Gemini Cell: A Shadow Ops Novel (Shadow Ops series Book 4) (21 page)

Chang turned and made for the gate, walking quickly, but not so quickly as to tip anyone off to his haste. The gate loomed before him, and for a moment he had an image in his mind of its refusing to open, of him turning while Ahmad led other sailors to grapple him.

But it did open, the wheels squeaking as the barrier drew aside. Chang breathed a sigh of relief, walked slowly through.

“Chang!”

He froze, Ahmad was jogging up behind him. “Dude. I thought you were going to check in with me before you split.” She could have been hurt, she could have been angry, she could have been about to ask to borrow five bucks. There was no way to tell.

“Sorry, Chief. I’ve gotta get back.”

“Okay,” she said. He turned to go.

“Oh, hey,” she said. “The ashes. I don’t know what’s up with that. That DNA place must have shit the bed. No way that’s pig ashes.”

“How’d you know?” he asked.

“Biggs called me on the shop phone.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“He didn’t talk you out of the rating change, huh.”

“Nope.”

“Well, don’t do anything tomorrow. Give me another week to change your mind.”

“Sure, Chief. Talk to you soon.”

Interrogation techniques were 90 percent bullshit. But there was something deeper stirring as the gate shut between him and Ahmad, her eyes boring into his back.

He didn’t think she really wanted another week to change his mind. He didn’t think she wanted that at all.

INBOUND

Eldredge and Jawid accompanied Schweitzer and Ninip all the way to the Globemaster. The ramp was already down, exposing a cavernous interior, Ninip’s twisted vision turning the shadows into crawling ghosts bent on murder. The plane grew as they approached, the cargo bay a giant dragon’s maw, its horns the long, sloped wings, stretching out into the distance.

A soldier waited for them beside the aircraft, what looked like a fighter pilot’s helmet tucked under his arm. He passed it to Eldredge, then walked off into the darkness without a word.

Eldredge raised it up, approached Schweitzer. “May I?”

What’s this?
Schweitzer asked Jawid through their link. It was easier than doing the heavy lifting of forcing their dead lungs and larynx to work.
It looks like it’s made of cardboard.

“He wants to know . . .” Jawid began.

“It’s not for protection,” Eldredge cut him off. “There will be personnel on-site who aren’t privy to the specifics of this program, and we’d prefer to keep your identity hidden.”

You don’t care if they know who I am. You care if they know what I am,
Schweitzer passed to Jawid.

Eldredge smiled. “You really are extraordinary. Yes, that’s right. The lure of media exposure is too much for many. Do you remember when Bin Laden was killed, and the SEAL who shot him wrote an unauthorized tell-all?”

Schweitzer remembered, the cold anger it kindled in him alerted Ninip, and the jinn began his usual dig into Schweitzer’s memories to bring himself up to speed on the subject.

“The Gemini Cell operates as well as it does because of strict secrecy. We can’t risk that sort of thing here.” Eldredge tapped the helmet. “You keep this on the entire time you’re there. They can speculate as much as much as they like, but there’s no need to give them evidence.”

What if people talk to me?

Jawid’s translation drew another smile from Eldredge. “You can manage monosyllables. Leave the rest to us.”

Schweitzer nodded and slipped the helmet on. Eldredge reached in and snapped connecting tabs from the helmet’s lower edge into the collar of his armor. The visor was tinted one-way: Schweitzer could see out easily, but the surface would show only darkness to anyone looking in.

Eldredge stood back, hands on his hips, surveying his work.

Does it make me look fat?
Schweitzer sent to Jawid.

Eldredge laughed out loud at that. “It makes you look terrifying, which is the desired effect.” He leaned in, slapping a patch against the Velcro surface on Schweitzer’s shoulder. Schweitzer looked down, seeing a subdued American flag shrouded in the gloom.

“That should at least take the edge off,” Eldredge said. “Let’s get you to work.”

Schweitzer was surprised when Jawid and Eldredge headed up the ramp along with them.
You’re coming with me?

This time Jawid answered. “Of course. You are our most independent subject. We need to be on hand to help you.”

Eldredge nodded, gesturing to a huge steel cage in the center of the enormous and empty interior. Ten men surrounded it, fire axes held casually over shoulders or head down on the deck plates.
No flamethrowers. They don’t want to risk fire while we’re in the air.
They were decked out in the armor that looked straight out of a documentary on the Middle Ages: thick leather riveted under steel plates.

Ninip looked at them eagerly, Schweitzer could feel his sense of recognition. Warriors with hand-to-hand weapons and metal armor? This was the world the jinn knew.

Only ten?
the jinn asked.
That is no challenge.

Schweitzer agreed. Even if they’d filled the hold with guards, Schweitzer would have given himself and Ninip even odds of taking them apart.

Jawid stiffened as he felt Ninip’s mood, nodded to Eldredge, who smiled at Schweitzer. “I’d keep Ninip in check,” he said. “The pilots of this aircraft have orders to scuttle it the moment they get word of a struggle back here. There are no parachutes on board. None of us want to die, Jim. But we are every bit as willing to give our lives for our country as you were when you lived. Remember that.”

Jawid looked pale, but the axemen’s and Eldredge’s faces were utterly committed. Schweitzer projected an image to Ninip of the plane slamming into the earth and exploding into flame, or their shared body vaporizing, the storm of souls opening up to receive them.

The jinn growled in frustration but receded.

Eldredge gestured to the cage. “Now, for your own safety. Please.”

As Schweitzer and Ninip approached the back of the cage, Schweitzer saw a small wooden stool piled high with books. At the top of the stack was a thick volume with a frayed dust jacket showing a group of women in hoop skirts gathered around a piano.

Oh, Ninip,
Schweitzer said,
have I got a treat for you.

—

Ninip was howling before Schweitzer had finished the first chapter. The jinn leapt at their shared hands for the third time, trying to force them to drop the book, but Schweitzer managed to hold on, limbs trembling, text remaining firmly in place.

Tedium,
the jinn cried,
they are women without money. Their parents should have sold them to the priests. They could have served the fertility goddess. Instead they bemoan . . . Christ . . .

Christmas presents,
Schweitzer finished for him.
They want to buy Christmas presents for their mother.

Why would anyone want to hear about peasant women? Your people are mad.

This is widely considered one of the great American novels. You should be more respectful.
Schweitzer could barely keep the laughter out of his tone.

Ninip blinked at him incredulously.
You should take care. I am a lord.

Yeah, you keep saying that.
Schweitzer went on reading, Ninip’s howling gradually receding as he found his rhythm in the prose. The truth was that he didn’t like the book much more than Ninip did, but his mother had forced him to read it before she agreed to let him join the navy. He still remembered her face over her morning coffee, cigarette dangling from one lip, the cancer slowly consuming her lungs.
You have to read it because I will not have you grow into some pig-headed macho dickhead. That book created the concept we know as “the American girl,” and every woman you meet has been influenced by it whether she knows it or not.

It had been agony, but he loved his mother, and in retrospect, a part of him knew that she was dying, so he read it cover to cover. He remembered Sarah’s expression changing when he told her he’d read it, the dawning interest behind her eyes.
Thanks, Mom.

I know you were a king and a god or whatever,
Schweitzer said,
but you had a family of your own. Why can’t you even begin to wrap your head around this stuff? Didn’t you have a wife?

Several.

Oh, right. Well, what about a favorite?

Ninip quieted at that. When the jinn did speak, his voice was soft.
Yes, there was one.

Schweitzer thought of the woman in the braided wig, bending over Ninip as his son fed him the poisoned fig.
What happened to her?

She would have married my son,
the jinn said.
Or he would have killed her.

Schweitzer paused, searching for something to say.

It doesn’t matter.
Ninip beat him to the punch.
That is all beyond us now.

Schweitzer thought of the jinn’s animal bloodlust, tried to square that with the grief he sensed from Ninip now.
You were a man once. What happened to you?

He could feel the presence fixing its eyes on him.
You have no idea how long I drifted in the soul storm. You cannot fathom the weight of all those years. It stripped everything. It is coldness, blackness, it is isolation. It is endless death, without even the shadow of life.

There were men in my time who became enamored of the Plant of Joy,
the jinn went on,
smoking the dried pods to the exclusion of all else, choosing delirium and dreams over their wives and children, over their lords and oaths. They became the husks of men, little more than animals.

We call it heroin,
Schweitzer said.

Whatever you call it, it steals men’s hearts, drives them like cattle. Blood is the pulse of life,
Ninip said.
You do not realize that it drives you with an even greater force than this heroin. In life, you never think on it, it is not until death, and the freezing darkness of the void that you realize how much you cherished it.

And that’s why you kill? Because you want blood?

I told you. Killing is still life. But it is more than that. Remember your . . . what is that story about the steppe count who drinks blood?

Dracula. You’re saying you’re a vampire?

No, not like in that story. But I can understand. When you cannot have a thing, sometimes you hunger for it anyway. The closeness of it, the taste of it, the feel of its heat. It is a pale reflection of the truth, but a reflection is better than darkness.

That’s not all, is it?
Schweitzer asked.

There is vengeance,
Ninip said.

Vengeance? For what?

I do not live. Why should they?

Schweitzer thought about that for a long time, understanding the answer, even as he was horrified by it.
You can’t kill everyone, Ninip.

Not now,
the jinn answered slowly.
Not yet.

—

Schweitzer took a break from the book when he finally felt the plane descending, and the axemen began to strip off their armor, stowing it and their weapons in Pelican cases to reveal army combat uniforms beneath.

A moment later, Schweitzer felt the dull thud and bounce that indicated the plane had landed, heard the roar of the backing engines as it taxied to a stop. Hydraulics hissed as the ramp dropped, bright, hot sun flooding the bay, chasing the shadows into the corners before extinguishing them utterly.

Schweitzer felt the heat hit him, could see the soldiers sweating. He smelled the familiar odor of diesel fuel and burning trash. He was in the Middle East, probably at a transit point to refuel before making the final push into Afghanistan. Qatar, probably. Otherwise, Bahrain or Kuwait.

Eldredge walked over to the cage and punched a code into a keypad. A soft click, and the door swung open.

“Out you come, now,” he said.

He led Schweitzer and Ninip up through a passageway that led to the cockpit, but turned off at an open hatch in the fuselage. Schweitzer and Ninip stepped out to see a Blackhawk spinning up on the tarmac. The cabin was empty, save for a single crewman waving them in. Eldredge and Jawid strapped on rigger’s belts and clipped them into the ring on the helo’s floor. Schweitzer and Ninip sat on the edge, feet dangling over as before, the inhuman strength in their abdomen keeping their shared body braced more tightly than if they’d been belted in.

They flew dark, the pilots relying on their night-vision goggles. The ground below was invisible to Eldredge and Jawid, but Schweitzer’s enchanted eyes saw clearly. The ground rushed by them, veiled in shadow. They quickly cleared the airbase’s edge, marked by tall, concrete barricade walls and plywood guard towers ringed with barbed wire, and soon found themselves moving over the kind of dense, quickly constructed village that sprang up around any US military installation in a foreign country. It was a hodgepodge of scavenged building materials thrown together around dusty, narrow tracks that could scarcely be called a road. Dogs and livestock prowled the quiet alleys while their owners slept.

And then even that hint of civilization was swallowed by the darkness, and the landscape gave over to broken, arid barrens dotted with tiny growths of scrub plant life.

They flew for an hour, with Schweitzer spotting only one person, a tiny figure wrapped in a single bit of dirty cloth, herding a small cluster of scrawny goats with a long stick. The air began to cool as they went on, the ground rising sharply, becoming richer with plant life. Soon the ground dropped off sharply into the ravines and peaks he knew from his time out here. His phantom stomach clenched instinctively, and his memories began to reel back images, fire coming from all directions, villagers who smiled at you and then shot at you once your back was turned. The nagging lack of finality, of being able to be sure that you were doing any good, of cutting off the hydra’s head only to have four more rear up in its place.

Ninip observed the reaction with interest.
These are hill people. Here the professional is not enough. Here, you need a king.

Schweitzer said nothing as the helo finally began to shed altitude. A tight ring of concrete barricades and piled sandbags hemmed in a postage stamp of a camp against the side of a rock face that looked like it had been ripped off a larger mountain and set there deliberately. Guard towers dotted the peak. Schweitzer’s augmented vision made out a mortar position there, with spotters and shooters carefully camouflaged alongside.

They were waved in by a ground crew with dimly lit wands, which were extinguished immediately after the helo was in position, leaving the pilots to eyeball the rest of the descent and landing.

They were met on the ground by a group of Americans in Pakistani army uniforms, with thick beards and long hair. Schweitzer immediately recognized the steel-eyed confidence, the unflappable acceptance of the strange, the subtle notions, like civilian hiking boots and nonstandard drop-holsters. Minor augmentations to their Pakistani AK-47s. An ACOG scope, two magazines duct-taped together, a wooden butt stock replaced with a plastic folding one. Dogs came with them, Belgian Malinois with jet-black muzzles, eyes as hard and alert as their owners’.

Schweitzer couldn’t be certain if they were SEALs, but they were cut from the same cloth, the community of hard operators he’d once called home. A pang of nostalgia dug at him, and Ninip snarled contempt while simultaneously hungrily taking in every detail about the men.