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  It had been a full day since the HALO jump, and his legs still felt shaky under him. He’d woken up four times the night before, thinking he was still falling. Once when he’d woken up, he’d seen Christopher across the room, sitting upright in bed wiping sweat off his forehead.

  “Falling dream?” Nick had asked quietly.

  “Yeah. Sixth one tonight.”

  Colonel Ross looked up at Nick as he walked in.

  “Have a seat,” Ross said, pointing with his pen at the chair across from his desk. Leaning against the wall next to Ross’ desk was the British soldier who’d asked Nick for a cigarette the day before.

  “Lieutenant, meet Captain Fraser McShane. He’s not here, understood?”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Good. Your unit will be getting its new assignment tomorrow night. Your crew has downtime until then, but I’ve got an assignment for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ross leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. Nick noticed something he hadn’t before, a tattoo along Ross’ ulna that said “Steel Sharpens Steel.” He was wondering just what that meant, and how he’d never noticed it before, when Colonel Ross started speaking.

  “If Captain McShane and his men were actually here, they’d be embarking on a high-priority mission almost immediately. And they’d need someone to tag along as a consultant of sorts.”

  “I copy, sir.”

  “Good. I’ll let the nonexistent Captain fill you in. Time is of the essence. You’re dismissed.”

  “Come on then, mate. Got one of His Majesty’s nicest choppers waiting for us,” McShane said, clapping Nick on the shoulder as they walked out of Ross’ office. There was an unmarked black Cougar outside, which Nick had seen as he hustled in to meet with Colonel Ross. McShane popped the truck’s back hatch and motioned for Nick to climb aboard. Nick forced his aching, tired legs to work as he threw himself into the truck.

  “Let’s move, Alex!” McShane yelled.

  “Right!” the driver yelled back, and the truck tore off.

  “So you’re SAS?” Nick asked as he and McShane took bench seats opposite each other.

  “That’s right, Lieutenant. How’d you know?”

  “Recognized the emblem. I thought Britain was staying out of the war.”

  “Officially, yeah. We are, but—and you didn’t hear this from me—not for much longer. Right at the moment, we’re not here in any official capacity, obviously.”

  “Right.”

  One of the SAS soldiers near McShane grinned. “Just a high-ranking official of ours doing a favor for an old Afghan War buddy.”

  “Understood. Say no more. So what’s our mission?”

  “I’ll update you once we get loaded on the chopper and get underway. What’re you using, Lieutenant? M4?” McShane asked.

  “Preferably, yeah.”

  “Alex! Grab an M4 and meet us on the bus!” McShane yelled as he threw open the back hatch.

  The Cougar stopped a second later. McShane and his men jumped out, their boots barely hitting the pavement before they rushed toward the waiting Puma helicopter. Nick got a quick count as they all loaded up. There were six men in the back of the Cougar, counting McShane, and two in the front. Inside the helicopter, there were four more plus a pilot and copilot. Fourteen men, probably only twelve SAS team members, the chopper crew, and Nick. A small unit, but one with plenty of firepower. An incursion, maybe?

  “Here you go, Lieutenant,” Alex said. He passed Nick an M4 and three extra magazines.

  “Sig P226,” McShane said, handing Nick a black pistol and an extra clip. “Use one before?”

  “Sure. My dad had four of them stashed around the house,” Nick said, holstering the pistol and stowing the clip in his vest.

  “You must’ve had an interesting childhood, Lieutenant.”

  “You can call me Nick, Captain.”

  “Right, then. Nick. Reggie! We ready to go or what?” McShane yelled to the front of the helicopter.

  “Sixty seconds!” the pilot yelled back.

  “Okay, Nick. Here’s the deal,” McShane said. “We’re heading to an area just southeast of here. Couple of days back, four of your Echo units and their COs were sent to capture a building in an empty town about ten miles from the Chinese lines. Intel said heavy resistance, which is why they sent Echo units. Or so they tell me.”

  “Echo units are suicide squads, Captain. Convicts doing time for murder. They’re sent in when the job looks too dangerous for real soldiers.”

  “Right. That makes a bit more sense, then.”

  “So the Echo units in trouble? Need bailing out?” Nick guessed.

  “Eh, no. Good guess, though. Apparently, the resistance was minimal to nonexistent. Soon as they occupied the building, the Echo units took their COs hostage.”

  “Oh, fuck. Uh, pardon the language, sir.”

  “No worries. Your boss Colonel Ross tells me you’ve got experience with Echo convict units. That you turned one of ’em into a Special Forces unit.”

  “That, and I used to be an Echo convict,” Nick said as the helicopter lifted off.

  “Then he’s right. You’re perfect to help us out on this mission. We’re going to try to breach the building quietly, free the hostages and do what we can to recapture the convict units.”

  “How do we even know what happened?” Nick asked.

  “The convict in charge of this little rebellion’s got balls. He radioed back to his base and said they wouldn’t let their COs go until they got better weapons, safer missions. Guess he’s all kinds of unhappy with the treatment he and his men have been getting. Plucky little basket weaver, that one.”

  Only a matter of time until something like this happened, Nick thought, setting his jaw. Can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same if things were different for us.

  “Twenty minutes to drop, Cap!” the pilot yelled.

  “Thanks, Reg! Nick, I’ve got the schematics of the building here. I’ve mapped out the route our teams are going to take. Want you to study them. And when we get on the ground, I’ll need you to tell me everything you can about how these convict units are trained, how they might operate.”

  McShane handed Nick a few pieces of paper, which he started shuffling through. The plan looked simple enough. One team of four men would drop in on the roof from the chopper. They were the distraction. The other eight men—and, Nick assumed, himself—would breach through the sewer lines running into the building and hopefully catch the convict units by surprise. A simple plan, sure, but likely to work. The SAS had been doing hostage rescues since before Nick was born.

  “Question, Captain,” Nick said as he leafed through the papers and committed the building plan to memory.

  “What’s that, mate?”

  “The Echo units. Did they give you the unit numbers?”

  “Yeah, let me check,” McShane said, pulling a small notebook from his uniform pocket and opening it. “Looks like 21, 22, 23 and 58.”

  Nick knew the answer before McShane gave it, but he still felt his stomach drop when he heard the name.

  “Shit. The guy who contacted command with his ransom demands—his name is Shaw, isn’t it?”

  McShane flipped through the pages and stopped on one.

  “Dead on, mate. How’d you know that?”

  “I know the guy. Saved his life about a year back. He’s the head of an Aryan prison gang.”

  “Aryans? Like, neo-Nazis? Skinheads?” Alex asked.

  “That’d be them.”

  A few of the soldiers started muttering to each other. Nick had read that England had problems with Neo-Nazi elements, so they had to be at least a little familiar with what they might be dealing with. Nick knew, both from jail and from working in the convict units, that the Aryans were nothing to sneeze at. They were violent and ruthless, and there were a lot of them in both Marine Echo and Army Kilo units. A large number of the white convicts—the ones who had already been in priso
n before the Convict Conscript Act—were Aryans.

  As the conversations continued in hushed tones around him, Nick remembered the first time he’d met Shaw. They’d been evacuating Area November, formerly the Russian city of Irkutsk, under attack from Renegade Russian armor and Chinese helicopters. They’d managed to keep the assault busy long enough to let all of the evacuation planes take off, but Nick and his men, along with Shaw and a few of his, had taken a Razor out to delay the Renegade armored vehicles, while helicopters evacuated the last of the base personnel.

  They’d managed to disable the Russian vehicles but had to run from their Razor—which they’d left firing on automatic to keep the Russians busy—to the tarmac, where the last two helicopters were ready to take off. Shaw had taken a bullet to the ankle and, despite his dislike for the man, Nick had carried him on his shoulders to the last helicopter out of Area November. Shaw had been considerably more affable after that, even though Nick was half-Chinese. He’d even stopped calling Nick “Chinky.”

  But he hadn’t seen the man in more than a year. And with all of the shit Echo units went through, he was frankly surprised to hear the Aryan leader was still alive.

  “You know him, then? Think he might listen to you?” McShane asked after a moment.

  “He might,” Nick said, “though I doubt he’s in the mood to listen to anyone.”

  No one in the chopper spoke for a few seconds.

  Then, quickly, McShane snatched the papers back from Nick and pulled out a pen.

  “All right, everyone! Listen up! New plan!”

  Chapter Twelve

  White Riot

  “You read me, Nick?” McShane’s voice buzzed in Nick’s ear.

  “Yeah. I just want to say again that I hate this plan,” Nick grumbled.

  “Duly noted. Keep your channel open. We’ll breach on your go,” McShane said.

  Nick could see the target building off in the distance. He guessed it used to be the town hotel, but it was the only building taller than two stories in the tiny village. The place was like so many other Siberian towns Nick had seen in the last year and a half: abandoned, looted and bombed out. Most of the Russian citizens who hadn’t gone renegade had fled west long ago, to the safer areas near Moscow and Volgograd. The hotel, if that’s what it was, looked relatively undamaged, apart from a few broken windows.

  Nick checked the command screen on his sleeve, which he’d programmed with the codes for 21, 22, 23 and 58 Echo. He could see forty red dots on his screen, the locators all convicts had implanted in their necks. The dots were grouped in the building ahead of him. They’d been expecting heavy resistance on their mission, so Nick guessed the Echo units would have more than forty assault rifles and a bunch of grenades. He rubbed his neck near the jugular, felt the now-deactivated locator under his own skin, and wondered idly if the folks back at Justice had remembered to turn Christopher’s off.

  Nick, on the other hand, didn’t even have the M4 Alex had obtained for him. The plan was for him to walk in unarmed so the Aryans didn’t consider him a threat. He was supposed to see if he could talk them into surrendering, or at least keep them busy while McShane and his men breached the building and took it back by force. He still had the Sig pistol tucked behind his back under his BDU jacket. McShane doubted they’d pat him down, but Nick wasn’t so sure.

  He’d seen the Aryans in action before, and they were nothing if not paranoid and efficient. In the two weeks he’d spent in the Lompoc Correctional facility after his trial but before he was shipped off to war, the guards had stuck Nick on an Aryan-controlled cell block. They’d said it was the only space available, but Nick knew what they saw when they looked at him, and it was the same thing everyone else saw when they first met him: they saw a Chink. They saw one of those same motherfuckers who detonated a nuclear bomb in downtown L.A., or one of those murderous bastards killing servicemen and Russian civilians overseas.

  Never mind that Nick had been born and raised in Los Angeles. He’d bounced around to a few other states when his parents were still married whenever the Navy had transferred his father, but he’d never even been out of the country. He certainly had nothing in common with the North Korean terrorists from the Los Angeles incident, or the Chinese Army regulars who took out hundreds of servicemen at the Battle of Neryugn. But that didn’t matter to most people back home—they saw a guy who looked Chinese and immediately hated him.

  He’d heard the guards had a pool going on how long it would take Nick to get beaten to death by the skinheads on his block. He was only too happy to make sure all of them lost their money.

  As he got close to the hotel, he saw two guards on either side of the front doors, both of them dressed in gray convict BDUs and holding M-16s. They trained their rifles on Nick as he approached, and Nick slowly raised his hands.

  “Tell your boss Nick Morrow is here to see him!” Nick shouted from about fifty feet away. Far enough, he hoped, that they wouldn’t see what the prison guards back home had seen—just another Asian—and open fire on him.

  “Don’t move!” the guard on the right yelled out. “Lay down on your stomach, face on the ground, and put your hands out at your side!”

  Nick did so, resisting the urge to tell the guard that lying down was moving.

  “Go get the boss,” Nick heard the guard say to his partner. “You! Stay right there! You even blink and I’ll shoot you right in the head!”

  Instead of asking how the guard could see him blink with his face in the street, Nick did as he was told. A few minutes later, he heard boots walking toward him. He listened and took a guess: five men.

  “You can stand up, Morrow,” a voice came from above him.

  Nick stood and counted the men in front of him. Yup, five. He mentally patted himself on the back as he looked them over. Only two had M-16s. The other three had what looked like AR-15s, commercial semiautomatic versions of the M-16. Probably police seizures from back in the States, Nick guessed. One of the problems with throwing a couple of million extra bodies into the war was arming them, so mismatched, out-of-date and confiscated civilian weapons turned up in the convict units all the time.

  The man who had told him to get up was Shaw, though Nick didn’t recognize him immediately. The man had lost a good fifteen pounds and had a long scar running from just below his right eye to his jawline. His blue eyes had dark rings under them, and his head had just started to sprout black stubble.

  “So, heard they made you a real Marine, Morrow.”

  There was a smile on Shaw’s face as he spoke, but his words had a hard edge to them. It sounded less like conversation and more like accusation.

  Nick looked into the man’s eyes and saw no trace of the smile. It had been pasted on to put Nick at ease, but it wasn’t working.

  “Yeah. Heard you kidnapped your COs and started making demands,” Nick said, matching Shaw’s pasted-on smile. “Ballsy move.”

  “I thought so. So they sent you here thinking you’d be able to talk me down, since we’re old buddies and all.”

  “What can I say? They’re not the best at making plans,” Nick said, more for McShane’s benefit than Shaw’s.

  “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. I know I owe you one—”

  “If by one, you mean your life…”

  “Yeah, that. So I’m not going to kill you. But I am afraid you’re going to have to join my CO and his people.”

  Nick thought about arguing with Shaw, trying to talk him down. He considered telling him about the crack British strike force just waiting to come in and rough them up, but he didn’t. Instead, a new plan started forming in his mind. He looked at Shaw and shrugged his shoulders. “Fair enough, I suppose. You want to lead the way?”

  “Check him for weapons, Hank,” Shaw said, motioning to one of his men.

  “I’ll save you the time. Pistol in my belt, behind my back.”

  The convict, Hank, reached into Nick’s waistband and took the Sig pistol. After a quick pat-down, Hank nodd
ed to Shaw. Nick was clean.

  “It’s this way,” Shaw said, nodding to the hotel’s front doors.

  He walked next to Nick as they entered the hotel, and his men followed behind.

  “So, why don’t you tell me what I’m up against, since we’re pals and all?”

  “Fifty special forces guys. They’ll be here in about ten minutes. You really don’t have much of a chance, man.”

  Shaw led Nick through a small ballroom and into a commercial kitchen. They stopped outside a walk-in refrigerator with a few bullet holes in the door.

  “I knew that coming into this, Morrow. But I have more of a chance with them than I do with the Chinks.”

  “It’s gotten that bad?”

  “Last week, they sent us on an offensive to try and push the Chinks back a few miles. Me and ten other Echo units, plus five Kilo units. They gave us weapons that…shit, man. I wouldn’t even call ’em guns. Pistols, hunting rifles. Some of us didn’t even get guns. They gave one guy in Kilo a shovel.”

  “A shovel?” Nick had a hard time believing that at first until he thought back to Camp Rattlesnake.

  They sent one of my guys out with a machete. The thought made him want to shudder, but he caught himself.

  “Not even a good one. Like, a fucking hardware-store shovel. These are the best guns we’ve had in a while, and we’re going to fucking use them.”

  Shaw put his hand on the refrigerator handle, and his men raised their weapons and trained them on the door. Shaw opened the door, and four Marines inside jumped to their feet.

  “Calm down, you. Unless you wanna get shot,” Shaw told them. “Morrow, in. Sounds like we’ve got an assault to prepare for.”

  “You’re the boss. Just gotta say, I think you should stand down, really. These guys who are coming, Shaw—they don’t play.”

  “Noted. But I’d rather take my chances in a firefight with decent weapons for once. Next time, could be me who gets the shovel. And you know what happened to that guy.”