by P. S. Power
It wasn’t true, but some of the men would be able to hear them, and it was way too late to work out what to actually do in that position. It hadn’t been what they’d trained for at all. Then, no one ever really had, so it would be no worse than anyone else doing the work.
They didn’t have to walk long, finding a nice field that was at the narrow point where two rivers met. They weren’t deep or fast in that area, but they were enough that you had to swim to reach the other side. Unless you had a bridge, of which there wasn’t one there. They’d been between that, and had moved north a way, effectively trapping themselves. The big difference was that most of their people could swim. The water would actually protect them as well as a wall would from the plainsmen.
Not that he loved being there, locked in place.
It wasn’t their choice, however. Just theirs to go and fight, as the High General wanted. Hopefully he wasn’t an idiot. George was not at all assured of that. Then again, he wasn’t the one in charge. It was always easy to claim you knew best, with partial knowledge of what was really happening in the world, but harder to be the one making all the difficult calls.
It was still an act of faith to stand there, getting ready to fight.
After the wagon stopped, there was a wave from Regina, about an eighth of a mile away.
He jogged over, with her smiling as he approached.
“I’ve got him. The man in charge… Their Chief. We need to go and speak to the High General. Things are not what they seem to be here at all.”
“Oh?”
She nodded.
“Yes. The man in charge here… He’s from your world, George. A… terrorist? These barbarians have bombs. We’re in horrible danger here!”
He nodded then. It didn’t make sense, but he could adapt, if he had to. In a way, the last twelve years had all been about learning to deal with new and strange things.
“And we’re trapped with a river at our backs. Do they have rockets?” If that was the case, then the only thing left to do was to rush in, getting so close to the other forces that no one would ever think to launch the things, lest they kill their own fighters.
“No. They have to carry them in, then blow themselves up… I can’t see that working well.”
He smiled then. The whole idea worked in his head, almost instantly. All the other side had to do was give the boxes or barrels to men to carry toward the line, then remotely detonate the things, using a Wizard. They didn’t have remote control devices and it was, historically, very hard to get people to commit suicide to take out a few of the enemy.
In general, human beings loved to live. That probably meant the men doing that part of the work wouldn’t understand what awaited them when they were successful. So, there was a weak point in the plans.
The Wizards. Without them, the bombs might as well have been rocks being carried toward the enemy lines.
“We can deal with that, then. Let’s go, we really do have to speak with some people.”
Chapter ten
The car swerved a bit as he blinked in. That wasn’t just due to his being distracted. The street under him was icy, it seemed. It meant steering into the slide, which happened automatically. That wasn’t even a big shock, since the road he was on was physically white with slick, packed snow. Interestingly, he had an electronic GPS device on the dash, telling him where to go. That had been picked up in a truck stop, for about two hundred dollars. The other him, the kid from Stena, had wisely enough paid cash for it.
Then, like an idiot, the guy had them driving at night, when the curfew was set. Only the snow and freezing weather saved him on that one. No one had stopped him, or were even out on the roads, since it was too cold for crime or even speeding.
The twerp had also gotten them seen on camera making the purchase, but that could be dealt with. After all, it had been just outside of Springfield. It was legal to own a device like that. The trick would be in making certain it was destroyed at the end of the mission, so it couldn’t be used to track where he’d gone. The device would have a data collection unit in it, after all. It wasn’t supposed to, but everything did. They had for years.
The hard part there was knowing if the NSA could and would trace his path, using the thing. There was almost no way to get around the fact that he was going to be seen on his trip. Part of why he was moving at night was to avoid pieces of the digital observation that would be going on. Street cams, highway tracking devices, even satellites.
Even given that, George understood something very clearly. He was, almost certainly, a patsy in the making. If anything went wrong, then it would be reported as a lone nut, probably a militia member, going off and killing a man for no reason. Well, other than racism. He was white after all. So was the man he was going to kill, but people would skip that part, since he was from the Middle East.
They always forgot that not all the people from that area were brown.
It didn’t really matter. Either he did a good job and could trust that would earn him some protection, or he took out the source of a lot of the problems his country was having and was sold into prison for it. That would be unfortunate, but honestly, he couldn’t hold back and do nothing, if he had a way of stopping all the deaths that had been going on.
The road was insane at the moment. It had been plowed, probably several times. The snow wasn’t gone though, given how cold it was. Even with his car heater on high it was barely forty degrees inside the vehicle. Outside it was a lot worse. Thankfully he’d bundled up well, so was going to make it. The trick was to prepare first. Having the right outfit was important in the cold weather. What he had on was very nearly as good as anything on the market, he noticed. Better than what he’d owned the day before.
The draining of his bank account was going to hurt a bit later, he didn’t doubt, when he saw the bank statement. After all, the FBI and the military probably wouldn’t be paying him anything for the work he did that day. It was part of why he was driving at night, so that he could kill the other man as he went to his morning prayers. Hopefully the cold weather wouldn’t stop his target, Mullah Abejine, from taking the two hundred feet of morning walk to the mosque near his home.
If so, then George had three other chances to get the man, at a distance. It could take days to make happen, which would impact his life, he knew. Worse, if he missed the first time, the whole thing would become much, much harder to get done. Flying bullets got people to hide, most of the time. Maybe even changing locations for safety.
Not that he was planning to miss, but he was really out of practice. Yes, the skills were still there and in a way, he was ready for war at the moment, but it was a different kind of thing. His mind was worn down and fuzzy, thanks to what had been happening in the other world. Worse, here he was, driving a car, leaving that poor kid, George from Stena, to go off into battle, possibly not even knowing what needed to be done for certain.
Well, that wasn’t literally true, thankfully. The plan was kind of simple. They had to send in teams to stop the Wizards, and the leader of the Tollan, taking him out before the end of the battle. Otherwise they might well see a return of more organized forces in the future. Hit with waves of real combat for years on end. The man using secrets from another world to fight in ways that Stena wasn’t ready for.
Kind of like George had been doing, but in a more technical fashion. The rules of war had suddenly changed, thanks to one man, however. It wasn’t even him. Not really. Someone else might have figured out how to fight the barbarians, without him being there. The methods of the Weapons Masters weren’t that different than what the Tollan used, after all.
The big issue in that moment was the High General. The man had not loved hearing about the new changes. On the great side, he believed that the Witch had found something from the mind of another leader and accepted they needed to be ready to handle things in a new way. He simply didn’t love the idea of doing it by assassination. It was foolish, but the man had, grudgingly, admitted that the
y needed to do something. At least if they weren’t sending twenty-thousand people, including themselves, straight to hell.
At the same time, it was clear that no one on the command staff really understood what might be taking place there. There were limits on what kind of bombs were coming in. They had to be man carried, or on horse, since the plainsmen didn’t really have animal pulled wagons. Not that anyone had seen. The resources for that were hard to collect as well. Bombs could be made from things that were collected from nature however. Especially if you didn't have a government there to stop your years of efforts in doing it.
On the good side, the range of the Wizards had limits. On the bad, Regina was fairly certain that it was something along the lines of being hundreds of miles, not the half mile that they’d be away from things during the battle. It was a mistake, bringing them that close, but also made some sense. They had people who could control energy, influence physical events and all that, but they were weak as far as data collection at a distance, even if their powers could do that. They also didn’t have radios, to allow them to act on command.
So, they were being held closer, which was the only thing that might save the fighters from Stena. A good way to shut down a bomb was to disable the detonators.
Then, just as they were setting up the teams, going into who would be trying to do what he was suddenly driving his freaking car. George, the other one, hadn’t even thought to get a different one. It probably meant he was going to have to at least repaint it in the next few days. It was a nice silver color at the time. A thing that he’d done himself, having a bit of down time at the garage about six months before. Gary had been considering putting in painting so had the equipment. They just hadn’t had the time to do that kind of thing yet.
If he did a good enough job, he could sell it as trying to pick up women, however. It hadn’t been his way in life, but putting that out into the world was going to be enough for most people. If he dressed the thing up enough, everyone seeing it would get the idea. That he was emotionally insecure and thought women were idiots that could be swayed by a pretty bit of expensive looking vehicle.
Not that he cared or even thought that was always real. Enough people did to use it as protective coloration.
The streets didn’t get better, moving toward Dearborn. That it was the right spot, the place where Muslim terrorists were hiding themselves, wasn’t even hard to figure out. As a raw guess, he would have picked that very spot. With a little study, he could have even found the right mosque, he bet. It would have taken about half an hour of Googling. Probably not a lot more. Dearborn had the largest Islamic population in the U.S. after all. They controlled parts of the city, and had a habit of generating terrorists.
Not constantly, but that wasn’t because the Muslims there were so moderate. Some were, of course. That wasn’t even a thing to consider. About twenty to forty percent of them were all in on the killing of the infidels, however. That meant the regular people around them. Now, it wasn’t to the level of thinking that they, personally should kill anyone.
That part was the saving grace of terrorism, actually.
There were far more people that thought it was a great idea than there were individuals willing to lose their lives in trying to make it happen. That part took careful grooming of marginalized individuals, even in the Middle East.
The recruiters had to find insane, often suicidal people, then offer them both forgiveness for all their sins, along with payments in cash for their families to get them to blow themselves up or to make a suicide attack. Even at that, with all the cash and prizes being offered, the vast majority of people backed out at the last minute. Even zealots weren’t willing to die for Allah all that easily.
It was very nearly the only thing that had kept Islam from taking over the world. That the fear of death existed in people everywhere.
He wasn’t all that clever in his approach to the mosque. The world was white there, covered with snow from the same storm that had hit Springfield. There were no cars out when he parked about two blocks away, walking into the office building that he wanted to use for his perch. No one tried to stop him, even if he was carrying a large duffle bag, stuffed to make it seem like he had his laundry with him. The shot was a long one from there, but he’d made longer. There was a secondary site, closer to the action, but it was actually in a secured building that faced the correct direction, so this place had been picked for the job at hand.
The weapon he had with him was the slower, but far more accurate hard wired remote shooting system. That took about two minutes to set up and aim at the door of the house he wanted. If the data was correct, three or four men would be walking out all at once, in about ten minutes. The sky was getting lighter, but the Mullah liked to do the call to prayer himself. That meant he left in the dark, before a white thread could be told from a black one.
Night vision wasn’t going to help, given the distance, but there was a handy porch light that had been left on, right over the door. The man wasn’t a giant, but Abejine was six-one. Stooped a bit with age, meaning that George had an approximate setting for where the head would be. If he missed, he had to get out of there after one shot.
Well, that needed to happen regardless, but he could abort the operation if he had to, that morning. The biggest issue he had at the moment was that his breath showed on the exposed rooftop. His head was below the snow-covered edge of the building, and someone had been helpfully cleaning the thing of snow, so there was a layer of ice, but it wasn’t even trying to melt under him yet.
His eyes and cheeks stung from the chill air. In fact, the hairs inside his nose felt like they were trying to freeze together with each breath. His nipples were hard, but it wasn’t the fear of what he was doing that had that going on. Soon they’d become sore, if he were outside for too long. It was part of why the operation might just work that day. If the puffing white cloud above him wasn’t seen first. There were lights behind him, but putting them out would, possibly, attract more attention than leaving them. What there wasn’t, up there on the roof of the low rent business operation, was a camera.
Once he dialed in the machine, the weapon pointed directly at the door, at the right level, he waited. The trigger mechanism was in his right hand, his thumb on the button, partially depressing the thing. That was dangerous, but the window he had to make the kill in wasn’t going to be long. Less than a second. He had to figure out which form in the doorway was the correct one, let the head come into the sight picture on the screen and fire inside of that time frame.
Technically, it couldn’t be done. Human beings weren’t fast enough as far as simple reflexes when it came to making it happen. The best snipers could do it about ninety percent of the time however. A few people had claimed it was a sign that psychic powers actually existed in real life. George had always figured that was bullshit, but Regina, his wife in another world, could certainly do it.
Except that it was probably all just make believe. That idea had occurred to him before as well. Real insanity never held totally immersive hallucinations like he perceived, but you might be deluded enough to think that you were seeing things without that being a real part of it. He thought. Which wasn’t the right thing to be doing. Focusing on the door, he tried to put everything he had in that one moment. Waiting.
For a long time, it felt like. The cold ate at him, making his fingers feel numb, even under the gloves. For a moment, he worried that the leather, stuffed inside with filler to keep his fingers from falling off, would get in the way of the button being depressed properly. Just as he thought that, his thumb not moving on the black device that was wired to the high-powered rifle by a dark cord, the white door on the screen moved.
Opening.
The first man out wasn’t anyone that had been in the data file sent by General Sayner. He was darker skinned, but clean shaved and wearing a heavy blue coat that made him seem very much like he belonged in the States. Right behind him however was the man with the lon
g white and gray beard. The face was the correct one, so as soon as the head moved into frame, his thumb convulsed. The weapon wasn’t silenced, so he jumped, after the fact. The loud sound carrying in the near dark and cold of the early morning.
The screen showed a falling man, but nothing other than that. It wouldn’t. Not in the conditions that he was in at the moment. What did happen, he saw, was that the man in the blue heavy coat didn’t duck down like the others did.
No, instead he scanned the horizon. It would be dark to him, and George wasn’t stupid enough to backlight himself, so he was nearly invisible. That meant he was reasonably shocked when a fire started, about twenty feet away from him, to his left. Just bursting out of nothing, hanging in the air. Above the roof, as it turned out, but then starting to move across it, as if searching for prey. It was pretty, but also seemed very unreal, as it happened.
Grinning, George re-aimed. It took dialing the controls in to the new target, carefully, which meant that the man in blue stopped what he was doing and ran inside, the others clearly calling him to get the door closed, instead of freezing like it had to seem to them he was doing.
“Well. Fuck.”
On the great side, he probably had the chief of the Tollan located. On the bad one, the man was still alive, a Wizard and his powers worked in the wrong world. That part just wasn’t fair. Delusion or not.
He moved quickly, taking the brass from the single shot and walking calmly from the place. Again, no one stopped him, or was even there to see that he was around. If the place had security, they weren’t doing a very good job of it. The rifle went into the trunk of his silver vehicle, and he drove away carefully. Pretending that he was making his morning commute on treacherous roads.
It was slow going, but he found an open rest stop on the way back, which was over a nice river that was partly frozen over at the edges. The GPS was disabled first, being broken beyond reasonable repair. Then acid was put down the barrel of the expensive mechanized rifle. He took it apart and made an effort to break everything he could on it beyond recognition. Then, he tossed all the bits into the river. It wasn’t a perfect solution, and anyone finding the thing would probably understand what it was for, but with the prints wiped off it wasn’t going to show up as being him that had done it.
