The same MPs who had taken him from the apartment were there with him now. One of them raised his sidearm to Nick’s head, while the other released him from his handcuffs and opened the door to the nearest box. A quick shove from the MPs sent Nick stumbling in, and the door closed behind him.
It was completely dark and silent in the box, and Nick wondered if that’s what the punishment was supposed to be—sensory deprivation. If so, he reasoned, he could handle that. He’d just wedge himself up against the wall and try to sleep through it. He hated being bored, but being bored for twenty-four hours wasn’t going to break him.
He quickly found out it wasn’t going to be sensory deprivation or mere isolation. Nick heard a low hum coming from the top of the box. He looked up, hoping his eyes would adjust to the darkness and show him where the hum was coming from, but he didn’t have any luck. There was no ambient light at all.
The hum slowly built into a whine, its pitch rising until it began to hurt Nick’s head. Just as the whine leveled into a long, loud tone, Nick realized it was getting warmer in the box. Warm quickly became hot, and hot became scorching. Nick slumped against the wall, but it burned his back even through his clothes.
Great. So, loud annoying noises, uncomfortable heat, and I have to stay standing. Maybe this isn’t going to be so easy after all.
Sweat started to trickle down his brow, so he knew the temperature increase wasn’t just in his mind. Nick pulled off his uniform T-shirt and used it to wipe the sweat from his forehead and hairline. The shirt came away soaked in his hands, and he realized he was sweating a lot more than he’d initially thought.
“You don’t have to worry when you’re sweating. It’s when you stop sweating that you’re in trouble,” Nick mumbled to himself.
It was easy to lose track of time without any sort of reference point—no light, no sound other than the long, toneless whine, no one to talk to. Nick forced himself to slowly count to sixty to mark off a minute. Even as he was counting, the one minute felt like ten.
Nick tested the floor with his hand. It, at least, didn’t seem to be heating up, so he lowered himself carefully, crossing his legs in a half-lotus position. The less he moved, he figured, the better off he’d be. He draped his soaked shirt across his lap and felt the sweat from his face and chest dripping into it as he slowly breathed in.
Nick had dealt with heat before. When he was ten, he’d wandered away from his mother and older brother on a trip through Death Valley. It’d been two hours before his brother had finally found him, and he’d been sweating just like this. He’d lived through that, and he’d only been ten years old and asthmatic besides. He could live though this too—the asthma had gone away when he was fourteen, and he’d gotten in a lot better shape in the nineteen years that had followed.
Of course, there hadn’t been this annoying goddamned noise in Death Valley. And at least he’d been able to see. When he was growing up, his mother had tried to teach him all about his culture. She’d made both him and his brother speak Chinese throughout their childhood and taught them about Kung Fu, about Buddhism, and about meditation. Nick had been a good student of the first two, but a terrible student of the last. He wished now that he’d paid more attention to the meditation, had learned how to put his mind somewhere else.
Such a skill would have come in handy in the box.
Nick’s throat started to hurt, and he swallowed hard. He licked his lips only to find them papery and dry. Lifting the shirt from his lap, Nick leaned his head back and twisted one sleeve over his open mouth. The sweat from the shirt did little to slake the powerful thirst he was starting to feel, but it was better than nothing. He’d have to conserve the sweat, he knew, so he only drank the smallest bit. As he swallowed, he felt blood in the back of his throat.
Nosebleed, he realized. The same thing had happened in Death Valley. His nose had started gushing just before Stan had found him. That had been about two hours, and he’d been in the box for a lot longer than that.
All right. Assuming I’ve only been in here two hours, that means I still have twenty-two to go. The last two hours have felt like five, so I need to do something to keep my brain occupied.
“And talking to myself probably isn’t going to help at all,” Nick mumbled in reply to his own thoughts.
Nick tried to concentrate on the last book he’d read—the specs Gabriel had brought him in the hospital for all of the military equipment. It felt like weeks ago, but Nick knew it had only been a few days. Trying to think of something other than time, Nick slowly repeated, out loud, the first words of the book.
“MQ-19 Aero UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. General Electric/Applied Warfare Inc., U.S. Air Force contract number DB-1812-482-XL,” Nick said quietly to himself. He remembered the words just as if they were right in front of him on the old, battered e-reader—he’d always had an outstanding visual memory.
By the time he’d made it to the Jackal light-combat vehicle, Nick realized he’d stopped sweating.
Don’t panic, he told himself. You panic, you’re just going to ramp your temperature up even further.
Nick figured he should try to hydrate as much as he could, but when he lifted the T-shirt from his lap, it was warm and dry. He’d squeezed it pretty aggressively somewhere around “G” in the manual, but it had still been quite damp then. He felt the cuffs of his pants—they were dry as well.
All right. Maybe now it’s time to panic.
Of course, he realized it didn’t matter if he panicked. It didn’t matter what he did at all. His situation wasn’t going to change until his time was up. The best he could do was sit there, stay as still as possible, and hope it wasn’t standard procedure to let convicts die in the box.
He tried not to think of the words heat stroke, instead focusing his thoughts on slowing his respiration and bringing down his hammering heartbeat. He’d read somewhere once about lizards going into torpor when the temperature got too hot or too cold, slowing down their systems and going into a state of near-hibernation to survive. He doubted such a thing would work for humans, of course, but there had to be something valid in the principle.
If he could just slow his system down enough, reduce his body’s need for water, it might be easier to get through the rest of the time in the box. Just how much time that was, though, Nick had no idea. It could have been fifteen minutes, or it could have been eighteen hours. He’d given up trying to figure out how long he’d been there.
He was already bored of the manual—he’d pretty much already proven to himself that he had the thing memorized. He started to think about the last TV show he’d seen, but most of the TV back home had been pre-empted by the news months ago. The last report he’d seen before his arrest and trial was the report on expanding the Prisoner Conscription Act to death-row inmates. Military enrollment numbers had been at an all-time low, he remembered, and Congress had abolished the Draft during the second term of the Obama administration. When the war with China broke out, prisoners seemed the only way to go—a force of more than three million men and women who were just taking up space Stateside.
At the time, Nick had shook his head and said “poor dumb bastards.” Two days later, his mother was dead. Two days after that, he was sitting in jail charged with five counts of murder.
Nick was just remembering the feel of the jail cell in the Los Angeles County Correctional Facility, remembering how huge it was compared to the box, when the door slid open. The light that streamed in through the door blinded him, and he threw up one arm over his eyes. Someone used the arm to drag him out of the box and onto his feet.
“Time to go back to work,” he heard someone say from across the room.
Chapter 14
Search and Destroy
As Nick’s eyes slowly adjusted to the light, he saw that Neal was the one who had spoken to him. Neal didn’t look happy at all, but then, he rarely did. Despite his real Marine uniform, he was a convict as well, and probably didn’t have much more to smile about t
han anyone else in the unit.
“Showers through the door to your left. Get yourself cleaned up and into a clean uniform. You’ve got five minutes, clear?”
Nick nodded slowly. His head felt about eight times its normal size. He quickly showered and put on the clean uniform hanging over the door—it was a 47 Echo convict BDU, but clean and new unlike the one he had been wearing for the last several days. Nick zipped up the sides of his boots, made sure his jacket was buttoned properly, and stepped back out into the box room where Neal was waiting. As the two of them walked out of the room and into a long hallway, Nick caught a glimpse of Neal’s digital watch—it was 0215. He’d been in the box a few minutes north of eighteen hours.
“Here. Drink this,” Neal said, handing him a bottle as they walked.
Nick uncapped the bottle and drank deeply. It was water, but something tasted a bit off about it. Still, he was thirsty, and finished the entire liter in less than thirty seconds.
“Mostly water, but there’s some amphetamine in there, too. You’re going to need to come back online and do it fast. We pulled you out early because you’re needed.”
Nick simply nodded.
“Come on, Morrow. Start talking. I need to make sure you’re not crazy from the heat.”
“What’s the situation?” Nick asked, tasting the dried blood on the backs of his teeth.
“I can’t tell you, because I don’t know yet. But Major Harrison told me to come get you. You, by name.”
“Nice to be wanted, I suppose.”
“Your unit’s on lockdown, but they might need to move on zero notice. Think they can handle it?”
“My unit’s solid, sir.”
“Even the big motherfucker you had tied to a chair?”
“That’s a problem I can handle.”
“Yeah, I think you can.” Neal nodded as the two of them climbed into a Humvee. Neal started the engine and slammed the pedal to the floor, heading for Command and Control.
Nick and Neal didn’t talk on the now-familiar elevator ride and the walk down the long hall to Command and Control. As Nick expected, Major Harrison was waiting for them behind the door, but he wasn’t alone—Lieutenant Colonel Markham stood right next to him. Both of them were obviously waiting on Nick.
“Major. Colonel,” Nick said with a nod.
“Morrow. Sorry to pull you out of the box. I know you were probably looking forward to another six hours of hell, but we’ve had a situation come up, one that needs your special skill set.” Harrison frowned.
“Here to serve, sir.”
“That tech you salvaged from the Chinese armor—a lot of it was damaged by the heat or the impact of the Russian guns. We managed to pull some data off of one of the drives, and I need you to take a look at it. Harrison tells me you’re fluent in Chinese?” Markham asked.
“That’s correct, sir.”
“We’ve got a few translators on the camp, but they’re all working on some transmissions we picked up earlier in the day. We could send it to Moscow, but that would take time. I’d very much like to see what’s on this drive as quickly as possible. Think you can handle that?”
“Sir.”
Harrison pointed Nick over to a small flatscreen bench to which the drive was connected with a spiderwebbed nightmare of differently colored wires. Nick sat in front of the bench, quickly bringing up the drive’s main menu.
“Communication control, sir. All of the CDM’s incoming and outgoing traffic ran through this drive,” Nick said, reading quickly.
“CDM?” Markham asked.
“It’s what the Mechoes are calling the QZS-22s, sir. Chinese Death Machines,” Harrison told him.
“What kind of information do we have here, Morrow?” Neal asked.
“Email, media files, radio transmissions. A few of the files are corrupted, but…” Nick tapped a series of icons, and a male Chinese voice poured out of the bench’s hidden speakers.
“Can you understand what that Chink’s babbling about?” Harrison asked.
Nick nodded, then began to translate. “Area November. They’re calling it Camp Ghost. They’re telling him that there’s an incoming vehicle. A Cougar. That must’ve been us.”
Markham shook his head. “They shouldn’t have been able to detect you from that far off.”
“The message is from a listening post called Underground Seven. They’ve got them at least fifty miles north of Ghost. They knew we were there before we even got close to the Aero. Right as we got dropped by the Chinook, sounds like.”
Another voice came on the line, still speaking in Chinese. Nick listened for a moment.
“This is the CDM’s pilot. He’s advising that he and his unit—the other two CDMs—are breaking off from perimeter patrol to intercept.”
The voice cut off.
“That’s all for that particular message.”
“Dig through and see what else you can find,” Markham said, clapping Nick on the shoulder and starting to walk away.
Nick started looking through the emails saved to the hard drive when he heard something faint from the station next to his, where an Alpha communications officer was wearing headphones. He leaned in closer, and could just hear the transmission the Alpha was receiving.
“Repeat, this is Razor 4-7 Echo. We are heavily damaged and approaching Camp Justice. Does anyone read us?”
“Captain Neal,” Nick said, spinning around in his chair. “You said my unit is on lockdown, correct?”
“Right,” Neal said.
Nick pulled the headphones from the console next to his, and the transmission flooded from the bench’s speakers.
“Say again, this is Razor 4-7 Echo, approaching Camp Justice. We are heavily damaged and have wounded. Is anyone copying?”
“Then who the hell is that?” Nick asked.
UAVs flying forty miles out from Camp Justice confirmed it. There was, indeed, a lone Razor limping along the M-52 highway traveling at about twenty miles an hour. All of the Razor’s blast shields were locked down, but the numbers on the vehicle’s hull confirmed it was the same Razor Nick and his people had crewed back at Area November.
“How’s that possible?” Nick asked. “I thought we detonated it from the choppers.”
“Signals must’ve gotten jammed,” Neal shrugged. “Once they realized there was no one in it, it probably didn’t take too long to break in and shut down the guns.”
Lieutenant Colonel Markham ran his hands through his hair and turned to the communications officer in front of the bench now displaying the Razor’s image.
“I want you to get in contact with the Razor. Tell it we’re receiving and talk it in.”
The communications officer nodded and started transmitting.
“Morrow, Neal, get back to your unit. Current speed, that thing’ll be here in about two hours. I want five Echo units armed and waiting for this thing to open. We’re going to direct them to the main garage. Get it cleared of all nonessential personnel and make sure we can lock it down at a moment’s notice. I want prisoners, not bodies. We clear, gentlemen?”
“Yes, sir,” Neal answered, leading Nick out of Command and Control and back down the long hallway.
When Nick made it back to 47 Echo’s apartment, he saw Peter cleaning a nasty cut on Owen’s forehead. Everyone else was asleep, and the only light in the apartment came from a small table lamp in the kitchen where Peter was working on Owen’s wound.
“Hey, boss. You don’t look so good,” Peter said quietly, nodding as Nick walked in the door.
“What happened here?”
“Got too close to the big guy. Got head-butted,” Owen grunted.
“So he never did calm down, then.”
“’Fraid not.” Peter sighed.
“We need to wake everyone up. We’ve got work to do,” Nick told them.
“What are we gonna do about Kenneth?” Owen asked.
“I’ll handle him. You two get everyone else suited up and ready.”
; Peter nodded and flipped on the lights. The seven sleeping Mechoes all woke up near-instantly, even Kenneth, who was still tied to the chair. Nick walked to the center of the room.
“Good morning, kids.”
“Jesus, boss, you look awful,” Anthony commented.
“I’m fine. We have a job to do, so get ready to move out in five minutes. We’ll be meeting four other Echo units in front of the building, so let’s look sharp, yeah?”
As his men set about getting ready, Nick walked over to the huge man tied down in the chair and squatted to be on eye level with him. Kenneth lunged at him, but his makeshift restraints held him back.
“Easy there, big guy. We don’t want to have a repeat of last night, right? You getting knocked the fuck out by a guy my size can’t be good for your self-esteem, now, can it?”
Kenneth growled, but said nothing.
“Now, I know you weren’t going to use those knives to carve up a Sunday roast. I’m thinking you were out to kill a bunch of people, am I correct?”
Kenneth nodded.
“Good. You behave, I’ll make sure you get to kill as many people as you want. We are in a war, after all. You step out of line the slightest bit, I got absolutely no problems putting a bullet in your skull. We understand each other here?”
“Fine,” Kenneth spat.
Nick untied the sheets from the chair, and Kenneth stood up, stretching out his limbs.
Jesus. Is he getting bigger? Nick asked himself, though he knew it was impossible. He was still in awe of the size of the guy, and still had trouble believing he had actually knocked Kenneth out. It’s like a big dog, he thought. Don’t show any fear in front of him, and he won’t attack.
Nick knew hiding his fear around this monster wouldn’t be easy, though.
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