MJ-12: Inception

25

“Next time, bring binoculars.”

Frank shunted aside the critique in his head — there were at least four voices now chiming in as he crouched atop the ridge, trying to get a read on the clearing below. The advice was becoming contradictory. General Davis wanted to get closer, while Sergeant Collins was far more interested in picking off folks one by one and using the high ground as an advantage.

Frank knew he, or rather Collins, was a fine shot, but sniping wasn’t their best option, especially when all they had were pistols. Plus, the idea was to go forward or around — not stay put. They had to get to the border at any cost. Unfortunately, all the voices agreed on the last-ditch plan, and it wasn’t pretty. Frank put it out of his mind as best he could. Focus on the objective first, which was getting everyone out in one piece.

He crouch-walked back to the rest of the group, who were resting on the hillside near a spring, a welcome sight after hours of marching through the wilderness. Thankfully, they had passed by a cattle farm on their way, and one dead steer later, Cal was near one hundred percent. That brought back memories of Area 51 barbecues…. They hadn’t eaten since the night before, and it wasn’t likely they’d eat again until well after the upcoming engagement.

“Two vehicles. I count at least eight uniforms, guessing probably close to twenty total, including a couple who were just sent out of the clearing,” Frank whispered to the group, who were taking turns gulping water from the trickling spring. “At least two in civvies. What are you getting, Maggie?”

“Just one, passing by on the roads on either side of us,” she replied glumly. “Someone angry, anxious — and looking for something, but at those speeds, I don’t know how they would. And… wait.” Maggie cocked her head a moment, then ducked down and whispered, “We have company.”

Frank heard the snapping of twigs below the ridge. He held up his hand for quiet and pulled his gun. Crouching forward, he peered off the side of the ridge…

… and saw four soldiers heading up a deer trail toward them.

Looking back, Frank held up four fingers, then pointed at Maggie and Ellis — the two best shots after him. Waving them forward, he turned his attention back to the patrol below. They hadn’t heard anything.

Frank carefully aimed his weapon. “They’re wearing helmets and vests. Aim for the necks. At this angle, it’ll go through the body.” Frank turned to the others and pointed to his own neck, then at the guards. Ellis and Maggie nodded. It would have to do.

Frank took a moment to lock eyes with Cal, who looked grim and saddened. He wanted to say something to him — he’d coached many a greenhorn just before their first firefight — but the soldiers were too close. Frank simply nodded at him and turned back to the task at hand.

Collins coached Frank through the prep — positioning his arms, breathing, aiming. And then he fired.

One of the men dropped immediately. He quickly shifted to another target, who conveniently looked up just in time for Frank to place a bullet between the eyes, at the same time that Maggie and Ellis squeezed off their shots. The two others went down — but one rolled down the hillside, shouting in Czech the entire way. “Jsou zde! Jsou tady! Jsem zraněný!”

They’re over here! Man down!

“Move,” Frank hissed. He took the time to take one more shot, silencing the shouting man permanently.

Everyone was on their feet, and Frank quickly made his way down off the ridge. They would circle around and try to come at them from the road. If possible, they’d commandeer a vehicle and race for the border. If not, well… it would get ugly fast. As planned, they kept Cal and Yushchenko in the middle — the Ukrainian because he remained the objective, and Cal because, frankly, Frank knew Cal wouldn’t shoot anyone. However, he was a good last line of defense, because he could drop people with a touch without killing them. Best to play to people’s strengths.

Frank rushed ahead as quietly as possible, planting his feet on rock and avoiding brush as best he could. He stopped suddenly as he heard another twig crack, whirling around with his gun before him. There — thirty yards off, looking away — was another soldier. A single shot felled him. There were no shouts. A straggler.

For now.

“Get to the—”

The voices went silent.

Frank whirled around, gun still raised, looking. There was nothing but tall trees and dappled sun. In the far distance, he could hear soldiers in combat gear trying to move quietly and failing — the Czechs and Russians would be after them. And if they had Variants, they’d be right there with ’em — if they weren’t already on top of his position.

And he’d just lost his Enhancement. Shit.

Ellis raced down the hillside, one hand around Yushchenko’s arm as the mud and rock threatened to send them both over the edge and into a dense copse of trees — trees probably teeming with Reds.

“You tell me right here, right now, what the hell else we could be up against, old man,” Ellis growled quietly as they rushed down the trail. “You tell me right now before I shoot you in the goddamn head.”

And the funny thing was, Ellis meant it. Screw orders, screw MAJESTIC-12, screw it all. His job here wasn’t to find out what the Russkies knew about Variants, or get this goddamn Red over the border. His job was to make it home alive to see his wife and kids, and he’d be damned if some intelligence operation was gonna get in the way of all that.

Yushchenko, perhaps, sensed some of that. “If there are others, they will not be able to use their Enhancements while the negative field is active,” the colonel said as he tried not to slip and fall, prompting Ellis to help him remain upright despite his better judgment. “It is when you feel your power returning that you should be worried.”

“I’m already goddamn worried,” Ellis retorted. “Who else could be out there? Your guys, your Variants.”

Yushchenko wrenched his arm free from Ellis’s grip but kept walking. “That was not part of the agreement.”

Ellis stepped in front of the colonel and put his pistol to the man’s forehead. “You’re gonna tell me, comrade, or so help me, I’ll kill you. And then what happens to your precious family, huh? Because I tell you what, I care a lot more about seeing my family than yours right about now.”

Yushchenko looked wide-eyed, then looked off over Ellis’s right shoulder. Ellis turned to find Cal, standing there, looking on, impassive. “Reason with him,” Yushchenko said, half-pleading, half-ordering.

Cal looked from the Russian to Ellis and back again. “Colonel, we ain’t gonna get out of this unless we know what we’re up against. So, maybe Mr. Longstreet puts that gun down, and you tell us what they got down there.”

Before Yushchenko could answer, Maggie interrupted from behind. “I’m back up. We’re not being blocked.”

And then Ellis’s pistol disappeared from his hand.

He turned to see a young man, no more than seventeen, smiling right next to him, holding his gun right up against Ellis’s chest. “We’re already here,” he said in Russian-accented English.

Then he fired, and Ellis looked down to see blood seeping from his abdomen. His body blossomed into exquisite, unrelenting, all-encompassing pain. It was the last thing he remembered.

Cal had never seen a man shot before. There was a flash of crimson from behind Ellis’s back, blood spattering onto Maggie’s face as she rushed forward. Cal saw the deep red spot expand across Ellis’s white shirt as he sank to his knees, a grimace of agony and… something else… on Ellis’s face. Fear.

The Russian teenager who’d literally come out of nowhere grabbed Yushchenko’s arm just as Cal ran toward him. Cal leapt forward to tackle him, grabbing him in a bear hug, determined not to let him escape — and they both landed in a thicket of trees that sure as heck wasn’t anywhere near where he’d been a second ago.

Cal heard the click of a gun and instinctively used his left arm in a sweep. The shot missed his ear by less than an inch. Cal grabbed the wrist and began to drain the boy.

“Yob tvoyu mat!” the Russian spat as he struggled. But the struggling grew weaker as the boy aged, rapidly crossing though middle age and into his dotage in three seconds, while Cal felt himself get younger and stronger once more.

The boy would live, just not as long as maybe he might’ve otherwise. Cal thought momentarily about giving some back to him, at least a few years.

But suddenly there was a new pain in his torso, a searing hit that cracked ribs, punctured his lung, and sent him flying fifteen feet in the air across the forest clearing, slamming him into a tree.

“Agh! Ow, sweet Jesus,” Cal breathed, barely able to talk, his eyes squeezed shut in a vain attempt to somehow make the pain go away. It was like someone had taken a sledgehammer to his ribs.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw a girl crouched over the teenager he’d turned into an old man, no older than ten. She had dark hair and eyes, and a humorless pout on her face. And she was wearing a small, fitted Russian army uniform.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Cal whispered.

The girl stood with a look of pure determination on her face, then strode purposefully toward Cal, pausing only to grab hold of a young tree no more than six inches in diameter.

Her fingertips sank into the bark as if it were a pillow, and she ripped it out of the ground as if she were just pulling a weed. It didn’t even look like she was exerting herself.

Cal coughed, blood coming out of his mouth and dripping down his chin. It was bad. Felt like he was on half a lung. Every breath was an exercise in new agony, and there was already a small part of his soul just looking forward to not having to breathe anymore, Jesus forgive him.

The girl lifted the tree and broke it in half across her knee, producing a club about five feet long and several solid inches thick — with a jagged, pointed tip.

“Eto moy brat! ” the girl screamed, gripping her weapon so tight that the wood splintered around her hand. “My brother!”

Cal thought about getting up for a second, but even thinking about moving his muscles resulted in new waves of pain. So, he just closed his eyes and waited, picturing God in his mind’s eye and praying he’d not done enough bad things to be kept from Heaven for too long.

But… he knew otherwise. The realization hit him like yet another hammerblow, this one to his very soul. All this sneakin’ about, all these spy games they had him doing, they distracted him from using God’s gift for a greater, nobler purpose. And when Cal went to meet the Lord — any moment now — he knew deep in his heart that he would be found wanting, and that the pain he’d endured this day would be a walk in the park compared to what the Devil would conjure up for him in Hell.

Cal was scared. God, he was so scared. He started to cry, to bawl, even as he knew that crazy little girl was about to put a tree through his head. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

Then he heard a crash and footsteps. Was that it? Was dying this painless?

Cal ventured to open his eyes, only to see Maggie standing above him, her hand extended. “Sorry about that,” she said with a smirk. “Didn’t have time to focus as much as I wanted to. Can you walk?”

The existential sorrow that had engulfed Cal sloughed off him like an unneeded blanket, and in that moment, Maggie was the second most beautiful woman in the world after his own wife. “Oh, Miss Maggie… I’m busted up bad,” he croaked, coughing up more blood. “I need to heal up again… before I can get far.”

“What about that teenage boy? He still has some… shit. He’s gone,” Maggie said. Cal peered behind her to see only bare grass and leaves where the recently made elderly man had lain just moments before.

“I’ll be all right here,” Cal said. “Get… INSIGHT. Ellis. Let’s get out of here.”

Maggie nodded and put a hand on Cal’s forehead — a brave thing to do, considering. Cal surprised himself by actually feeling tempted for a moment. Then she dashed off into the woods, loping away like a predator and leaving Cal up against his tree, wondering just how much of what he’d just experienced was Maggie’s Enhancement….

There.

Twenty yards to her right. Two men. Young. One angry but focused, the other fearful and all over the place.

Too easy.

Maggie crouched down amongst the undergrowth, her suppressed pistol at the ready. She was trying to get back to Yushchenko and Ellis but didn’t want to waste the opportunity. Angry one first? He’s the threat. But scaredy-cat would probably shriek like a baby, she thought. Scaredy cat first, then angry one could get off a shot.

Maggie made a mental note to herself that if she made it out alive, it might be useful to start training on two pistols, one in each hand.

The shots came quickly — she’d made a split-second decision to go for the competent one first, hoping that scaredy-cat was more of a deer-in-the-headlights kind of guy. Her first shot entered the soldier’s ear, angling upward due to her crouched position, and ricocheted around the inside of the steel helmet he wore. At least it was quick.

By the time he fell, Maggie’s weapon was already trained on the second target — but he was more competent than she’d given him credit for. He hit the deck immediately, screaming in Czech and firing his rifle aimlessly — in the complete opposite direction from where Maggie was.

Time to go.

Maggie ran off at a ninety-degree angle from where those soldiers were, hoping she wasn’t about to run right into anyone coming to help them. She knew Cal would need at least one or two of them alive and in decently good shape, and she nominated scaredy-cat as her top pick. She’d seen his face and felt his emotions — she’d remember him.

Maggie cast out her senses once more, trying to find more minds out there — minds attached to bodies, bodies that needed either rescue or elimination. There, at the very edge of her Enhancement, about twenty-five yards ahead, were four of them….

And then they winked out of existence.

Not again.

Maggie ran forward, heedlessly, in the general direction that she’d last felt the other minds. Nothing. They were gone. Her Enhancement was gone. Everything was gone.

“Tady! Tady! Myslím si, že člověk je tady!” came a voice from up ahead.

She quickly knelt behind a tree, her gun raised, eyes wild. She didn’t recognize whatever language that was. She couldn’t assess her targets. She didn’t know where they were. How the hell was she supposed to actually fight them?

She stayed as still as she could and was finally rewarded by the sound of footsteps on twigs and leaves — they were attempting to move quietly, but failing miserably. Then there was a brief whisper. And another returned.

Remember your training. Remember it.

Her heart racing, breath short and rapid, Maggie turned from behind her cover and tried to get her targets in sight. But she moved too fast, too urgently, firing at blurs while exposing herself too much, diminishing the element of surprise. She retreated back behind the tree, having missed completely, only to hear more shouts.

“Vot! My nashli yeye! Derzhite podal’she Natal’ya! Privesti soldat!”

Maggie tensed up and prepared to fire again, but before she could, a shot rang out from behind her, up and to the right, followed two seconds later by another round.

Her Enhancement suddenly returned.

Thank God.

She reached out with her mind, pushing hard against the people in front of her — there were four, in fact, not three — frightening them into unconsciousness. One was already injured, scared and fading anyway, and the other three folded quickly enough.

Up from where the shot came out, she felt worry and urgency. Frank.

She turned and took off toward him at a jog. She had a feeling her Enhancement wasn’t going to get blocked out again anytime soon.

“Sloppy,” Frank chided when Maggie reached the ridge.

She shrugged and gave him a winning smile. “Panicked. My power went bye-bye again and I freaked out. But I think you may have solved that.”

“Oh?”

“When you made your shot, my power came back in a blink. I think you hit whoever was dampening us.”

Frank frowned. “And that means everyone else’s power is back too. Move out!”

It was Frank’s turn to march double-time. Whoever was out there, it was more important to get back to Yushchenko and get him squared. And so, he ran. At one point, a bullet whizzed behind him, but he left that to Maggie, who continued to relish having her powers back a bit too much. One problem at a time, he reminded himself.

Frank burst into the clearing to find Yushchenko holding a soldier’s coat to Ellis’s abdomen. “He is losing blood. We need to help him.”

Kneeling down, Frank peeked under the coat. “Severe internal injuries. From the angle and what he’s coughed up, looks like ruptured stomach, some colon, maybe a bit of the lung if he’s really unlucky today,” the doctor said. “Do not move the patient. Field surgery needed.”

“That’s a lot of goddamn field surgery, Doc,” Frank muttered.

“Either that or he dies in minutes.”

“I don’t have minutes,” Frank replied, a little louder than he cared to.

“Are you communicating with someone?” Yushchenko asked, surprised and now looking at him suspiciously.

Shaking his head, Frank shoved the Czech rifle he borrowed into Yushchenko’s hands. “If it ain’t one of us, shoot it,” Frank said. “I gotta get him stable so we can move him.”

Yushchenko took up a position behind a rock on the trail, while Frank ripped open Ellis’s shirt, prompting a sharp intake of breath from the Southerner, followed by a few choice words.

“Didn’t realize you were awake,” Frank said, drawing a knife, also borrowed, from his belt.

“I wasn’t,” Ellis replied weakly. “Where’s Cal? I need Cal.”

“No Cal right now,” Frank said. “Just me and my ghost-doctor.”

“Need Cal,” Ellis repeated. “Need to go home.”

Frank started cleaning the skin around the entry wound. “What? Don’t want to take one for the team?” he asked.

“God, no. Find Cal,” Ellis croaked as his eyelids fluttered and his body tensed.

“Going into shock. Get that bullet out and staunch that bleeding. You’ll need to cauterize everything before he bleeds out.”

Frank went to work, cutting away blood-soaked clothing, using the tip of the knife to try to dig in and find the bullet. It was horrible, horrible going, and Ellis’s breath was becoming shallower.

Then Yushchenko swore and cocked his rifle, prompting Frank to tense up and reach for his pistol. A voice came from the woods. “It’s me!” Maggie cried out. “I have Cal!”

Maggie came up onto the trail, half-carrying, half-dragging a nearly unconscious Cal behind her. Frank had hoped Cal would be up for a miracle, but he looked ashen, and his hand weakly clutched his side. Frank ran up and took him off Maggie’s hands, laying the man gently down onto the ground next to the trail. “He needs donors. Now.”

Maggie shook her head. “You can’t stay. Their tracker will have them on you at any moment!”

As if he needed confirmation, Frank began to hear the voices of soldiers coming from below. “Can you send them all off?” he asked her.

Maggie closed her eyes a second. “No, they’re learning. Coming in from different directions, staggering their approach. I hit one group, another one comes up behind.”

Frank looked up at Yushchenko, who was still focused on the perimeter of the trail but had undoubtedly heard every word. Cal, meanwhile, was breathing shallowly but steadily, and Ellis was slipping fast.

“You have only one option to get your team out,” General Davis said. “You just don’t want to take it.”

Frank stood up and went over to Cal. “You awake, Cal?”

He got a half-lidded, weak smile in return. “Kinda. You found someone I can borrow from?”

Shit. Shut up, General. “Yeah, Cal, I think I do. But you gotta promise me to take it.”

“Not sure… I have a choice… now, do I?”

“Nope.”

Get the team home.

Frank stood up and turned to Yushchenko. Like Anderson said, it was time to make the hard choice. “Sorry.” Frank lifted his gun.

But the Ukrainian already had his rifle trained directly on Frank. “I think it is time for you to drop your weapon.”