Gemini Cell: A Shadow Ops Novel (Shadow Ops series Book 4) (8 page)

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Physically, Schweitzer stood before a stainless-steel workbench heaped with instruments of war. Eldredge stood with his arms folded as an armorer arranged the gear, added more. Internally, Schweitzer huddled inside his own mind, spiritual arms wrapped around intangible knees, head down and weeping. Sarah and Patrick gone. This . . . thing sharing his body. His own life snuffed out and replaced with . . . what?

Confusion and grief blotted out his senses.
Oh, Mom. First Pete and now me. I’m so so sorry.
Was his mother looking down on him now? Did she feel grief? He gritted his spiritual teeth as he shut out the legion of questions his new existence raised. But he couldn’t shut out the faces whirling through his mind. Sarah, Patrick, Steve Chang. Pete. Always Pete.
Proud of you, bro. Always knew you’d make it.

Schweitzer had always ignored the tiny sliver of his heart that secretly hoped that, when he finally gave up his last breath, he’d see Pete again. He’d known the priests were wrong but could never kill the hope they were right.

Were they? What was . . . this? Where was he now? Who was he now?

Lock it up. Dead or alive, you’re still a SEAL.

Sniveling like an infant.
Ninip shuddered around him, oozing contempt.
Death is the gateway to strength.

He felt his spirit buffeted by the jinn, knocking him against the inner walls of his own body. Images began to replay in his head, blotting out the faces of his friends and family. A hostage-rescue op in the Colombian jungle, Schweitzer springing from a tree branch like a jaguar, bearing his target to the damp earth, gloved hand clamped over his mouth, knife plunging into the enemy’s throat again and again, hot blood washing over him. Turning a corner in an abandoned warehouse in Greece, coming face-to-face with three armed thugs, as surprised as he was. Pistol flying out of its holster almost of his own accord. Three headshots in as many seconds, three bodies crumbling lifeless to the concrete floor.

Artistry.

Schweitzer had always allowed himself a nod of cold, professional satisfaction at a difficult job well-done, sustained himself with the knowledge that his family and the families of his brothers-in-arms slept safe in their beds because of what he did.

But this time, the images were accompanied by an exultant thrill, a naked and simple joy, the chest-thumping predator lust of bloody victory. SEAL training had worked overtime to kill that kind of thinking. Quiet professionalism trumped heroic pride in his line of work.

It felt wrong. It felt fantastic.

What the fuck are you doing?

Showing you the truth,
Ninip answered.
The truth of what you have done, of who we are together.

Schweitzer pushed back against Ninip, felt the jinn give ground, swarm back in. He could swat the reaching tendrils of the presence from his mind, but he was a man with only two spiritual hands, where Ninip was an octopus.

He shook his head, blinked, clung to the conscious world before him.

Eldredge stood beside the armorer, looking over the panoply laid out on the workbench. The SEAL teams had always gotten their pick of the latest and greatest war gear the navy could buy, but this was special.

Pretty.
Schweitzer could feel Ninip’s excitement, the presence reaching out to their hands, tensing the trigger finger.

Ninip’s tendrils dug deeper in his memories, matching the image of the weapons before them to Schweitzer’s knowledge of guns, from shooting skeet with his father as a little boy, all the way to his first qualification with the M16 in boot camp, to the slow building of his deadly skill in the CQB shoothouse. The presence shuddered in excitement. Schweitzer observed Ninip, soaking up every detail, reaching out to touch the jinn even as it touched him.

Schweitzer thought of the bloodlust sensation the jinn had sent coursing through him, choreographed to scenes from his past. Whatever this demon wanted, he wanted the opposite. All good ops started with intel. Knowing your enemy was the first step.

New to you, eh?
Schweitzer asked.
Who the hell are you, anyway?

Who I am is as useless as who you are,
Ninip answered.
There is we, and that is all that matters.

He felt Ninip pressing to stretch his filter across their joint senses again, shadows gathering in the corners of the room. Schweitzer fought back against it, boosting his own energy into their shared body, struggling to keep his view of the world.

I’m thinking things would go a lot easier if we made an effort to get along.

Schweitzer could feel Ninip’s anger and frustration. It was not used to being defied.
Let’s try this again,
Schweitzer said.
Who are you?

I am a god,
Ninip answered. Schweitzer’s vision went white, then to static again, as it had when Jawid had shown him his story.

It resolved into an image of a muscular man, back to him, standing atop a stone pyramid. His dark skin was festooned with jewels, dangling from his crown, from the collar that stretched to the tips of his shoulders, from the trimming of his leather boots and broad belt. Tight black ringlets of hair hung to his waist, shining with oil.

Guards stood to either side of him, nude except for bronze helmets and hide shields. Their bronze-tipped spears pumped into the air, matching the rhythm of the throng of people at the pyramid’s base. The crowd was sallow-skinned, with hooked noses, black hair and eyes, matching the guards’ and the jeweled man standing before them, arms outstretched, soaking up their adulation.

I ruled them. The greatest warrior of my age. And now I am joined with the greatest warrior of yours. And we will rule again.

Schweitzer’s vision returned, crystallizing into Eldredge, arms folded across his chest, regarding him frankly. “Jim? Are you with me?”

The speaking was coming more easily now, but it was still difficult to consciously do what had always been unconscious. “Talk . . . jinn.”

Eldredge’s eyebrows drew together. “Ninip? What does he say?”

“Eh . . . gypt . . . Sumer? Old.”

Eldredge shook his head. “You are the first Operator we’ve had who could communicate with us. I’d love to get some interview time. Do you think . . . Ninip would be willing to talk to us?”

Old fool. We will drink his blood,
Ninip said.
You bray like a donkey with this animal. Take the weapons! Let us go!

Schweitzer felt their shared hands twitch toward the war gear, threw his will against Ninip’s, struggling to pull their limbs back into place.
Calm the fuck down! We can’t just shoot our way out of here. Everyone has guns like these.

We are greater than the best of them,
Ninip said. The bloodlust surged again. Schweitzer felt a phantom pulse, as if his dead heart raced with excitement. It was heady, addictive. He pushed against it.

There are hundreds of them, and they’re the good guys. Calm down and let’s get our bearings first.

Schweitzer felt Ninip pause, relax the fight for their shared hands and arms.
We shall see what the cattle offer.

“No talk,” Schweitzer managed.

Eldredge shook his head. “See what inroads you can make. This is the first . . . communications we’ve ever had with a jinn since the program began. I’d love to see what we can do with that. The jinn do not speak with Jawid willingly.”

“Other . . . Op . . . rators?”

“Were not strong enough to grapple with . . . with what Jawid calls jinn. They became . . . uncommunicative.”

Schweitzer didn’t like the sound of that.

“The world is changing, Jim. It has been for some time. Jawid isn’t the only person with his . . . abilities. What Jawid does . . . this summoning, is particularly rare, nearly singular. But there are most certainly others. Those who can call fire. Those who can fly. Those who can heal flesh or tear it. The Gemini Cell is looking into what these phenomena are. Sometimes, they manifest in decent people, folks who are cooperative, who want to work with us. Sometimes, these powers manifest in . . . bad people, criminals, terrorists. When that happens, we need to take action. Fight magic with magic, if that makes sense.”

“Me,” Schweitzer said.

“Yes.” Eldredge nodded. “The souls of the dead linger about the body for a time. Paired with a jinn, they remain. The union creates a magical being powerful enough to go toe to toe with the magical beings that threaten us. You are the heart of a new and growing Supernatural Operations Corps.”

Idiot prattling,
Ninip said.

Shut the fuck up and listen.
Even now, dead and reanimated, sharing his own corpse with a malevolent spirit, he could barely believe Eldredge’s words.

“Maj . . . ick,” Schweitzer managed.

Eldredge nodded. “We call it the ‘Great Reawakening.’ We don’t know what it is yet, but we know this: Magic is coming back into the world.”

“Back?” Schweitzer asked.

“Yes,” Eldredge answered. “We now believe that there was a time like this before, roughly a millennium ago. We’re not sure why or how, but it raises the troubling possibility that this . . . thing . . . is orbital, or ebbing and flowing like a tide. And that means things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.”

Schweitzer felt the force of the statement swamp him. His training answered. Failure to accept reality ran ops off the rails, got good men killed. The untrained, the average, froze when disaster unfolded around them; SEALs responded to events, not their perception of them. Life wasn’t fair. Sometimes it didn’t make sense. You didn’t worry about that. You determined where the fire was coming from, and you got off the X.

He could feel Ninip’s appreciation. It weighed his thoughts, replaying them, considering them.
Your way of war is . . . different. We have much to learn from one another.

It flashed him an image of a man, naked save for a bronze helmet, shield, and spear. He strode out from his place in the front line of an army, beating his chest and shouting at the enemy, brandishing his spear. He shouldered the weapon, grabbed his testicles and penis, thrusting his pelvis forward, shaking his manhood at the enemy.

Schweitzer imagined the response such antics would get in his day. He pictured an infantryman sighting down on the posturing warrior from behind a rock, taking his time to line up his sights, easing back the trigger.

And as he thought it, the image materialized, blotting out his vision and Ninip’s at once. The American soldier braced his shoulder as his rifle bucked, the posturing warrior’s bronze helmet flying, a tiny red hole appearing in his forehead, the back of his head exploding, spraying his comrades with fragments of his skull.

He felt Ninip’s amazement.
That kind of shit doesn’t fly nowadays.

The jinn didn’t answer, only replayed the image again and again. Schweitzer clawed through it, struggling to reengage with Eldredge.

“There’ll be some training,” the old man was saying, regarding him from beneath frosted caterpillar eyebrows. “It never takes long. The soul remembers most of what it knew in life. We want to get you in the field as quickly as possible.”

“No,” Schweitzer said.

Eldredge looked up at that. “No?”

He could feel Ninip’s surprise.
You said we would hear his offer.

Shut up. I’ve got this.

“Why?” In life, he’d fought for his country, for the mass of citizens he would never meet and see. But while that moved him, they were always an undercurrent, a theme that never truly touched his heart. There was pay, there was advancement. There was the house he wanted to buy, the records he wanted to break. There was the immense pride in knowing he did things no one else could do. There was his mother, alone on the West Coast.

But most of all there was his family. A son he wanted to make proud. A woman for whom he still felt the little-boy impulse to impress and protect.

And now they were gone.

“Why?” Schweitzer repeated.

“For your country,” Eldredge said. “To do good.”

Schweitzer felt Ninip’s contempt. The jinn understood the words, but not the concepts behind them. He dug in Schweitzer’s memories, replaying old civics classes, the pledge of allegiance, the Constitution, the abstract notion of pledging one’s allegiance to an idea instead of a leader.

Madness,
the jinn said.

Schweitzer felt only nostalgia and sadness. “I . . . dead.”

“You’re still an American,” Eldredge said. “You pledged yourself to the navy. That oath still holds.”

Today,
Master Chief Green had said,
you erase your old life. You put away everything you knew or sought. From this day forward, you belong to your country. You belong to one another.

Chang, Biggs, Ahmad, Perreto, even Martin. What would they see if they saw him now? How would they react to his ash-colored skin, the pools of shimmering silver where his eyes had once been?

“No.”

Eldredge scratched his head. “Jim, I don’t think you fully appreciate your position. We’d prefer your cooperation, but if you force our hand, we can simply have Jawid compel you.”

That goatherd cannot compel us to do anything,
Ninip said.

No, he can’t,
Schweitzer agreed.
If he could, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. He wouldn’t be trying to motivate me. Us. Whatever.

Schweitzer shrugged their dead shoulders.

“The Gemini Cell does deadly work, Jim. Our Operators tread paths that even the teams you used to run with shy away from. You know better than anyone that these paths
must
be gone down, Jim. If you won’t walk them, then we’ll have to send others. Living men. Men with families, wives, and sons. Men like who you once were.”

The words sent a spasm of grief through him, but Schweitzer was careful to bite down on it, send it funneling inward to boil beneath the jinn’s contempt.

Eldredge was right. He was dead. His family was gone. Nothing in the world would change that. The most he could hope to do was what he had always done. He remembered the motto of the Air Force pararescuemen who had medevac’d Chang off the deck of the freighter:
So others might live.