MJ-12: Endgame

by Michael J. Martinez

  Frank nodded. “Position your men. Remember, I want every paper checked. Every passenger. They could be hiding anywhere. Every single potential counterrevolutionary must be detained. Understand, Mikhail Mikhailovich?”

  “Yes, Comrade Colonel! It will be done!”

  The chief rushed off and Frank turned to Ekaterina. “Twelve minutes, huh?”

  She nodded. “Someone heard that radio call. They will look into it.”

  Frank turned around and saw Tim Sorensen, now in an MGB uniform, by the truck he’d stolen from the local Red Army barracks. With a nod and a salute, Tim ducked into the back of the truck to shed his uniform and get to work.

  The sound of screeching brakes and a growing bright light heralded the arrival of the train, slowly gaining volume and luminance as it ground to a halt. “Remember, Comrades!” Frank shouted. “Wait until I give the word to board the train! We do not want these traitors jumping out beforehand!”

  The police—twenty-two in total, given the chief’s near-groveling request for someone to stay behind and man the phones, and another to patrol his town—took positions on either side of the tracks, pistols and war-vintage SKS carbines pointed toward the train.

  With a gasp of steam and a final long, piercing grind, the train stopped just two feet away from the temporary barriers. Frank dashed forward, Ekaterina easily following, to come up beside the chief. “I have a man inside. He should be toward the back. My assistant will go to see him now. Have your men remain at their stations.”

  The chief assented, and Ekaterina ran toward the back of the train as quickly as she could—which was pretty fast, considering her strength had her covering five or six yards at a stride once she was away from all the lights. She saw Danny clambering off the train, pinning a badge to his otherwise shabby suit.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “Fifth car. Three of them,” Danny said. “Where’s Tim?”

  The sound of footsteps came from behind them. “Dammit, Katie, I can’t run as fast as you!” Tim huffed from the darkness.

  “Fifth car. You ready?” Danny asked him.

  “Yeah. Just … yeah. Okay.”

  Ekaterina turned to the direction of his voice. “Go!”

  Sorensen’s footsteps retreated and, a moment later, the door leading to the back of the fifth train opened. Ekaterina and Danny watched closely and, a few seconds later, the car began to fill up with noxious smoke. There was suddenly a great deal of movement in the car, and some shouts, and the door in the back slammed shut. Sorensen appeared a second later out of thin air, coughing up a lung.

  “Jesus, Tim,” Danny said, rushing over. “What happened?”

  “Someone … some … someone bumped into me,” he said between outbursts. “Couldn’t … hold … breath.”

  Before they could do anything more, the side of the train ahead of them erupted.

  A huge gout of water at least thirty feet long burst out half the windows on their side of the train, spraying them with liquid and, more importantly, ventilating the car. A second later, gas began pouring from the now-broken windows, and the sounds of shouting and swearing were far more clear.

  “Dammit,” Ekaterina swore in Russian. It was her turn.

  Grabbing Danny by the scruff of his uniform, she jumped up—at least ten feet—and grabbed the edge of one of the broken windows. Leaving Danny hanging from the edge of the window beside her, she tore open a gaping hole in the metal hull of the train car and proceeded inside, punching the first uniformed man she saw. He didn’t get up.

  Then she was hit by a fierce wave of water, one that actually staggered her back a few steps. That was impressive, she thought. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been pushed back by anything.

  The water abated, and Ekaterina surged forward, wiping her eyes. She saw a thin man in the uniform of an NKVD major, and recognized him immediately, despite the five years since she’d defected. He was Alexei Ivanovich Rustov, a Variant like her, one of the first found by Beria’s Behkterev Institute. And his Enhancement seemed to have improved considerably over the years.

  “Ekaterina, is that you?” Rustov asked, a flash of recognition in his eyes. “Ekaterina?”

  Grimacing, Ekaterina tromped toward her former comrade, shoving a would-be tackler into the wall of the train. She grabbed Rustov by his necktie and threw him back toward Danny, who managed to crawl into the car behind her. Many of the other men were still coughing, dazed but not unconscious as planned. Moving determinedly down the car, Ekaterina pummeled and slammed her way through the officers, trying not to take a grim sort of pleasure from it. They were Beria’s men, yes, but most of them were simply doing their jobs and trying to feed their families. That was, perhaps, not a very good excuse, but for her, it was enough to show relative restraint.

  That is, of course, until a wave of vertigo washed over her, one so profound that it dropped her to her knees and brought her latest meal up onto the floor of the train.

  “What?” she gasped, looking around. Most of the people in the train, including Danny and Rustov and the NKVD men still conscious, were similarly indisposed.

  Except for one.

  A woman three rows ahead of Ekaterina simply sat there, smiling, an eyebrow raised. She was young, though older than Ekaterina—perhaps in her twenties. Ekaterina had never seen her before, but the captain’s rank on her uniform—far too high a rank for the woman’s age—was enough to tell her that this new woman had to be one of Beria’s special recruits.

  Suddenly, the woman’s head jerked to the side as her eyes widened, and she collapsed into the aisle, unconscious. At that moment, the nausea and vertigo evaporated like a mist, and Ekaterina shot to her feet once more, dashing forward to grab the woman and heave her bodily through the gash in the car’s side.

  “Thanks, Timoveyish,” she muttered in Russian, using her pet name for Tim Sorensen. She’d seen enough of his handiwork to know when he was around.

  “Guess she can’t target what she can’t see,” the invisible man whispered in English in her ear. “Let’s go.”

  Ekaterina shouted over to Danny, in Russian. “Where’s the third? The swimmer?”

  “Outside, heading toward Frank,” he replied. “Let’s move.”

  Jumping through the hole in the side of the train, Ekaterina took off at a dead run, passing each car in just a few strides and quickly catching up to the man ahead. She took a great leap and landed right on top of him from a height of about fifteen feet. He didn’t get up.

  Tough being a Variant whose Enhancement requires being submerged in water.

  “Secure!” she shouted ahead.

  The stolen Red Army truck surged forward from the temporary barrier, Frank Lodge at the wheel. “Let’s go,” he called out. “We need them all in there.”

  “All of them?” Ekaterina asked. That’s not the plan.

  “All of them,” Frank replied.

  Ekaterina took the runaway she’d landed on and hurled him into the back of the truck, then jumped on the tailgate as Frank sped back toward Danny and the other NKVD officers. Danny had already secured the two other Soviet Variants, hands tied behind their backs as they lay unconscious on the ground.

  “Frank wants them all,” Ekaterina muttered as she fetched Rustov and the vertigo woman.

  Danny looked over to Frank, waiting impatiently in the truck. “There’s twenty men in there. Some of them won’t stay down for long,” Danny said. He then walked over to the truck and got in next to Frank. Ekaterina couldn’t hear what was said, but she could see the two of them getting pretty animated. After a couple minutes, Danny got out again and, looking angry and pained, walked over to Ekaterina. “Let’s get them in the truck. We’ll need to gas them when they’re inside.”

  With a sigh, Ekaterina jumped back into the train car and started gathering unconscious NKVD men. Well, mostly unconscious—there were a couple groggy ones who needed a bit of reinforcement, but again, she restrained herself from being too rough with
them.

  Ten long minutes later, Ekaterina put the last officer in the back of the truck, and Danny followed suit with a second canister of gas, quickly closing and securing the canvas flap around the top. It wasn’t ideal—Ekaterina could see gas starting to flow out from around the edges of the truck bed—but those inside wouldn’t be in a position to complain much about their destination, wherever that was.

  “Tim, you and I are in the truck. Katie, you go back with Frank. Rendezvous at Point B in an hour,” Danny said tersely.

  Again, not the plan, Ekaterina thought as she followed Frank back toward Mikhailov’s policemen. There would be glad-handing and Frank acting imperious and commanding, more scraping and bowing by the police chief …

  … and then what?

  What the hell are we going to do with two squads of NKVD officers?

  * * *

  Danny rode silently in the truck while Tim navigated through the darkness of the Russian countryside outside Moscow. Their operation was, technically, one of the greatest successes MAJESTIC-12 had scored to date—the capture of three Soviet Variants in the middle of the Soviet Union itself.

  But the other twenty guys presented one hell of a complication. And there were no good solutions.

  Tim pulled onto a dirt road that led through a thick stand of trees. Pulling to a stop, Tim shut down the truck’s headlights and waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim moonlight, then started down the rutted road again, the truck bouncing and straining in protest.

  “The Ruskies don’t really believe in shock absorbers, do they?” Tim said quietly. “This thing handles like a goddamn battleship. And we’re low on gas.”

  Danny sighed. “Gas won’t be an issue. Truck’s staying here.”

  Tim nodded and kept silent for the next several miles, finally pulling into a small clearing where a couple of burned-out farm buildings—likely casualties of the Nazi invasion during World War II—sat squat and dark in front of the trees. They were easily forty miles outside Moscow now, and a good half hour from anything remotely civilized.

  It would do.

  Danny got out of the truck and reached back with his senses to check on their captives. All three were unconscious. He’d seen the water Variant’s work firsthand, and felt the woman’s vertigo, of course, but he still didn’t know what the third could do, though apparently the man decided running was a better option than using his Enhancement. Maybe his abilities weren’t particularly combat-effective, or maybe he was just a rookie. Or a coward?

  Still, Danny didn’t feel like finding out suddenly, so he rifled through his rucksack for a null-field generator. Mrs. Stevens had managed to get the device down to the size of a smallish ashtray without sacrificing too much range.

  Before he could turn it on, though, he felt a … rustling … in his senses. He looked toward the truck, and for a moment saw three pale swirling mists and, God help him, one of them formed an enraged face for a split second.

  Watching carefully, Danny flipped on the null-field generator. The mists seemed to speed up and flail around before dissipating entirely.

  They know? Dear God, do these … things … know when we’re about to cut them off? Have they … learned … about the generators?

  Relatively early on, in 1949, Danny and the scientists working at Area 51 had discovered that there were indeed intelligences on the other side of the strange vortex created by the Hiroshima bombings. They had come to believe that Variants were created when one of these intelligences escaped the vortex and attached itself to a normal person. Each time the vortex surged with radiation, Danny believed, a new Variant was Enhanced. The correlation was too strong to ignore, even if they hadn’t always been able to locate every single Variant. Maybe the intelligences didn’t find a good “host” in time, or the Enhancement was too minor to pick up.

  But it seemed the Variants were indeed hosts to these entities. Thus far, no Variant had ever showed signs of being controlled by these intelligences, or of being in contact or communion with them in any way. The entities just sort of tagged themselves to a person, and that person would manifest an Enhancement, along with a side effect or two.

  The only two Variants known to the MAJESTIC-12 program who didn’t exhibit any side effects at all were Frank Lodge and Danny himself. Frank, of course, did seem to be in some sort of communion with the memories of the dead folks he’d absorbed, but no one was sure if that really counted or not. And as for Danny, his sole Enhancement seemed to simply be the ability to detect other Variants, sometimes at great distances.

  Though Danny sometimes wondered if his ability was changing, evolving. Ever since the Russian nuclear test in Kazakhstan in 1949, it seemed Danny was sensing more about these intelligences. Just glimpses, really, and they didn’t make much sense.

  “I hate it when we use those,” Tim said, startling Danny slightly.

  “Yeah, well, we don’t want our guests getting ideas,” Danny replied. “But I know how you feel.”

  Tim nodded. “It’s like … being cut off from a part of yourself. There’s a comfort to having that ability there. It’s like a companion, almost. Weird, I know.”

  “Not weird. Well … not weirder than things already are.”

  “True that, son. There are days when I just want to go back to Minnesota and screw around with electronics for a living again,” Tim said. “I mean, I’m in the middle of goddamn Russia, in the middle of the night, wearing a secret police uniform with like twenty-plus Soviet officers in my truck, which I hot-wired and stole from the Red Army.”

  Danny laughed at this, feeling a little better about things in general. “Well, when you put it like that. At least it’ll be something you can tell your grandkids about.”

  Tim’s good humor waned as he dug around for a cigarette. “Dan, I ain’t gonna see my grandkids. And if you don’t have kids by now, you won’t have any either.”

  “Kids were never in the cards for me,” Danny replied. “I’m not wired like that.”

  Tim lit up and drew in deeply. “Married to MAJESTIC?”

  “No. Just … not a family kind of guy.”

  “Confirmed bachelor. Or … confirmed bachelor?”

  The difference in Tim’s question was telling, but while Danny liked him just fine—there were some secrets Danny wasn’t prepared to tell anyone. There was a reason he was good at his job. Secrets came naturally.

  “Never mind, you dirty bastard,” Danny replied jokingly. “Go keep watch down the road. I’ll keep an eye on our guests.”

  Tim gave Danny a clasp on the shoulder before heading off back down the road, pistol in hand, while Danny cracked open the back of the truck. The gas had finally dissipated, but the canvas and enclosed space had kept it circulating in there for a while. Nobody was getting up any time soon. Mrs. Stevens had designed the gas to last three hours, and they were barely a third of the way there.

  Still, Danny kept the null-field generator going. It was hard to battle Variants when you didn’t know their abilities, and the geyser guy threw things out of whack. The program had Rustov in its files since ’47, so they should’ve taken him and the others into account. Danny thought back to the close call they’d had in the cisterns under old Istanbul back then, and figured Rustov had to have been in on it. Only natural that his abilities might evolve during that time. Others certainly had.

  Frank had confided to Danny that his dead-man memories were becoming more conversational in his head, and seemed to interact with him and one another in very self-aware ways. Cal could still glean life energy from living things to keep young and strong, or use that energy to heal others in exchange for aging himself back to normal, or beyond into old age. But the continued testing at Mountain Home showed that, over time, he had to take in and expend more and more energy to get the job done. In 1948, Cal could kill a steer and age himself twenty years younger. Now, it was maybe fifteen years. Where would it be a year from now?

  Yamato had more difficulty with random sparks and a
rcs when he slept lately. Sorensen would occasionally phase in and out of sight—sometimes just a hand or leg, sometimes all of him—unless he kept a conscious grip on his ability. And Maggie … well, Maggie had just become more reserved, more cold and distant over time, even as she honed her emotional control over others into the most potent weapon MAJESTIC-12 had.

  If he was being honest with himself—and being alone in the woods with a truckful of Russians that needed to be dealt with was a surprisingly good opportunity for introspection—it was clear to him that the Variants within MAJESTIC-12 would likely have a short shelf life for government work. Maybe ten years, maybe less. After that, Danny feared that Cal would require downright disturbing amounts of life energy to function; Frank would be overwhelmed by the voices in his head; Sorensen and Yamato would likely have to be hidden away from everyone as their Enhancements became uncontrollable. And Maggie …

  Danny didn’t want to think about what Maggie might become.

  A whistle from Sorensen—it was supposed to be a whip-poor-will call, but he never mastered it—dragged Danny’s attention to the road. There was a car coming, lights off. It should be Frank and Katie, but …

  Danny drew his pistol and aimed it at the road just as the car pulled up. Katie and Frank were inside, but both Danny and Sorensen had their weapons drawn.

  “Lovely evening,” Tim said in Russian, the first part of the password.

  “Yob t’vyu mat,” Frank replied as he got out. It was one of the vilest curses in Russian, and still not really used in polite company, and not so immediately in conversation. So oddly enough, it was a good rejoinder for the second part of the password.

  Danny and Sorensen holstered their weapons. “Any problems?” Danny asked as he walked over to the car.

  “Just an overeager police chief excited about his Order of Lenin medal, sure to come in the mail any day now,” Frank replied. “I told him to keep off the phones and radios for forty-eight hours, until I could ‘secure the NKVD and remove all the traitors to the Motherland.’”