by Mike Leon
Megan walks calmly down the hall, past the bathroom, and to the elevator. She rides the elevator down two floors and starts wandering. She knows only in theory what she’s looking for, and she cannot stop and ask for directions, both because of her impediment and also because it is not wise to draw attention to herself. She has already received a few awkward glances from people she passed in the hallway, though they went on about their business without stopping her. Those were people in normal clothes though, not soldiers. She tries to avoid soldiers, but when that is impossible she simply passes them, keeping a straight face, as if she belongs there. She circles the whole fourth floor before deciding her query must be elsewhere. She takes the stairwell up to the next floor. She walks those halls for only a few minutes before she finds what she seeks.
When she finds him, Sid Hansen is doing the most spectacular sort of weight lifting she has ever seen. With his right hand, he dangles from an I-beam that runs the length of the gym room ceiling. He grunts as he pulls himself up to touch his chin on the beam, then back down again. With his left hand he curls, not a hand weight, but a full-size barbell upon each successful chin-up. A gruff voice startles her.
“Hey! What are you doing here?” barks a tall Graveyard operator wearing black fatigues. He stands in the doorway at her back, halfway in the hall still. He has a big gun in his hands, but he isn’t pointing it at her. He just hovers over her with a condescending stare.
“Your mom or dad brought you here?” he asks.
She shakes her head.
“What’s your name, kid?”
She only looks back at him, wide-eyed and frightened. She doesn’t know what to say.
“The girl is with me,” says Sid, without stopping his exercise routine or even turning around to look at them.
“Uh,” the operator stammers. “I can’t have unauthorized children wandering this floor on my watch.”
Sid drops down from the ceiling and turns around to face her. He is shirtless and his chest is a mass of muscles upon muscles. His six-pack is more like a twelve-pack. His arms and hands are striped with straight scars. His abyssal eyes zero past her, on the operator standing over her. Those eyes are black like coal.
“I, uh,” the operator says. “Yeah.”
Then he slowly backs out into the hall and walks away.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” Sid says. “How did you lose your guards?”
She shrugs.
“I’m not surprised. Walter’s operators lack discipline. They are not good warriors.”
He sits down on a small wooden bench as he says this and he picks up a plastic water bottle. He gulps some water.
Megan sits down on the bench to his right. She brushes her hair back behind her left ear using her right hand. The motion is unnatural, but she doesn’t want him looking at her mangled fingers.
“I’ve been spending time with the Filekeeper in the sub-sub-basement,” Sid says. “He has asked me some very strange questions.”
Megan crooks her head to the side curiously.
“Is killing wrong?” he asks. There is a clinical coldness in his voice and he eyes her creepily as he waits for a response.
Megan can’t answer. Even if she could speak, she wouldn’t know what to tell him. Of course killing people is wrong. But then, sometimes it’s okay – like in wars or when the police kill bad guys. She wishes someone would kill the bad man.
Megan throws up her hands in cluelessness.
Sid looks disappointed.
“Nobody else knows either. I think the answer is no, but they keep telling me it’s not that simple.”
It must not be. Ms. Fields, her social studies teacher, always says violence never solves anything, but that doesn’t really make sense. If it were true, then people would have stopped hurting each other long ago.
“The word doesn’t make sense. If you do something wrong, then it doesn’t work. If you clean your gun wrong then it jams. If you apply the rear naked choke wrong, then your opponent escapes. But killing works. When I kill my targets, they stop doing the things I don’t want them to do.”
The guy is seriously all up in his head. Most of the boys she knows don’t think about stuff like this. It’s really hot.
“The rags say someone called Allah punishes you for killing after you die, but I’ve seen a lot of dead rags and they just lay there. Nobody does anything to them.”
Megan scoots closer to him. Maybe if she touches him he’ll get the picture.
“But then why didn’t I kill the guards at the front door when we got here? That’s what he keeps wanting to know. They tried to shoot me. He says I should kill them now so they don’t try to finish the job. But then their allies might try to kill me if I do that, so I need to kill them as well. Then I need to kill anyone who is allies with those people too. And those people. And the people after that. It doesn’t stop. I think I just need to kill everybody. Everybody on the planet needs to die. It makes my head hurt when I think about it.”
He puts his head in his hands. Megan watches him. Is he upset? Is he crying? She thinks maybe he’s crying.
Megan reaches to put her good hand on his leg. He snatches her wrist and glares at her. She gasps.
“What are you doing?” he says. He has the same coal black gaze he always maintains. He wasn’t crying. She should have known better.
Megan shrugs again.
“Don’t ever touch me. The next time I might snap that arm off.”
Megan withdraws her hand and crosses her arms as she retreats to the other side of the bench.
Then the intercom mounted in the corner of the gym crackles alive with the sound of Judy’s voice.
“Sid Hansen, report to the war room immediately.”
The super soldier makes his way for the door.
“You should go back to your room,” he says as he leaves her. “They’ll be looking for you.”
KILL TEAM ONE TWO
“You’re aiming for this spot here,” Sergeant Holman says. He shouts in Sid’s face over the noise of the jet engines, while pointing at the back of a model plane. His face is half covered by the breathing mask that is necessitated by the altitude. Sid just keeps thinking how stupid this is.
Ahead of him, the stratosphere beyond the bay door is like an ocean of cold blue emptiness. Even clouds do not dare reach this high. In one hand, the boy grips a colt M4 loaded with high capacity box magazines taped together in sets of two. In the other, he holds a fifty foot length of shock cable that is attached to a harness over his ballistic jacket. Pockets on the jacket hold sixteen extra magazines and a dozen darts for the modified M9 strapped to his right leg. He breathes one-hundred-percent oxygen from a tank on his back.
Deadeye shouts into Sid’s face even louder than Holman did.
“We coated yer knife with nerve agent fer any close encounters and the darts are tipped with some nasty designer shit that will put down an elephant in like a tenth of a second. You see any escapees from Jurassic Park, you shoot ’em with that.”
“What’s Jurassic Park?” Sid asks.
“Dinosaurs, kid. Dinosaurs. Listen, Krupp only trusts his own security people. His team is like a who’s who of career guys. He’s got DEVGRU, SAS, you name it. Even Spetznaz – old Spetznaz! There’s about twenty of these guys. Some of us call them the Renfields, you know, on account of the fucker looks like Count Dracula from that old movie.”
“I knew I wasn’t the only one!” Walter shouts.
“One what?”
“Nothing.”
Walter puts his hand on Sid’s shoulder. Sid hates that. He hated it when his father did it. He hated it even more when Ashley did it. Now he loathes it. He let Grenadine touch him and that was a mistake. That stupid Van Duyn girl tried to touch him and he scolded her. He can’t scold Walter.
“We’re all counting on you, son,” Walter says. Son. Why do they all call him that? He is…frustrated. For the first time ever, he questions his orders. He wants to be back in the
sub-sub-basement with the Filekeeper and its stacks of books, or following Morgan around the Graveyard building to see what curious things he does. He remembers Grenadine and how soft and smooth her skin felt against him. That would be much better than this. No. No it would not. That was a mistake. He has to remind himself again.
“This is a terrible idea,” he shouts back.
“Why? You don’t think you can do it?” Walter’s half covered face shows the onset of doubt. Sid shrugs.
“No. I can do it. I just don’t want to.”
“You don’t want to?” Walter repeats, as if the phrase came out in some foreign language and he needs a travel book to understand it.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t want to? What the fuck?” Walter growls. “It’s two minutes to midnight on the day before Armageddon and you got the Antichrist starin’ down the barrel of your shotgun just waitin’ for you to pull the trigger, but you don’t want to? You don’t want to? You think Kill Team One ever didn’t want to? I’m sure Kill Team One didn’t want to fight a polar bear with his bare hands naked in Alaska during a blizzard. But he did, because it needed to be done!”
“That wasn’t me. That was Kill Team One.”
“Yeah, well he’s gone and you just got promoted. You see anyone else around here qualified for the job? Look around, son. You are Kill Team One now!”
“Technically he’s Kill Team One Two!” corrects Holman.
Walter looks at the man strangely, prompting him to expand on the original statement.
“Like in comic books. You know. Green Goblin; Green Goblin Two.”
“Holman, when we get back, you’re cleaning every toilet in the goddamn building to pay me back for the ten seconds of my time you just wasted!” Walter turns his attention back to Sid without taking another breath. He points back at the open bay door. “Kill Team One, I want Krupp’s head in my hands the next time I see you! Are we clear?”
Sid gives Walter a sullen look, an act worse than treason by the standards he has been held to for his entire life. He can do nothing else. He dashes forward and leaps from the back of the plane.
Outside, Sid looks down and sees the target as a tiny dot. He stretches into a dive. This high in the air it doesn’t even feel like falling, but he knows he is speeding toward the target faster than any human was ever meant to move.
Forty thousand feet. The chill air bites into him as he readies the hook. A few feet of slack trail from his hand. The gun is slung over his shoulder now and the strap digs into his neck. If he wasn’t wearing so many layers of knitted polypropylene and a heavy down jacket then he might actually feel it. The target grows larger.
Thirty-five thousand feet. He continues his descent. The temperature is forty below zero. Getting warmer. The Condor has form now. The big black plane looks like the shadow of some huge bird cast against the ground from up here.
Thirty thousand feet. Sid can clearly make out the engines now and the tail section that is his destination. He checks his gun one more time, even though he knows it is ready. Magazines loaded. Round in the chamber. Safety off.
Twenty five thousand feet. Lining up the toss. He will only have one chance at this.
Twenty two thousand feet. Sid throws the hook at the tail of the plane. A length of shock cable streams behind it as Sid falls beyond the plane. The hook catches its target. Cable unravels behind him. It grows taut as he reaches the end of its length. Then it stretches beyond. Then it reaches its limit and Sid halts his descent. For a single infinitesimal measure, he is suspended in perfect stillness above the Earth. Then the cord begins to rubber band him back toward the plane. He is propelled upward by the elasticity of his shock cable and the acceleration of the jet like a tiny child dragged by a big unruly dog at the end of a leash. He reaches out and snatches a section of the cable closer to the plane and hangs on.
Sid begins to scale the cord with only his arms to hoist him. Soon, he has reached the tail section of the Condor. He heaves himself up onto the tailplane near the fuselage and then it is a fight against the wind to move forward. The tailplane of the Condor could be the wing of most other planes. The actual wings up ahead are so large that men could play football on them without much trouble.
Sid makes his way up onto the fuselage and lines up the spot Holman told him to plant the charges. He draws two blocks of C4 from his vest as he discards the breathing apparatus. He hangs on to the shock cord as he sticks them to the top of the plane and mashes them down into lines that will give him a clean cut. He puts the shiny metal cylindrical blasting caps in the explosive charges and then moves toward the forward section of the fuselage.
Sid detonates the charges and a flash is followed by a wisp of smoke. He barely hears the blast over the sound of the jet engines. He is already moving forward back toward the hole he has just blasted in the top of the cabin. He watches a fine wooden chair blown out past him as the compartment depressurizes. He waits as several other frivolous items escape into the wild blue. The he jumps down the hole.
The tiny room he falls into is furnished with an oak desk and little else that wasn’t sent hurtling towards the ground when he blew the ceiling open. Sid drops an empty backpack on the floor. Then he makes for the door. He has only seconds before he encounters security forces. That blast could not have gone unnoticed.
He kicks the door down and finds himself in a small hallway that is more like the interior of a train’s passenger car than that of a commercial airliner. Thick fog fills the hallway. It is lined with doors leading into little compartments. Some of the doors are open and Sid sees futons and tiny couches in the compartments. A few of them have small televisions.
Two women occupy the third room he passes. They are already huddled in the corner when he looks in on them. The room is a mess from when the compartment depressurized. Both of them are pretty girls a little older than him. One is wearing a yellow bikini and the other just a pair of sweatpants with nothing else. She covers her breasts with her hands.
“Hello,” Sid says.
“Please don’t kill us!” the topless girl shrieks. “We only came here for money! We don’t know anything!”
He doesn’t like to kill harmless girls. He figured that out about himself in the mountains with Victor. But maybe these girls aren’t harmless. Maybe this is a trick. They sure remind him of Grenadine. She would have begged in order to trick him. She did beg in the end.
He should probably kill them just to be sure.
Then he makes contact with the first of the Renfields. Two of them breach the door at the end of the hall with a shotgun and Sid fires at them with the M4. They are wearing body armor, but the needle-like 5.56 rifle rounds from his gun burn right through it. One is killed and falls on his face and knees, his body forming a sort of ramp with the ass-end pointing up at the ceiling. The other is only wounded and ducks behind the doorframe. It accomplishes nothing. Sid fires a shot through the wall and straight through the mercenary’s brain.
Sid looks back at the girls. Neither of them has moved on him. They are not in his way. The one in the bikini is drooling and gibbering on the other one’s shoulder. They appear harmless, but they are clearly in league with his target or they would not be here. If he finishes them each with a bullet to the brain stem it will be painless. He knows Kill Team One would not take any chances. He remembers what Walter said. He is Kill Team One now.
Walter. Fuck Walter. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck. Fuck. He likes that word. He should say that more.
He picks up the ass-up mercenary’s shotgun and slams the door to the girls’ compartment. He bars the door with the gun and moves on.
The next room is filled with rows of seats and an aisle between them. This is more like what Sid expected from the hundreds of airline combat drills his father made him do. He can tell as he enters that there are more women in this room. He can hear them crying under the seats. He realizes now that the plane is probably full of them. Harmless or not, dealing with each of them will
slow his advance. He makes a mad dash down the aisle scanning left and right as he goes. He must at least see their faces. He spots only a few unfamiliar crying women wearing lingerie and quickly leaves them in his dust.
Near the end of the room, the Renfields spring their next trap. One of them pops up from behind a seat holding a woman in front of him as a human shield. Two others appear in the doorway ahead. The one with the hostage extends an MP5 at Sid and fires. Sid ducks behind some seats in front of the hostage. He finds a shot underneath the chairs and takes out the hostage holder’s feet with some rifle rounds. The man falls to the floor, dragging down his hostage’s flimsy pink tube top with him.
Leaping over the seats, he nails both of the other mercenaries with his rifle. He comes down on top of the man whose feet he shot away and smashes the merc’s skull with the stock of his rifle.
The hostage wraps her arms around Sid’s right leg. Tears stream down her face as she reaches to pull her tube top up to cover her breasts. She’s another pretty girl. All of the girls on this plane are pretty.
“Thank you!” she cries. “Please don’t let me die! Please don’t let me die!”
She snatches the handle of Sid’s KA-BAR and draws it from the sheath on his leg. She lunges at him with the knife, but he turns it around on her. Just a slight knick from the point sends her sprawling to the ground.
Sid watches as she chokes and spasms from the Revenant nerve agent on his blade. Death by nerve agent is the worst kind of death. As the convulsions intensify, Sid thrusts the knife through her throat and severs her spine to finish her quickly.
“Fuck you, lady,” he says. This plane is a hazard. Anybody might try to kill him here.
Sid moves forward into the next room and is greeted by five more mercenaries. Killing them is terribly easy. All of them are shot to death before he even makes it through the doorway. This room is wide open and floored with hard wood. At the center is a long wooden table, polished to a shine. A crystal chandelier hangs over it. The table is littered with the blood and corpses of the mercenaries who tried to use it as hard cover.
