Gemini Cell: A Shadow Ops Novel (Shadow Ops series Book 4) (7 page)

We have a new life together,
Ninip whispered,
and we will see the butcher’s bill paid in full.

Schweitzer raised his head, blinked again, met Eldredge’s eyes.

“You must have a lot of questions,” the man said as the soldiers around him slowly lowered their weapons. “Let me start with the first one. Moving isn’t living. Thinking isn’t living. You are dead, James Schweitzer.”

“How?” He exhaled.

Eldredge patted his shoulder. “It will take time to master speaking, and you’ll likely never be fully capable,” he said. “Pushing air over your vocal cords came naturally before. Now you have to force it.”

It wasn’t an answer. Frustration spiked, and Schweitzer clenched a hand on the stainless steel of the table’s edge.

And felt it crunch in his grip. He looked down to find the metal crumpled in his fist, balled like tissue paper below his dead, gray knuckles.

A mountain,
Ninip crooned,
a river in flood. We are mighty.

Schweitzer felt the power surging through him. The strength bunched in his muscles, coursed through his tendons. He looked back up at Eldredge, the man suddenly looking old, tiny, and frail. Schweitzer could break him in half with no effort, all he had to do was reach and . . .

He battered the lens aside. Ninip again. His seeing, his thoughts, his hungers.

Not so fast,
Schweitzer said.

They are toys,
Ninip said.
They cannot harm us. They are made to be our slaves.

They are people,
Schweitzer said,
and we’re not enslaving anyone. That went out of style a long time ago.

He felt Ninip’s sigh.
My grandfather told me that repetition can teach even the donkey. I will repeat the lessons until you learn.

Good luck with that,
Schweitzer said, straining against Ninip’s influence. The eagerness to test his newfound strength on Eldredge didn’t abate, but he managed to hold it in check, surging just below his skin, making his fingers twitch.

“How?” he managed again.

“Well,” Eldredge said, shrugging. “Honestly? Magic.”

The older man stepped aside. Behind him stood another man, thick beard neatly trimmed, dark eyes regarding Schweitzer with open curiosity. He wore the long shirt-robe and baggy trousers common to the hill tribesmen in the lawless steppe around Afghanistan and Iran. He was thin, his head looking too big for his shoulders. A small kufi capped his wild shock of black, tightly curling hair.

The air around him shimmered, swirled, as if some barely visible river coursed about him. Schweitzer shook his head, but it was not Ninip’s influence this time. Whatever he was seeing was true to the man before him. Eldredge paid it no notice; nor did any of the soldiers.

“This,” Eldredge said, “is Jawid Rahimi. He is . . . well . . . he is a Sorcerer, and he has raised you from the dead.”

Hello.
Jawid’s voice echoed in Schweitzer’s mind, penetrating into the space that he shared with Ninip.
Hello to both of you.

It was the language of Jawid’s thoughts. Schweitzer could hear the Pashto beneath, the slow and painstaking translation into the halting English that reached him. It was like listening to two men, one talking slowly after the other.

Jawid did not share the space with Ninip and Schweitzer, merely spoke into it, but Schweitzer could sense the channel that connected them, could see the swirling current about the Sorcerer focusing forward toward him.

This one is strong,
Ninip said to Jawid.
You have done well.

Jawid said nothing, but Schweitzer could feel the Sorcerer’s fear at Ninip’s words, felt him withdraw slightly, drawing back up the channel he had created.

Sarah and Patrick,
Schweitzer said hurriedly.
Where are my wife and son?

They are meat,
Ninip snarled,
and we are steel.

Fuck off. Where the fuck are they?

You mewl and whine like a kitten,
Ninip answered.
You cry for milk and your mother. You are with me now. We are a storm.

Jesus, give it a rest. Jawid, what happened to my family?

He knew the answer before Jawid gave it, could feel it in the Sorcerer’s link to he and Ninip.
They . . . they did not survive. I am sorry.

Though Schweitzer had known this, had seen it, the grief still came anew. He lowered their shared head, cradling their head in their hands, the emotion setting their shoulders shaking, physical motions performed out of habit. They had no tears, their shared cheeks would not redden.

Disgusting,
Ninip said.
They are better off, beyond the bags of flesh that held them prisoner.

Where?
Schweitzer asked.
Where are they now? Are they in heaven?

I don’t know,
Jawid answered.
I only found Ninip.

Where did you find him?
Schweitzer shouted.
Maybe they’re in the same place! Send me back there?

I cannot. I . . .

Jawid is a fool,
Ninip said.
An ignorant goatherd who cannot spell his own name.

Shut the hell up, you don’t . . .

No . . .
Jawid cut in,
he is right. I cannot read and write, and I am not good at stories. I will show you.

Schweitzer’s vision blotted out, his mind swept along the current of Jawid’s magic, drowning even Ninip’s curses. His vision returned to the grainy static, flickering and wavering, the colors finally running together into unbroken white.

Slowly, the field dissolved, a scene resolving beneath it.

A little boy, shivering beside a goat path, scrawny, filthy, arms wrapped around his knees. Behind him, a hut of scavenged wood, plastic sheeting, and corrugated metal has been ransacked, set alight. There are corpses among the wreckage, the boy’s family.

It’s you,
Schweitzer said.

Yes,
Jawid answered.
My father was proud. He would not pay the warlord for the privilege of herding in our own ancestral range. They left me to starve. How could a little boy survive in the hills that ground the Russians and the Americans both to powder?

The little boy standing, tears streaking clean trails through the dirt covering his face. The air beginning to eddy around him, shimmering, visible only to him. The little boy crying out to the world beyond, reaching for his family.

And finding something else.

A hand stretched out from the afterlife, grasping his own, hungry for life, following the sound of his voice back into the land of the living.

My grandmother told me of the jinn,
Jawid said.
I put the first one in a stone and carried it with me. It made me run faster than the wind. Fast enough to hunt hares on my own.

The boy, face red with blood, sheltering under an overhanging rock, chewing hungrily on the body of a rabbit.

That was how they found me.
Hard men with eyes like flint, dirty white turbans trailing over Russian military fatigues. They carry guns, grenade launchers. They kneel before the boy, offer him food, their eyes crawl over him with a hunger that made Schweitzer recoil.

What could I do? I was a child. I wanted nothing more than a family again.

The boy, eyes kohled and lips rouged, dressed in a woman’s gown, sitting in the lap of one of the hard men, a finger idly stroking his hair.

Abdul-Razaq told me he loved me, and I told him of my jinn-in-a-stone. Some of the Talebs wanted to kill me, but others saw the power in what I could do, they made me reach out again and again. I made amulets, talismans. The jinn made the Talebs strong, or swift, or able to see in darkness. It made our little band mighty. Until . . .

A gun battle. The boy shivering again, from fear this time, hiding behind a boulder as explosions sound around him.

One of the Talebs leaping over him, the amulet about his neck sending him fifty feet in the air. The sniper takes him anyway, the huge round nearly severing his head.

American soldiers. Special Forces by their gear, surrounding the boy. One of them kneels, takes the boy’s shoulders, speaks gently. He knows what the boy can do. They have gotten it from a captive Taleb.

The rear hatch of a C-130 slowly closing. A female medic smiles at the boy, checking him for lice, giving him shots, antibiotics. The shudder as the huge plane takes off, the bumpy ride through the long hours before the hatch lowers again, the light of the American sky flooding in.

They have given me a home, here. I still bring the jinn, but now . . .

. . . I am the amulet,
Schweitzer finished for him.
My body.

Schweitzer’s vision went white again as Jawid’s magic withdrew, then resolved back to the room, Eldredge looking at Jawid, his brow furrowed with worry.

“No problem,” Jawid said to Eldredge in heavily accented English. “I am telling him how he came to be.”

“Ah.” Eldredge turned back to Schweitzer. “So, there it is.”

That’s what you are,
Schweitzer said to Ninip.
One of these jinn.

A goatherd’s name for a thing he cannot understand. I was a god and king both, in my time. It pleases me to live again.

Sarah, Patrick. The images flashed through his mind, a bullet knocking his wife back into the wreckage, the burning door covering his son. The thought of this unlife without her . . . He didn’t think she’d like this existence, but he was powerless before the impulse, so strong it blotted out even Ninip’s presence for a moment. If there was even a chance that he could see her, could talk to her . . .

Schweitzer sucked in air again, working the bellows of their lungs, tensing the muscles around their larynx. “Make . . . Sarah . . . live.”

Eldredge and Jawid exchanged a worried glance.

“I cannot do it for everyone . . .” Jawid said. “They were not . . . strong enough.”

Lies,
Ninip said.
They were not useful enough.

“Why?” Schweitzer asked.

Eldredge nodded to Jawid, who stepped back. “You served your country in life, Jim. We were hoping you’d continue to do so now.”

“What?”

“The Gemini Cell has been engaging in some experimental operations based on Mr. Rahimi’s rather . . . unique capabilities. You will find you now have some capabilities of your own. Your memories, your skills, didn’t pass with your life, Jim. You are still a SEAL. This is why the Cell doesn’t work with taxi drivers or chefs. We make warriors, Jim. Warriors the likes of which this world has never seen.”

He has the right of it,
Ninip said.
The world has never seen the likes of us.

“Let me show you.” Eldredge waved to two of the soldiers, who slung their carbines and stepped aside to reveal a dressing mirror set into the wall. “Look at what you are now.”

Schweitzer stood, felt the energy course through their legs, the muscles tensing, ready to respond to his commands. He wanted to run, to leap. He knew they would run faster than he’d ever gone in life, jump higher than any living man could.

Through me you have these gifts,
Ninip said.
Together, we are a mighty work. Alone, you rot.

Schweitzer forced them to walk, slowly, deliberately, the soldiers parting around them, until they stood before the mirror. He stripped away the hospital gown and surveyed himself.

He recognized his body, still lean and hard from grueling training, the buoy swims, the beach runs, op after op in sixty pounds of gear.

They’d done the best they could with his stomach. The sutures were a Frankenstein mess, but they were solid and holding.

They’d had less success with his face.

The bullet had entered through his chin and sheared off the back of his head. It had tumbled en route, shattering the bone behind his eyes, nose, and mouth. He raised a hand to feel the surgical steel they’d used to provide the armature that had once occurred naturally, his skin stretched taut over it, stitched with the same wide white sutures along his false mandible. What remained of his face stretched out, flattened across the metal surface beneath, looking as if his old self had been painted across a slightly curving canvas.

His eyes were gone. In their place, soft silver light played in the sockets, glowing gently, eddying like the air around Jawid’s shoulders.

He gestured to the twin flames. “Eyes.”

“Magic.” Eldredge shrugged. “We don’t understand why it happens when a soul is paired with one of Jawid’s jinn, but it always does. We tried leaving the old eyes in at first, but they always burned away. Now we just cut to the chase and take them out.”

Schweitzer gazed back into the mirror.

“Monster,” Schweitzer said.

“Only to your enemies,” Eldredge said.

“To the rest of us, you’re a hero.”

OUT WITH THE BAD AIR

Steven Chang looked down at the tiny tube emerging from his chest. A three-sided bandage hid it from view, letting air escape from his reinflated lung, preventing it from drawing any back in with each breath.

In his years with the teams, Chang had seen far worse but never on himself. The sight reminded him that he was dizzy, nauseous. He swallowed, felt faintness swamp him, put out an arm to steady himself against the hospital wall.

You’re not a SEAL,
Master Chief Green had said to him in Coronado.
Fucking slant-eyed piece of shit. You can wear that pin, but you didn’t fucking earn it. Don’t you ever forget that.
In addition to being a racist, Green was a mean drunk and he’d been drummed out of the navy shortly after, but his words stuck with Chang, and down the years he’d never been able to shake them.

The doc told him that the bullet had broken his ribs, driving them into his lungs, a hidden wound that could have easily killed him had it not been for Schweitzer’s quick thinking.

Jim Schweitzer, the first smiling face since graduating the SEAL basic course known as BUD/S, the first friend he’d had in the teams. The man who never doubted him, even when he doubted himself. The same friend who’d had his head sheered off by a bullet while Chang slept soundly in an air-conditioned hospital room. SEALs were closer than brothers. His had saved his life, then died hours later.

You couldn’t have done anything. Don’t do that to yourself.
But saying it over and over in his head didn’t make him feel it. If he hadn’t gotten himself shot, if he had trained harder, fought harder.

You’re not a SEAL.
Green hated him for his race, but that didn’t make him wrong. Chang tried to take a breath to steady himself and winced at the fiery agony in his chest. He doubled over, panic racing up his spine to burn at the base of his skull. He was no stranger to fear, he knew how to put it aside, but that didn’t address the root cause.

Weakness. He could see Green’s disgusted face in his mind’s eye.

Chang looked up, nodding at one of the nurses, who frowned in concern. “I’m fine,” he whispered.
You’re not fine. You’re weak and Jim’s dead and it’s your fault.

He straightened, composing his features before moving the rest of the way down the hallway to the outpatient room. The sign outside the room read
SENTARA PRINCESS ANNE, MED SURG—3
.

I can’t let you go,
the doc had said.
I need to keep an eye on you.
But one look at Chang’s face had convinced him. Chang might be a lousy SEAL, but he was a good friend. He owed Jim this much.

He turned the handle and eased the door open, stepping into the immaculate hospital room. It looked more like a hotel, complete with banal art and a fake potted plant in the corner. Four beds lined the walls, all empty save one.

Sarah Schweitzer was awake.

She lay on her side, a huge swatch of white gauze taped over her abdomen. The round had struck her hip and ricocheted off the bone, tumbling upward to take a sizeable bite out of the meat below her ribs. What it hadn’t done was pierce any vital organs. Chang didn’t doubt she was in pain, be he also didn’t doubt that she’d live.

And the pain she felt was nothing compared to what she was about to feel. He braced himself against the wall, watching his T-shirt bunch and rise around the tiny tube, fighting against dizziness again.

Lock it up. She’s not going to hear it from some jerkoff chaplain. She never believed in God. It needs to come from you.

She looked up as he shut the door, struggled to rise, winced at the pain in her side, and lay back down.

“Steve!” Her voice trembled, her pink hair a slash across her eyes. God, she was beautiful. Jim had always talked about what a firecracker she was. A true SEAL’s wife. He’d deserved her.

It should be him here, not me.
The thought flooded him, dampening his smile. She frowned as she saw it.
Damn it, you will be strong for her.
He grinned until he felt like a store mannequin, and made it the rest of the way to the bed, pulling up the metal-framed chair beside it.

“Hey, Sarah. How’re you holding up?”

“I’ve been kidnapped,” she said. “This isn’t a hospital. This is a fucking jail. Nobody will tell me anything. I have to see Patrick . . .”

“The P-Train is fine,” Chang said. “He just needs to rest is all. So do you.” A lie. Patrick was badly burned, with one arm broken in three places where a round had passed clean through. That didn’t even count the damage the experience had done to his still-forming mind, but it wouldn’t help her to hear that. “He’s in pediatrics. Doc says you can see him tomorrow.”

He silently prayed she would stay focused on the good news, be too distracted to ask him about Jim, give him time to get his nerve up to . . .

“Where’s Jim?”

Focused as a laser. She could have been a SEAL herself. His heart sank.
Try not to fuck it up too badly.

He opened his mouth to answer, closed it. He paused, tried to form words again, but it was no use. Jim was dead and he was alive and the world would never be right again. The silence at last dragged on long enough for her to have her answer.

“Oh, Steve,” she said. He felt her fingertips brush his knee. Her voice broke. “Oh, Steve. You poor kid. I’m so sorry.”

He heard her sobs, felt her hand shaking. In the midst of all this, she was sorry for him, only worried about how keenly he felt the loss. It was too much.

He pitched off the chair, wracked with sobs so hard they doubled him over. His knees hit the reflective tiles of the floor, and he fumbled for her hand, grasped it tight, heedless of his fingernails digging into the backs of her knuckles, his wounded lung singing in agony as the hitching sobs shook his ribs. She reached across, a move that he knew must hurt her equally, wrapped her arm around his head, drew him close.

They lay like that, her on the bed and he slumped on the floor, the room filled with their hitching breaths and exhalations, the pouring out of sorrow, the whispered “I’m sorry,” and “I’m so sorry,” and “I won’t leave you alone.”

It was Chang who said the last, and when he looked up at her again, he realized how deeply he felt it. This woman and her son were the last he had of Jim, and he couldn’t bear the thought of them struggling, with grief or anything else. He knew Sarah was tough as nails. Hell, Chief told him she’d stabbed one of the assailants through the neck with her canvas knife. She didn’t need his help, but that didn’t lessen the urge to give it. He’d loved Jim, and that meant he loved her, too.

They cried and cried, and Chang couldn’t remember when they finally stopped, exhausted and dried out, no tears left in them.

“What happened?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know,” he answered lamely. “They’re still trying to piece everything together. I just got discharged from medical an hour ago.”

“And you came straight here.” Her eyes went wet again.

“I wanted you to hear it from me.”
Bullshit. You needed someone to lean on. You don’t want to be alone either.

“Terrorists? Criminals? Who were they?” Sarah was a SEAL’s wife. She knew the list of bad guys lined up to take their vengeance on her husband was a mile long. “How the fuck did they find us?”

“I have no idea. We’ll find out, Sarah. We’ll find out, and we’ll make sure it never happens again.”

She tried to sit up again, slumped down grimacing in pain. “You do that, Steve. You make sure those fuckers pay. They hurt my boy.”

“I swear to God, Sarah. We’ll take care of them.”
Others will do that. I will sit on my ass and “convalesce.”

“You got any other family in the area?” he asked. “Anyone close? I doubt you have to worry about it, but it stands to reason we should warn them.”

“Just my sister, out in the Shenandoah Valley. Hours away. Middle of nowhere.”

“Okay. I hate to put this on your plate, Sarah, but we need to start thinking about relocating you as soon as you’re discharged. Whoever these guys were, they were able to pin down a team member. That means they’ve got some intel. I’m not trying to scare you, but . . .”

“No.” She shuddered with grief, spasms crossing her face until she bit down, swallowing them. “No, I appreciate it. You’re right. I just can’t . . . I just can’t deal with all this right now.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“Oh God.” She sighed. “I’ve got so many phone calls to make. I’ve got so many people to tell.”

Chang patted the air with his palms. “Please don’t do that. Not for a while.”

She stared at him. Her expression said she understood the why of it, but that didn’t make her like it.

“This is life with the teams,” he said. “Schweitzer wasn’t just gunned down in a barroom brawl gone bad. This was a hit by an organization. They’re asking you to hold off on talking about it until they can get on top of this, figure out how Jim’s identity got leaked.”

She stared at him, tears forming in the corners of her eyes, spilling down her cheeks.

“You want to get these guys, don’t you?”

She nodded silently.

“You’re not alone.” He reached out and grabbed her hand again. “I’ll be with you every step of the way through this. Promise.”

She looked up at him, gratitude and determination mixing in her beautiful, dark eyes. “I appreciate it, Steve. I do.” He believed her, but that didn’t mean she needed him.

She swallowed, steeled herself. “I need to see his body.”

Chang started, stomach doing flips. He’d been hoping she wouldn’t ask that, had known she would. He stalled for time. “What? I mean, do you think it’s rea . . .”

“I need to see him,” Sarah said again. “I need to . . . I need to close this. I can’t leave until I do.”

Chang had been grateful when they refused to show him his teammate’s body. He had asked because he knew what was expected of a brother SEAL. But the thought of Jim’s body, cold, gray, and dead, the gaping wounds covered up by gauze or sewn shut, turned his stomach. He loved Jim, he couldn’t bear to see him dead.

Sarah was braver. “I need to see him,” she repeated. “I don’t care what he looks like.”

Chang bit down on the tears again, swallowed hard. He struggled to draw breath, to find the words to tell her.

“Sarah, he got chewed up pretty bad. They . . . they shot him in the head.”
Shut up, you idiot! She doesn’t need to hear that.

Sarah didn’t bat an eyelash. “I said I don’t care what he looks like. I need to see him.”

Chang swallowed again, winced at the pain in his chest—and said it. “You can’t.”

She managed to sit up this time, wound or no wound. Her eyes were hard. “What the fuck do you mean ‘I can’t’? Why can’t I?”

“There’s nothing to see. He got . . . he was . . .”

“What the fuck do you mean there’s nothing to see? How the fuck can there be nothing to see!?” She was yelling now, and Chang felt himself shrinking into his chair. He couldn’t bear to see her in pain, but this anger, this was a hundred times worse.

He realized his posture and sat up straight, cheeks burning with shame. She wanted it unvarnished, then that’s what she would get. “They mangled him, Sarah. They cut him to ribbons. There was nothing to preserve. As soon as they got what was left back to base, they cremated him.”