“One…two…three.” He pressed up on the panel with all his strength. Mueller cried out and pulled himself away. Some of the metal had pierced the man’s left leg, but with a scream of pain, he tore it free, widening the gash.
Knight dropped the panel and moved to Mueller’s side. He glanced at the wound on the man’s leg and sighed. Knight reached to his belt—a fifteen hundred dollar stingray skin belt—and unbuckled it. He wrapped the belt around the man’s leg and cinched it tight, coating the pricey accoutrement in blood. He could afford another one—his parents had been wealthy, leaving their small fortune to him when they died—but he didn’t like seeing nice clothing ruined. He lived simply most of the time, especially while on base or on a mission. But he dressed to the nines and traveled to exotic locations—and women—when he could, which is exactly what he had been doing before his vacation had been cut short in the middle of a date with a pretty blonde he’d met at the beach.
Unfortunately, when he had been pulled into this mission, he hadn’t been given any details. He was told that he would receive a briefing and all of the necessary equipment when he arrived. He hadn’t even been given time to change his clothes, and he still wore his eight thousand dollar Brioni cream silk suit and printed silk shirt.
With the bleeding contained, he pulled Mueller from the wreckage and propped him against the far wall of the parking structure. “Sit tight. I’m going to grab some supplies.”
He climbed back into the downed Osprey’s cabin and searched the mess for anything that they might need. He assumed that they were close to the rendezvous point, but they were also in hostile territory. He needed weapons.
The back half of the cabin contained a four-wheel ATV that he assumed would have been for his use on the mission. It was black with a supply rack mounted on the back containing extra fuel and spots for storing weapons and ammo. He noticed a bulletproof shield mounted to the handlebars and nitrous oxide boosters connected to the engine. He could have had some fun with it, but it was useless now. The EMP would have fried it as it had the Osprey, and the bay doors were wedged shut.
Next to the ATV, he found the weapons locker. It was locked tight, but he found a piece of metal that had torn free from the fuselage and was able to use leverage to snap the lock free. The locker contained a row of standard issue M4 carbine assault rifles, but the last in line had been modified with a grenade launcher. He grabbed it, two Beretta 9mm handguns and some extra ammunition.
He returned to Mueller, snapped a magazine into the M4, jacked back the slide and then looked out over the ghost city. From his vantage point, he could see a good distance in both directions. The cityscape resembled any other modern metropolis with skyscrapers, traffic lights, shopping malls, parking garages, store fronts, subways and office buildings. The difference here was that this city—called Shenhuang—lacked a major component possessed by all the other cities of the world. It was empty. No one lived there.
The Chinese government had built sprawling urban centers like Shenhuang in remote areas of their country to raise their gross national product and make their country appear as if it were sustaining growth. In actuality, the Chinese people couldn’t afford to live within the new cities with estimates putting the number of empty homes at as many as sixty four million. But the government had no plans of stopping their expansion as they continued to build twenty new cities every year within China’s vast areas of open country.
Normally, the few people who did live in the cities were maintenance workers and government authorities. This particular city, however, had been evacuated. The government claimed that it was due to a chemical spill, but Knight suspected it was to a far more nefarious end. The evacuation of a city that hardly anyone lived in, however, hadn’t been enough to draw much international scrutiny.
The wind blew up from the streets and ruffled his dark, black hair. It blew the smells of the crash from his mind. The air smelled clean and cool. No hint of the pollution or car exhaust that he had become accustomed to in other cities. The air smelled like country air, but not quite. It was missing something. In the countryside, the smells of flowers, crops and vegetation permeated every breath. But the air here was oddly sterile.
The one nice thing about the city being uninhabited was that he would be able to spot their enemy coming from a mile away. But as his eyes passed over the towers of glass and concrete and the roads labeled in Chinese script, he couldn’t see a single person, enemy or otherwise.
“Can you move?” he said to Mueller.
“I think my leg’s broken, but I’ll make it.”
Knight slid an arm under Mueller’s shoulders and lifted him from the pavement. The pilot stood six inches taller than Knight, which made carrying him down the stairs of the parking garage a formidable task. But within a few moments, they had reached the bottom floor and set off down the empty street of the ghost city.
2.