Chapter 15, eee!
I know, it's not much, but I've been so busy lately... I'm worried that if I wait any longer to post this, I just won't have time anymore.
That, and I think I have a Virus of Doom, and I'm also worried that it will corrupt my files if I wait.
And I need to do something happy before work. Woe.
So... enjoy! Just wait till the next chapter, lol. Not just that, but I've actually come around the plot-bend where I actually see the end. It's... terrifying for me, come to think.
The call came in the middle of the night - we were to grab all the supplies we’d need for civilian travel, load a case up with all the artillery we’d need in case of an emergency, and report to the launch deck. We were six miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, and a special ops helicopter would deposit us discreetly not far from the train station. From there, it would be a seven-hour ride to the station south of the Del Rio/Acunia border checkpoint, where our machines would be waiting for us. And once we were in our mechs, it was merely an issue of getting beyond the restricted zone and infiltrating the base.
I studied a topographic map of the region as we flew over the gulf; the landscape was relatively uncomplicated, but sharp hills and plateaus dotted the region, mere shadows of the mountains not too far from there. The base was hidden deep in one of the jagged hills, and from what I could see, there were only three logical entrances.
I narrowed my eyes. A heat scanner showed that there were a number of man-made caves dug out by drug runners in decades past, leading directly to elevators that sunk several hundred feet beneath the arid land and into a massive underground complex. A printout from the Mexican branch of Mithril showed the part of the complex that was most likely to house prisoners, and to our good fortune, it was right beside a lab of sorts. The data indicated that the lab had previously been used to convert cocaine and other substances into their marketable forms, and there didn’t seem to be a more ideal place to run whatever kind of experiments were run on the Whispered.
I rolled up the many loose papers I had with me and stuffed them into my bag once we landed and made our silent way to the train station. The only words exchanged were tense; each of us was preparing to go into high gear. There was little room for distraction.
“I didn’t know Mexico’s railway system had improved much in the last ten years,” Kurz remarked.
“It hasn’t,” Mao replied, shouldering the bag of ammunition.
He sighed. “Figures.”
Little else was said.
0150
Once the train got off to its rickety start, we chose a private compartment and settled in for the lengthy trip, and I pulled out all the data and laid it out again.
I circled the hill that hid MUSE’s base and cleared my throat. “It’s a ten-mile trek south from our AS pickup point to the base, and there are no viable entrances from that direction. On the west side, however, is an abandoned shaft I assume was used for mining purposes, and satellite readouts from the last few days show that no one comes or goes from that way. One of us will most likely be able to slip in from that side and report back to the others on the possibility of entering from there. We won’t be able to go in immediately, since we know little about the layout, but that entrance is also directly above the detention ward and what looks like a laboratory. Both of those locations could possibly be where Chidori is being held.”
“I don’t like one of us having to go in there alone,” Kurz said with a shake of his head.
“We can’t afford to bring anyone else,” Mao sighed. “Any of our guys would just be four obvious foreigners instead of three, and we’re pushing it already. Plus, Mithril’s Mexican unit wasn’t willing to do more than give us the information they had on the base; apparently they’re worried about MUSE blowing Mexico City off the map, since they’re so technologically challenged that they can’t really defend themselves. We’re going to have to make do with what we’ve got.”
“Any more people, and we would just be weighed down,” I agreed. “I would like to be the one who infiltrates the base, which would leave you and Major Mao keeping an eye out on the surface.”
“Still don’t like you going in there alone.”
“It’s a one-man job,” I shot back. “If either of you came with me, we would be too obvious, and that would leave someone on the surface without backup.”
“If anyone can do it, it’s Sousuke,” Mao put in.
I acknowledged the praise silently. There was still a corner of my mind that refused to be pacified; I could feel something very wrong around us, but I couldn’t figure out what. Mao and Kurz had donned black wigs and contacts in an effort to blend a little better, and so far I was sure we hadn’t been spotted as intruders. But there was still something… wrong. No matter how long I looked at the map, or how acquainted I made myself with the terrain we’d be crossing, there was still some variable making me uncomfortable. And the worst part was that I simply couldn’t figure out what I was missing.
Melissa sighed and flopped out on the stained mattress. “I’ll give them this, at least Mexico’s made train cars within the last fifteen years. I hated having to ride them in North Korea.”
“Why would you take a train in North Korea?” Kurz demanded. “That’s like really uncomfortable suicide.”
“That’s classified,” she shot back. “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”
“You know I love it when you talk dirty.”
“You don’t want to make the next six hours the most miserable hours of my life, Weber,” she warned. “Because we can run this operation with just two people.”
He flashed a charming smile. “You wound me, babe.”
“You call me babe again and I swear I’m gonna -“
I coughed. “Kurz, perhaps we should head to the dining car and find something to eat. There might not be another chance once we arrive.”
“At least someone on this mission doesn’t have a death wish,” she grumbled. “Get him the hell out of my hair, Sagara. We could do it alone, but the idiot’s the best shot of us all.”
I stepped into the corridor and dragged Kurz with me. “We’ll be back,” he promised.
She glowered at him. “Bring me a whiskey sour.”
In the hallway, he shot me a knowing glance. “She only drinks whiskey sour when she’s getting all hormonal,” he said wisely. “That’s why she’s a little testy right now. When she’s in a better mood, she’ll just go for straight-up beer, but I think the carbonation messes with her sometimes.”
I shook my head. “It’s none of my business.”
“I figured that you of all people would pick up on these things, since you’re around women so much,” he remarked. “Doesn’t Kaname have some warning signs?”
I thought about it for a moment. “I suppose so. Every three and a half weeks she goes from hitting me to throwing things at me. But that phase only lasts a few days, and then she’s back to normal.”
“I’m so glad your relationship with her is healthy,” he deadpanned. “These days, people tend to get themselves into situations where a friend or family member is physically abusive, and they just don’t know how to deal with it.”
I ignored him; he always went into a good humor before a mission. It might have been his way of easing my tension. Or it was his way of easing his own tension. It was anyone’s guess.
The dining car didn’t look like the most sanitary place I’d ever been, but it wasn’t the worst, either. And since it was the only smoking section on the train, the air was thick with ten different kinds of smoke - only six of which were familiar to me.
We sat down at a table in the corner and placed our orders with the waiter - Cerveza for Kurz, Mao’s whiskey sour, and water for me. Food would be later.
Kurz wrinkled his nose. “God, I hate cigars.”
“Wholly unpleasant,” I agreed.
He made another face. “I think they all smell like shit, especially these - whatever they are.”
“I actually suspect that several of them are very good cigars,” I countered. “That doesn’t make it more appealing, but I believe I smell a Cuban in here somewhere.”
His eyebrows rose. “How do you know what a Cuban smells like? You don’t even smoke.”
I glanced at him, my face carefully blank. “I know people who do. I suppose I picked up an appreciation for them by association.”
He sighed and took his beer when our drinks arrived. “More than likely, I don’t want to know.”
I shrugged and sniffed my drink, wary in the aftermath of Raskowitz. Upon closer inspection, I suspected that while there were no drugs in the water, I didn’t want to know what was.
“Don’t get too picky about the water down here,” Kurz added. “I hear it’s lethal.”
“No worse than Russian water,” I muttered. At his confusion, I continued, “That was how I was drugged in Moscow.”
“Ah. Well, I guarantee that your water is totally, completely, 100% Mexican sewage,” he promised solemnly. “No man-made drugs of any sort.”
I sighed. I knew he was being melodramatic, and the water probably came from a bottle, but it served to quench my thirst before I’d taken a drink.
“So,” he said curiously, “what did you see when you tripped?”
I frowned. “I don’t really know for certain. Everything around me was very vibrant, and I was extremely paranoid until Gauron knocked me unconscious - but I suppose I didn’t really see anything new. I merely looked at everything from a different perspective.”
“Did you like it?”
“No.”
He leaned back. “I guess you weren’t really in a very good environment for it.”
“Have you done it before?”
“Nah, but I had some friends when I was younger who experimented with it. They said it was the coolest shit they’d ever done.”
“They probably weren’t in danger of being shot from three different angles at the time.”
“Probably not,” he agreed.
We sat quietly for a long time before anything else was said.
“What will you do when you see him again?” he asked after awhile.
I took in his choice of words silently: when. Not if.
“A week ago, I would kill him,” I finally admitted. “Now I… believe my judgment is clouded.”
“Before I jumped in with Mithril,” he said casually, taking a long sip of beer as he got comfortable, “I was dating this girl back in Wurzburg. My dad banned me from seeing her, because her family was on the run from Berlin - it was right after Mithril came in and knocked the Communists out of power there, so all the Reds had to go running somewhere. If they were real high-profile people, they were forced to go somewhere like Russia or the Middle East to keep from being tried for war crimes, but the minor supporters didn’t have to go as far. Her family was just hiding out until things blew over… but they were definitely Communists.
“Anyways, the fact that my dad told me to stay away from her just made her that much more appealing,” he continued. “We never listened to our parents; we’d go down to the firing range all the time, sneak out at night, stuff like that. When I threw in with Mithril, I asked her to come with me - she didn’t, and I didn’t really think she would. But it never hurt to try, right? So after I left, I figured I’d never see her again.”
“Did you?”
He didn’t answer at first, choosing instead to nurse his beer for a long moment. “Remember when they sent us to North Africa to deal with that terrorist cell?”
I nodded.
“She was there,” he explained. “She was a sniper.”
My eyebrows rose - I remembered his comment about the sniper. He had been setting up a shot, and the long piece of grass he’d been chewing on was shot off.
Shit, he’s one good son of a bitch, he’d remarked later.
“She came and found me later on, after we were forced into an early retreat the first day. Still cute as ever,” he added wistfully. “Anyways, we did some catching up that night, had too much to drink, that sort of thing. Next day we had to blow the stronghold off the map.”
He had also been shot from three-quarters of a mile away. We’d had to wrap the mission up quickly and get him to any doctor we could find before he died.
“You never mentioned that while we were there,” I said finally.
He shrugged. “Didn’t really want to talk about it. I still wonder if she’s out there - I did some math later, worked out the trajectory of the shot in comparison to my position and alignment, and she wasn’t on the base when you and Mao Napalmed it. She was about a quarter-mile west when it blew. I keep thinking that maybe she’ll just show up randomly one day - but at the same time, I kind of hope she won’t.”
“What would you do if you saw her again?”
A grin. “Something pretty stupid. ‘Course, I’m not in love with her - we were just kids back then. But sometimes I wish I had another chance.”
I was impressed. It sounded nothing like the Kurz I knew - for a few minutes, he was deep, insightful, and obviously premeditated. “So do you get what I’m trying to tell you?” he asked finally.
“I understand why you told me.”
“Not the same thing.”
I looked away. “What you’re talking about is treason. I - you could have gotten in real trouble.”
His eyes were intense. “Why? I did my job in the end. Didn’t get in the way of what I was trying to do. Besides, you make it sound like we’re our own country, swearing allegiance to a flag or whatever.”
I shifted under his gaze. “Have you forgotten that he tried to kill you?”
“So did she,” he shrugged. “And frankly, I’ve tried to kill a lot of people too. Don’t get me wrong, this could be the worst advice I’ve ever given you, and I hate the son of a bitch. But you’re another story, dude. You’re my friend, and I know you can’t see what this is doing to you, but I can. I know you have a thousand reasons to blow him off the face of the earth - I’d like nothing more than to bust a cap in his ass, myself. He’s an asshole and he deserves to die.” Now his voice was wry. “But somehow, he hooked you. I’ve seen drug addicts fare better than you are right now - how long has it been since you really slept? Or ate? You haven’t been really okay since Helmajistan - no, since before that. You haven’t been okay since the hijacking. You’ve been freaking out the entire time.”
I ground my teeth. “It’s not because -“
Kurz waved me off. “Don’t start. I’ve seen how everything else in the world gets to you, and nothing gets to you like he does. We’re all worried, okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. Sure, the world would definitely be a better place if he’d go six feet under. But I think he might take you with him.”
“I don’t want to discuss this right now,” I said with quiet steel.
He wasn’t swayed. “Too bad. I think you’d better figure out what you’re going to do when you see him again, and fast, because you don’t have as much time to brood on it as you think.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So why tell me this now?”
“Because I don’t think Melissa would benefit from this conversation.”
“Wrong answer.”
“It’s like I said - I’m worried about you. You have to deal with him. You’ve been running away from it for months now, and I’ve never seen you run from anything,” he returned coldly. “You’re supposed to be invincible, remember? Get a grip on yourself. You’ve got two options: you can either blow his brains out, or you can shoot him.”
I frowned. “That makes no…”
A sly grin spread across his face as he waited patiently. The implication sank in after a moment, and I glared at him. “You are not amusing,” I said tightly, trying to keep my face blank.
“Kidding,” he grinned. “But no, really, I’m making a point. You’re either going to shoot him, or let him live. Just make sure that whatever you do, it’s what you really want to do. If you kill him, make sure you want him dead. If you don’t kill him…” He sighed. “Make sure you really want him alive.”
He stood up sharply and grabbed Melissa’s whiskey. I started to stand as well, but he shook his head.
“Think on it awhile before you come back,” he said grimly. “You don’t need to have anything distracting you tomorrow, so get this sorted out first.”
I sat back down heavily. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Sure I do. Just don’t make me regret it,” he shrugged.
I pushed my water across the table and folded my arms. “Very well.”
“I want you to understand that this is as hard for me as it is for you,” he added, turning to walk out. “Maybe harder, since I think I know a little bit more than you do right now.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “Affirmative.”
As he walked out, I heard him grumble, “Melissa’s going to kill me.”
0150
Thinking about Gauron was the last thing I wanted to do, but Kurz’s words stalked me: I didn’t run from a challenge. I was a strategist, a professional, and professionals didn’t run away. Retreat was only acceptable in extreme situations.
I waved a face-full of cigar smoke away in annoyance. Kurz’s timing was certainly off today; this was not the time for me to think about him.
But I didn’t know for a fact I wanted him dead.
Actually, I did know for a fact I didn’t want him dead.
I sighed. Feelings were not my particular specialty - give me any gun ever built and I was lethal, but alone with a mass of confusing thoughts and conflicting emotions, and I was useless.
I surveyed the car suspiciously, my hand on my gun as I did so. One thing I would never take for granted again was my weapon; it was probably better that I locked myself away from anything lethal in Moscow, but now that I ‘had all my oars in the water,’ as Kurz put it, I would occasionally reach down just to make sure it was there, and relax slightly.
It was not because I was off my guard that it happened; I was alert and aware of everyone in the car around me, and I was confident that very little would take me by surprise. But it was as I’d told Melissa: when it came to Gauron, he had far more experience in combat situations than I did, and since he was a spy, he could move across a war-torn country as silently as he could move across a room. He was found only when he wanted to be found, seen only when he chose to be seen.
That knowledge only offered hollow comfort later; it was a grim realization on my part that if he didn’t want me to see him, I wouldn’t see him, no matter how highly my senses were tuned.
It made no difference at that moment, however. My hand slid comfortably around my gun, too late to save myself if he chose to shoot first.
Gray eyes shone with a malicious amusement as he stepped right into my line of sight and flashed a grin at my face.
“You could at least pretend like you’re happy to see me, Kashim.”