tracking.”

  The line clicked, and Nick thought for a second whoever was on the other end had hung up. He was about to hang up the phone, as well, when another voice came down the line.

  “Hey. Nick, right?”

  This voice was more familiar. Nick knew he’d heard it before, but he was having a hard time placing it.

  “Yeah,” he said again.

  “Captain Jason Black. We’ve met a couple of times.”

  “How did you know about this number?”

  “I deal in information, Nick. Ain’t much I don’t have access to. Now, listen. I have your coordinates from your last report. There’s an unarmed civilian cargo vehicle coming down the road two kliks east of you. It’s alone—no escorts, no soldiers. Most you’ll have to worry about is a driver with a pistol. You take that, it should be able to get you the rest of the way to your objective.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Can you see the moon?”

  Nick looked up. He could, indeed, see the full moon in the sky, bright and white and directly above his position.

  “Yeah.”

  “It can see you, too. And your friend from Erenhot asked I help you out. Now, you might want to move. The truck ain’t fast, but the longer we spend jawing, the less chance you’ve got of catching it.”

  “Um…thanks?”

  “Don’t thank me. Just get it done.”

  The line went dead, and Nick put the phone back in his bag, zipped up, and toggled his radio.

  “Daniel, you on?”

  “Yeah, brother. What’s up?”

  “The road we came in on. See anything?”

  “Yeah. About a mile off in the distance. Headlights, heading this way. We need to scramble?”

  “Keep an eye out. Let me know what you see as it gets closer. I’m heading your way.”

  Nick left the radio channel open as he headed for Daniel’s position, just at the foot of the woods they had chosen to hide out in. He knew the young man was probably down low to the ground, scanning the road with his sniper rifle, doing what he always did—protecting his friends.

  “Nick, I can see it now. Looks civilian, and no escort. One driver, no passengers I can see. One of those box trucks.”

  “Think you can take out the driver?”

  “Shit, Nick. Remember who you’re talking to.”

  “Good. Let him get a little closer. I’d hate to have to walk too far.”

  * * *

  The truck was old and slow—really, it was a piece of shit—but it ran, and Nick’s people all fit inside. Bryce was behind the wheel, and Mary and Nick were next to him on the bench seat in the cab. They kept in contact with the rest of the unit in the back of the truck via radio, as there was no opening between the cab and the cargo area.

  Daniel had made one hell of a shot through the open driver’s side window, so a quick cleanup was all the vehicle needed to pass for normal. The back of the truck was full of cardboard boxes, and Nick had tasked Martin with ripping into them to see if they had anything the unit could use.

  “Looks like forty, forty-five is the best we’re going to get out of this thing,” Bryce said from behind the wheel.

  “Three hours if we take the path of least resistance into Shanghai,” Mary told them, checking her netbook screen. “That still takes us through a lot of populated areas, though. It’s unavoidable much past sixty miles out from the city.”

  “What about a direct route?” Nick asked.

  “Two hours. A little less. But that takes us through some pretty dense cities, at least according to prewar intel.”

  “Yeah, but we’re just three folks in a truck. And under cover of darkness, we have a better chance of finding somewhere to hole up and recon the area, find the central core complex,” Nick said, thinking out loud. “And if we can’t avoid populated areas anyway, we have no idea what we’re driving through no matter which way we go.”

  “Suppose you have a point there,” Mary admitted. “Bryce, straight on.”

  “I’ll keep an ear on the frequencies, try to steer us clear of the hairiest bits,” Nick assured them, popping an earbud into his left ear. “Any idea where the core will be?”

  “Intel seems to think it’ll be close to the coast, but I can’t see that as anything more than a wild guess,” Mary said. “Shanghai has changed so much in the past ten years that it could be anywhere. They’ve got a long history of just knocking down buildings and putting up new stuff whenever the hell they feel like it.”

  “But can’t you, like, pick up on it with your computer?” Bryce asked.

  “I’m sure going to try. Nick, if you hear anything…”

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  Nick turned his attention to the radio chatter. He was getting a lot more of it as they got closer to the edge of the Shanghai metroplex, everything from civilian radio playing horrible Chinese pop music to coded military transmissions. Mary’s program automatically switched frequencies every ten seconds, and after almost a half hour of listening, Nick noticed a change in the signals. They were getting more and more military-dominated. Civilian traffic was disappearing almost entirely.

  “My guess is we’re coming up on another military base,” he told Mary and Bryce.

  “Approaching Taizhou,” Mary said.

  Taizhou. The name tried to ring a bell in Nick’s brain. Someone had told him something about Taizhou, but he was having a hard time remembering what it was. While his visual memory was excellent, almost photographic, his auditory memory was for crap. He wracked his brain as the truck rolled forward, trying to find an image to attach to the name.

  Then he had it. Kenneth. Kenneth had told him that Taizhou was the closest he’d ever gotten to Shanghai, that it was a huge, heavily armed military base. That there was no way past it.

  “We need to avoid Taizhou,” he told Bryce and Mary. “Mary, find us a way around.”

  “Give me a second, boss. It’s a big area, and the roads here are more complicated than L.A.”

  “Fast as you can. We’re in a really bad spot.”

  “Man, you aren’t kidding,” Bryce said, his voice as flat as ever. He nodded down the road ahead of him.

  Three CDMs were rolling directly toward their truck in a wedge formation. Nick checked the rearview mirror and saw that two large Armored Personnel Carriers had pulled up behind them. The CDMs in front didn’t break their course, but they did slow down as they got closer to the truck.

  “Can’t outrun ’em or lose ’em in this piece of shit, boss.”

  “I know, Bryce. Looks like they want us to stop. I’ll try to talk our way out of this one.”

  “Understood.”

  Bryce slowed the box truck to a stop. In the rearview, Nick saw a few soldiers get out of the APCs and start walking toward the cab. There were three on Bryce’s side and two on his.

  “Wenjian,” a short man at Bryce’s window demanded.

  The soldiers already had their guns up on both sides of the truck.

  Nick slowly pulled his MSS identification out of his pocket and passed it across Bryce to the man in charge. He looked at the ID for a moment, then tapped a few commands into a screen on his sleeve, one much like the command screens Nick was used to. He looked down at the screen for a second, then sighed and looked back into the truck.

  “Get out of the vehicle,” he said in flawless, accentless English.
<
br />   “Wo bu mingbai,” Nick said, trying to look confused.

  “You understand me just fine. I did my undergrad at UC Sunnyvale. But fine, have it your way. You can either get out of the vehicle, or I can have my men in the QZS-22s up there burn your truck down to the frame,” the man in charge said, nodding to the three CDMs up the road.

  Bryce looked over at Nick. His facial expression didn’t change in the slightest, but Nick knew what his driver was thinking. He shook his head—no way we’re going to be able to fight out of this.

  “All right,” Nick said, switching back to English. “We’re getting out of the truck.”

  “Hands away from your weapons, please. On your heads will be fine,” the man in charge told them.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Horror Business

  The building they were taken to wasn’t far from the road. Nick guessed they were in the back of the APC for maybe two, two and a half minutes before the large vehicle stopped and soldiers pulled him and his people out. He’d been mentally mapping out the turns and distances as they traveled, but when he tried to look around and confirm their position, one of the soldiers stopped him with a quick punch to the side of the head. His vision went black and spotty for just a moment. The guy hit like a baseball bat.

  “Eyes forward.”

  The guards pushed Nick and his crew into a long, low brick building. Inside, the place was dimly lit and had a wide corridor down the middle. Without anyone having to say anything, Nick knew this was a jail. He’d been in enough of them to know one when he saw it. It actually reminded him of a place in Mexico he’d been held overnight after a few bad decisions on Spring Break his junior year of college—long and dark, with a central hallway flanked by large holding cells on either side. This place smelled better, though that didn’t take much.

  “Line up, backs to that wall,” the man in charge said.

  Nick feared for a second that these soldiers were just going to line them up, shoot them and go on about their day, but no bullets came his way. Instead, one soldier pulled out a tiny digital camera and took each of their pictures, then a picture of the whole group. He handed the camera off to the man in charge, who reviewed the pictures and nodded.