Scott looked at his friend incredulously. “You mean they’ve all had their spines hacked out?”
“Not hacked,” said Marcus. “Torn.”
“Torn? But how is that possible?”
Marcus’s brown eyes were deeply troubled.
“You tell me,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
2000
“Haaaappppy New Yeeeear!” Jason Flynn bellowed as the countdown ended and the chimes and cheering began. He leaped up onto the mess hall table, beer slopping out of his glass as he threw his arms in the air. Joyous, red-faced, eyes glazed with alcohol, he yelled it again. “Haaappy New Yeeear!”
“Don’t you mean ‘Happy New Millennium’?” said Marcus, laughing.
“Well, strictly, the new millennium doesn’t start until the end of 2000,” said Lau, ducking to avoid the beer splashing out of Flynn’s glass.
Flynn had already started conducting an impromptu sing-along of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”, which was blasting out of a nearby speaker, but now he stopped and peered at his friend incredulously. “I can’t believe you jus’ said that,” he slurred. “You are such a nerrrrd.”
As the two friends began to bicker good-humoredly, Marcus turned to Scott, who was watching the exchange with a smile on his face and a glass of bourbon in his hand.
“You okay, buddy?”
“Fine. You?”
“Missing my girl and my folks a little, but apart from that… yeah, I’m good.” He tilted his half-empty glass in Scott’s direction. “But you’ve been quiet all evening. Something on your mind?”
“Not really. Just never been much of a party animal, I guess.”
Although that was true, it was New Year in particular that Scott disliked. He vividly remembered how, as a kid, each time an old year rolled by and a new one began, his mom would hug him and tell him that this year would be their year. She’d said it when he was thirteen and 1983 had ticked over into 1984: “This will be our year, Scotty. I just know it.”
Seven months later, not long after his fourteenth birthday, she had been diagnosed with cancer, and less than three short months after that she was dead.
In Scott’s mind, therefore, he’d never quite been able to view New Year as symbolic of a fresh start and fresh opportunities. To him, it just meant another year of life had ticked by, with the inevitable result that the grave was another step closer. Not that he was a pessimistic or particularly morbid soul. On the contrary, his chosen career had taught him to be pragmatic and realistic, and while he had a healthy respect for death, he didn’t fear it. Experience had taught him that pain and suffering were far worse than extinction.
What he did fear, though, was meandering through life without really achieving anything, without ever becoming the best version of himself he could possibly be. He enjoyed his life as a soldier, and knew in his heart of hearts that he had saved lives and done some good in the world. Yet it never seemed enough; he could never quite shake off the feeling that he ought to be doing more. Exactly what that entailed, he had no idea – but it always seemed to come to the fore at times like this. To Scott, New Year was not a time for celebration, but a time for reflection, for contemplation.
“Well, party animal or not, I’d like to propose a toast,” said Marcus, raising his glass. “To friendship. To life. And to making it into a new millennium more or less intact.”
Scott smiled. “I’ll drink to that.” He raised his glass, chinked it against Marcus’s, and the two friends drank.
“How many missions we been on together now?” Marcus said.
Scott shrugged. “Twenty? Twenty-two maybe?”
“Twenty-two. And we’re still here. That’s more than can be said for some.”
Scott looked around. What Marcus had said was true. Of the twenty-three other guys who’d joined the team when they had, three were now dead, including Suarez, with whom he had done guard duty at the crater in LA on their first mission together over two years ago. Last spring Suarez had had his legs blown off by a grenade during an unexpected attack by rebel forces on a mission to aid government troops to restore order in a volatile area of Somalia. His injuries hadn’t killed him outright, but he had bled out because medical services had been delayed after coming under fire from a separate rebel contingent.
A couple of other guys – Mancuso and Henderson – had also been killed, taken down by stray bullets on different missions, and on top of that several more guys had been injured, including their youngest member, Pip O’Hara, who was currently undergoing a grueling six-month program of physical rehabilitation and wouldn’t be back in the team until next summer, at least.
“Long may it continue,” Marcus said, of their own so-far-charmed lives.
“Amen to that,” said Scott.
“Hey, you hear the MIBs have been hanging around base again? Flynn said one of them gave him the stink-eye earlier today.”
“For what?”
Marcus grinned. “According to Flynn, he was just minding his own business.”
Scott grinned too – though in truth the MIBs rankled him more than they did the other guys, who tended to treat them as a joke. Scott was desperate to know what they were up to. That old cat-killer, curiosity, coming to the fore yet again.
It was Flynn, predictably, who’d come up with the name MIBs, which stood for Men In Black.
“But they don’t even wear black,” pointed out ever-pedantic Lau.
“Some of them do,” argued Flynn.
“Yeah, but not like as a uniform. We’re not talking classic Men In Black here. Most of them dress pretty normally.”
“For government nerds,” Flynn said. “Government nerds with attitude problems.”
Flynn wasn’t wrong. Rumor had it that the MIBs were part of a new government faction, and on the occasions they had been spotted around base, they did indeed tend to be surly, uncommunicative, even disdainful in their dealings with “common” soldiers like Scott and his buddies, who they clearly considered to be several strata of society below them.
Not surprisingly, stories about them around base were rife. Some said the MIBs used Hangar 12 to store alien technology, or as a waystation in the distribution of secret weapons based on alien technology – though exactly where those weapons might be going was anyone’s guess. Others even claimed that somewhere on site there was a secret laboratory in which an actual live alien was imprisoned.
However outlandish these rumors (and it wasn’t uncommon for soldiers who spent weeks together between missions, and who were often kept in the dark like mushrooms, to share and halfway even believe theories and stories so batshit-crazy that out in the “real” world they’d be regarded as delusional, if not certifiable), Scott dutifully recorded them in his little red book.
He’d been jotting down his thoughts and observations pretty much ever since he had first joined the team – or at least ever since that first mission in LA, when he had been left with so many unanswered questions. He used a cheap hardback notebook with a plain red cover that he’d bought in a stationery shop while on leave, and if anyone were ever to ask him why he did it, he’d probably say it was simply to order his thoughts, clear his mind. The vast majority of the missions undertaken by Scott and his team were straightforward – even mundane – as was ninety-nine percent of the time they spent in Hangar 12, eating, sleeping, keeping up with their training and living their daily lives. Now and then, though, something odd happened, something inexplicable – like the gauntleted arm leaking green fluid he’d seen in LA; like the skinned, headless, spineless bodies in Mexico – that he couldn’t make sense of, that niggled and nagged at him until he thought he’d go crazy. It was these things he recorded in his book. And not only did he record them, but he jotted down his own questions and theories about them; and sometimes he made connections between them, some of which he thought were spurious, some of which made him wonder whether he might actually be onto something.
He had never told anyone about his bo
ok, not even Marcus, and when he wasn’t writing in it, or browsing through it, he kept it hidden behind the row of tatty paperbacks on the bookcase in his quarters. He wasn’t sure exactly why he did this. Was it because he thought he was recording information that ought to remain off the record, and that he’d get in trouble if his superiors found out what he was doing? Was it because he thought he might be suspected of spying, or of passing on sensitive information to enemies of the state? Or was it simply because he didn’t want that old bugbear of his, his natural curiosity, to be seen as a questionable trait, as something that might hold him back?
He guessed it was partly a little bit of all of this, but that wasn’t the whole story. Mostly, he supposed, it was simply that he didn’t want to be laughed at. There was something very different between expounding crazy stories in public, bouncing them back and forth between your buddies and yourself, and actually compiling a dossier of every weird incident, both major and minor, both real and rumored, that emerged as a consequence of the job. The first example could be seen as simply having fun and letting off steam, whereas the second could be seen as a somewhat creepy pastime that maybe bordered on obsession and psychosis.
All at once, Scott became aware that Marcus was clicking his fingers in front of his eyes. “Hey, buddy, you still with me?”
Scott blinked. “Sorry, what?”
“You zoned out for a minute there. You sure you’re okay?”
Scott forced a smile. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just tired.” He held up his almost empty glass. “Really tired, in fact. Too much of this stuff. I think I’ll hit the sack.”
Marcus glanced around. The mess hall was like a spartan, functional and windowless version of pretty much every high school and college dining hall in the States, and it was currently filled with dozens of raucously drunk soldiers, who were singing, yelling, stomping, dancing on tables and spilling almost as much alcohol as they were pouring down their throats.
“What, and miss all the fun?” he said.
Scott laughed. “I think I can live without the inevitable hangover.”
“Okay, buddy. Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Bright and early? Run at seven, followed by breakfast at eight?”
Marcus grimaced. “Just this once I think I’ll pass. Now take your chance and make a break for it while Flynn’s back is turned, otherwise he’ll never let you go.”
The two men briefly clasped hands, then Scott slipped away. He exchanged handshakes and hugs with a few of his colleagues en route to the exit door, but no one tried to stop him leaving.
Stepping out of the mess hall, with its blaring music, its echoing din of raised voices, and its comforting but overpowering stink of sweat, beer and testosterone, and into the long, clinical, brightly lit corridor beyond, was both a relief and, weirdly, something of a shock. As the door clicked shut behind him, and Scott found himself alone, he paused, feeling suddenly untethered, like an ant separated from its colony, or a mutineer cast adrift in an open boat.
Shaking his head, he smiled. Crazy thoughts. Crazy, drunken thoughts. Knowing he was a conundrum of a man – a loner who was also a great team player; a relaxed, laidback kind of guy who was also something of a control freak – he wandered down the corridor, his head buzzing.
He had gone no more than a dozen steps when he staggered and had to put out a hand to steady himself. Whoa. He was more drunk than he’d realized. He didn’t like the way his thoughts had suddenly started to drift sluggishly about in his skull, like blobs of oil in a lava lamp.
What he needed was fresh air to clear his head, and plenty of it. The nearest door to the outside was on his right, and would lead to the front of the building, but he decided to ignore that, because out there was where the smokers congregated, and he had no desire to be drawn into conversation.
Instead he turned left, and left again, heading for the back of the building, which contained a maze of corridors connecting storage spaces for equipment and vehicles with a bunch of rooms and offices given over to the various maintenance departments. Out back was a large open area containing an airstrip and a couple of helicopter pads, above which the sky was so vast and open, and so free of air pollution, that on a clear night the profusion of stars was breathtaking.
Scott knew this because often he would end up there after running several circuits around the inner perimeter of the grounds, and he would reward himself for his exertions by simply lying back in the cool grass and staring up into the heavens as the sweat dried on his body. The sight never failed to calm him, never failed to make both himself and whatever worries he might have feel tiny and insignificant. With the advent of the icy winter weather, it was a good eight weeks or more since he had last communed with the universe, and suddenly he found himself looking forward to it, thinking what a perfect way it would be of ushering in the New Millennium.
Eventually reaching the exit door, he tapped in the code that would take him outside the building. As the door buzzed and he pushed it open, he was met with a blast of air so icy it was like a double slap across his cheeks. Momentarily he staggered, screwing up his eyes, and then he recovered, standing his ground and taking in deep lungfuls of air so cold and refreshing that his muggy thoughts cleared in an instant.
He looked up. The sky was beautiful, the stars glittering as though, with the turn of the clock on this insignificant little planet, the universe had been newly minted.
“Happy New Year, Mom,” he said.
He did a quick calculation in his head, and worked out that if she’d still been alive, his mom would now have been fifty-two. Fifty-two! The realization staggered him. Fifty-two was no age at all – hell, Captain Parker was older than that! – and yet so much water had flowed under the bridge since his mom’s death that it sometimes seemed she belonged to another time, a simpler one where problems were quickly solved and decisions easily made.
He stood outside for several more minutes, then decided to head off to bed. One of the privileges of being a member of his current team – and like many black ops teams, they didn’t have an official name, just a code number for documentation purposes, but they referred to themselves, unofficially, as “the Brotherhood” – was that each of them got their own room, a place they could retreat to after a particularly arduous mission or when things got too intense. Admittedly, the rooms were not exactly five-star accommodation; like much of the rest of H12, they were bare and functional, and not much bigger than the average prison cell. But Scott appreciated having his own space. And unlike some of the other guys, who liked to be around people all the time, and therefore used their rooms as little more than places to sleep, he relished his daily periods of solitude, the chance to read, to write, or just to think.
The accommodation block, for Scott’s team at least, was on the right-hand side of the building – or the left if approaching from the rear, as Scott was doing now. This meant following a different route than the one that had brought him here, moving steadily left and passing through an area of what he assumed were larger storage units, which were fronted not with doors but with slide-down steel shutters. Hangar 12 was a huge building, and most people were congregated in the communal areas celebrating New Year’s, so for the first couple of minutes of his meandering trip through the warren he encountered not a soul. Then, as he turned another corner, he heard sounds echoing toward him – clangs and thumps of movement, conversing voices and a sharp bark of laughter. Scott slowed, half-wondering how he’d explain his presence here, then picked up his pace again. If questioned, he’d just tell the truth – he was on his way to bed and needed some air. Not that anyone had any reason to question him. As long as he wasn’t trying to break into locked rooms, he was perfectly within his rights to go anywhere he liked.
Turning another corner, he saw movement ahead. A bunch of guys, at least half a dozen of them, standing in front of one of the steel-shuttered doors, which he saw had been rolled half-open. The guys were bending over something on the ground, gest
uring toward it. As Scott approached them, his heart sank. These weren’t New Year’s revelers. They weren’t even soldiers. They were MIBs, and there were seven of them altogether. Although he wasn’t relishing the encounter, Scott never for a moment considered retracing his steps and seeking an alternative route to his quarters. He kept going.
“Hey!”
One of the MIBs had spotted him.
Scott saw them all straightening up, turning his way. Four were in suits and looked like accountants. Two wore black wax jackets over jeans and boots. The seventh guy, a black dude with a pugnacious expression and a diamond stud glinting in his left earlobe, looked as if he was dressed for a summer garden party in a light-colored linen suit and pale brown loafers with little tassels on the top.
Quickly, Scott’s eyes flickered from the men to what they had been hunkered over. It was a metal strong box the length of a coffin with handles at each end. From what Scott could make out, the strong box contained several metal poles, a circular disc from which projected half a dozen curved blades, a huge sword with a heavily serrated edge that resembled shark’s teeth, and what looked to be a faceplate of some kind.
He recalled a conversation he’d had with a big, musclebound guy from his team who went by the name Spider Johnson, so called because of the tarantula tattoo on the side of his neck, when the two of them had seen four MIBs hauling strong boxes from the back of a jeep one time.
“You ever wonder what they’re carrying?” Johnson said as the two of them, cooling down after a fitness session, watched the men moving between the jeep and the loading dock.
Scott snorted. “Sure. All the time.”
“Cybernetics,” Johnson had said with the confidence of a man who had no idea what he was talking about. “I hear it’s parts gonna be used to make a better, stronger soldier. Can’t be stopped. Can’t be killed.”
“Yeah?” said Flynn, who was standing nearby, sipping from his water bottle. “You think you need new parts, Johnson? I guess you could use a brain.”
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