MJ-12: Endgame

by Michael J. Martinez

  Miguel nodded and headed down the hill toward the bulk of the battalion covering this part of the front. They had free rein to grab whatever they needed, within reason, and Cal was sorely tempted to grab a jeep and just drive. But that was suicide. Here, in the dark and the rain, they had the best chance of sneaking across the lines and settling into Chinese territory. It was the perfect weather for—

  Cal heard a large branch snap in the woods off to his left and, even through the rain, some sort of muffled whisper.

  Perfect weather for an ambush.

  “Down!” Cal shouted, diving for the mud.

  Muzzle flashes lit up the woods from both sides of their little encampment, and the ground was sprayed with bullets and mud. Cal heard more shots from back down the hill, and figured Miguel was being kept busy as well. Hopefully he’d run out of Chinese before he ran out of bullets.

  A blinding light erupted next to Cal as he huddled down behind a rock; Yamato was going to work with the lightning again, but stopped after a few seconds or so.

  “I can’t see for shit,” Yamato yelled. “Don’t know what I’m hitting!”

  About a hundred yards away, Cal could hear excited shouting from multiple people. “Shi tāmen! Shi tāmen!” “Tāmen zai zhe’er!” “Gàosù Hei Feng!” “Gàosù bùxi!” “Wmen b tāmen bāowéile!”

  “Kim? What they saying?” Cal called out.

  Cal looked around for the Korean translator, but Kim was nowhere to be seen from Cal’s admittedly horrible vantage point. The fact that all that chatter was happening after Yamato lit up the place couldn’t be good, though. Cal was used to people running away from Yamato’s lightning. These boys weren’t.

  The rain stopped.

  But it didn’t just peter out, nor did any sort of wind push through. The rain just stopped dead. Cal looked up at the clouds, but they were low and black and seemed like they were still ready to open up. And the sound of rain was still all around them. About twenty yards away, Cal could still see the mud splashing up from the ground where the rain was landing.

  Oh, this ain’t good.

  “Move! Back down the hill!” Cal cried out. “Let’s go!”

  Cal grabbed Yamato by the scruff of his poncho and dragged the young man to his feet, but before they could get going, a metal canister landed at Cal’s feet, a thick cloud of white gas spewing forth from it. Cal tried to kick it away, but the gas was already doing its work, and his foot missed the target as his world suddenly became very dizzy.

  As Cal fell back onto the mud, he began to nod. He understood it now.

  Just as they were hunting the Immortal Black Wind, no doubt Hei Feng was doing the same, looking for the lightning thrower and his friends.

  Then Cal’s world went black, his last conscious thought being how disappointed Sally was gonna be that he wasn’t coming home.

  April 12, 1953

  Light bathed the grand hall of Leningrad’s Moskovsky Station, a welcome respite from the concrete-and-brick gray of more recent Soviet architecture. A bust of Lenin, stern and visionary, welcomed Danny into the building, but the authorities somehow deemed the station’s mid-nineteenth-century facade and interiors worthy of preservation, even after a recent renovation that somehow failed to overshadow the building’s grandeur. It reminded Danny of Grand Central in New York, or Union Station in Washington—a temple to the idea that everyday people could escape their place of origin and see more of the world than their parents and grandparents could ever imagine.

  Of course, this was the Soviet Union, and travel was still highly regulated and monitored. Thankfully, a different shift was working security today than had been on duty last night when Danny arrived. This was intentional, of course, but there was a risk that there would be someone putting in some overtime or covering for a sick comrade. Danny had different papers today, ones that said he’d arrived in Leningrad two weeks prior to provide assistance to the Ministry of Agriculture as a student of the Moscow Agricultural Institute. Yesterday, he’d been a dockworker newly assigned to one of the shipyards.

  The student papers at least got him into a slightly better berth on the return train to Moscow, which he looked forward to greatly after yesterday’s journey on a hard wooden bench, pushed against the window by a couple of pensioners who took up generous amounts of pine. But Danny lingered over a cup of tea near the track, carefully watching the train through the reflection of a distant window, an old tradecraft trick, while pretending to read today’s Izvestia newspaper. Izvestia meant “News” in Russian, and was paired with Pravda (“Truth”) at most newsstands. He was reminded of the phrase heard constantly all over the Soviet Union: V novostyakh net pravdy, i nikakikh novosti v pravde net. “There is no news in Truth, and no truth in News.”

  For all the rallies and slogans spouted off at every corner, it felt good to know that most of the Russians still weren’t buying the Party line wholesale. Most of the people milling around him were just regular Joes and Janes—well, Ivans and Ioannas—trying to get through the day. That gave him hope. Maybe, one day, even Variants would be accepted with that sort of collective shrug. But not if Beria had his way. Danny knew, as surely as he knew his own name, the Joes and Janes and Ivans and Ioannas would quickly turn on Variants around the world if they believed they were trying to seize power, no matter how careful they were. The best Variant paradise would be one in which they could live like everyone else, drinking tea and reading newspapers and catching trains to wherever they needed to be.

  The sounds of heavy bootsteps echoed down the track, and Danny looked up at the window to see a squad of uniformed men walking behind him toward his train. He couldn’t see the uniforms in the dim reflection, but he concentrated a moment and felt the presence of three Variants very close by. Turning to throw his newspaper in a rubbish bin, Danny looked up to see that, yes, the men were wearing NKVD uniforms, and were boarding the fifth car of the train. Danny was in the seventh car. Perfect.

  Slowly, in the slightly tired manner of your typical Soviet Russian, Danny trudged toward his assigned car, papers in hand. He looked up idly at the cars as he passed, referring back to his ticket as if he were trying to find the right car, but instead peering through the windows to ensure that his targets were indeed where he thought they’d be.

  As he passed the fifth car, an unfamiliar face stared blankly out the window, and Danny felt his presence in his mind—a Variant, one he’d never seen before. There was no sign of the man’s Enhancement, not that he expected him to be on fire or anything, but a physical cue might have helped. Regardless, Danny made note of the man’s appearance—brown hair, lean, midthirties, captain’s rank.

  Then something began to stare back.

  Danny nearly froze in his tracks as a ghostly face seemed to somehow detach from the NKVD officer’s head to look right at Danny. It was only for a split second, but Danny could’ve sworn that the face of a woman was looking at him, one with Asian features and a poisonous look of malice.

  Then it was gone.

  “Problem, Comrade?”

  Danny jumped and turned around to find one of the station’s security men standing behind him. Apparently, Danny had stopped dead in his tracks, a goddamn rookie move. “No, Comrade, I’m sorry,” Danny stammered in Russian. “I am very tired and misplaced my car.”

  “Papers.”

  Handing over his papers and ticket, Danny looked up to see that the man requesting them was familiar—one of the guards working late the night before. It wasn’t one that had dealt with Danny personally, but he was around. A supervisor, maybe. Shit luck, for sure.

  Yet the man simply handed the papers back. “You are in the seventh car. Two down. You can—wait a moment.”

  Shit. “Yes, Comrade?”

  The man—a dark-haired, burly fellow filling out his uniform to good effect—gave Danny a disconcerting once-over. “When did you arrive in Leningrad, Comrade?”

  “Two weeks ago,” he replied. “I was helping Oblast Collective Farm Number
Twelve with planning for the planting season, soil testing, that sort of thing.” Danny put down his suitcase. “I can show you some of the soil samples if you like, Comrade.”

  The man stared intently at him. “I could swear I’ve seen you sooner than that. Let me see your hands.”

  “My hands?” Danny asked, heart fluttering.

  “Hands.” It was nothing short of an order, and an imperative one at that.

  Danny held his hands out in front of him, and the security man took his right one and held it up to his face. “Hmmm. Yes. All right.” The guard dropped Danny’s hand and gave back his ticket and papers. “Seventh car. Hurry up.”

  Trying not to seem horribly relieved, Danny grabbed his suitcase and, with a quick spasiba, hustled for his car. Only when he found his seat—padded this time—did Danny look down at his fingers.

  At the time, it had seemed like an unnecessary bit of theatrics, but now, Danny was immensely grateful he’d had the foresight to jam his hands into the dirt of a freshly planted flowerbed at his hotel that morning. The dirt under his nails may have just saved his life.

  This spy shit is gonna give me a heart attack.

  * * *

  The police station on Pervomayskaya Street in the little town of Skhodnya was tucked into a brick apartment block, across the street from another brick apartment block and about six blocks up from the local train station—perfect for commuters into Moscow. It was a sleepy little burg that, as Frank and Ekaterina got out of their car, would soon wake up in a big way.

  “This is stupid,” Katie said as they walked up to the front door. “I am too young to be an NKVD cadet or assistant or whatever you say I am.”

  Frank just smiled. “You look older than you are,” he said quietly, noting that the uniform Tim had stolen fit her perfectly, as did the colonel’s uniform he now wore. “And quit with the English. Pa Ruskiy, pozhalsta.”

  Katie frowned, but kept quiet as Frank unceremoniously barged into the station. “Where is the chief of police? I need to speak to him now,” he demanded in perfect Russian.

  The desk officer looked up lazily, then launched to his feet as if he had a rocket strapped to his ass and gave a salute that wouldn’t have passed muster in basic training anywhere in the world. “Hello, Comrade Colonel! The chief is on patrol with another officer now!”

  Frank put on his best senior officer glare. “You have a radio, do you not, Comrade?”

  The officer, a pudgy man in his midthirties, swallowed hard. “Yes, Comrade Colonel. We have a radio.”

  “Then pick it up and call him in immediately. And do not, for the love of the Motherland, tell him who is here!”

  The officer practically dove for the radio and made the call, greeted at the other end by a peevish older voice. It took some doing—the chief wanted to know why he had to come all the way back to the station—but the officer held fast, and soon the officer looked up with a sycophantic smile. “The chief will be here in five minutes.”

  “If you wish to make yourself truly useful, you will call in every single officer from this town for a briefing. Every shift. I want them here and ready in thirty minutes,” Frank said. “Where is the chief’s office?”

  The officer quickly paled. “Everyone?”

  Frank leaned in menacingly. “Is there a problem with your hearing, Comrade?”

  “No, Comrade Colonel. Every officer. Thirty minutes. The chief’s office is the second door down the hall to the left.”

  Frank immediately marched off, Katie in tow, and let himself into the shabby, wood-paneled office, closing the door behind them. The desk was stacked high with papers, covering every square inch not occupied by a small blotter, a typewriter, or a telephone. “What a shithole,” he muttered in English, looking at the photos on the wall showing a corpulent man in a policeman’s uniform next to several other corpulent men in suits, shaking hands and smiling. “What is it about the locals that they all have ‘love-me’ walls like this?”

  Ekaterina plopped down in a chair in front of the desk. “It is for when people like us come in, so we can see he is a proud member of the local Party, and loyal.”

  Frank took the chief’s chair behind the desk. “Nice to know ass-kissing knows no borders. Timmy? How you doing?”

  A voice came from the corner of the room. “The cleaning staff here needs to be fired.”

  “They use inmates from the local jail,” Ekaterina said. “The drunks and the wife-beaters. You expect them to work hard for a man like this?”

  Frank heard Tim chuckle, and let the matter drop as they waited. Four minutes later, the door opened and the chief himself—grayer and fatter than most of the pictures—barged in. “What is the meaning of—Oh.”

  Frank rose stiffly. “Comrade, I am Colonel Pavel Andreyovich Petrov of the Ministry of State Security. And you are?”

  The chief hustled over with a broad smile and a meaty hand extended. “I am Chief Mikhail Mikhailovich Mikhailov. It is an honor, Comrade Colonel.”

  Most unoriginal parents ever, Frank thought as he shook the man’s hand and waved him to the seat next to Katie, which he took without argument. Like calling someone Michael Michaelson Michaels. “Understand, Mikhail Mikhailovich, the conversation we are about to have is of the utmost sensitivity. What I am going to ask of you is a critical matter of state security, and goes to the very heart of the Party and the Motherland.”

  Frank could practically see the chief’s heartbeat increase before his eyes. “I am your man, Comrade Colonel. You may rely on my discretion fully.”

  One of Frank’s voices entered his head—Andrei, one of Beria’s men from the park. This one is an opportunist. He will call to confirm your orders. Tread carefully.

  “I am not sure you understand, Mikhail. I need your help. There are counterrevolutionary forces within the Party that wish to see the legacy of our beloved Stalin dismantled. There is talk of socialism’s failings—if there was ever such a thing!—and even a broadening of political discourse beyond the path shown us by Vladimir Ilych himself. So when I say I need your discretion, Comrade, I need to know that you will follow my orders to the letter over the next twelve hours. This is a critical point in my investigation and, I should note, a critical point in your career. Succeed, and you will be honored greatly for your contribution. But if word gets out and we fail, lives will be at risk. Possibly including both of ours. The enemies of the State cannot know we are about to score a decisive victory over them! Have I made myself clear?”

  The chief nodded vigorously, his smile gone, replaced by the most serious—and worried—mien he could muster. “I understand, Comrade Colonel. What can I do to help you preserve our great Party and Motherland?”

  “How many officers do you have in total?”

  “Two dozen, Comrade Colonel.”

  Frank smiled. “That will do, Mikhail Mikhailovich. I have your man up front bringing them all in. I have very precise instructions for them. I expect you to help me carry them out.”

  “What will we be doing?” the chief finally asked. Took him long enough, Andrei noted.

  “Stopping a train and capturing counterrevolutionaries,” Frank said simply. “And we cannot fail.”

  Mikhail Mikhailovich Mikhailov nodded vigorously. “I swear to you, we will not, Comrade!”

  Frank caught Katie giving the man a piteous look, and gave her a swift kick under the desk. She whipped her head around to glare at him, but quickly fell back into character, pulling out a sheaf of paper. “Comrade, we will need to gather the following materials in the next three hours, and do so without alerting anyone as to why. Can you make this happen?”

  Mikhailov took the paper and scanned it, his eyebrows shooting upward several times. “This is … extensive.”

  “We were told we could rely upon you,” Frank said, an edge to his voice.

  The chief looked up and nodded again; Frank thought the man’s head would pop off at any moment. “It will be done, I promise you, Comrade!”

&nbs
p; * * *

  Ekaterina stood stock still, in a military at-ease, and watched as Frank and Mikhailov positioned the portable barrier across the train tracks, electric lights already blinking. She had to admit, the spot Mrs. Stevens had chosen was perfect—flat and lightly forested, with well over a mile of straight track and line of sight ahead. Even if the train didn’t have a working radio—always possible, given the Soviet Union’s notorious lack of efficiency—the train had plenty of time to stop before plowing into them. The dirt road that crossed the tracks there was well away from most everything else nearby—just a couple farms on either side, with farmhouses well away from the tracks themselves.

  Of course, if it had been her on the train, she would’ve set a watch among the NKVD men there, ensuring that they’d have plenty of warning against such an ambush. But it wasn’t a bad gamble on Mrs. Stevens’s part, thinking they’d be caught off guard on such a common route, in the heart of the Soviet Union and barely twelve miles from central Moscow.

  That said, she figured they’d have twelve minutes, at most, before someone would come rolling up. Grab the Variants, deal with the rest of the NKVD, get the local police moving and get the train moving again—all in twelve minutes.

  To think that most American girls her age were just sitting around their phonographs at home, listening to Eddie Fisher or the Four Aces and scribbling unsent love letters to high school crushes. More and more, Ekaterina found herself wanting to join them, to embrace being Katie the American Teen-Ager. To go to high school, whatever that was. It seemed … nice.

  All that said, she figured she’d last maybe a week before getting frustrated with all the simplistic, ineffectual nonsense involved and punching someone into a coma.

  Danny warned her that theirs wasn’t meant to be a normal life, at least not yet and not any time soon. He was right, but there were times she mourned a life never to be lived.

  Mikhailov rushed up to where she and Frank were standing, Handie-Talkie at the ready. “I have reached the conductor! The train will stop for us!”