Gemini Cell: A Shadow Ops Novel (Shadow Ops series Book 4) (19 page)

She wrinkled her nose.

“They’re sedated,” he said. “At least, when we’re not trying to simulate a noncompliant case.”

“What happens when you’re done with them?”

“I have no idea. Maybe they serve them in the DFAC.”

“So, it’s possible they cremate them? That there was a mix-up?”

He was silent for a long time. “If it’s a mix-up, it’s one hell of one. I mean, I’ve seen some dumb shit go down, but this takes the cake.”

“We have to go back there,” she said. “We have to talk to Chief Ahmad and find out what the hell happened.”

He was already patting the air with his palms, standing. “There is no
we
here, Sarah. I understand you’re grieving, but you are not just walking onto our compound shaking your fist and demanding answers. Leave it to me, I’ll get it figured out.”

“I need to be sure, Steve. I’m going.”

“Sarah, I understand this has you pissed. I’m mad as hell, too. But it’s just ashes. It’s not some conspiracy.”

She bridled, embarrassed. Enough of her suspicions had leaked into her tone. “I didn’t say anything about a conspiracy.”

“No, you didn’t. You just radiated it. Sarah, you said yourself you’ve been having dreams that make you feel like he’s alive. But he’s not alive. A screwup with his remains doesn’t change the fact that he’s not coming back. We both need to accept that.”

“I do accept that,” she said, fighting to keep the lie from her voice. “I just . . . I need this handled. You can get me into Little Creek.”

“No way. You’re going to have to trust me on this. It was hard enough just to get that can in the first place. If I bring you back there in your current . . .” He stopped himself, blushing.

“In my current what? My fucking current condition? My hysterical, driven-mad-by-grief condition?”

Patrick started crying at that, and Steve lifted him to his chest, rocking him gently. He met Sarah’s eyes over her son’s shoulder. “I’m not taking you, Sarah. Not because I’m ashamed of you, or because I doubt you, but because it won’t help. You want to find out what happened? Then you need to let me take care of this.”

She went to him, gathered Patrick into her arms, felt Steve’s hesitation in releasing her son. Patrick held on, cried worse when they were finally separated, drummed his tiny hands on her neck. Her heart broke at the sound, but she held him close. She felt the mother lion behind her eyes, staring Steve down.
You’re not taking my boy.

The silence between them stretched. “So,” he finally said. “I’ll go find out what’s up. Then, after, we can talk.”

“Fine,” she said, her voice sounding foreign in her own ears, hard. “Thank you,” she added. “I appreciate this.”

He nodded, headed silently for the door.

“How long do you think it’ll take?” she asked before he could leave.

He turned to her, exasperated, his hands already sweeping up into the broad motion that would say,
How the hell should I know? Calm down.

“Please, Steve,” she said, her voice husky now. “I need this to be over.”

His eyes softened at that, and he nodded. “I’ll head there now, and I’ll text you as soon as I have something. Just . . . just hang on.”

And then he was gone, leaving Sarah to rock her son into tearful sleep, and to hang on, as ordered.

OCONUS

Schweitzer offered no resistance as they moved him from the damaged cold-storage unit to a reinforced cell farther down the hall. This one had no transparent panel, no slot in the door. A narrow cage occupied the center of the room, well away from the walls. The cage’s bars were thick, stretching from the ceiling to the floor, where Schweitzer knew they were probably anchored several feet deep. He wasn’t sure if he could bend them with his newfound strength, but he doubted it.

Burn and freeze nozzles covered the walls, newly painted, layers of deck gray that were unable to fool Schweitzer’s enhanced vision. He could see the deep furrows in the reinforced concrete behind them, smell the faint, acrid odor that wafted from the scorch marks. The room’s burn function had been used, and recently.

I think they’re done fucking around,
he said to Ninip.

No cage can hold us,
Ninip answered, but the jinn’s voice lacked its usual razor edge, seemed muted somehow. Quieter.

Schweitzer paused, tried to goad the jinn into speaking again.
I don’t know, those bars look pretty thick.

Ninip didn’t answer.

You think you can bend them?
Schweitzer tried again.

Perhaps,
Ninip said.

Definitely quieter, and there was something . . . smaller about Ninip’s voice, a hair less arrogant. There was the hint of a reverberation, as if the jinn were speaking from the bottom of a very wide well.

Schweitzer tentatively reached out into the darkness they shared. The presence still dominated it, but there was a bit more space for him to slide into. The sense of being pressed into the edge of their shared body had abated a fraction. Was the jinn some kind of vampire? Did he need slaughter to sustain himself? Had the revelation of the death of his civilization sapped his will? Schweitzer reached into the presence, fumbling for a grasp on the jinn’s thoughts and memories.

Ninip came alive at that, snarling and slapping him away. Down but not out, then.

I was a millennium in the storm when your ancestors were a hope of generations distant. Do not presume to match your strength to mine. Your precious professionalism will not help you here.

Schweitzer raised phantom hands in a placating gesture.
Okay, okay.

Ninip gave a final growl and settled back. It was a little while before Schweitzer realized with a start that the jinn hadn’t tried to push him out again. For all Ninip’s bluster, Schweitzer still had his extra share of the darkness.

He batted away a thousand questions. The only one who could likely answer them was the jinn. He could ask Jawid, or Eldredge, but he remembered his old adage from the counterintelligence portion of his indoctrination.
Need to know,
his instructor had said.
I don’t care if it’s the guy standing right next to you. The essence of compartmentalization is only revealing that which must be revealed. That way, if your buddy’s compromised, the mission isn’t. Treat everyone like mushrooms, keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em shit, until the mission absolutely requires otherwise.

No need to tip his hand until he had a better grip on what this meant.

The books were gone, and he didn’t want to risk tangling with Ninip again, so he spent his time reaching out into the void, stretching for some hint of the tremor he’d felt before, the intense feeling that Sarah was searching for him.

Ninip seemed content to let him, and the lack of resistance allowed him to push his consciousness easily outward into the freezing darkness that lay beyond the walls of their shared body. The screaming assaulted him instantly, and he felt the slightest tug toward the maelstrom of souls, a hint of an undertow that he hadn’t noticed before.

Most firefights were an enabling scenario for Attention Deficit Disorder, a flashing series of peripheral engagements that prevented focus on anything. SEALs trained for that, expanding their peripheral vision, their ability to flit from task to task, their focus everywhere at once. Master Chief Green, in one of his rare metaphysical moments, had quoted from the Samurai sourcebook
Hagakure
.
Taking an enemy on the battlefield is like a hawk taking a bird,
Green had said.
Even though it enters into the midst of a thousand of them, it gives no attention to any bird other than the one it has first marked.

There was a time and a place for laserlike focus. A supported prone shot over long distance didn’t require multitasking. The ability to drill down to a single space in the universe, to will a round to go into it, no matter how small or far away, was just another tool in their toolbox.

Schweitzer summoned this focus now, drilling down through the distractions, the cold and the screaming and the gentle tug into chaos, searching for the echo of his wife.

It was harder than when he was alive. Schweitzer was used to the smells and sounds of combat, able to slip into the space where the primate faded back, and the artist stepped up to do his work. The void was different. The shrieking pastiche nagged at his senses, tempting him to focus, to try to single out individual voices from the throng. It diverted his attention from the undertow, reeling him slowly closer as he focused, until he snapped back to himself, pushing suddenly backward, alarmed at how close he’d come. He knew that, once sucked in, he’d never escape.

Slowly, the voices slipped farther and farther to the edge of his hearing, going from scream to murmur and finally to the low buzz that masked everything when he focused, gunfire, explosions, radio chatter.

And there, at the bottom, was his sniper’s lens. It arced out into the tangle of souls, swept through in search of its single target, the signature of the love of his life, the scent of her homemade perfume. The maelstrom was chaos of an order of magnitude he’d never experienced, but this focus was Schweitzer’s own bit of magic, his artistry of the gun. It could put a bullet into a square inch at almost two thousand yards.

It could find anything.

He was dimly aware of Ninip rousing, reaching out to observe Schweitzer’s focus, but that quickly receded into the low hum of everything around him, until it became so thematic that it was a kind of quiet.

And in that silence, he found her.

The smell of rosewater, faint, but unmistakable, and something more, a tremor, a pulsing, weak and rapid, but most certainly there. No, two pulses, one smaller than the other, regular rhythms in counterpoint.

Heartbeats.

Schweitzer jolted back into himself, whirled to face the jinn.
They’re alive. My family is alive.

The jinn’s focus on Schweitzer had been nearly as intent as Schweitzer’s focus on the void. Ninip startled back, paused for a moment before shaking his head.

No, they are not.

They are! I felt them. Their hearts are beating. I picked it out of the storm.

Nothing can be picked out of the storm. I was there for . . .

For thousands of years. I know. You bring it up every chance you get. I’m telling you, I spotted it. They’re alive. I heard their heartbeats.

Ninip sighed.
Millennia mean nothing to you, but you must trust me that it is time enough to observe one’s own surroundings. There are no heartbeats in that place. It is for the dead.

Bullshit.

I know . . . I know your family is your purpose, but you must believe me. My helmet bearer served me since I became a man. When we fought the barbarians from the swamps, he took one of their poisoned arrows through his knee. The wound soured.

So you killed him.

He was a warrior and my friend.
Ninip sounded hurt.
The priests took his leg from the knee down. They made him a harness to go around the stump, holding a bit of wood there, so he could walk in a broken fashion, like a camel gone lame. He was no longer able to fight, to be sure, but I made him my master of granaries, and he served me faithfully until his death.

Is there a point here?

He swore to his dying day that, though he could look plainly and see that the leg was gone, he felt it as it were not. He felt himself stretching his calf, moving his toes. Phantoms. Illusions conjured by a desire so deep it can bend our seeing the world for what it is. I felt the same when I first came into the storm. That I could hear the voices, or feel the warmth of my people, my concubines, my sons. Phantoms, I tell you.

Schweitzer’s joy curdled so rapidly that he could feel himself deflate.
That can’t be it,
he said, even as he realized it was.

I am sorry,
Ninip said.
Even if they were alive, even if we could go to them, what would you do?

Schweitzer ran the scenario through his mind. His corpse-gray skin, the silver flames of his eyes, the Frankenstein scars. The broken remnants of his face, scraped over a steel frame until he could neither smile nor kiss.

Sarah would never recognize him. Patrick would be terrified. For the first time since his death, he looked down at their cock, limp and gray, trailing along the inside of one thigh. He remembered desire, caught echoes of it in Ninip’s lust, but the root of it was lost to him.

Ninip laughed at that.
Is that what you want? A woman?

Schweitzer’s sudden anger burned so hot that even the jinn was taken aback.

I am sorry,
Ninip said.
That is likewise beyond us. We are an engine of war, nothing less than that. There are no more wives, nor children. The touch of a woman is yet another phantom from the life you have been cut from. You do not truly desire it. It is only an echo that will fade as you begin to see it for what it is.

He was right. Schweitzer couldn’t make love. He couldn’t come home at night and chat about a day at work. He didn’t truly inhabit the world of living, just a twilit corner of it, a shadow of life, forever cut off from the interactions that made the true living world worth enduring.

That’s what his love was. A phantom limb.

He lifted the dog tags, looking at the image of Sarah and Patrick. The lines seemed clearer now, the rust scraped away in the jostling of his breaking through the transparent panel to his cell. But it meant nothing. They were shadows. Memories. They were gone.

The realization struck Schweitzer so deeply that he didn’t realize he’d sunk into a reverie until Jawid’s voice snapped him out of it.

Step into the cage, please.

Why?
Schweitzer asked. Ninip coiled beside him, ready to spring. Without reaching for them, Schweitzer could see the images flashing through the jinn’s mind as he recalled staring down the nozzle of the flamethrower, pilot light flickering beneath.

For your own safety,
Jawid said.
Dr. Eldredge wishes to speak with you.

Schweitzer could hear a dull hissing as the gate’s bars sank into the floor. The long, slow slide told Schweitzer he had been right in his guess of how deeply they were anchored. He met Ninip’s spiritual gaze in the darkness. The jinn’s eyes seemed serpentine in his mind, golden orbs, split by a black chevron of a pupil. They dipped as the jinn nodded. If the world of the living was where Schweitzer’s heart lay, then Eldredge was his connection to it, and Jawid the man who’d given him a chance to remain in it a bit longer. That counted for something.

As soon as he stepped into the center of the dotted square left by the retracting poles, they shot upward until they slid into the depressions in the ceiling and slammed home with a dull clank.

Thank you,
Jawid said.

The door hissed open, and Eldredge stepped into the room, hand wrapped around a small plastic cylinder capped with a shiny, red button. Schweitzer guessed depressing it would trigger the burn nozzles, freeing him and Ninip both to chase their respective phantom limbs in the chaos beyond.

“Jim,” Eldredge said, “I’m sorry about this.” He gestured at the bars.

Schweitzer raised their shoulders a fraction of an inch, dropped them.

“How is . . . your companion doing?”

Schweitzer did the miniscule shrug again. Inside their shared body, Ninip crouched beside him impatiently, waiting for Eldredge to get on with it.

“It was a good thing you did, Jim,” Eldredge said. “That would have gone ugly if you hadn’t popped in. Thanks for that.”

Schweitzer gave him nothing. He could hear the
but
in Eldredge’s voice, see it in the set of his mouth.

Sure enough, “But there are . . . people higher up in the chain of command here who are . . . concerned about what they’re seeing as an outburst. They’re worried about the safety of their personnel. They don’t see you the way I do, Jim. Unfortunately, they’re in charge.”

Will he destroy us?
Ninip hissed.

Relax,
Schweitzer said.
If they wanted to destroy us, we’d be destroyed already. He’s here for a reason.

“Fortunately, we’ve got our first lead on a Body Farm supplier, and they happen to be OCONUS. This kills two birds with one stone, Jim. It gets you out of the country, which will settle the nerves of my superiors, and it puts you on the track of whoever did this to you.”

Schweitzer’s heart leapt. The defeat and sadness of Ninip’s revelation reversed course, suddenly fanned to a blaze. He couldn’t be back with Sarah and Patrick again, but he could avenge them. For a brief moment, his own bloodlust matched Ninip’s, and he could feel the jinn exulting, fanning the flames until Schweitzer shivered. He fought down the impulse, knowing it would do no good, but he found their shared body pressed up against the bars, Eldredge taking a fearful step back, thumb hovering over the button in his hand.

Schweitzer fought through the flood of eagerness that drowned him, took control of their lungs, throat, and mouth, managed to squeeze out a single word. “Intel.”

“You’ll get it with your targeting package once you’re on the ground.”

“Where?”

Eldredge paused. At last, he shrugged. “Waziristan. It’s a . . .”

Schweitzer was already tuning him out. He’d run three ops in the lawless Federally Administrated Tribal Areas that composed a mountainous no-man’s-land claimed by both Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was a broken sprawl of shattered mountains, stunted trees, and people mired in the dark ages in every respect save their access to modern weapons.