Authors: Shawn Kupfer
Ryan and Nick stayed low as they ran, though there were few lights on in the small town ahead of them. As the Razor rolled away, back on course for its daytime cover location, Nick made it to the driver’s door of the box truck and found it unlocked. He and Ryan climbed into the truck and quietly closed the doors. Nick reached for the steering column cover and began to yank it off, but Ryan put a hand over his.
“Check it, boss. Looks like someone got to stealing this one before we did,” Ryan nodded at the ignition, and Nick saw that there was a screwdriver jammed in where the keys should have been.
Nick twisted the screwdriver experimentally, and the engine turned over.
“Huh. What do you know. Thanks, random thief-guy,” Nick said, backing the truck onto the road.
Ryan folded out his copy of the satellite photo on his lap. “All right. You know where we’re headed?”
“Generally. We’ll have to get a better fix as we get closer. You see anything around the area where four big-ass Rangers could be hiding out?”
“No. But if there’s one thing about Johnny, it’s that he’s not gonna do something you’d expect.”
“So how do you know this guy?”
“Before the war, we both lived in Denver. Same neighborhood. I ran a bar. He came in all the time. We were in a band together.”
“Oh, yeah? What kind of band?”
“Hardcore punk. Old-school.”
“Shit, Ryan, you’re what? Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-six.”
“You even remember punk?”
“A little. When I was, like, four. But I listened to a lot of the old stuff. Better than that Mecho Thrashcore bullshit by a long shot.”
“You talked much to Mary? Think you two would get along really well. She’s into the old-school punk, too. Misfits. Shit like that.”
“Right on, man.”
“So tell me more about this guy Johnny.”
“Uh, let’s see. Johnny was a Ranger before the war. Iraq, Afghanistan. Then he got out, became a cop. Five years on the Denver PD, then he went back in when I did. Good guy. Tough as shit. I’m not surprised he survived.”
“My dad was in Iraq. Back in 2005. Navy SEAL.”
“Yeah? What’d he do when he got back?”
“He didn’t come back.”
“Oh, shit. Sorry, boss.”
“Don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago.”
“That why you joined up?”
“I didn’t. I got convicted of murder and sent out here two months ago. Then my conviction got overturned, and I got sent back home. But there was no way I was going to leave my boys here on their own, so I went to the recruiter after I’d been home a couple of days.”
“That’s…that’s fucking hardcore, Nick. I joined up because I didn’t want to get my ass kicked by rednecks who couldn’t tell a North Korean from an American.”
“And they put you to work as a translator?”
“Yeah. Supposed to be a desk job. This is my first operational situation. Don’t mind telling you, I’m scared as shit.”
“They tell you how to shoot that Glock in Basic?”
“Yeah. But it was Air Force Basic, so, you know. Not well.”
“Easy enough. Point it at the thing you want to kill and pull the trigger. Hopefully, we won’t need to fire a shot. I want to do this as quietly as possible. If we can do this without seeing a soul other than your boy and his crew, I’ll be happy.”
“Speaking of my boy, I should probably check in with him, eh?”
“Do it.”
Ryan pulled out the radio and turned it on. “One-three-eight Ranger, this is 4-7 Echo. Do you copy?”
“We copy. That you, Ryan?”
“Yeah, Johnny. We’re inbound. Twenty, thirty minutes tops. What’s your status?”
“We’ll keep until then. Just make it as fast as you can—we’ve got NoKo patrols crawling around here like fucking roaches.”
“Roger that. Sit tight. I’ll raise you again when we’re closer, and you can talk us in.”
“Affirmative. Thanks, Ryan.”
“Stash the radio. We’ve got headlights behind us,” Nick hissed.
“Shit. What do we do?”
“Depends on if we gotta stop. If we do, depends on what language they start speaking. Be cool.”
Ryan, Nick could see, was not being cool. In fact, the young guy was sweating, and his eyes were darting around. He was about three seconds from freaking out. Nick popped the straps on his leg holster and turned toward Ryan.
“Chill out, bro. We’re on a public road. Headlights aren’t exactly out of the ordinary.”
“Right. Right. They’re splitting.”
“What?”
“The headlights are splitting. One’s going left, one’s going right.”
“Motorcycles.”
“Looks like.”
“North Korean Army uses ‘em. They’ll probably just pass us by.”
The motorcycles accelerated, pulling up next to the box truck’s open front windows. Nick stared straight ahead, and the motorcycles accelerated, cutting in front of the truck and slowing to a stop. Nick stepped on the brakes, stopping just short of the two North Korean Army officers who were dismounting. One of them yelled something at him.
“That Korean?” Nick whispered.
“Yeah. He wants us to get out of the truck.”
“All right. Let’s do that, then.”
Ryan nodded and reached for his door. Nick was out on the street first, Glock in hand. He fired five quick shots, dropping both of the North Korean officers.
“Let’s get them and their bikes into the back of the truck, fast.”
Ryan’s face was quickly turning ash-gray. He extended one trembling finger at one of the soldiers on the ground. “He’s still moving,” Ryan choked.
Nick raised his Glock and fired once, sending a .40 caliber slug into the moving soldier’s brainpan. “Solve your problem? Now, we gotta move them fast. You know how to ride a motorcycle?”
Ryan nodded, still staring at the two dead soldiers.
“Good. Get them in the truck. I’ll handle the bodies.”
Ryan stood still.
“Now, Sergeant!” Nick snapped, and Ryan jumped into motion, hopping onto one of the still-running motorcycles and tearing off around the truck. As Nick grabbed one of the dead soldiers by the leg, he heard the truck’s rear door slide up. Nick grabbed the other dead soldier’s leg with his right hand and started dragging them back around the truck. Before he’d made it halfway there, Ryan jogged past him and brought the other motorcycle around. Both motorcycles now in the truck, Ryan helped Nick pick up the two soldiers’ bodies.
“Sorry I freaked out, sir.”
“Drop the sir. It’s fine.”
“It’s…I’ve just never seen a dead body before, you know? Never seen someone killed.”
“You are aware we’re at war, right? I mean, that fact didn’t manage to slip by you, did it?”
“I was at a desk.”
“You’re not at a desk now. That door secure?”
Ryan checked the door—it didn’t move. “Yep.”
“Good. We have some Rangers to pick up.”
“One-three-eight Ranger, this is 4-7 Echo.”
“One-three-eight Ranger, go ahead.”
“Hey, Johnny. From our triangulations, we’re about a mile away from your location, but we don’t see anything yet.”
“What’s your speed?”
“Forty-five miles an hour.”
“Stop in forty seconds. We’ll come to you.”
“Roger that. We’re in a white—”
“White box truck. I have eyes on you.”
Ryan switched off the radio and smirked.
“Shit. Your boy is good, Ryan.”
“Yeah. Yeah, he is. Forty seconds, boss. Time to slap the brakes.”
Nick nodded and slowly depressed the brake pedal. As the truck rolled to a stop, three lights clicked on, one directly in front of the truck’s cab, the other two off to the sides.
“Identify!” Nick heard from outside the truck.
“Chill out, Johnny! It’s me!” Ryan yelled back.
“Yeah? What’s the third song on our set list?” the voice came back.
“‘TV Party’!”
The lights immediately clicked off, and a face appeared at Ryan’s window. The man was in his early forties, with a thin beard and a blood-soaked bandage above his right eye. Despite his ragged condition, the man had a huge smile on his face.
“When they let you out of the office, brother?”
“Special for this mission.”
“Not to pick us up, though.”
“Fortunate happenstance. Come on, let’s get your people loaded in the back of the truck.”
“Carson, Mon, get Freddie loaded up. Let’s move,” Johnny said.
“Ryan, give them a hand. We have to get moving if we want to catch the Razor before daylight. Major, sorry if I’m a little short with you, but time is very much a factor.”
“Understood, Lieutenant. This is your command, I’m just a ride-along. And I appreciate the hell out of you going off-mission to help us out.”
“Anytime, sir. Now, let’s get loaded. How severe are your wounded?”
“Monica, Carson and I are okay. Freddie’s not holding up so well. Do you have a full med kit on your Razor?”
“We do.”
“I can hold him until morning, but Monica really needs to get in there and patch him up before then.”
“We’ll do anything we can, sir. Where were you hiding?”
“Spider-hole. Dug it fifty meters north of here.”
“Good cover?”
“Yep.”
“We came across a North Korean patrol on the way in. Think we can stash them there?”
“Put ‘em in the hole, and they’ll never be found.”
Nick nodded.
“Ryan, get ‘em loaded up, then have the Major and his people help you stash our North Korean friends. We’ve got twenty minutes, tops. I’ll go stash the bikes.”
“I’ll help you with the bikes, sir. There’s a small river near here where we can dump them,” another voice said.
“You do that, Carson,” Johnny said. “Monica, you got Freddie ready to move?”
“Yes, sir. I’d really like to get him looked at in the next couple of hours. His vitals are pretty weak, sir.”
“Faster we load him, the better.”
“Come on, Carson. Let’s clear out the back of that truck,” Nick said, hopping out of the cab and landing next to a huge soldier in Army BDUs.
“Roger that, sir.”
Carson followed Nick to the back of the truck, and when they opened the doors, the interior lights popped on.
Nick immediately noticed that the bikes had saddlebags—he rifled through them and found a small medical kit in each one. “Um, girl soldier!” he yelled. “Sorry, I forgot your name.”
“Monica, sir. Staff Sergeant Monica Andrews.”
“Right. Monica. Found some Korean med kits. We’re stashing them in the front corner of the cargo area for you.”
“Thank you, sir!” Monica’s voice floated out of the darkness.
“All right, Carson. Let’s go make these things disappear.”
Nick and Carson started up the bikes and rode them out of the truck, and Nick followed Carson about a half-mile through the dark until they heard water. Carson stopped suddenly, and Nick had to lay his bike down to keep from hitting him. As he slid across the grass, Nick managed to get himself untangled from the bike just as he and the motorcycle slid into the river.
“Sorry about that, sir!” Carson yelled.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nick sputtered as he pulled himself out of the water. “At least the bike’s hidden.”
As Nick drove the truck toward the cover location, he checked his watch. It was barely five-thirty in the morning. They’d passed the Razor at some point, but neither Nick nor Ryan had seen it. His left knee twinged as he pushed in the clutch to downshift to fourth gear—he must have messed it up when he wrecked the motorcycle.
Nothing a couple of hours of sleep won’t cure,
he told himself.
“What is that, anyway?” Ryan asked, looking at the cluster of low buildings just ahead of them.
“Used to be a garment factory, according to intel,” Nick said. “It’s been condemned. Contaminated groundwater, some sort of radiation thing.”
“Lovely.”
“Quiet, anyway. No one wants to get near a quarantine zone. Just, you know…don’t drink the water. Or touch it. Probably best not to look at it, really.”
“I think I’ll just spend my time in the Razor. Gotta be some comm frequencies that need monitoring.”
“Speaking of,” Nick said, picking up the radio from the dashboard. “Razor 4-7 Echo, this is CO 4-7 Echo. You copy?”
A few seconds later, Anthony’s voice came over the line in a sea of static.
“We copy. Getting a fix on you now.”
“I’ll save you the trouble. We’re in visual range of the cover point.”
“Yep. We can confirm. Christopher asks if you can scout us a place to stash the Razor.”
“That’s affirmative. Tell Christopher to have Gabriel stand by with the med kit.”
“Copy. You take wounded?”
“One of the Rangers. Wounded before we got there. Also tell Chris I’m going to need some of the specialized supplies he scammed back at Zulu.”
“Roger that. Bryce expects us to be there in forty, forty-five minutes.”
“Copy that. See you in forty.”
Nick clicked off the radio and winced as a quick jolt of pain shot through his left leg.
“You okay, Nick?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. I just wrecked one of the North Korean bikes before I put it into the river. Caught my leg under it for a minute. I think I just twisted something.”
“You want me to take a look at it when we get back to the Razor? I did my EMT-B in Basic.”
“I think it’ll be fine, honestly. I just need to rest.”
“I’ll say. When was the last time you slept?”
“Caught a couple of hours at the extraction. Before that…don’t remember. Feels like days. Sometime around the initial SF briefing, maybe?”
“You been hitting the amps?”
“Nah. Amphetamines make me jumpy. We’ll have several hours of daylight, so I’ll have plenty of time to crash out. Hey, that look like a loading dock to you?” Nick nodded to a large door at the back of the largest building.
“Yeah. Yeah, it does.”
“Think that’s big enough for the Razor to drive into?”
“Wide enough, tall enough, sure. We’ll have to look inside to see if it’s deep enough to fit the whole thing. It’s a big bitch, that truck.”
“Well, let’s do that, then,” Nick said, shifting down into third and slowly heading for the large door.
He slowed the truck to a stop and hopped out. There were no handles on the outside of the door, but there was a small metal door hanging open a few feet away. Nick pulled the flashlight from his hip pocket then pulled the Glock from its holster. He clicked the flashlight on and raised the Glock—Ryan mimicked his movements as the two of them walked, guns up, into the darkened building.
Nick swung his flashlight around inside—as near as he could tell, he was standing in a cavernous, empty room.
“Yeah, this looks plenty big enough for the Razor,” Ryan whispered.
“Big enough, yeah. But we’ve got a slight problem,” Nick said, aiming his flashlight at the ceiling.
Ryan looked at the beam and noticed a small motor attached to a long, thick screw. “Shit. Powered door. Looks heavy, too. We got any power in this building?”
“Even if we did, we couldn’t use it. Go let the Rangers out of the truck. We’re going to need to look around to make sure the place is secure. It looks like the five of us are going to have to figure a way to get this door up in the next half hour.”
As Ryan left to get the Rangers, Nick looked around for anything they could use to help raise the heavy rolling door. He saw the tracks along the ceiling that the door would slide on. Assuming they could get a rope attached to the top of the door, the five of them might be able to hoist the door with nothing more than their own strength. The Rangers, however, had been without food or rest for God knew how long, so they probably weren’t in any shape to do a bunch of heavy lifting.
Ryan came back into the building, followed by three more lights—the Rangers with their flashlights taped to their M4s.
“How’s your man?” Nick asked as they walked in.
“Slightly more stable. I was kind of working in the dark, but I think I stopped his bleeding,” Monica told him.
“You the team’s medic?” Nick asked.
“Nope. Freddie was. I’m hoping your medic can give me a hand.”
“We’re a convict unit, Sergeant. We don’t get a medic. Ryan has some EMT training, and so does another guy in my unit. They’ll help you as much as they can, and we’ve got a full trauma kit and field surgery tools in the Razor. We’ll do what we can for him.”
“So, how are we gonna get that door up, Lieutenant?” Johnny asked.
“No idea, sir. I’m open to suggestions.”
Carson’s light panned around inside the room. “Um…I think I have it, sir.”
“This would have been a lot easier if we’d kept the motorcycles.” Nick tested the rope one more time to make sure it was secure. One end was tied to the top of the door, and the length of the line ran more than a hundred feet back through the building, then draped over a roof support, then ran left out of a high shop window. Somewhere outside, the other end of the rope was tied to the idling box truck’s bumper.
Nick picked up his radio and pressed the button.
“All right, Carson. Nice and slow. We see any sign the rope isn’t going to hold, I’ll tell you to stop.”
“Copy that, sir.”
Nick could see the rope tighten then watched as the heavy metal door slowly slid up on its tracks. The rope seemed stable enough, but Nick was worried it would fray around the windowsill or the roof support. As soon as it was up a good fifteen feet, Nick radioed for Carson to park the truck.
“Razor 4-7, what’s your ETA?” Nick radioed.
“Two minutes, boss. We have the door on cameras now. We’ll be heading straight in. Christopher wanted to know if you saw anywhere we could set up the solar collectors.”
“Yep. There’s an outbuilding just over from the main that’s already got solar panels on top. We should be able to put ours right on top of those without anyone noticing.”
“Copy that. We see it. Coming to you now. Do you have eyes on us?”
Nick looked out the open door and saw nothing. “Nope. Sure don’t.”
“That’s comforting, then. Means this stealth shit actually works. Bryce requests that you keep everyone clear of the doors and our parking spot. Wouldn’t want to run anyone over.”
Nick motioned with his hands for everyone to flatten themselves to the walls. The air around the door seemed to shimmer, and Nick heard the quiet hum of the Razor’s hybrid engine.
“We’re in,” Nick’s radio chirped.
“Carson, drop the door.”
The door rolled down as slowly as it had gone up, and the rope went slack.
“Outstanding. Untie the rope and stash the truck. Then get in here,” Nick said as the air stopped shimmering, and the Razor seemed to pop in out of thin air. The engines immediately shut down, and both doors and the back hatch popped open. Gabriel was the first one out of the back hatch.
“Hey, Gabe. Right up there. Help Ryan and Sergeant Andrews out with the wounded Ranger. Shout if you need anything from me.”
Gabriel nodded and headed in the direction Nick indicated. Martin and Peter were already heading back outside with the solar collectors. Nick was impressed at the speed with which his men moved. Christopher walked over to Nick and tossed him a pack of cigarettes.
“Special provisions, as requested.” Christopher smiled.
“You guys have any trouble?”
“Nah. Once you and Ryan left, it was as boring as it always is. We picked up some North Korean transmissions, but they were headed away from us. We recorded them for the flyboy anyway.”
“Good man. Get everything set up and a day watch going. Snag the Rangers some food and water. I’m crashing out in the Razor for a few hours, but come get me if anything happens.”
“Yeah, I was just about to suggest you get some sleep. I’m not into dudes or anything, but I was just noticing that you’re not your usual, dashing self. You look like shit, actually.”
Daniel walked by, popping a clip into his M4. “I
am
into dudes, and you do look like shit, boss. No offense.” He smirked.
“I agree,” Bryce nodded.
“Thanks, guys. Really. I’m off to sleep, okay, mom? And mom?”
Bryce laughed as he and Daniel moved toward the door. Nick was too exhausted even to chuckle. He just trudged into the darkened Razor, nodded to Mary as she walked out, and climbed into one of the top racks. Less than a minute later, Nick was asleep.
“I don’t want you to take the boys to play war games anymore,” Nick’s mother said.
“It’s not war games, it’s paintball.” His father sighed. “And Nicky’s really damned good at it. Kid’s not even ten, and he’s a hell of a player.”
“I know what you’re doing, Alex. I don’t like it. I don’t want you getting the kids into all of this Army stuff. They’re not going to join the military and waste their lives.”
From his vantage point at the top of the stairs, Nick could see his father’s face tighten up. “Waste their lives? You mean like me?”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“No. I’m interested now. What exactly did you mean, Sue?”
Nick’s mother threw her hands up in the air and walked out of his field of view. “Forget it. I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”
“Like what? What am I like? Besides a guy who wasted his life in the Navy, of course.”
Nick’s mother walked back into his visual range, shrugging on her jacket. She had her car keys in her right hand. “Leave it. I’m going to pick up Stanley from soccer practice. I think we just both need a chance to cool down.”
“I’m cool, woman. I’m super-cool.”
Nick’s mother just shook her head and walked out of the house. A few seconds later, Nick heard the car start up. He waited another couple of minutes before he walked downstairs—his father was in the living room, taking apart a Beretta M9 on the table.
“Hey, Nick. I’m proud of you for the paintball game this afternoon.”
“Mom’s not.”
“You heard that, huh? Your mom just wants you to have it better than we did growing up. I want that, too.”
“But I like playing paintball, Dad. It’s fun.”
“And you’re really good at it. Next Saturday, we’re going over to the base, and I’m going to show you how to shoot this.” Alex smiled, nodding to the Beretta on the table.
“Cooool,” Nick said.
“Just don’t tell your mom, okay?”
“Okay.”