MJ-12: Shadows

30

Cal looked idly out the window of his plane at the rolling steppe below, fighting nerves and trying to stay alert as best he could. Frank said they were aboard a Soviet military Lisunov Li-2 transport — a Soviet-made knockoff of a DC-3 passenger plane — and Cal supposed that wasn’t the worst plane they could be on, given the stories he’d heard about the subpar machinery the Soviets designed themselves.

They were prisoners, but at least they weren’t gonna fall from the sky. For now.

They’d been taken from Mezze Prison to the airport and put on a nondescript cargo plane headed for Yerevan, the capital of Armenia — part of the Soviet Union. Once there, Karilov had handed them off to a bunch of soldiers who hustled the Americans onto the plane they found themselves on now. They’d taken off and landed several times, and Frank had been calling out the names of places as they flew into them: Yerevan to Baku, Azerbaijan, and then a bunch of towns in some place called Kazakhstan. Fort Shevchenko, Shalkar, Astana, and now to some other place. It was hard to keep up.

Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union just like Armenia and Azerbaijan but a lot bigger — the same way Texas was a lot bigger than Rhode Island, Cal figured. They’d flown over mountains and desert and now grasslands, and it was all sparsely populated as far as he could tell. Frank — or maybe it had been one of the people taking up residence in his head — figured they were headed to a remote military facility of some kind, since they were headed well away from Leningrad, home of the Bekhterev Institute, where the Reds studied their own Variants. They were also pretty far from Moscow, for that matter. In fact, they were getting to within spitting distance of Mongolia — which meant they were the farthest Cal had ever been from home.

Thoughts of home were hard. Cal had last called his family a whole eight days before, so he knew Sarah and Winston — the boy was done with college and working at The Washington Post’s printing presses for the summer — would be worrying sick about him. The government folks had given Cal’s family a number to call in case he was out of touch for a while, and he hoped the CIA would take care of them after…

… after whatever happened to him.

Frank and Zippy had talked a lot about what-ifs during their journey. There had been a lot of initial plotting about overpowering the guards, maybe seizing control of the aircraft. But then Cal spotted the other planes off in the distance to either side of theirs — fighter aircraft. Frank identified them as Yak-9s, and apparently they were fast and pretty good in a scrap, and it was safe to assume they were there to shoot down their plane if it deviated off course. Their presence also made a parachute escape highly unlikely.

After that, the talk turned to what their lives might be like under the Soviets. Zippy was the most outwardly worried, concerned about rape and torture and all kinds of dark ideas — and while Cal had put a fatherly hand on her shoulder and said the right things to calm her down, he truly had no idea what would befall them. Would they be recruited? Cal knew Frank wouldn’t flip, and Zippy seemed grimly determined to give them nothing. For himself, Cal figured the Russians couldn’t touch his family, and they were a Godless lot besides. So, between family and God, they had nothing to bargain with him. They could do their worst.

That was easy to say, of course, without knowing what the worst might be. As Variants, they were mighty valuable, and when Zippy wasn’t thinking the worst, she’d wondered if they might be treated well enough because there simply weren’t that many Variants around — the Russians couldn’t afford to be cruel to them. Frank, however, had reminded the two of them that if they didn’t play ball, then the Soviet Variant program — whether it was at Bekhterev or wherever else — could almost certainly use some experimental subjects. “Those who can’t be suborned can be dissected,” Frank had said. Grim thoughts indeed.

Cal told himself he was ready to make his peace with God, and to see Sarah and Winston again at the Second Coming — but he wasn’t. He desperately wanted to go home, to kiss his wife and hug his boy and write off all this spy-game nonsense once and for all. And if he ever got out of all this, maybe he’d do just that — so long as the MAJESTIC-12 folks let him. There was that to consider as well.

The plane suddenly pitched forward, and a Russian voice came over the intercom. Cal turned to look at Frank, who was busying himself with his seatbelt. “Strap in,” Frank said. “Coming into Semipalatinsk.”

Cal buckled up. “Where’s that?”

“Middle of nowhere, Kazakhstan. Ought to be a real garden spot,” Frank said.

But it wasn’t quite nowhere. They’d flown over a handful of small villages — collections of thatched huts and small stone buildings — and now were descending toward some kind of outpost. Cal looked out the window and saw clusters of buildings surrounding a modest airstrip, and there were jeeps — or whatever the Russians called their versions of jeeps — and people going about their business. Honestly, with the prefab buildings and aircraft hangars and such, the place looked a whole lot like Area 51, except it was situated in a much nicer-looking grassland, with a decent-sized river flowing nearby.

“Could be worse,” Cal said with a smile.

Frank smiled back grimly. “How do you do it?” he asked.

“Do what?”

Frank nodded to the window as the plane swooped lower. “We’re captured Americans in Soviet territory. We might not get home again. And you, with the optimism. How do you do it?”

Cal thought about this for a moment and found himself thinking back to his time working in the Firestone plant back in Memphis — the daily insults, the weekly fistfights, the sabotage by his white coworkers, and the docked pay from his white foremen that led to less food on the table and postponed promises to his wife and boy. “Because I’ve seen worse,” he said finally. “When it gets really bad, I promise I’ll let you know.”

Frank nodded and went back to looking out his own window. At first, when Cal had talked about working conditions for Negroes in the South, Frank had looked shocked and in disbelief. Cal figured it wasn’t Frank’s fault per se. He was the rare white man who treated black folks well enough, even though he’d never spared much of a thought for the folks around the country — not just in the South — who saw things very differently. Most of the people in MAJESTIC-12 were pretty good about it, though he imagined they were under orders. After all, Cal had seen a black woman, a Hispanic-looking fellow, and an Asian kid around the base, and was sure they were Variants too. No reason for a black woman to be out in the middle of the Nevada desert otherwise.

Cal’s thoughts were interrupted by tires on tarmac, and the plane landed with a jarring thud and a screech of rubber. Cal had been on a fair number of planes over the past couple years — never having flown his entire life before that — and he already could tell these Russian pilots didn’t have half the skill of the American boys. He actually took a little pride in that for some reason.

Immediately, the Russian soldiers unbuckled and stood up, and while their weapons weren’t trained on the Americans, they were certainly in hand. “Vstavay. Poyekhali.”

Frank was already rising. “We’re moving. Let’s go,” he said.

Cal waited for the two of them to go ahead before following; he and Frank had agreed early on that they’d work to protect her. Wasn’t like she wasn’t trained up — she was — but Frank carried with him the skills and knowledge of a half dozen top-notch fighters, while Cal could drop a man with a touch. Zippy’s Enhancement was great for gathering intelligence, but Cal knew he and Frank would have to take the lead in a scrap.

Of course, they couldn’t stop bullets, and a full squad of Russian soldiers was a bit too much to handle at the moment, so they had little choice but to walk out of the plane and into a warm, sunny August day. It was a dry heat — not as bad as Area 51 but still pretty warm. The air smelled clean, and Cal wondered if there were farms nearby, based on the slight whiff of mown grass and manure in the breeze. The prefab buildings were clean and new, and it looked like the base was kept in fine order. Cal had seen photos and heard reports about other Soviet bases, and this one seemed far better. That meant funding, and it probably meant the people in charge had decided whatever was going on here to be pretty important.

Once they set foot on the ground, the soldiers threw a pair of heavy work gloves at Cal’s feet, and at Zippy’s as well. “Naden’te perchatki,” one of the soldiers said.

Cal didn’t need Frank to translate. He picked up the gloves and put them on, as did Zippy. Only then did the soldiers come and put handcuffs on each of them. They definitely know what we can do, Cal thought. They already got us pegged. But how?

Hands cuffed behind their backs, they were marched to a waiting cargo truck and forced to sit in the back, along with the soldiers who had accompanied them on the plane. Again, their weapons were held at the ready, and an officer barked at them for a good thirty seconds straight before the vehicle began to move. Cal assumed he was warning them that they’d be shot if they so much as blinked wrong, so he sat tight and waited for the next thing. The back door was shut, and a couple flashlights provided the only illumination. The Russians were apparently pretty good at keeping folks in the dark.

The drive was a good twenty minutes, but it felt longer without being able to see where they were going. Paved tarmac turned into gravel, then to a bumpy dirt road. There were a few turns here and there, and then finally the truck came to a complete stop. The back was opened, and everyone was ushered out with shouting and a few shoves. Once Cal set foot on the ground again, he looked around and saw that the base and airfield were no longer anywhere in sight.

Instead, they were in a cluster of three older buildings in the middle of a kind of dirt courtyard. One looked to be a crumbling old home, a stone structure that maybe had once been fine indeed but was long past its glory days. The second building was a big old barn, weathered and gray, with closed doors and no straw in sight on the ground; Cal had five bucks it wasn’t holding livestock. The third looked to be some sort of stable, but again, there was no evidence it was still being used for its original purpose. All three buildings were old, and Cal imagined that they’d withstood a lot through the years on the steppe. No trees around, no shelter at all. Great for farming, he imagined.

The large sliding door to the barn wheeled open, and Cal could see that he was right; there were a concrete floor and electrical lights inside. In fact, it looked like they’d put a prefab inside the barn, complete with barebones furniture like desks and chairs. A man in a lab coat and a grim-faced, pale soldier wearing an officer’s uniform waved them in; the shoves at their back provided incentive to accept the welcome.

“Officer’s an MGB colonel,” Frank whispered as they walked toward the barn. “Scientist seems civilian, though. Joint ops like this are rare. This is big.”

Cal nodded briefly, trying to take in as much as he could. They were moved past a security desk in the front room, and then through a smaller door into an area with worktables lining the walls and all kinds of scientific equipment scattered around. Chalkboards covered in graphs, equations, and Russian script filled up the back of the room, where a man sat on top of a desk with his arms folded, looking at the newcomers with a smile.

He was a slight, balding man with round spectacles on a round face, wearing a suit and tie over his thin frame, but all the Reds entering the room immediately saluted him. Cal felt he’d seen the man’s face before but couldn’t place it.

“Please, sit,” the man said in accented English, pointing to three stools in front of him. Slowly, each of the Americans took a seat, Cal and Frank still bookending a wide-eyed Zippy. Frank also looked surprised, which Cal took to mean that this guy was someone big.

“Thank you for being here,” the Russian said. “I know, of course, you did not want to be here, but we are nonetheless grateful. I believe you have met some of my friends before, yes?”

Cal looked around, and saw two more people enter through a side door — a severe-looking middle-aged woman and, incongruously, a girl who couldn’t have been more than eleven. Both wore MGB uniforms, both highly decorated. Cal recognized both of them immediately. The woman was Maria Savrova, a Variant who could track a single person across the globe once she’d touched them; the little girl was Ekaterina Illyanova, and Cal knew from personal experience she was as strong as Superman and mean as a rabid dog.

They’d fought a year earlier in the woods outside Prague. The Soviets had set a trap for the American Variants, and Cal, Frank, and Maggie had barely gotten out alive. Ellis Longstreet hadn’t.

“Good to see you ladies again,” Frank said. “You’re looking well.”

The little girl spat out something in Russian that didn’t sound like she was returning the kindness, and she glared daggers at Cal. The girl’s older brother had also been a Variant, someone who could move like lightning itself, but Cal had gotten his hands on him, aged him something fierce. He wondered, given the girl’s reaction, if the Illyanova boy was even still alive.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” Cal said as gently as he could. “I truly am.”

The top dog chuckled. “The funny thing is that I believe you, Comrade Hooks. From what I have read of you, you are a kind man. A gentle man. You do not belong here.”

“Well, then. If it’s all right with you, I’ll just be on my way, then,” Cal ventured with a smile.

The man’s chuckle evolved into a short bark of a laugh. “Americans! So full of vigor. Full of confidence. But sadly, since you’ve allowed yourselves to be used by your imperialist masters, your presence here is no fault but your own now. And we have such plans for you.” The man in the suit got up and began to pace. “We have very good intelligence on your Empowered program — that is what we call the people you call ‘Variants.’ We know you have a very effective means of locating your Empowered, far better than what we are capable of. So, the first thing I’d like to explore, once you’ve been tested and settled here, is how exactly you manage this.”

He’s talking about Danny, Cal thought. They ain’t got anybody like Danny. But they sure as hell have enough folks up in our business back home.

A third figure entered the room — this one far different from the rest. It was a vaguely human-shaped inky shadow, moving in a manner that could only be described as half-walking and half-floating, and it paused to “look” at the American Variants. Cal assumed it was a look, but only because something vaguely head-shaped turned towards him.

“Ochtet,” the suited man said.

The shadow’s voice replied as a whisper, but one that seemed to be right in Cal’s ear. He wondered if everyone heard him that way. Of course, Cal couldn’t make out a word of it, but when he looked over to Frank, there was pure shock on his face.

The guy in charge smiled at the Americans once more. “I think you understand now, Mr. Lodge, how we know so much.”

Frank nodded slowly. “That’s a Variant. He’s not even here. He’s a shadow — and he can be anywhere he wants to be, more or less.”

“Very perceptive,” the man said. “He cannot track, of course — that is Comrade Savrova’s gift. But yes, when conditions are right, we can have a presence wherever we need to be, including at your Area 51. Or in Washington. We can whisper in ears, even.”

Cal nodded slowly. “You knew about Area 51 from your plant, Captain Anderson, which allowed you to send your Variant there.”

The Russian nodded, then turned back to the shadow and spoke to it in Russian again. The shadow nodded… and promptly disappeared.

“You’ll notice that we do not use your null technology here,” the man said. “We have no reason to distrust the Empowered working alongside us here. We will, of course, take other measures to ensure you do not use your gifts upon us — this is why we asked you to wear the gloves. But we will not cripple you the way you have crippled your own fellow Empowered at your training facility.”

The man rose and put his hands on his hips. “You are loyal Americans, and for that I commend you. Loyalty is important. But as you spend time here, as we begin to study you, I would simply ask you this: To whom are you loyal? To people who fear you? To a country that enslaves you? Or is your loyalty better suited toward each other? Should you not be loyal to your fellow Empowered instead?”

That wasn’t the sales pitch Cal had expected. When they had been training him up, the Area 51 folks had been sure to warn them about how they might be tempted if they fell into enemy hands — money, sure. But class, race, and gender, too. Cal had been told all about the Russkies’ crazy ideas that the Soviet Union was a paradise free of racial and religious strife.

Loyalty to the Empowered, though? To Variants? That was something else. Cal had long felt a bond with his fellow Variants — shared experiences and all. Apparently, the Russians felt the same way about theirs.

The man left the room, followed by his two Variants, and Cal looked over to Frank questioningly. Frank looked back, wide-eyed.

“That was Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s number two guy,” Frank said quietly. “And I’m pretty sure he’s a Variant, too.”