Supercritical Page 24

  “Get these uploaded,” the man in charge told the soldier, handing back the camera.

  From there, everything happened quickly. Nick and his people were searched, all their gear collected and laid out on a long table near the wall where they were lined up. Soldiers put restraints—long, stock-like bars—on their arms and led them all to cells down the hall, two people to a cell. Nick ended up in a cell by himself, which he didn’t consider a good sign. He guessed they’d already figured he was in command and wanted to keep him separate from his people. It was exactly what he would have done.

  Most of the soldiers left the jail after that, leaving just the man in charge and two of his people. Nick sat down on one of the narrow shelves in his cell. From the pillow at one end of the shelf, he could tell it was meant to be a bed, but it wasn’t the least bit comfortable.

  If you’re ever caught in battle, give them your name, rank and serial number. And that’s it. Nothing else, ever. Don’t talk about your mission, or your family back home, or the weather. Name, rank and serial number, the words of his trainer in OTS came floating back to him.

  Nick sat on the sorry excuse for a bed for what seemed like a while before anyone came to see him. The man in charge, the UC Sunnyvale alum, walked up outside his cell, carrying a wooden chair in one hand. He placed the chair facing Nick’s cell and sat down, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and lighting a smoke.

  “I would ask if you smoke, but we took cigarettes from you when you came in. Would you like one?” the man in charge asked.

  Nick shook his head.

  “Fair enough. My name’s Zhao. You want to tell me just what you think you’re doing driving a stolen truck directly through a military base? I mean, that’s just not smart.”

  “Lieutenant Nick Morrow, 3246-1153.”

  “Oh. So that’s how you’re going to be about it.”

  Nick just shrugged.

  “That’s fine, I suppose. But let me tell you where I’m coming from, Nick. I see seven Americans deep in China, obviously headed for Shanghai. You really think my bosses are going to be satisfied with your guys’ name, rank and serial number? Or do you think they’ll tell me to do whatever I have to do to get information out of you?”

  Nick said nothing. He just stared at Zhao, who leaned back in his chair, one foot up against the bars on Nick’s cell door.

  “I can tell you it won’t be pleasant. And I can tell you that if you don’t cooperate, I won’t go after you first. I’ll start with your people…maybe that pretty little girl who was in the front seat with you.”

  More than anything, Nick wanted to spring up, grab Zhao’s leg and tear it right off through the bars. He started doing the math in his head. Would he have time to cover the distance between him and Zhao before the Chinese soldier realized what was happening and got away from the door?

  “We won’t go easy on her, or any of them. But you’ll see that, because you’re going to watch. Unless, that is, you’re suddenly feeling talkative.”

  Nope. Probably won’t make it, Nick thought. He felt himself tensing his leg muscles anyway, getting ready to launch himself at the grinning soldier outside his cell. He was just about to spring up off of the bed when Zhao suddenly stood up.

  “All right, then. You’ve obviously made your choice. Zhong Shi!” Zhao yelled down the hall, calling for one of his soldiers.

  Nick expected one of his lackeys to come running.

  So did Zhao, as he was obviously surprised that no one answered him. He walked a few steps toward the front area of the building and yelled again.

  “Zhong Shi Po!”

  Still no answer. Zhao froze in place, and Nick could see the confusion on his face. He watched as the confusion suddenly turned to shock. Zhao fumbled for the pistol on his belt but didn’t even get his hand on it before a long, serrated knife plunged into his right eye.

  * * *

  Nick stood up quickly, covering the distance to his cell door in a fraction of a second. He saw Zhao twitching on the ground, the knife still sticking out of his eye, and heard someone walking down the hall toward him. A gigantic man leaned down and pulled the knife out of Zhao’s face, wiping the blade on the fallen soldier’s uniform before putting it back in his belt. The huge man turned to Nick and smiled.

  “See, Nick? I said you guys wouldn’t make it past Taizhou,” Kenneth said. “Good thing I was in the neighborhood.”

  * * *

  Kenneth had them out of their cells in a matter of minutes. As Nick led his people back up toward the front of the building, he noticed the other two soldiers on the floor next to the door. Both men had their throats cut. Nick tried not to step in their blood as he grabbed his gear from the table, but it wasn’t easy. There was an awful lot of it.

  “Not that I don’t appreciate the rescue, Kenneth, but what the hell are you doing out here?” Nick asked.

  “Got to thinking after we talked a few days back. Figured you were coming down here to do some real damage, and you know I’m down with that. And I’ve got a better chance really fucking with their program if I work with you.”

  “Should it bother me that he’s making a lot of sense all of a sudden?” Christopher asked, checking the ammo in his sidearm before putting it in his leg holster.

  “Yeah, he does that now,” Nick mumbled, shoving his TotalVis goggles into a cargo pocket.

  “Oh, hey, Chris. Yeah, I’m on some decent drugs now,” Kenneth said, smiling at Christopher.

  “How’d you make it down here without getting caught?” Briggs asked.

  “Very good question, guy I don’t know. I swiped a Chinese APC back up north. I’ve been listening to their comm channels long enough that I know the correct responses to all of their challenge transmissions.”

  “You speak Chinese?” Martin asked.

  “I spent months in a Chinese prison, and I have an IQ of one-ninety. Do the math.”

  “All right, people. Let’s cut the chatter. Kenneth, you still have the APC?”

  “It’s right outside.”

  “Good. Load up, Echo. Our cover’s blown, so we’re going to have to move fast if we want to make it to Shanghai.”

  Nick and his crew picked up the last of their gear, and Nick held one of the AK-47s out to Kenneth.

  The huge man laughed and shook his head.

  “Got stuff way better than that in the car.”

  Kenneth led the unit out to the APC and opened the rear hatch. Nick and his crew piled in as quickly as they could, and Kenneth got behind the wheel and started the vehicle. Nick climbed into the passenger seat next to Kenneth as Daniel slammed the back hatch closed.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where the Central Computer Core is in Shanghai, would you?” Nick asked as Kenneth drove away from the jail.

  “Didn’t even know there was one. This is the farthest I’ve ever been,” Kenneth replied.

  “Right. Mary, get online. See if you can give us some idea of where we’re headed.”

  He heard no response from Mary, and he looked back over his shoulder at her. She was sitting between Bryce and Daniel, not moving. Nick realized she’d probably heard what Zhao had said about her, was probably shaken and scared. Up until now, what might happen to them if they got caught was theory—Zhao hadn’t been specific, but that wasn’t a good thing. Her imagination could fill in the gaps now, and Nick had no doubt those gaps were getting filled with some horrible images.

  Had it been one of his guys—Martin or Christopher, maybe—Nick would have just repeated the order, louder and angrier. But even though he knew Mary was tough, as tough as any one of them, he didn’t yell at her. It would be like yelling at his little sister.

  “Mary,” he said, making every attempt to keep his voice even and tapping his prosthetic fingers against the metal bulkhead near her.

  “Huh? Sorry, boss, what?”

  “I need you to give Kenneth an idea of where to go.”

  Mary nodded slowly and opened her netbook. Nick looked at her fo
r a few more seconds. She was back in work mode now, but he made a mental note to keep her busy for a while. Being busy always worked for him when he had shit he didn’t want to think about.

  “Kenneth, I’m counting on you to get us where Mary says we need to go,” he said, turning to the giant in the driver’s seat.

  “Do the best I can, Nick. So what’s our plan?”

  “We’re going to crash the Chinese Army network.”

  “That doesn’t sound like too much fun. I thought we were gonna get to kill a bunch of people.”

  “Oh, we will. I don’t expect them to just let us in the front door. And as soon as the network is down, the bombers will be able to fly into mainland China.”

  “See, that’s better. That’ll be some epic destruction,” Kenneth said with a laugh.

  Nick felt his skin crawl. He had every intention of carrying out his mission, and he knew that meant that a lot of people were going to die, but he wasn’t happy about it. Not like Kenneth seemed to be. The only way Nick had been able to get through this mission so far was that he knew all of the targets were military ones, and that the people killed would be enemy combatants. He doubted that would matter to Kenneth, though. The big guy just wanted to see people get killed.

  The minute you feel right about doing this kind of thing, that’s when you know you’ve gone too far. They were his own words from only hours ago, though it seemed a lot longer than that. Nick guessed Kenneth had gone too far years ago and never bothered to come back.

  Nick shot a look back at Christopher and saw that his second in command had a sickened look on his face. He raised an eyebrow at Nick, who nodded in return. I know, Nick thought. I feel the same way. But we need him right now.

  “We’re going to have to drive this thing right into downtown Shanghai,” Mary said from the back of the APC.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem. Nick, you wanna keep your ears on the comm frequencies? ID number on this crate is 558-1119-Alpha. You hear anyone asking after that number, let me know,” Kenneth said.

  Nick slipped on a pair of headphones. Next to him, he heard Kenneth starting to hum happily to himself. He did his best to tune the man out and focus on the radio transmissions.

  Kenneth had the radio set to a specific frequency, and not much traffic was coming through. Mary fed Kenneth directions, and Kenneth kept humming as he drove them deeper and deeper into the Shanghai metro. In twenty minutes they were inside the city, surrounded by huge skyscrapers and civilian vehicles.

  Nick checked the APC’s outside cameras and saw something he hadn’t seen in a while: normal people, civilians, going about their day. None of them seemed to be too surprised at the large APC driving down the city streets. As Nick panned the cameras around, he noticed several more military vehicles sharing the road with the regular cars and trucks.

  “Should be around here somewhere,” Mary said, checking her screen again. “A lot of traffic in this part of town. Massive data flow.”

  “I think I found it,” Nick said, tapping the screen in front of him.

  Everyone crowded in behind his chair to look at the screen. Even Kenneth took his eyes off the road for a second to take a glance. All of them saw the same thing, but Christopher was the first one to put what they saw into words.

  “Well, fuck,” Christopher spat. “That’s all kinds of not good.”

  About a half-mile down the road, a large office building stood apart from the others. It was partially because of the architecture, or lack thereof, since it was just a short, square block of a building in a city of sweeping, curving skyscrapers. But even without the terrible design, the building would have been conspicuous, as there were several hundred soldiers and at least fifty CDMs ringing the place’s perimeter.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Indestructible

  Kenneth listened when Nick told him to drive past the building and keep going. He’d set the cameras to record as soon as they spotted the Central Core, and he aimed every camera the APC had at the building as they rolled past. He wanted to study the footage, see if he could find a way for them to get inside.

  They’d found their objective, Nick was sure, but it wasn’t as if they could just park outside, so he told Kenneth to keep going. Kenneth drove them a few miles down, past the skyscrapers and manicured downtown gardens. The farther they got from the city center, the more run-down the buildings got.

  “Where do you think we are now?” Martin asked.

  “The ghetto,” Kenneth said. “I grew up in one. I can smell them a mile away.”

  “Gotta agree. This place reminds me of where I grew up, too,” Briggs said, “and that’s not a compliment.”

  “Think you can find somewhere to stash this thing? Stop moving for a minute, get oriented?” Nick asked.

  “Sure. It’s your show.”

  Kenneth drove around for a couple of blocks until he found an industrial building that looked abandoned. There was a fence around it secured with a chain and a padlock. He piloted the APC behind the building, away from any streetlights, and killed the APC’s engine.

  Nick brought up the footage he’d recorded on the dashboard’s four small screens and started playing it back.

  “Man, that’s a lot of guys,” Christopher mumbled from behind him.

  “Yeah. And it looks like they’re standing no more than five feet from each other. Then there’s the CDMs behind them,” Bryce said.

  “I noticed a few of those big choppers in the air, too,” Daniel added.

  “Lovely,” Nick said. “Any idea on how we get in there?”

  “You won’t. Not without an army,” Kenneth rumbled.

  “Hate to say it, but he’s right, boss. We’d need air cover, tanks, something other than eight people in a stolen APC,” Briggs said.

  Nick stood up and stretched. Think, Nick. Plan. That’s what everyone thinks you’re good at. That’s why they gave you this job. He turned around to look at his people and noticed that Martin and Mary were huddled over her netbook.

  “Guys? Got anything?”

  “I think I have the city map here, Nick,” Mary reported.

  “And I think I have an idea. That computer core thing has to be drawing a lot of power, am I right, Mary?” Martin asked.

  “Yeah. Scientifically speaking, a fuckton of electricity.”

  “So maybe we don’t touch the computer core building. Maybe we just cut the power,” Martin continued, turning the screen to face Nick.

  He pointed to a building just outside of town, on the edge of the bay.

  Nick knew what the Chinese characters next to the building meant, but he didn’t need to read them to know why Martin had chosen that particular facility. The nuclear radiation symbol was enough.

  “Songshan Nuclear Power Station.”

  “Right. We go in there, shut off the power and call the other units. Even if they have backups, it’ll take them several minutes to get that much power to their core, I bet,” Martin said, nodding his head.

  “Anyone know anything about nuclear power stations?” Christopher asked.

  “Sure. One of my degrees is in nuclear physics,” Martin told him, grinning.

  Nick thought about it for a moment. It wasn’t as if they had many other options, he decided. They could at least go check out the power station. It might help them plan their next move.

  “All right. Looks like we’re moving again.”

  * * *

  “These guys just love their security, don’t they?” Christopher said, sighing and shaking his head.

  As Kenneth drove the APC past the front gate of the Songshan Nuclear Power plant, the vehicle’s external cameras picked up several soldiers walking the perimeter and five Mengshi light assault vehicles with 50-caliber machine guns mounted on top. The gate itself was locked, with four guards and a CDM in front of it.

  “They know something’s up,” Nick told him. “That guy Zhao must have called someone. Put them on alert.”

  “It’s not as well-d
efended as the computer core,” Bryce said.

  “Still more than we can push past. Kenneth, take us back to the ghetto. I need to think,” Nick ordered.

  “Not gonna be able to think our way past these guys, Nick,” Kenneth said, but he turned the APC around anyway and headed back to the same building they’d used for cover earlier. It was about twenty minutes away, and no one talked much on the drive. Nick spent the time running simulations in his head.

  That one CDM had enough firepower to take out ten or twenty APCs, he figured. And if they somehow managed to stop the CDM, which would have to involve some sort of divine intervention, there were still the Mengshi LAVs and the foot soldiers to deal with. Apart from the assault rifles and a couple of shoulder-fired rockets Kenneth had in the APC, the only weapon the vehicle had was a single 50-caliber machine gun on top, just like the Mengshis. And 50-caliber bullets wouldn’t even dent the CDM.

  “Hey, boss. Check that out,” Daniel said as they headed back through the edge of the city. He pointed to one of the screens showing the APC’s external camera feeds. A nearby apartment building had a large billboard on the wall closest to the street, and that billboard was flashing images. Mug shots.

  Nick recognized his own face, then Daniel’s, then Mary’s before the APC rolled past the building.

  “Shit. We’re definitely blown.”

  “Yeah. But at least my picture looks good,” Daniel said, shrugging.

  “Dude, you don’t take bad pictures,” Bryce said.

  “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  Nick usually would have chuckled then, but he had no reaction to his friends’ banter this time. He was too in his own head, desperately trying to figure a way to get past that gate. Or, failing that, a way to get them the hell out of the city and back to friendly territory. This mission was quickly looking like a no-win scenario, no matter how much he didn’t want to admit it.

  Nick hadn’t come up with any ideas by the time Kenneth killed the engine behind the abandoned factory. They needed a tougher vehicle, better weapons. They had neither. Talking their way past the soldiers outside wouldn’t work now that their faces were being broadcast all over the city. How the fuck are we going to get in?