Deep War: The War with China and North Korea - The Nuclear Precipice

by David Poyer

  Two dark forms rose from the sand, shaking it off. They were slight, smaller even than the other insurgents, but bulky under heavy black burkas. They trudged up and over the crest of the dune toward the guard posts, bent under heavy packs.

  Teddy slid back into cover. With hand signals, he maneuvered the demo squad into position, then aligned the assault teams behind them.

  The stars wheeled as the women trudged slowly toward the bunkers. The rebels lay motionless, faces buried in the sand, fleeces pulled over them. Teddy lay listening for drones. Then raised his head an inch, squinted, and pulsed the goggles again.

  A rectangular opening glowed, silhouetting one of the women. Then it occulted, a door closing.

  A flash flickered at the observation slit. A thump trembled away through the sand. When he pulsed the goggles again the door hung awkwardly athwartships in its jamb.

  The suicide vests had been Qurban’s idea. Teddy had agreed, when he couldn’t come up with a better way to deal with the guard posts. Now one was out of action. The occupants of the other had been too suspicious to let in a woman approaching alone from the desert, crying that she was lost, to be let in, to be given water.

  Regardless, he couldn’t lie here any longer. Pushing to his feet, throwing off the sheepskin, he shouted, “RPG teams, attack!”

  Yells and screams as the command was repeated down the line.

  Among the stars, along the top of the hill, silhouettes rose out of the desert like the sandworms of Dune. They waded downslope, then paused, reorganizing into fire teams, just as he’d taught them. They started forward.

  But suddenly they wavered. Some halted in place. Others bent as if into a high wind, covering their faces with their arms. Teddy frowned, and started forward himself.

  Then he too halted, pinned in place as heat seared his face and the exposed backs of his hands. It felt exactly like holding his skin against a fired-up hot plate. Scorching, burning. He could feel the blisters rising. But after a moment in hell the scorching faded. The beam, whatever it was, had moved on.

  To his right, lances of bright fire as rocket-propelled grenades lashed out toward the observation slit of the remaining post. The heat cut off abruptly. When he pulsed the goggles again the flat plate was gone. Blown off, leaving only a rotating stub.

  Time to act. He went to one knee and pushed the Initiate stud on the beam gun. Its awkward “barrel” wavered as it whined, charging up. The green diode winked on, and he swept it along the top of the dune.

  The drone dropped straight from the dawning sky, rotating as it fell. Fifty feet above the sand it suddenly snapped out of the descent, stabilized, and came whirring in at them. Teddy twisted his upper body to track it, got it in the reflex sight, and pressed the trigger. The red Engage LED came on. Then began blinking, as the circuitry identified the command signal and began jamming.

  The drone fired six rounds, brrrp, then seemed to decide that was a bad idea. It shuddered and rotated slightly, as if distracted.

  Then it lost its grip on the air. Tumbling end over end, it dove violently into the sand, throwing up a spray of gray dust as it crumpled.

  Releasing the stud—Vlad had warned battery life was limited—Teddy got up and half sprinted, half limped toward the entrance, which his demo team was hoofing it back from. He took a knee again fifty meters off and scanned the sky once more. A distant speck wavered, but did not approach.

  The doors flashed. The blast thumped his chest. Twelve pounds of C-4, divided between the hinges and the centerline of the doors, blew thick steel chunks out cartwheeling into the desert. One door came down square on an insurgent, whose scream was cut short. Teddy rose again and limped on past, bending to pick up the dead man’s AK, but still carrying the beam gun too, tucked under his arm.

  A cloud of choking smoke. Teddy pointed to Nasrullah and waved him on in. The platoon leader screamed to his men, beckoning them on. They swarmed into the entrance, firing down the corridor inside.

  Teddy had to stop and blow, bent over, resting the two weapons on his knees. Just too fucking tired … hard to keep up with twenty-year-olds. Especially guys who’d grown up scampering over mountains eleven thousand feet up.

  That was when the second quadcopter popped over the rise, bearing directly down on him. The machine gun, slung on a pod beneath speed-blurred rotors, winked as it came. The brrrrrp of a long burst stitched up the sand leading to Teddy’s boots. He hesitated for perhaps a tenth of a second. Then dropped the drone gun, charged the AK, and set the butt to his shoulder, ignoring the sand-spray of a second burst from the rapidly nearing, canted-forward drone.

  Something whined past: small-caliber, high-velocity, the kind that made little holes going in and gaping ones on the way out, after the bullets tumbled and fragmented, blasting apart meat and bone. The drone canted left, then right, hosing the bullet-spray past him in one direction, then the other. He was just starting to think he was invulnerable when a fist slammed into his side, the impact jerking his sights off the oncoming target.

  The battle starts once you get wounded.

  He pulled back onto the jinking drone, muttered, “Fuck you, machine,” and pressed the trigger.

  * * *

  FOUR minutes later, inside the complex. Blood soaked his side, but it was still numb. He didn’t have time to stop and bandage it. Anyway, not much you could do with an in-and-out other than patch it. He’d slung the beamer over his shoulder at the entrance, aiming the Kalashnikov now as he stepped over bodies, both Han and Uighur, some dead, others moaning and writhing. The Kalash had never been his favorite, but at squash-court range it delivered the mail. The tunnel was twenty yards wide with an arched overhead of corrugated metal and drop lighting. The floor was raw concrete. He limped past parked sedans and something that looked like an olive-drab Chinese version of the Wrangler, but with an extra axle at the rear. None looked to have been driven recently.

  Up ahead, flashes, reports, and battle cries. Zigzagging forward, using the vehicles and pallets of boxed supplies labeled in Mandarin for cover, Teddy caught the full-auto chatter of at least three different calibers clamoring down the tunnel. Behind him trotted the litter team, toting a wooden pole. Swaying beneath it like a captured tiger was a black torpedo-shape.

  The TA-4. Get it down this corridor, hang a right, find a place to park it; then they could withdraw. Now was when seconds counted. There goddamn had to be a major reaction force on its way, to back up whoever pulled security within the complex.

  He was thinking this when a door slammed open and four Chinese in helmets and black tac gear emerged from a side corridor. They moved in urban assault stacking, obviously practiced. He admired the way each pivoted to cover a different threat axis even as he shot the first two down while they were still in the fatal funnel, giving each a burst in the groin and belly, in case they were wearing armor.

  The remaining two ducked away behind one of the jeeps. As Teddy signaled his bearers to take cover, the Chinese split up, popping up to mask each other’s rushes with fire as they worked forward, obviously intending to pincer him between them.

  This was decent. Unfortunately for them, they made two mistakes: not moving fast enough, and expecting him to retreat. Instead Teddy rolled behind a stack of pallets, and crawled rapidly along on one hand and both knees until he figured he was flanking the Chinese closest to him. He popped up above the boxes lined up where he expected the guy would go. And there he was, side profile. Before he could react Teddy double-tapped him in the head. The trooper went down, hard.

  Except that after Teddy’s second round the rifle clicked empty. “Fuck,” he muttered. He dropped the magazine and yeah, it was dry. Should’ve picked up the rest of the dead rebel’s load, but sucking wind and already carrying the beamer, he’d let it go. A bad decision.

  But one he could fix. He ducked back as a burst blasted apart the boxes he’d just fired from, filling the air with rice flour. Surprise, speed, and violence won in close quarters. This lone survivor w
ould already be rattled, from having his buddies dropped.

  A thud, a rolling clank, off to his right, but no pop of a grenade spoon. A can or something, thrown to make him reveal his position. Instead, bent double, Teddy limped rapidly around the line of pallets to where the third Han, the one he’d just double-tapped, had gone down.

  The guy was still dying. Bleeding out, convulsing, eyeballs rolled back, out of it. Teddy stamped a boot on his throat to make sure, crushing the windpipe. He picked up the trooper’s rifle—a QBZ-95, the carbine model—and racked it. A live cartridge flew out. The guy had grenades, too. Creeping to his left, Teddy popped up and triggered a short burst toward where he’d started from.

  A head jerked up from the pallets ahead, looking downtunnel. As he’d expected, hearing his buddy’s rifle behind him had made the guy complacent. Teddy stitched a burst across the back of his skull, enjoying the low recoil impulse of the little high-velocity rounds. Then shot him again in the upper back as the black-clad soldier twisted and sagged, disappearing amid the stores. As soon as he triggered the last round Teddy dropped again, in time to let another burst from uptunnel pass harmlessly overhead.

  Ears ringing—he liked this carbine, but firing it in an enclosed space blew your eardrums in—he yelled to the guys with the litter, who’d taken cover while he dealt with the defenders, “Follow me!” He closed the side door, lived one of the grenades, and wedged it under the handle, in case somebody else decided to make an entrance, stage right. Then wheeled and limped on, waving the guys with the Package after him.

  He touched his side. Sopping wet now, and the numbness was wearing off. It was gonna hurt, all right.

  When he reached the crossbar of the T more bodies lay about, some in dull green uniforms, others in the shalwar kameez of the insurgents. Here and there, too, a few in white lab coats. Some fights had gone hand to hand, judging from the way the corpses were interlocked, and the blood and guts congealing on the concrete.

  Teddy swept left and caught Nasrullah’s glance. The platoon leader had his remaining men in cover, ready to hold against any assault from the living areas that lay that way. He swept right, but saw no one in the right-hand tunnel. There were no pallets here, no cover, just concrete, overhead lighting, and doors opening to both sides. And through the singing of his ears, a low, susurrant hum. Each door was labeled, but he couldn’t read Chinese.

  Where the fuck was Qurban? Had the big tough al-Qaeda dude chickened out? Then he noticed that each door’s window had been bashed in.

  Fire crackled suddenly from ahead. Squinting through the carbine’s optic, Teddy kicked open one of the doors and peered in.

  Into an antiseptic, humanless world, inhabited only by that unending hum, now so deep it vibrated his teeth. The room was floored with white, ceilinged with cream acoustic tile, and only dimly lit by widely spaced overhead fixtures, as if sight were not really necessary here. The converging rows of servers, computers, whatever they were, breathed a continuing sigh through hundreds of fans. Perhaps that was the singing hum he’d been hearing. It was mesmerizing, and he sucked a breath. Blue LEDs glowed at each cabinet, spaced every few meters down a receding length, fading into darkness so far away he couldn’t actually even guess at how far under the desert the space extended.

  “What the fuck is this,” he muttered. Obviously computers, but he’d never seen banks of them like this. He crossed the corridor and poked his head into another door, to be confronted by the exact same sight, as if he were wandering a house of mirrors.

  If every one of these doors opened onto a corridor like this, there had to be thousands of these ominously blinking machines.

  Okay, Obie, Teddy, Scarface, Lingxiù Oberg al-Amriki—whoever you are now—better focus. The litter bearers had been hanging back. He waved them forward. They looked cowed, bent under the weight of their burden, but intimidated, too. He gave them a smile and clapped a skinny kid on the back. “Ni shi haoren,” he told them, but got only frightened glances in return.

  Okay, they were spooked, too. Odd, there didn’t seem to be many people around. Just the security force, which had actually been fairly light, and the few white-coats he’d stepped over.

  Where was everybody?

  What was this place?

  “The mission,” he grunted, and limped rapidly along until he figured he’d gone about two hundred meters down the right hand of the T. He couldn’t shake the creepy suspicion he’d missed something and was screwing up. Generally when he felt that way, he’d discover later he was right, but just now he couldn’t see where he was going wrong. Just that this all seemed too easy. He’d lost maybe twenty out of his assault force, serious losses, sure, but still, it should have been harder than this, penetrating a high-security installation that obviously meant a lot to the enemy.

  But hell, when you catch a break … He pointed the bearers into one of the side rooms. They slid the Package out of its sling, easing it to the floor between the purring ranks of cabinets. The tiles sagged under the weight; for a second Teddy wondered if they’d hold. But they did, and he signaled the littermen out to establish a perimeter while he bent to the weapon.

  Two ways to initialize the thing. The simplest was with an app on his phone. He called it up, entered the access code, and hit Confirm.

  FIFTEEN MINUTES TO GET CLEAR the screen read. ALLOW AT LEAST 1000 METERS BETWEEN PERSONNEL AND GROUND ZERO.

  Okay, a klick in fifteen, they could do that. If they weren’t carrying wounded, a decision he’d already gotten the Uighurs’ buy-in for. He fingered his side, which was really hurting now. A slow seep of sticky blood, but he could still walk. Hell, yeah. If the alternative was getting fried.

  He slid the green circle sideways until it winked and turned red. 15:00 came up on the screen. Then 14:59. 14:58. 14:57 …

  “Time to scoot, Teddy boy,” he muttered. He straightened and pointed his guys toward the exit. Out the door, down the corridor, to the left. “Women zhai zeli wancheng. Ran women likai zheli.” Let’s get the hell out of Dodge, or as close as he could manage in pidgin Han.

  But as they emerged into the corridor again something loomed out of the dimness ahead. Teddy braked, puzzled. What the fuck, over.

  At first he thought it was a guy. Huge, but still a human silhouette.

  Then he realized it wasn’t.

  He froze, staring at the thing.

  It towered from the concrete nearly to the curved overhead. Two-legged, but it seemed to glide forward rather than walk. A head with three cameras swiveled this way and that as it advanced. From there on down it presented solid-looking green-painted metal.

  Beside him Qurban was taking aim. Bullets sparked off the thing’s head. But each time he fired, one of the cameras seemed to … blink. A steel shutter, snapping closed over the optic when microwave radar or lidar detected the possibility of damage.

  So it could sense as well as see. Probably had infrared too.

  Astonishing him even more, it spoke. In a computerized voice, not monotone, but the singsong inflection of Han made it sound even stranger. “Tóuxiáng, ni huì shòudào haopíng.” He wasn’t completely sure, but it seemed to be inviting them to surrender.

  Well, fuck that. Teddy rolled behind a stack of palleted supplies as the thing skated forward, its head inclined. Motors whirred. Steel wheels grated on concrete. The cameras moved independently both of the head and of one another, mounted on stalks, like the prehensile eyes of a lobster. One locked on Teddy. An arm lifted, steadied, locked, and fired a ripping short burst of heavy slugs. They tore through the bags in front of him in a spray of rice to spin bronzeglittering on the concrete. One hit his thigh, but robbed of velocity by the rice, the impact only made him grunt.

  “Fire together. One, two, three!” Teddy yelled. He and the hajji both popped up simultaneously. Teddy hosed the chest area. His bullets didn’t seem to do much more than scar the paint.

  As they continued firing, a litter bearer scurried forward, doubled over. It was the ski
nny kid. Before the towering machine could react he tucked a grenade beneath its left foot. Then straightened and turned. But before he could escape the left arm rotated backward, in a way no human limb could have flexed, gripped him at the waist, and whirred shut.

  With a choked scream, the insurgent came apart. His chest and head fell in one direction, his legs in another. They kicked, then went still, gushing blood.

  A short, sharp bang and the left foot lifted slightly from the concrete. The robot held it aloft. Shook it. Then set it back down, rebalancing in an elephantine fashion that gave the impression it must weigh many tons. The upper half of the bisected rebel went on screaming, covering his face with his hands, until his cries ebbed and he too fell silent.

  The robot took a tentative stride forward. It favored its foot at first, then seemed to sense it wasn’t seriously damaged and took another, firmer step.

  Teddy fired out his magazine until the carbine clicked empty. He dropped it and rolled from cover, another burst following him, and scrambled into a side corridor. Not the one with the Package, though they all looked identical. A hall of mirrors … With Qurban and his remaining littermen close behind, he limped rapidly down the passage. When he glanced back the robot was peering in the door. It looked far too large to fit through it, though.

  A pincer gripped the jamb. It levered, and motors whirred.

  It tore the jamb upward. Its other arm gripped the far side, and tore that apart as well.

  “Fuck,” Teddy muttered, scrambling away across the smooth plastic floor. Searching for a shortcut between corridors, or a way out. Actually, he wasn’t sure what he was doing. Scooting like a scared rabbit seemed to about sum it up.

  The thing stepped through. It set a foot gingerly on the floor, as if testing it. The tiles groaned and bent.

  It lifted its foot, ducked, and peered through the torn-open door. Aiming carefully, it fired a burst after them. A rebel spun and fell, dead before he hit the floor. But the other projectiles whined harmlessly past, centerlined between the parallel rows of consoles.