Vandenberg just hoped Wallace delivered for the President, no matter how closely he followed orders.
April 9, 1953
It was an unusually warm night in Moscow, which meant that it was actually above freezing, and the breeze was keeping most of the smoke and smog well above ground level. The Russians were embracing these first signs of spring, walking through Red Square at a leisurely pace and enjoying the sights and sounds. A small band played traditional music in one corner, and several carts offered steaming cups of tea from battered samovars. Most of these Russians were among the nation’s elites—government workers, midlevel military officers, minor Party functionaries, factory foremen and the like. A few less-fortunate citizens mingled with the rest, mostly cutting through the square to get wherever they needed to be, whether it was work or home. The luxury of a stroll on a clear night with a cup of tea wasn’t theirs to have, despite living in a worker’s paradise. A few of these souls, clad in the woolen coats and trousers of the proletariat, were noticeably drunk. Most everyone else paid these unfortunates little mind.
That suited Danny Wallace just fine. He pulled a small bottle out of his coat pocket and gave it a long pull. The label said Stolichnaya, but the contents were simply water. Admittedly, he’d always had a taste for Russian vodka, but tonight wasn’t the night. He replaced the bottle in his coat and picked up the broom and long-handled dustpan from where they leaned against the side of a garbage bin before continuing his slow, leisurely patrol of Red Square, on the hunt for cigarette butts and candy wrappers.
Join the CIA and see the world, he thought. What a great idea.
To be fair, it was a great cover. The actual street cleaners only worked from nine in the morning until six in the evening, but nobody seemed to notice or care that someone was working late, nor would they bother to question it. It was his fourth night on the job, and the NKVD men posted around the square were already ignoring him. The first night, one came up and questioned him, but his cover story—that one of the Party men wanted an extra shift to cover the square to improve cleanliness and prevent vagrancy—passed muster, as did the work order and papers Sorensen had lifted from the Kremlin’s maintenance offices the week prior. The NKVD man let him be, and he’d been free to roam ever since, complete with limited access to the bowels of the Kremlin itself, thanks to a stolen key to the janitorial department.
It was all going according to plan, including Sorensen’s nightly forays into the most secure, secretive parts of the Kremlin itself. For the past week, MAJESTIC-12’s very own Invisible Man had gained access to the entire building, thanks to momentary lapses in security, unlocked doors, and, of course, his Enhancement. He’d been able to rifle through Beria’s desk drawers, take photos of Malenkov’s personal diary, listen in on phone calls between high officials, and lift hundreds of forms and papers that would help MAJESTIC-12 wreak havoc on the Soviet Union.
Danny wondered if the Soviet Variants had gained similar access to the White House. Their shadow Variant—a man who could project a shadow image of himself anywhere in the world—could very well have gotten into the White House or Defense Department with ease, but he wasn’t invisible, and more importantly, it didn’t seem like he could actually move material objects without becoming material himself. If he was the best Beria had, Danny felt pretty good about keeping American secrets safe.
“Shouldn’t you be cleaning, Comrade?” came a voice from behind him, speaking Russian.
Danny smiled and didn’t bother turning around, but he did pick up the pace a little. “Your accent needs work, Tim,” he muttered in English. “Any problems?”
“None whatsoever,” the voice replied. Danny could feel Sorensen standing next to him, but saw nothing. “Thank God it’s a warm night. Mrs. Stevens says she can’t insulate this suit. Gonna get the flu or something.”
“How’d the bag work out?”
“Halloween is on. See you back at the house, Comrade Colonel.”
Danny chuckled and went back to his cleaning. “The bag” was a new innovation from Mrs. Stevens. Sorensen’s Enhancement allowed him to be invisible—but in the beginning, only when he was buck naked. MAJESTIC-12’s resident genius had created a kind of mesh suit for Sorensen to wear, which gave him some limited protection from the elements and certainly helped with modesty. She was able to create small pockets in the suit so he could squirrel away papers and keys, even a small pistol when warranted. But bigger items still eluded them, resulting in the sight of a satchel or bag being carried around by invisible hands—which was hardly covert by any measure.
After another half hour spent sweeping up, Danny carried his garbage bin back inside and locked up for the evening, then took his usual roundabout way home, using two separate subway lines and three buses that took him an hour out of his way. At least he got to sit—Sorensen would walk the entire way home, invisibly.
By the time Danny arrived back at the safe house, Mrs. Stevens had a dinner of chicken, potatoes, beets, and carrots ready. Danny had offered to create a rotation to cover meal prep, but Mrs. Stevens insisted on cooking—though she was happy to surrender dish duty in the process. Sorensen had already arrived and unpacked his bag, judging from the pile of documents on the table next to the food. There were also three NVKD uniforms thrown over one of the chairs—a key resource for any future operations that they’d been itching to get their hands on.
Danny immediately shucked his coat and took a seat at the table, while Mrs. Stevens gathered some documents and stood at the head to give her now-nightly briefing. “All right, couple things,” she began. “Let’s start with the back-burner stuff. Tim here found a number of communiqués from Eastern Europe, complaining to other members of the Politboro that Beria’s MGB has been, for want of a better word, slacking off in keeping their people in line.”
“How so?” Danny asked.
“Diplomatic relations are handled through Molotov, but Beria is charged with working directly with the secret police in the Eastern Bloc countries, like the Stasi in East Germany,” Mrs. Stevens said. “Most of them are afraid to take any initiative without consulting with Beria first, and he hasn’t been keeping up with their requests for guidance lately. So they’re worried that they’re going to see some dissent. With Stalin gone, some are even wondering if that’s permissible. Of course, the Politburo says it’s counterrevolutionary, so no.”
“Why does this matter?” Ekaterina asked. “We’re in Moscow, not other countries.”
“If we want to undermine Beria, encouraging dissent elsewhere could be a possibility,” Danny said. “Any good candidates, Rose?”
She shuffled through several papers. “I like East Germany for that, maybe Hungary. Both have economic issues that could light a fuse if things get worse. But they’re not quite ready yet.”
“Okay, keep an eye on it,” Danny said. “What else?”
“This is the good one,” Mrs. Stevens said. “Obviously, Beria keeps his most sensitive stuff at the Lubyanka, MGB headquarters, not at the Kremlin. But he’s also first deputy premier, so his office at the Kremlin handles some things for him. Tim found a request for the transportation minister to add an additional train car on a Leningrad-to-Moscow route three days from now to accommodate a ‘special NKVD project’ based in Leningrad.”
Frank shrugged as he helped himself to more potatoes. “That could be anything.”
“Except there’s a roster that includes twenty names. Any of them look familiar?” Mrs. Stevens asked, handing Frank a sheet of paper.
“Yeah, there’s a Variant in there, Victor Smirnov,” Frank said, handing the list to Katie. “Our old friend Yushchenko says the swimmer’s there. Maybe two others, not sure. If so, unknown abilities.”
“Here is another,” Katie said. “Alexei Ivanovich Rustov. He can create water out of thin air. Lots of water. Like Beria does with fire.”
Frank and Danny traded a look. “Our old friend from Istanbul,” Frank said. “It’ll be nice, punching him in the face
.”
Danny nodded. “Best as I can tell, there’s only a few Variants left in Leningrad. Seems like he’s cleaning the place out, consolidating them here.” There were looks around the table, and Danny knew that this was their best chance yet to hit Beria where it hurt. “Rose, we’re gonna need a plan.”
She smiled and opened another folder. “Already thought of that. It’ll take some doing, but I think we can grab ’em. Or if not, well … we can at least deny them to Beria.”
“I’d much rather capture them,” Danny said. “I think we can all agree there. What are the variables?”
Mrs. Stevens scanned the list of names and pulled out a railway map. “Obviously, unknown powers is a big one, but worse comes to worse, we can use null generators to even our odds. There’s a lot of rural space in Russia, even right outside the city, so time and place isn’t an issue. But there’s a lot of MGB people here. We’ll have to figure out what to do with them. If we have to use Enhancements, well, they’re going to run straight to Beria to tell him what they saw.”
Danny nodded quietly. “Frank and I will take care of it. Let’s get to work.”
April 10, 1953
There are times when the Lord decides to try men’s hearts, and Calvin Hooks was sure that getting rained on in a muddy trench on some Korean hillside was one of them. His olive drab fatigues were soaked through, and while his helmet provided some cover, the metal was cold, chilling him to the bone. At least they had a sputtering fire, courtesy of a subtle spark from Tim Yamato’s Enhancement, which had only led the Colombian fellow to stare and ask more questions.
Of course, while Miguel’s English was pretty good, the whole concept of Variants was a tough one to manage. Yamato had leaned on a shared knowledge of comic books to get the point across, which had apparently led Miguel to wonder whether he could learn how to fly.
Wouldn’t that be nice, Cal thought. Maybe we could get a nice aerial view of things, track this Chinese boy down fast and easy.
But there was nothing fast nor easy about their mission. Without Danny to point them in the right direction, they ended up having to go from unit to unit, muscling in on interrogations of Chinese prisoners for any inkling of intel on the superpowered soldier who could change the direction of bullets. And always—still, now, even with Truman having desegregated the armed forces—Cal and Yamato had to put up with all kinds of white-boy grief. Never mind that Cal now wore the double-bars of a U.S. Army captain. Never mind that he had orders drawn up by Colonel Kern himself—or, rather, orders Kern reluctantly signed under orders from Washington. They were still questioned and hassled and given all kinds of static about how some “nigger officer” and his “gook sergeant” and “that wetback spic” were tying things up with prisoner transfers.
It took all of Cal’s God-given patience not to punch some of those crackers into next year. A couple times, he hadn’t even bothered to ask Jesus for forgiveness after getting short-tempered. Some of those boys deserved a good old-fashioned chewing out, and Cal had been around enough Army boys over the past five years to dish it out pretty well.
But finally, after a couple weeks of going from unit to unit, from POW camps to MASH units to rear-guard intel units and turf freshly retaken at the front line, they’d finally found a Chinese Red with something useful. Their initial chat under the watchful eye of Army Intelligence had led Cal to believe the boy—and he was a boy, probably no older than seventeen—had known something. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably when Cal started talking about “unusual soldiers” who seemed “blessed.” It had taken some doing to kick the intelligence officer out of the building, but once they had, Cal had asked Yamato to produce a little parlor trick, and a second later the Japanese American’s hand had been covered in flickering arcs of lightning.
The translator had nearly had a heart attack. The Chinese boy had spilled everything shortly after.
They still didn’t know the Chinese Variant’s name, but the soldiers had taken to calling him Black Wind—a rather impressive nickname, Cal thought. Black Wind had apparently kept his ability secret from the officers around him, but had nonetheless risen through the ranks because of his success on the front lines, going from conscripted private to full lieutenant in just six months. The men, of course, loved him, because all they had to do was come up behind him and fire away, knowing damn well that Black Wind would keep them from getting shot.
The interrogated soldier even said that he personally believed that Black Wind was secretly one of the xian—the Immortals of ancient Taoist belief, even though Black Wind himself said he didn’t really know and generally doubted it.
Then the soldier asked Yamato if he was an Immortal.
Yamato just smiled. “Maybe.”
That idea hadn’t sat too well with Cal, but from that point, it had been easy enough to get a unit name from the Chinese boy, including where he thought the unit had last been seen. Naturally, they were in the thick of it, right where the fighting was worst, but it wasn’t as though they had a choice. So Cal had taken Yamato and Miguel, thrown them in the jeep and, to Army Intelligence’s chagrin, commandeered the translator as well, a Korean fellow named Kim Park Song, who had been too damned scared to question anything they asked after having seen Yamato’s arm light up like a Jacob’s ladder.
And now here they were, at the very front lines, stuck in the rain, trying to keep a fire going and wondering just how to get across to the Chinese side of the line without getting killed. The best plan they figured on was, in Cal’s estimation, outright horrible.
“It’ll work, I swear,” Yamato said, huddling under his rain poncho. “I look Korean enough, don’t I?”
Kim looked him over. “Maybe so, if it is dark outside, but you do not actually speak Korean. Or Chinese.”
“But you do, Kim. So you’ll take the lead, I’ll stay back and stay quiet. I’ll even put a bandage around my throat so they think I can’t talk no more. We cuff Cal and Miguel here, tell ’em we took ’em prisoner, and that they have special information for Black Wind.”
Cal shook his head sadly, with a grim smile on his face. “What if that Chinese fellow made your face couple weeks ago? You were throwing the lightning around pretty good.”
Yamato smiled. “Well, that’s the best part. When I let loose, I tend to blind people. I figure he really didn’t get a good look at any of us. Plus, he was concentrating on not getting shot. Face it, it’s the best plan we got.”
“This is a horrible plan,” Miguel chimed in. “Just get me close enough. If I can see him, I can shoot him, and we can go home.”
“No can do, Miguel,” Cal said. “Those ain’t our orders, and it’s not something I’m interested in doing unless we got no other choice. We gotta try to capture him before we pull the trigger.”
Looking nervously at each of his new compatriots in turn, Kim piped up again. “So let us say that we get behind enemy lines and the Communists decide that we are telling the truth, which they will not. Let us say we meet this Black Wind. And even though he can do what you say he can do, that he can move bullets with his mind? Let us say we capture him. Somehow. We do not know how yet. But we do. How do we bring him back to the U.N. side of the lines? If they think he is a xian, then they will come and try to rescue him, yes?”
Cal shrugged. “We gotta give him a chance to defect to our side first. Folks like us—like Rick and Miguel and me—we’re pretty special. And I’d like to think we look out for each other. Plus, compared to what I know of how the Commies treat folks like us, I think Mister Black Wind may want to take his chance with us.”
“Hei Feng,” Kim corrected.
“What?”
“His name in Chinese. We should all know it, so we know who to ask for.”
Cal nodded. Honestly, it really was a horrible plan, and it was predicated on no fewer than three big strokes of luck even before Kim and Yamato marched into a Chinese camp with Cal and Miguel held “captive.”
Cal took some small comfort
that, even if Danny was there, he wouldn’t have magically had better options for them, though his tracking ability sure would have come in handy.
“All right,” Cal said. “We’re gonna go across, hopefully find some uniforms for Rick and Kim here. Now, I would much rather sneak around and try to spot Hei Feng before we try to march into a camp. Ideally, he’s gonna go take a leak or something away from everyone else and we can grab him then. This little play-act you got going, that’s our last resort. And since we got no time limit, I suggest we load up on rations here, because I’d rather wait a week to get him quietly than give ourselves over to the Chinese.”
There were grim nods all around the guttering fire, which Rick hit again with an arc of lightning to keep going under the deluge. Cal stood and felt his back protest—it’d been a few weeks since he’d been able to grab a bit of life from some livestock, and his body was getting older. No matter how much life force he gathered to make himself strong and young, or how much healing he did to age himself, Cal’s body was like a slow-motion rubber band, eventually heading back to his late fifties. He’d arrived in Korea the equivalent of a hale, hearty twenty-eight-year-old, but was feeling easily ten years older than that now.
“Are you okay?” Miguel asked quietly.
Cal smiled at him. “I ain’t no good sleeping on the ground like you young boys.”
“You’re aging.”
“It’s what I do, Miguel,” Cal said with a nod. “I heal folks, and I get older. I take life from people or animals, I get younger. If I do neither, I fall back to my regular age.”
“How old are you?”
“Old enough to be your daddy, and that’s as specific as I care to be right now,” Cal said with a smile. “Now, I suggest you get yourself some rations and ammo and whatever else you need. We’re gonna be out there a while.”
MJ-12: Endgame Page 10
