The Wizards 1: Combat Wizard

by Jack L Knapp

  Military cadre assigned to the School were less of a problem; they had signed non-disclosure agreements as soon as they arrived. After the School closed, they had been split up among various commands. Some had ended up in Europe, some in Asia, a couple in Alaska (at widely separated commands), and some had taken early retirement. None of the former cadre had reason to regret being transferred; contented troops don’t have reason to complain. Henderson had learned that from what had happened with the School’s failures; comfortable boats should not be rocked.

  Fortunately, none of the non-graduates had ever known the true mission of the School. Security procedures installed by his predecessor had worked to protect that secret.

  The former students had been transferred as well, those who had not already graduated and left for employment with the agency. In addition to working as communicators, some had gone into the Army, although none were known to have survived; a few now worked for investigative agencies, where their ability to distinguish truth from lies was deemed valuable.

  From the various assignments, the former students quietly began to disappear from view.

  A heart attack was thought to be the cause of one fatal accident, and two automobile accidents had happened where it was believed other medical issues might have played a part. Simple vanishings had occurred too, including one where the body had been dumped down a mine-shaft in Nevada. False identifications planted on some of the bodies (furnished by an intelligence office where the general knew someone who would do him a favor) meant that if anyone realized the victims had died and claimed family status, only cursory inspection of the false documents in their files would be given. In two cases the body was quickly cremated and the ashes scattered.

  The general had done some of the work himself. It was easy to track down a former student when you knew his new name and location. As for being in possession of the remote controller, there had been several of them, at least in the beginning. All had eventually been recovered and destroyed. General Henderson kept the last one, a kind of insurance policy that didn’t arouse anyone’s suspicions because no one knew he'd kept it.

  A couple of the loose ends had been terminated by people who had no idea what they’d done. One had thought he was checking for an IED, one had thought he was triggering a remote camera owned by a photographer. An actress named Lohan was expected to be at the location, and the photograph might be worth considerable money. The remote had been triggered to see if it worked properly, and a worker had collapsed; the event had been cancelled because of his death, so no photos were taken.

  The loose-ends operation had been so successful. Almost.

  The School was soon closed and BG Henderson waited for orders. Then one day he’d been called to the Pentagon for an interview; it had not gone well. There had been questions about what had happened to the former graduates. Henderson had no good answer, none he could reveal, and as a result, Brigadier General Henderson had become Colonel Henderson. There had been no evidence that something had been done, but with all the suspicion caused by vanished and dead former students, that had been enough.

  It happens. The military services don’t like to admit that a general officer has done so poorly as to be reduced in rank. Along with the reduction had come orders to retire immediately, so Henderson, formerly Brigadier General Henderson, became Colonel Henderson, US Army Retired. There would be no farewell medal and no retirement parade; don’t let the door hit you in the ass, Colonel.

  It was during this process, while Henderson had been in Washington, that a former student had fallen through the cracks. An intelligence analyst and communicator in California had simply disappeared. It seemed almost as if he’d known what Henderson was doing, but that was impossible; Henderson had shared his plans with no one. Perhaps the man had simply cracked. That had happened to some of the students, early in the recruiting and training process; probably it was all too much for their brains to handle.

  Henderson had used some of the funds he’d taken to hire a private detective firm. They’d managed to track the communicator and former student to southern California’s surfer subculture. It was thought that he was still there, somewhere. Perhaps he’d slipped into Mexico; surfers often did that. He might be in Australia or Hawaii, even Fiji. He might even be in a mental hospital somewhere. No one knew.

  No one realized that the analyst and graduate had become suspicious as other graduates began dropping out of contact. One contact, conceivably; all of them, no. Not by accident.

  He, the former student who’d been known to his peers as Surfer, realized that friends and fellow-students were no longer contacts that could be accessed with a bit of effort. Then he had made the connection between the disappearance of contacts, the deaths he was certain had occurred, and a fragment of gossip from a man who worked as liaison between the military officers and the students.

  With help from a friend, Surfer had confirmed the existence of what the gossip had suggested, a small foreign object in the back of his neck.

  The general, now a colonel, had never really understood just how well his training programs had worked.

  Henderson bought a house in San Antonio. There were military facilities nearby that his retirement status entitled him to use, medical support available when he needed it, and other old soldiers that he had much in common with to form a ready group of friends and acquaintances. As a retired senior officer (he never mentioned that he’d been a BG for a time), he could play golf and swap war stories with other old soldiers and the occasional retired Air Force officer.

  He also worked on developing his tennis game and eyed several ladies in the same group of acquaintances.

  He had no need to look for a post-retirement job. The money he’d so-quietly slipped out of the clandestine accounts saw to that. He’d closed out the contract with the private investigation firm and made another transfer of money, this one to his personal account.

  Over the next few weeks, the earlier account, even if not known to be associated with Colonel Henderson, was emptied and the rest of the money transferred. Some of it went into Henderson's bank, some went to purchase Krugerrands that in turn went into a safe deposit box in a different bank.

  Life was good, except for that nagging sense of a task undone. There was the realization that somewhere out there was someone who could dig up what should stay long buried. Whether by accident or by intent, there was a loose end that should be tied up or trimmed away.

  Well. Colonel Henderson still had the special remote control. He made it a practice to change the batteries every month, just in case, before putting the remote back into a drawer. It was there if he needed it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ray Wilson was sitting at the library table with a young Mexican woman. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties and was well dressed, as many Mexican students at UTEP are. Her skirt was perhaps a bit shorter than other women might have worn, but then, she had the legs for it. Ray had noticed them early on and decided that those legs were worth displaying.

  The two had become acquainted in a class they shared and had then met later over coffee at the SUB. Ray found that he enjoyed her company and didn’t wonder particularly why she would be willing to spend some of her between-class time with him; it was enough that she did. The age difference didn’t appear to be a factor, or it might have been that she didn’t see him as anything other than a fellow student. But that relationship, slight as it was, had been enough until now. It was a beginning, in Ray’s mind; perhaps there might be something more, later on.

  She had come to class today, but was clearly distracted. When he’d mentioned that, after the class ended and they filed out of the lecture hall, she had begun sobbing.

  A comforting word had not helped, and going to the SUB cafeteria with an obviously distraught young woman was nothing he wanted a part of. After waiting a few minutes for her to stop weeping, he had suggested the library. They had walked there together and she had gotten her emotions under better con
trol by the time they arrived.

  The library was quiet, but there was enough background noise to cause them to speak louder than they might otherwise have done. The voices had to overcome the low murmur of other, distant, voices, and the occasional noise of copiers and printers, where UTEP’s students downloaded and printed references or scanned them through microfiche readers.

  #

  Two people were at one of the tables and speaking when I walked into the library.

  I had come to return materials and see what resources they might have regarding the medical services available in Ciudad Juarez. I knew that many Americans still crossed the border into Juarez to get dental or minor medical treatment, even though the recent drug wars had slowed medical tourism to a trickle compared to what it once had been; still, some continued to cross the border, reasoning that despite the additional danger they might be reasonably safe if they kept to established streets and only remained long enough to see a doctor or dentist. For some, the poor of El Paso and the more-affluent Mexicans who had the documents to cross the border, there was little choice. Many such Mexicans had bought, or rented, houses or apartments in El Paso when the narcowars flared up, and they now lived in the USA temporarily without any intent to change citizenship; they often lacked American health insurance, and medical costs in the US were prohibitive, compared with what was available just across the border. I was still considering whether I might join those if I found a surgeon I thought I could trust.

  Mexicans taking up a temporary residency was, after all, not so different from their earlier practice of renting a tenement and sharing the cost among several families. By so doing, they could use the same address to enroll their children in schools in El Paso, particularly in the elementary schools that fed into Guillen Middle School. From there, the children went to Bowie High School.

  It was a relatively simple matter to begin living in those tenements or in better-class dwellings when the danger level in Juarez began to rise. Some Mexicans simply moved in with relatives to wait out the troubles. Despite laws intended to regulate the border, local people crossed it daily, and many of them felt as much at home on the northern side as they did on the southern.

  Cross-border communities often have families with part of the family on one side, part on the other. It’s not to be wondered that so many in El Paso are bilingual or even bi-national in terms of family. Regardless of the actions of governments, people flow back and forth across the border with relative ease.

  Some Mexicans come to UTEP, the University of Texas-El Paso, to become students; the university makes attracting them a matter of policy, even a priority.

  I had become aware of these things as I worked on my own project, finding a way to remove the control in my neck. Now I wanted to see what I could find in the library’s extensive database.

  #

  Surfer had become increasingly paranoid about the explosive charge in the back of his neck; at the same time, he was dubious about allowing me to try removing it, even though I would be assisted by Shezzie. Even her professional qualifications as a special-skills surgical nurse were not enough to convince him. We had tried a partial mind-meld among the three of us to see if that would convince him, but it hadn’t been enough to change his mind. Surfer’s own Talent was too strong, and it had proved impossible for him to relax enough to allow the deep melding that Shezzie and I had managed while we were in the Middle East. Still, after that unsuccessful attempt I noticed that my Talents had become stronger. Shezzie had also begun to do things she’d never before been able to do, such as move objects with more strength and even get hunches using the same type of rudimentary precognition that I had. We were also not yet certain that the changes had run their course.

  Surfer had not benefited from the effort, so far as we could tell; his mind had blocked all our effort to meld with it. Shezzie and I had managed the necessary deep connection, but his attempt to join us had allowed only a superficial contact. Even so, we had picked up enough that we couldn't ignore his feelings.

  Surfer continued to believe that a professional surgeon should be the one to remove the device; nothing less would do. He had contemplated simply forcing a doctor to perform the surgery as an outpatient procedure. He was aware that I could provide the necessary force to compel a doctor’s cooperation, even if he didn’t know just how much I could exert; but he hadn’t decided what to do afterwards, and had not thought through all the possible outcomes from such an action.

  Could we release the surgeon, to almost-certainly tell about what he’d been forced to do? Should we try to wipe his memory, or even murder him afterward? Surfer wasn’t willing to consider either of those options, but I had; I didn't know how we would deal with the spread of information, but I wasn't willing to try altering an innocent man's mind or kill him.

  If people became aware of the explosive implants, they might also learn about why they'd been put into us in the first place. Surfer’s paranoia might force us to go on the run again. If people found out about our special abilities, there was no way of knowing how they would react. Even without the devices, we could be killed; it would be harder, and take a more determined effort on their part, but it could be done.

  At the very least, two people currently unknown and unsuspected would become fugitives again, and after the resulting publicity from having a doctor remove the devices, we would find it much harder to be anonymous. All of us had that to lose, the ability to be able to blend in unnoticed.

  The three of us would be of interest around the world if our abilities were exposed, not only to people in our own government, but to agents of other governments who might decide we had secrets they could use. Private companies would seek to use our abilities too; we could easily steal secrets from a competitor, and the developer of those secrets would never know it had happened.

  It would be far better for all of us to keep the whole thing quiet. The major risk at the moment was to Surfer and to me, and Surfer was currently the only one thought to be somewhere in the US.

  #

  As for me, I was prepared for Surfer to take risks that he hesitated to assume for himself. I could be more dispassionate, even cold blooded, about what might happen to Surfer. After all, I had not put the explosive device in his neck, and if it came down to risking Surfer rather than Shezzie and myself, he would just have to take his chances.

  I understood that the thought was cold, colder than others might understand; but I had led men in combat and seen them killed while they were under my leadership, men whose lives were my responsibility when they'd died. I felt more in common with those men than with Surfer, and I would have risked much more for them than I would be willing to risk for him.

  That attitude comes with the assumption of responsibility when you lead. I had made every effort to protect them at the time, as they had done for me within the limits of their ability, while we worked to accomplish our shared mission. That made the combat losses much harder to bear; those dead and maimed men were personal failures on my part. But Surfer and I had only gone through a training program together, and essentially that defined the complete relationship between us. I hoped it would not come down to my having to choose between Surfer and Shezzie, or for that matter, between Surfer and myself.

  No, we had very little in common at all. Even in the area of Talents, he had his abilities and I had mine. He had warned me, true, but he had done so in the hope that we could somehow protect each other if the opportunity arose. Meantime, Shezzie had become important to me; I wasn’t prepared to take risks concerning her well-being that could be avoided.

  So I had come to the library today because I could kill two birds with one stone, return some borrowed library materials, then research what medical care was available in Juarez so that I could talk to Surfer about what I’d found.

  Many of the physicians and dentists practicing in Juarez had been trained in US universities, but for whatever reason had decided to open offices in Juarez. Family and citizens
hip might have played a part. Some, indeed, had offices in El Paso as well as in Juarez. I would avoid those; they had the same drawbacks that a doctor from El Paso had, regarding our purposes.

  My ideal professional was a general surgeon, even a neurosurgeon, although I doubted that I would find such a one. But it might be possible to locate a general surgeon who could perform the operation, assisted by Shezzie and overwatched by me, and with a healthy fee and a promise that there might be more to come. And with Surfer examining his motives for any sign of betrayal, again assisted by Shezzie? It might be doable.

  I entered the library and quickly spotted the man I’d seen in the cafeteria after the accident; I remembered him because of the interest he’d shown in Shezzie and me. That interest, with no known reason for it, had caused us to leave as soon as we could do so without attracting notice. Still, we’d wondered at the time. There was a young woman with the man today, but she was no one I had seen before. I sensed agitation from her; my Talent picked it up, but really, any observer would probably have done the same.

  I collected the materials I was interested in and took a seat at a nearby table, sitting behind the man I hadn’t yet identified; perhaps I could hear what they were saying; my TP wasn't good enough to pick up all their thoughts.

  The two were generating intense feelings and I picked that up immediately. I could even pick up the man’s name, Ray, and I could sense that he was sympathetic to the young woman and perhaps a bit more. Empathetic was a better descriptive, and the girl was clearly worried, angry, and fearful. It proved quite easy for my improved Talent to pick up the strong emotions, and after a bit, even some idea of what the two were saying. I couldn’t tell if I got his name from his mind or from that of the young woman, but I also caught her name, Ana Maria.