MJ-12: Inception

14

Frank peered through the scope of his Winchester Model 70 bolt-action sniper rifle and saw his target through the crosshairs. It was far — easily a mile and a half away, impossible to hit anything at that range, no matter the size. Gravity would tug the bullet to the ground before it could even get halfway there, to say nothing of accuracy at that range. In practice, Frank once hit a target three hundred fifty yards off. Once.

Good thing he wasn’t shooting at anyone today.

The operational security at Area 51 was absolutely top-notch, something for which Frank had a very grudging admiration after weeks of probing analysis. But occasionally, very occasionally, they screwed up ever so slightly, and each time they did, Frank got just a tiny bit smarter. Like when they set up the shooting range so he could aim away from their little base and off toward the vast expanse of Groom Lake’s salt flat.

That meant that the major facilities at Area 51 were right in his scope, and the scope was better than the crappy binoculars they got off Roger the Airman.

Frank turned his attention briefly to the target, roughly two hundred fifty yards off and slightly to his right, and squeezed off a round. Even with his utter inattention to the task at hand, he managed to put one in the outer ring of the target.

“Adjust for wind next time. Remember to exhale right before you take your shot.” The voice of Gunnery Sergeant William Collins echoed in his head a moment, just one of the many voices swirling around in there. Thankfully, they only seemed to offer opinions — and yes, it was an awful lot like having a room full of opinionated people in your head — on the subjects that Frank consciously gleaned from them at the moment of their deaths. Having subsumed the skill and knowledge of at least four different military veterans, Frank imagined he’d get an earful if they all chimed in. Collins had been a crack shot, a WWI sniper-turned-instructor who had died down in Phoenix a few weeks before.

“I wasn’t really aiming,” Frank muttered to himself before turning back to the main base and the “mystery hangar” that all the white coats and brass kept visiting, over and over, every day. During one of Cal’s hospital visits, he’d seen just the one entrance to the building, heavily secured by men and procedure. The guards checked IDs and lists every time someone went inside — even if they had just stepped out for a cigarette or lunch. There were patrols all around it. It was very well lit.

“What about the back? May have some limited sightlines and low light in the back,” General Sam Davis whispered in Frank’s head.

Frank filed that one away, wishing for the umpteenth time that he could simply use the expertise he absorbed without getting the voices as well. But it just didn’t work that way. At least the voices didn’t demand attention. It was as if Frank simply remembered those people saying those things to him, even if they never actually had.

Other than the big hangar, there were several other buildings — offices and probably some laboratories, Frank guessed, along with the base hospital, plus the usual assortment of barracks, personal quarters, storage areas, that sort of thing. The labs might be of interest, but if they were really going to try to break in somewhere, the hangar was the obvious goal.

Frank focused on the target again, getting a quick read on the wind speed and remembering to exhale right before he took the shot.

Not quite a bull’s-eye, but solidly in the inner ring. If it were a person, they’d be good and dead.

“Nice one,” Collins whispered.

“Thanks,” Frank muttered, shaking his head slightly.

He then focused his scope on the other Area 51 facility, a full three and a half miles away on the northeastern shore of the salt flat. At that distance, he couldn’t see much. Buildings, single story probably, no more than a dozen give or take. Guard tower. Fence.

It all looked eerily similar to where he and the other Variants were being kept.

“I think there’s other groups here,” Frank said quietly that night as the four of them sat eating in an otherwise sparsely populated mess hall.

“Other groups of what?” Maggie whispered, looking up from an Army manual on camouflage. She was always reading stuff like that — Frank thought she’d make a helluva soldier.

“People like us. Variants.”

That got everyone’s attention. Cal looked up from his Bible and Ellis stopped staring off out the window. Frank explained what he’d seen through the sniper scope, and how the camp was structured.

“Makes sense,” Cal said. “Commander Wallace only comes ’round once a week for a day or two. If there’s other groups here, he’s probably checking on them, too.”

“He’s the liaison,” Frank agreed. “He’s the one in charge of keeping tabs on us, training us, probably reporting up to Montague and whoever else is in on MAJESTIC-12. He’s young for his rank, but he’s high up enough to command a destroyer. So, he’s smart. Science specialist, probably, or maybe a spy.”

“What about Anderson?” Ellis asked. The Marine captain had been doubly tough on Ellis since his escape; the fire in Vegas ended up destroying three buildings, not one, and injuring dozens. In fact, he’d been tougher on all of them lately and far less chatty. Maggie said she noticed he was more nervous around them, more suspicious after Ellis’s little trick.

“Anderson’s just the trainer,” Frank said dismissively, then thought better of his tone. “I mean, sure, former OSS, he’s good, no doubt. We’re learning a lot from him. And he’s also helping out on security, too. I heard some of the MPs say he personally took custody of those guys in Vegas Ellis got friendly with. I think he has our back, but sure, we probably pissed him off. All that said, he’s not the one working with us on our abilities. We’re learning to be covert soldiers from him, but that’s it. I bet the other two groups have someone like him training them, too.”

“So… we’re really going to be spies? Like in the novels?” Maggie asked, with just a little too much excitement for Frank’s tastes.

“Kind of. Spies are actually people who live in a foreign country and give information to us. We’d be the ones either making contact with them or doing other things that the government doesn’t want too many people to know about.”

“So, secret agents, then.” Maggie said, smiling.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” Cal cautioned gently, sounding much older than his current appearance; Frank had him pegged currently at a very healthy thirty. “I mean, we’ve only been here a little while. Takes years of training for that sort of thing, right? And besides, not all of us can be secret agents. Why, what do I know about that sort of thing? I’m an old man!”

“You ain’t gotta be, boy. You know that. You can be young as you like,” Ellis said darkly, prompting a scowl from Cal.

Frank held up his hands. “Obviously, we’re being trained as soldiers, and it’s likely we’re going to go places and do things most other folks couldn’t handle. Makes sense. It also makes sense that there’s others like us, and that the government would round ’em up. I’m guessing that if they have more than one group of us here, whatever’s in the mystery hangar is related to our Enhancements — and maybe, just maybe, we can get some answers.”

“Answers to what?” Cal asked. “What exactly do you suppose we’re gonna find in there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. But I want to know the full extent of everything that’s going on here before I commit to it,” Frank said, surprising even himself with the assertion he’d only now just thought of, let alone spoken out loud. And it was true — weeks and weeks of training with little further explanation was not what he had in mind when he’d originally signed up.

“Where’s all this coming from now?” Ellis demanded. “I rocked the boat and look what happened. Why you want to do that again?”

“Because of what happened with you. Exactly that,” Frank said. “We had to burn down half a city block just because you turned a floor to sand. They’re serious about keeping us very secret. This whole base is a secret. And I want to know everything about it while I can.”

Ellis shrugged. “Well, good luck with that. They’ll come down on you hard. Trust me. They’ll catch you and come down hard.”

“Not if we do this together.”

The silence among the four of them was thick like tar, despite the scattered sounds of background conversations and the clinking of plates from elsewhere in the mess hall. Maggie finally spoke. “So, what’s the plan?”

Frank smiled at her; he knew she’d be the first aboard. She didn’t love the military, after all; she loved the action. “Gotta have everyone on board,” Frank replied. “Gentlemen?”

Ellis looked down at his tray of food, then shrugged. “What the hell. Now you got me thinkin’ about it, I feel as though I ought to know and I don’t. I’m in.”

“Cal?”

Cal still had the depth and fatigue of wisdom behind his eyes, staring off into space in front of him. “They could retaliate, you know. Pull my boy out of college. Make lives miserable for our families.”

Frank nodded. “I thought of that. Thing is, though, you know anybody else who can heal or kill with a touch? Play with emotions? Turn objects into sand or gold or whatever? Even if the other folks in the other groups can do exactly what we do, how many of us could there really be? They need us a lot more than we need them, no matter what they say.”

Cal thought about this in silence for several long moments. “The one thing I’ve always worried about here is how what they have in mind for me to do is gonna square with the Word. I ain’t never gonna do anything that goes against God. So, if they ask me to be a soldier or secret agent or whatever, I need to know just what that might entail.” Cal looked hard at Frank. “I’m with you, but we aren’t gonna hurt anybody doing anything. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” Frank stood up and pressed his hands together, a slight smile on his face. “And I got it all planned out.”

Pat O’Reilly was a Long Island kid and Kevin Dolan was from Boston’s Back Bay. Both had enlisted in the Army at age eighteen in the waning days of the war, and both ended up, years later, walking perimeter patrol at Area 51 in the middle of the night as part of the new Air Force. They spent it talking — and fighting — about baseball. Everyone who’d stepped within a few dozen feet of their patrol knew it, and it was accepted knowledge around the base that if it weren’t for their shared Irish heritage and upbringing, they would’ve come to blows within a week of being posted together.

“How can you even compare DiMaggio to Ted Williams? No contest!” Dolan said as they walked, scanning the darkness beyond the base lights. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Only thing that doesn’t surprise me about it is that it’s coming from a New Yorker.”

O’Reilly chuckled. “You’re just sore because ever since we got the Babe from you guys, you ain’t won jack shit.”

“This is the year,” Dolan vowed. “You’ll see. I… oh, God. Oh, God, no. Oh… oh…”

Dolan collapsed to the ground in a faint. A moment later, O’Reilly lay there next to him.

“Not bad, Maggie,” Frank whispered. “You’ve been practicing.”

The two dashed out to drag the two guards back into the shadows behind the latrines. “The trick is to scare ’em so hard they faint, but not so much that I scare ’em to death,” she replied. “Harder than it looks.”

Frank checked the two boys’ vitals. “Shit. I got one going into shock. Get Cal here.”

Maggie dashed off and, a few moments later, returned with Cal and Ellis. “I got him,” Cal said, looking down at Dolan’s body. “Let’s see if I can do something here.”

Cal reached out and put his hand on Dolan’s forehead. A moment later, the boy’s shallow, rapid breathing normalized. In fact, he began to snore, leaving Frank looking up at Cal in confusion.

“Gave him enough to get him stable, then just made him tired enough to fall asleep proper,” Cal said, his smile practically the only thing visible in the shadows as he rolled the guard over onto his side; the snoring stopped. “It’s hard — Commander Wallace and I been working on it for a little while now. Didn’t even tap me too much.”

“Well done,” Frank said. “All right. We take this from the shadows and approach the hangar from behind. Once we’re there, we’ll do some spot recon. Ellis, you’re up.”

With a grin, Ellis put his hand to the ground at the edge of the fence. Slowly, the ground gave way, turning to water and immediately filtering through the dust. He moved his hands left and right, making more water, until there was enough of an opening beneath the fence for someone to roll under and up the other side.

“They should’ve fixed the sightline problem,” General Davis muttered in Frank’s head. Frank ignored him as he rolled under and out, then stood to help Maggie up. The woman ignored his outstretched hand, though, and practically leapt to her feet.

Everyone handed Ellis a large article of clothing or bedding — a sweater, a spare pillow, a blanket. Ellis shoved them under the hole and then laid his hands on them, turning them back to desert dirt. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d do.

“What about footprints?” Cal whispered.

Frank pointed toward a small ridge about four hundred yards off. “We get there, we can travel over rock to cover our tracks. It’s been breezy these past few days — let’s hope it keeps up tonight. Let’s move.”

Ellis nodded and took off through the darkened desert in a crouch-run, still exploiting the failed sightline of the guard tower, followed by Maggie and Cal. Frank looked ahead and then behind them to ensure their little trick didn’t capture any attention, before sprinting forward to catch up with the group.

A half-hour later, they were approaching the rear of Area 51’s main base. To Frank’s surprise, nobody had raised an alarm yet, but the two airmen were the only ones on night duty, and it seemed Maggie and Cal’s combined Enhancements had put them out of commission for a while. Maybe luck really was on their side.

Frank led them toward the very back of the massive mystery hangar, which was very close to the ridge they had traveled to get there. He dashed across a dangerously well-lit stretch of rock and collapsed into a shadowy pocket between a huge, noisy air conditioning unit and some other machinery sticking out from the side of the building. The smell of ozone filled the dry night air. One by one, the rest of the team joined him. Ellis looked to Frank as he approached; Frank nodded to give him the green light.

Ellis placed his thumb against the metal prefab wall and screwed his eyes shut for a moment. His thumb then sank through the wall as the metal turned to water, leaving a peephole. Ellis peered through a moment, pressed his ear to the opening, then turned to the others.

“Dark,” he whispered. “Probably a machine room.”

Inadvertently, Ellis’s hand dropped to his side and came to rest on the ground — which immediately turned to pure white salt. Frank looked up at him, and the Southerner just shrugged.

“It’s never something good like gold or diamonds,” Ellis whispered as he brushed some sand over the salt to obscure it.

Frank looked out a moment, ducking his head back around the AC unit to ensure they weren’t being followed, then studied the wall carefully before pointing at a shadowed corner. “Make it small. No liquids.”

Ellis frowned; he had more control over water than solids, but after a moment’s thought, he smiled and placed both hands on the steel wall. It didn’t look like anything until he poked a finger into it and began to rip through.

“Paper,” he whispered.

Frank and Maggie traded a look and a smirk; Ellis was getting smarter about using his Enhancement. It only took him a minute to quietly rip away the paper wall, leaving a two-foot circular gap in the metal. He stood and dramatically waved his hands toward it like a magician might do to conclude a particularly clever trick; the Voila! was left unspoken.

This time, Frank took point, with Maggie close behind. As he crawled through, Frank realized she could react to potential targets far faster than he could. But he still had issues putting a girl up front — even one who regularly kicked Ellis’s and Cal’s ass in training. He scurried through quickly and allowed Maggie to slide into the building; she did so without so much as a sound, and with a grace that he’d not seen in the woman before.

Frank unhooked a flashlight from his belt — another present Maggie got from Roger the Airman — and clicked it on. Thankfully, the glass was grimy and the bulb dim, so while it was just enough light for him to get his bearings, it wasn’t bright enough that they needed to worry about it being seen a mile away. They were indeed in a machine room of some kind — a big one, too. Frank couldn’t make out the ceiling in the dim light. As for the machines around him, Frank shuffled through the memories in his head — a machinist from the Navy, a couple of guys in construction, an engineer — and came up with very little. There were vacuum tubes and more air vents, tons of electrical generation and plenty of wiring and pipes, but it was beyond his experience — beyond a lot of people’s experience, in fact. There were a number of sort of half-finished comments from the people in his head, but overall, Frank’s impression was that there was a collective shrug from his assemblage of memories.

“Where to, boss?” Cal whispered deeply, quietly, like a rumble from the desert floor itself.

Frank held the flashlight aloft so as to cast enough dim light for everyone to see. “Doors. Let’s find ’em.”

The group fanned out in pairs, Ellis joining Maggie and Cal staying with Frank; putting Ellis and Cal together on anything just seemed damn foolish, no matter how much better they seemed to behave together lately. And while Ellis was many things, he remained surprisingly gentlemanly around Maggie, in that way only Southerners could manage. Of course, the fact that Maggie could reduce a grown man to a babbling puddle in seconds likely wasn’t lost on Ellis either.

It took about thirty seconds for the team to find two exits. Ellis created floor-level peepholes near each and quickly reported that one led to a simple janitor’s closet. The other led… out. There was light on the other side of the door — harsh, fluorescent light — but they could tell nothing beyond that.

Except, of course, that there didn’t appear to be any cover to be had. They would be completely exposed.

Frank whispered out the orders, and the team wordlessly took their places. Ellis opened the door for Maggie, who quickly walked out and pressed her back to the wall to the right. She then gave a hand signal back through the empty door — all clear. The rest followed and were soon out in the open.

And it was a very big open. With a very big light inside.

Even knowing its general dimensions from the outside, the hangar seemed oddly more cavernous when you were inside it, Frank noticed. Perhaps that was because of the large, swirling white light in the middle of it — hovering in place, about four feet from the ground. It was vaguely spherical, maybe eight feet across, but it was so hard to look at that it was tough to say, really. One got the impression that its dimensions were constantly changing on a nearly imperceptible level.

Frank started walking forward, all pretense of stealth forgotten. He knew that light all too well.

“Frank!” Cal hissed. “What you doing? Dammit, Frank! Get back here!”

But he kept going. He heard Ellis and Maggie whisper-arguing whether he was in his right mind or if he’d been somehow entranced by the vortex. But he knew exactly what he was doing.

And it didn’t have a damn thing to do with the light itself but the men standing around it with their recorders and instruments. One man in particular, out of the dozen or so in the sprawling corrugated room, was firmly in his sight, and for the first time in three years, Frank wished for nothing more than a gun in hand.

He could hear the others jogging behind him to keep up, and part of him knew he should’ve ordered them back — should’ve gone back into the darkness of the machine room himself to think things through, to plan better, to do more reconnaissance. All his Army training, his training at Groom Lake, was firmly shoved into a very dark, silent corner of his mind.

Hands grasped at his shoulders and arms, but he shook them off. Then someone stepped directly in front of him, causing him to gasp.

“Frank, we need to get you out of here now!” Danny whispered, his face a mask of anger.

The others, apparently having paid more attention to their surroundings, had already turned back toward the equipment room, moving as fast as they could without attracting noticed. But Frank wasn’t going anywhere. Finally, he broke his stare and looked Danny in the eye.

“You know who that guy is.” It wasn’t a question.

“I know. I’ll explain everything. But let’s step outside,” Danny said, his eyes softening a moment. “Frank, you can’t be here.”

“That man is a goddamn Nazi!” Frank hissed. “Why should I listen to you?”

Danny put both hands on Frank’s shoulders. “Because I’m not one of them, Frank. I’m one of you.”

“What?”

“There’s something you need to know. I’m a Variant too.”