But it was too late. The jeep, despite Danny’s best efforts behind the wheel, began to overturn and fly through the air as POSEIDON pulled it toward him. Hamilton was thrown from the vehicle, while Danny and the other MPs clung on to whatever they could find.
POSEIDON slammed the jeep down on the valley sands on its side, continuing to drag the vehicle toward him on the ground. Danny wanted to reach for the tranq pistol in his belt at the small of his back, but it was too much just trying to hang on to the steering wheel and brace himself inside the jeep so he wouldn’t fall out. Both MPs finally lost their grips and tumbled out, leaving only Danny in place as the jeep finally skidded to a stop in front of POSEIDON.
“You!” the Russian Variant shouted. “You I will kill with my bare hands!”
Dazed and bruised, Danny let go of the wheel, slumping out of the jeep onto the sand, then looked up to see POSEIDON, his fists balled and rage writ upon his face, about twenty yards away.
“Come and get me,” Danny whispered.
He felt the pull of POSEIDON’s ability, completely helpless as he was dragged across the desert sands, rocks battering his ribcage and sand stinging his eyes. Then he was airborne, moving faster than ever.
It was the only thing he could think of to do, and in the mere seconds he had to spare, Danny reached for the tranq pistol, pulled it, and fired it at POSEIDON’s chest at a range of about four yards.
The dart broke the Russian’s concentration, and Danny landed hard on the sand, skidding to a halt. He looked up and POSEIDON was coming for him, fists raised, but then the man staggered and fell to his knees, collapsing just inches away.
Danny heard a scream. Julia.
He slowly got to his feet, his legs almost buckling with the effort. Kurt Schreiber and Julia were nearly ten feet away—Schreiber holding a gun to the Variant’s head.
“That’s close enough, Commander,” Schreiber said. “Drop your weapon.”
Danny looked from Schreiber’s grim, determined expression to the panicked, anguished look on Julia’s face. It took a few seconds for the incongruence to register in his head, but once it did, Danny had to force himself not to smile.
Instead, he calmly reloaded the tranquilizer pistol. “You know, Doctor, I think I’m actually genuinely insulted right now,” he said.
A flash of confusion passed over Schreiber’s face, quickly replaced by anger. “I will kill her, I promise you, Commander. I will kill her and then I’ll kill you.”
Danny finished loading as Hamilton—dirty, bruised, and bleeding from a cut on his forehead—walked over, his automatic pistol pointed at Schreiber. “Drop it, Doc,” Hamilton said. “She’s a lot more valuable than you are.”
“Which is why you will call for another jeep which will take us away from here, and you will not follow,” Schreiber said, pulling Julia’s body in front of his. “I mean it. I will shoot her.”
“Not if I shoot her first, Doctor,” Danny said. He raised the tranquilizer pistol, aimed it at Julia’s heart—and squeezed the trigger.
Julia immediately turned immaterial, and the dart passed right through her, sticking into Schreiber. The scientist gasped and staggered backward as Danny threw the other object he’d been carrying right at Julia.
The active null-generator landed at her feet.
She gasped, then turned and began to run. A tranquilizer dart from one of the MPs took her down in a matter of steps.
Danny walked over to the bodies now lying on the desert floor and picked up the anti-null device next to Julia’s inert hand. It was about the size of a dime-store novel, and it looked burned out. Sorensen’s. Not a bad bit of work, really. Danny shoved the device in his pocket; he imagined Mrs. Stevens would be very interested in analyzing it.
“Get an ambulance over here, and activate more nulls just in case they wake up,” Danny told Hamilton.
“You want me to put Meyer in with the Russki until we figure out what to do?” Hamilton asked.
“Nope. I want them both doped up, nulled at all times, and ready to travel.”
“What about Schreiber?”
Danny entertained the notion of just tying him to a pole in the middle of the desert lake bed and leaving him there to die. Not a very kind idea, admittedly, but then Schreiber wasn’t exactly deserving of Danny’s good Christian charity at that moment.
“Throw him back in the brig,” he muttered. “But don’t feel you have to be nice about it.”
August 17, 1949
Cal looked idly out the window of his plane at the rolling steppe below, fighting nerves and trying to stay alert as best he could. Frank said they were aboard a Soviet military Lisunov Li-2 transport—a Soviet-made knockoff of a DC-3 passenger plane—and Cal supposed that wasn’t the worst plane they could be on, given the stories he’d heard about the subpar machinery the Soviets designed themselves.
They were prisoners, but at least they weren’t gonna fall from the sky. For now.
They’d been taken from Mezze Prison to the airport and put on a nondescript cargo plane headed for Yerevan, the capital of Armenia—part of the Soviet Union. Once there, Karilov had handed them off to a bunch of soldiers who hustled the Americans onto the plane they found themselves on now. They’d taken off and landed several times, and Frank had been calling out the names of places as they flew into them: Yerevan to Baku, Azerbaijan, and then a bunch of towns in some place called Kazakhstan. Fort Shevchenko, Shalkar, Astana, and now to some other place. It was hard to keep up.
Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union just like Armenia and Azerbaijan but a lot bigger—the same way Texas was a lot bigger than Rhode Island, Cal figured. They’d flown over mountains and desert and now grasslands, and it was all sparsely populated as far as he could tell. Frank—or maybe it had been one of the people taking up residence in his head—figured they were headed to a remote military facility of some kind, since they were headed well away from Leningrad, home of the Bekhterev Institute, where the Reds studied their own Variants. They were also pretty far from Moscow, for that matter. In fact, they were getting to within spitting distance of Mongolia—which meant they were the farthest Cal had ever been from home.
Thoughts of home were hard. Cal had last called his family a whole eight days before, so he knew Sarah and Winston—the boy was done with college and working at The Washington Post’s printing presses for the summer—would be worrying sick about him. The government folks had given Cal’s family a number to call in case he was out of touch for a while, and he hoped the CIA would take care of them after …
… after whatever happened to him.
Frank and Zippy had talked a lot about what-ifs during their journey. There had been a lot of initial plotting about overpowering the guards, maybe seizing control of the aircraft. But then Cal spotted the other planes off in the distance to either side of theirs—fighter aircraft. Frank identified them as Yak-9s, and apparently they were fast and pretty good in a scrap, and it was safe to assume they were there to shoot down their plane if it deviated off course. Their presence also made a parachute escape highly unlikely.
After that, the talk turned to what their lives might be like under the Soviets. Zippy was the most outwardly worried, concerned about rape and torture and all kinds of dark ideas—and while Cal had put a fatherly hand on her shoulder and said the right things to calm her down, he truly had no idea what would befall them. Would they be recruited? Cal knew Frank wouldn’t flip, and Zippy seemed grimly determined to give them nothing. For himself, Cal figured the Russians couldn’t touch his family, and they were a Godless lot besides. So, between family and God, they had nothing to bargain with him. They could do their worst.
That was easy to say, of course, without knowing what the worst might be. As Variants, they were mighty valuable, and when Zippy wasn’t thinking the worst, she’d wondered if they might be treated well enough because there simply weren’t that many Variants around—the Russians couldn’t afford to be cruel to them. Frank, however, had rem
inded the two of them that if they didn’t play ball, then the Soviet Variant program—whether it was at Bekhterev or wherever else—could almost certainly use some experimental subjects. “Those who can’t be suborned can be dissected,” Frank had said. Grim thoughts indeed.
Cal told himself he was ready to make his peace with God, and to see Sarah and Winston again at the Second Coming—but he wasn’t. He desperately wanted to go home, to kiss his wife and hug his boy and write off all this spy-game nonsense once and for all. And if he ever got out of all this, maybe he’d do just that—so long as the MAJESTIC-12 folks let him. There was that to consider as well.
The plane suddenly pitched forward, and a Russian voice came over the intercom. Cal turned to look at Frank, who was busying himself with his seatbelt. “Strap in,” Frank said. “Coming into Semipalatinsk.”
Cal buckled up. “Where’s that?”
“Middle of nowhere, Kazakhstan. Ought to be a real garden spot,” Frank said.
But it wasn’t quite nowhere. They’d flown over a handful of small villages—collections of thatched huts and small stone buildings—and now were descending toward some kind of outpost. Cal looked out the window and saw clusters of buildings surrounding a modest airstrip, and there were jeeps—or whatever the Russians called their versions of jeeps—and people going about their business. Honestly, with the prefab buildings and aircraft hangars and such, the place looked a whole lot like Area 51, except it was situated in a much nicer-looking grassland, with a decent-sized river flowing nearby.
“Could be worse,” Cal said with a smile.
Frank smiled back grimly. “How do you do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
Frank nodded to the window as the plane swooped lower. “We’re captured Americans in Soviet territory. We might not get home again. And you, with the optimism. How do you do it?”
Cal thought about this for a moment and found himself thinking back to his time working in the Firestone plant back in Memphis—the daily insults, the weekly fistfights, the sabotage by his white coworkers, and the docked pay from his white foremen that led to less food on the table and postponed promises to his wife and boy. “Because I’ve seen worse,” he said finally. “When it gets really bad, I promise I’ll let you know.”
Frank nodded and went back to looking out his own window. At first, when Cal had talked about working conditions for Negroes in the South, Frank had looked shocked and in disbelief. Cal figured it wasn’t Frank’s fault per se. He was the rare white man who treated black folks well enough, even though he’d never spared much of a thought for the folks around the country—not just in the South—who saw things very differently. Most of the people in MAJESTIC-12 were pretty good about it, though he imagined they were under orders. After all, Cal had seen a black woman, a Hispanic-looking fellow, and an Asian kid around the base, and was sure they were Variants too. No reason for a black woman to be out in the middle of the Nevada desert otherwise.
Cal’s thoughts were interrupted by tires on tarmac, and the plane landed with a jarring thud and a screech of rubber. Cal had been on a fair number of planes over the past couple years—never having flown his entire life before that—and he already could tell these Russian pilots didn’t have half the skill of the American boys. He actually took a little pride in that for some reason.
Immediately, the Russian soldiers unbuckled and stood up, and while their weapons weren’t trained on the Americans, they were certainly in hand. “Vstavay. Poyekhali.”
Frank was already rising. “We’re moving. Let’s go,” he said.
Cal waited for the two of them to go ahead before following; he and Frank had agreed early on that they’d work to protect her. Wasn’t like she wasn’t trained up—she was—but Frank carried with him the skills and knowledge of a half dozen top-notch fighters, while Cal could drop a man with a touch. Zippy’s Enhancement was great for gathering intelligence, but Cal knew he and Frank would have to take the lead in a scrap.
Of course, they couldn’t stop bullets, and a full squad of Russian soldiers was a bit too much to handle at the moment, so they had little choice but to walk out of the plane and into a warm, sunny August day. It was a dry heat—not as bad as Area 51 but still pretty warm. The air smelled clean, and Cal wondered if there were farms nearby, based on the slight whiff of mown grass and manure in the breeze. The prefab buildings were clean and new, and it looked like the base was kept in fine order. Cal had seen photos and heard reports about other Soviet bases, and this one seemed far better. That meant funding, and it probably meant the people in charge had decided whatever was going on here to be pretty important.
Once they set foot on the ground, the soldiers threw a pair of heavy work gloves at Cal’s feet, and at Zippy’s as well. “Naden’te perchatki,” one of the soldiers said.
Cal didn’t need Frank to translate. He picked up the gloves and put them on, as did Zippy. Only then did the soldiers come and put handcuffs on each of them. They definitely know what we can do, Cal thought. They already got us pegged. But how?
Hands cuffed behind their backs, they were marched to a waiting cargo truck and forced to sit in the back, along with the soldiers who had accompanied them on the plane. Again, their weapons were held at the ready, and an officer barked at them for a good thirty seconds straight before the vehicle began to move. Cal assumed he was warning them that they’d be shot if they so much as blinked wrong, so he sat tight and waited for the next thing. The back door was shut, and a couple flashlights provided the only illumination. The Russians were apparently pretty good at keeping folks in the dark.
The drive was a good twenty minutes, but it felt longer without being able to see where they were going. Paved tarmac turned into gravel, then to a bumpy dirt road. There were a few turns here and there, and then finally the truck came to a complete stop. The back was opened, and everyone was ushered out with shouting and a few shoves. Once Cal set foot on the ground again, he looked around and saw that the base and airfield were no longer anywhere in sight.
Instead, they were in a cluster of three older buildings in the middle of a kind of dirt courtyard. One looked to be a crumbling old home, a stone structure that maybe had once been fine indeed but was long past its glory days. The second building was a big old barn, weathered and gray, with closed doors and no straw in sight on the ground; Cal had five bucks it wasn’t holding livestock. The third looked to be some sort of stable, but again, there was no evidence it was still being used for its original purpose. All three buildings were old, and Cal imagined that they’d withstood a lot through the years on the steppe. No trees around, no shelter at all. Great for farming, he imagined.
The large sliding door to the barn wheeled open, and Cal could see that he was right; there were a concrete floor and electrical lights inside. In fact, it looked like they’d put a prefab inside the barn, complete with barebones furniture like desks and chairs. A man in a lab coat and a grim-faced, pale soldier wearing an officer’s uniform waved them in; the shoves at their back provided incentive to accept the welcome.
“Officer’s an MGB colonel,” Frank whispered as they walked toward the barn. “Scientist seems civilian, though. Joint ops like this are rare. This is big.”
Cal nodded briefly, trying to take in as much as he could. They were moved past a security desk in the front room, and then through a smaller door into an area with worktables lining the walls and all kinds of scientific equipment scattered around. Chalkboards covered in graphs, equations, and Russian script filled up the back of the room, where a man sat on top of a desk with his arms folded, looking at the newcomers with a smile.
He was a slight, balding man with round spectacles on a round face, wearing a suit and tie over his thin frame, but all the Reds entering the room immediately saluted him. Cal felt he’d seen the man’s face before but couldn’t place it.
“Please, sit,” the man said in accented English, pointing to three stools in front of him. Slowly, each of the Americans
took a seat, Cal and Frank still bookending a wide-eyed Zippy. Frank also looked surprised, which Cal took to mean that this guy was someone big.
“Thank you for being here,” the Russian said. “I know, of course, you did not want to be here, but we are nonetheless grateful. I believe you have met some of my friends before, yes?”
Cal looked around, and saw two more people enter through a side door—a severe-looking middle-aged woman and, incongruously, a girl who couldn’t have been more than eleven. Both wore MGB uniforms, both highly decorated. Cal recognized both of them immediately. The woman was Maria Savrova, a Variant who could track a single person across the globe once she’d touched them; the little girl was Ekaterina Illyanova, and Cal knew from personal experience she was as strong as Superman and mean as a rabid dog.
They’d fought a year earlier in the woods outside Prague. The Soviets had set a trap for the American Variants, and Cal, Frank, and Maggie had barely gotten out alive. Ellis Longstreet hadn’t.
“Good to see you ladies again,” Frank said. “You’re looking well.”
The little girl spat out something in Russian that didn’t sound like she was returning the kindness, and she glared daggers at Cal. The girl’s older brother had also been a Variant, someone who could move like lightning itself, but Cal had gotten his hands on him, aged him something fierce. He wondered, given the girl’s reaction, if the Illyanova boy was even still alive.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Cal said as gently as he could. “I truly am.”
The top dog chuckled. “The funny thing is that I believe you, Comrade Hooks. From what I have read of you, you are a kind man. A gentle man. You do not belong here.”
“Well, then. If it’s all right with you, I’ll just be on my way, then,” Cal ventured with a smile.
The man’s chuckle evolved into a short bark of a laugh. “Americans! So full of vigor. Full of confidence. But sadly, since you’ve allowed yourselves to be used by your imperialist masters, your presence here is no fault but your own now. And we have such plans for you.” The man in the suit got up and began to pace. “We have very good intelligence on your Empowered program—that is what we call the people you call ‘Variants.’ We know you have a very effective means of locating your Empowered, far better than what we are capable of. So, the first thing I’d like to explore, once you’ve been tested and settled here, is how exactly you manage this.”
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