The aircraft was an old KTVC News 12 chopper, narrow-bodied and short. It was also bright red. At first, Deborah thought they were dangerously exposed inside its Plexiglas windows, but the color of the helicopter was immaterial. It was their radar signature that mattered, and, more importantly, their transponder and radio codes.
They were a hundred and forty miles from San Bernadino. The Osprey had crashed on the eastern face of the Sierras near Mt. Whitney and Sequoia National Park in the central part of California. Bornmann must have veered north before they were hit, trying to escape the fighters. Even so, they were in Chinese-occupied territory. The Russians weren’t supposed to be here. Their border with the People’s Liberation Army had been drawn another fifty miles north, just south of Fresno, and yet they’d maintained Special Forces inside that line. The officer, Lt. Colonel Artem Alekseev, had commanded several covert surveillance units whose isolation saved them. A third of Alekseev’s men fell victim to windborne drifts of nanotech, but there was no one else to fight off. They survived. Now they’d joined with the Americans — or vice versa.
After he decided to risk everyone in his command to Cam’s inoculations, Alekseev had rummaged up some spare clothes, putting the three Americans in Russian uniforms. Medrano did what he could to keep them distinct. He insisted on removing the name tapes from his uniform and Deborah’s in addition to her Army patch and his own USAF patch, all of which he sewed onto their new uniforms — but there were only four identifiers for the three of them. REECE. MEDRANO. U.S. ARMY. U.S. AIR FORCE. In combat, American soldiers wore nothing else, not even the flag. He put the u.s. ARMY patch on Cam, but the effect was negligible. All of them looked like Russians.
Alekseev proved to be in his forties when he finally took off his biochem mask. His face was dark from sun and weather except along one cheek, where the skin was branded with three white puncture scars Deborah couldn’t identify. What could have made those marks? Barbed wire?
Deborah didn’t trust him. To convince Medrano to share the vaccine, she’d said the Russians were no longer their enemy. They all wanted to live, and that was true, but Deborah wasn’t so forgiving.
Alekseev was a ferret. She planned to watch him closely, even if he didn’t seem to have anything to gain by betraying them to the Chinese. Easy prison sentences for his men? His ambitions were larger than that.
Much like General Walls, Alekseev had divided the remainder of his troops into two squads and told them to find other survivors. His assets were too minimal to mount a serious counterattack. Throughout the day he’d waited and listened, raging at his helplessness. By now, the Chinese must have completed their takeover of the top U.S. installations. Before sunrise tomorrow, if not sooner, they would turn their attention to cleaning up any pockets of resistance in Russian California, so Alekseev chose to support the three Americans in their all-or-nothing gambit to find Kendra Freedman.
First, he owned the helicopter, stashed at an old refugee camp seven miles north of his hiding place. Second, Russian intelligence had been monitoring Chinese radio traffic since the occupation with a great deal of luck. It had been necessary for the allies to coordinate their air missions, which gave the Russians many more opportunities than the U.S.-Canadian side to study, hack, and infiltrate the Chinese system. Colonel Alekseev believed he could fool Chinese air control where the Americans failed. Unfortunately, the KTVC chopper only contained four seats. Alekseev had had far more volunteers than he could send. None of his troops wanted to stay behind. Deborah felt a grudging respect for their courage even as she joined Cam and Medrano in arguing with Alekseev. She didn’t want to remain behind, either. What would she do? Nap?
It didn’t help that Deborah, Cam, and Medrano were hurt. Alekseev’s medic tended their wounds, setting Medrano’s arm with a splint and stitching their cuts, but the three of them were a mess. As far as Alekseev was concerned, the only American to fill one of the precious seats would be Cam. They’d explained that Cam knew Freedman and some nanotech, but Deborah extended this half-truth to herself. I’ve been a research assistant, she said, and Medrano’s studied the Los Angeles area. He’s also an engineer. We need him if we’re going to be digging through what’s left of the city.
Alekseev believed the chopper’s load allowance would permit six people. It would be tight, but they needed everyone they could fit. There must be a large Chinese guard at the labs. Their best hope might be a sudden blitz. When their pilot returned with the chopper, Alekseev’s troops loaded it with one person’s equivalent weight of rocket-propelled grenades and other weaponry. That left five slots — just four, after the pilot, an unfortunately heavyset man called Obruch.
They were saved from an even tougher decision. In the smoke, Alekseev had sent three men to investigate the plane. These soldiers reported no trace of Tanya Huff or Lewis Bornmann. If they’d survived the crash, which seemed unlikely, they must have been killed in the missile strike.
Like Foshtomi, Huff had been a part of saving Cam and Deborah. Huff’s death made her feel small and humble and yet unspeakably proud. She would carry on for them as far as possible.
Deborah expected to die with these strangers. Their entire strike force consisted of herself, Cam, Medrano, Colonel Alekseev, and Sergeant Obruch — and the chopper’s tanks were only two-thirds full. That meant their maximum range was 160 miles. They would need to find an airfield and refuel in order to leave L.A.
She was glad she had one friend. Jammed together in back, Cam worked to familiarize himself with a Russian AK-47 as Medrano inspected an RPG. Deborah merely rested her shoulder. She watched the sun and the land below. Impossibly, she was at peace.
Deborah Reece was a good soldier.
They were still a hundred miles from San Bernadino when their chopper hit the ash like a solid membrane. The aircraft rocked. Even the beat of the rotors changed. The whup whup whup whup of the blades deepened into a shorter, harsher sound as if everything was closer now.
One thing Deborah didn’t worry about was radiation. The booster nanotech would protect them from all but the worst dosage. In any case, she didn’t expect to live long enough to get sick.
She stared into the darkness. Dust ticked and clattered against the Plexiglas.
There were layers in the clouds. Sometimes she couldn’t see anything but the swirls of gray and black. Other times, the haze opened up and she could see the ground, which was mostly blackened desert. Occasionally there was a road or fences or a line of blown-down telephone poles.
They knew the Chinese had taken over the U.S. military bases in the Mojave. Medrano thought these targets must have been hit, too. The earth was empty and burned, which didn’t make their job any easier. They’d lost their maps and electronics in the plane crash. That meant they’d also lost their sporadic satellite connection. They’d memorized the GPS coordinates for Saint Bernadine Hospital, but the News 12 chopper had had its global positioning system torn out long ago to support the Russian war effort.
Working with Medrano, Alekseev thought he’d pinpointed the right spot on a map of his own. By using compass headings, some landmarks in the terrain and dead reckoning, they believed they could find the general neighborhood. Fortunately, San Bernadino lay on Interstate 40 on the south side of a narrow pass between the San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains, which formed the eastern border of the Los Angeles sprawl. Those peaks would be tough to miss. A few of the highest nubs actually poked above ten thousand feet, and the Interstate should act like a red carpet, creating a long, distinct ribbon in the terrain.