by Jacob Hammes
“Whether you slept or not and with whom doesn’t really matter now,” Gregory finally said. “What does matter is this man in front of you repainting the walls with the shopkeeper’s brains.”
Gregory, without a sense of preamble, set the film in motion. Marcus watched without saying a word. He knew his boss was in business mode and now was the time to start digging in. He had been at work for less than five minutes and Gregory was already requiring Marcus to act as the team leader he was.
The scene played out in five frames per second of splendor. The man with the gun to his head was speaking noiselessly. There was no sound on the tape, just the grainy footage. Marcus thought of all sorts of ways to get out of the situation. You were never supposed to touch someone with a pistol; it made it easy to get away if you knew what you were doing. The only reason Marcus could think of for holding the pistol like the gunman did was for pure intimidation. Someone who didn’t know about weapons and combat and Special Forces training and the likes would surely be intimidated.
Suddenly, the slide of the pistol flew back, ejecting a spent casing as the projectile made quick work of the man who had been pleading for his life. Black and white spray shot out from behind the man’s head and the projectile cracked the window. In less than a fraction of a second, the victim had fallen lifelessly to the floor, back propped against the wall behind leaving him in a sort of drunken sleep posture.
His boss paused the grainy video waiting for the effect to set in. If it was surprise he expected from Marcus, he was sorely disappointed. A veteran of ‘black-ops’ campaigns, Marcus’ stomach was not so easily turned.
“So who’s the shopkeeper?” Marcus asked, wondering what relevance this had to the Unusual Operations Division. He leaned back in his big, black leather chair and interlaced his fingers behind his head.
“His name is not important,” Gregory said, dimming the lights as Marcus settled in. “Whose name is of great importance, however, is this man.”
A laser pointer danced across the back of the assailant.
“His name is John Flipske,” Gregory continued. “He is part of an elite detachment of Special Forces soldiers, the Green Berets, on deployment in Afghanistan.”
“How do you know?” Marcus asked with a smile. The thought of dealing with someone that Marcus could have worked with was intriguing. He also had an immediate gauge of the situation, and it wasn’t optimistic.
“He left photo identification,” Henry said while Gregory rolled the tape forward a few seconds.
It was an almost perfect view of his face.
“The guys working the shop said the man was American,” Gregory said. “The tape was passed along by authorities in hopes we could help come up with an ID.”
Marcus stared at the picture on the screen. The dead guy sporting a new hole in his head looked distinctly Asian. He was shorter than the average Afghan, had dark long hair and had a smooth hairless face. If it were not for the obvious characters on the desk, Marcus may have been confused. Instead, he played stupid as much for his own amusement as for his boss.
“So there are Asian shopkeepers in Afghanistan, too?” Marcus chimed in. “Their roots spread far and wide.”
“It’s not Afghanistan,” Henry, Marcus’ close confidant for many years said. “It’s China. Facial recognition through the Department of Defense databases positively matched the man after the Chinese Government passed us the footage. It is being considered an international incident.”
“So either the government is doing some undercover operations in China or John Flipske is AWOL,” Marcus pondered, becoming more and more intrigued by the minute. The cases brought to the Unusual Operations Division involving murderous fugitives were always the hardest to crack.
“John Flipske is by all accounts dead,” Gregory said matter-of-factly. “He and his team were found in Afghanistan two weeks ago, burned and buried. The bodies were exhumed, dental records were taken, and John, as well as everyone else who worked with John, were declared deceased.
“They have already been buried in the states. You can tell John’s father that the flag he received at his son’s funeral doesn’t belong to him if you’d like.”
Chapter 3
Small flecks of rain floated from gray overcast skies in the Chinese city. It was not exactly cold but almost everyone wore some sort of overcoat and carried an umbrella. The local population was used to such weather as Xian was mostly overcast year round. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to see an entire month of rain.
John felt more than heard the man tailing him. The streets were crowded and he was one of two million people in the city. His tail was a tall Chinese man about forty yards behind him trying too hard to remain inconspicuous. The man didn’t have a clue how to tail a Special Forces recon soldier, especially one with a dark visitor augmenting his every sense. He could sense any man that looked at him for longer than a second. In fact, the mere thought of someone noticing him burned his spirit like standing too close to a bonfire. Being American, dressed in drab clothing that had days of dirt caked on them, made it difficult for John to stay beneath the radar.
During the Cold War, spies were directed to never look at their target. It is an unusual human instinct that allows people to unconsciously feel a pair of eyes following them. Scientists think it has something to do with human evolution. Something like how humanity was once prey to a broader food chain. Whatever the case, John Flipske could feel the eyes of the man following him like piercing daggers in his neck. He knew it was not evolution but more instinct.
“It’s a shame,” he thought. “Thought I’d have more time before I was found.”
John was a very well built man, big and muscular in every aspect. People saw his dirty sweatshirt filled out perfectly and mistook him for a boxer. He was, however, amazingly attractive for a man of the Special Forces. People working for the United States Army were rarely of GQ quality, but John was. He had striking blue eyes set above sharp cheekbones just under perfectly sculpted brows. His light brown hair was a mess that stylists yearned to recreate. The stubble covering his cleft chin and thin cheeks made the entire package more ferociously stunning. John was amazingly intelligent, attractive, and trained by the world’s best.
The headaches that had been making his vision blurry lately had been getting more severe. Ever since he had been attacked in Afghanistan and watched as a crazy man killed his entire team one by one, he had been feeling strange. Not quite sick, yet not healthy either. When he captured and questioned his team’s murderer, he learned that he was a special government agent sent to eradicate John and his team. The assassin had almost finished the job but a dud bullet left John just enough time to disarm him and put two in his skull.
Strange thing is, once John killed him his own skull began to throb. Somehow, through diversions and special training, he managed to escape Afghanistan without running into any other mercenaries or government-hired hit men. He had escaped cleanly. Now that he was away from the gravelly mountains, he felt more calm and collected. His headaches, however, had started getting the best of him. Yesterday, for example, he was walking down a side street when his vision went so blurry he’d had to hang onto something for damn near ten minutes to keep from falling over. When he opened his eyes against the throbbing pain he realized that he had stumbled nearly two blocks.
It’s funny what pain can do to a person.
The city was crowded with residential buildings as high as business skyscrapers. The streets themselves were madness. People walked this way and that, from side to side, climbed ladders and scurried from one side of the street to the other all while cars and mopeds beeped loudly trying to make some sort of headway. It was amazing that anyone could even suspect him in this jumbled mess, let alone find him in the mayhem. The world was such a big place and there were so many people in it, you would think that finding someone in the fray would be like finding a needle in a silo full of other needles.
The man had been trained well, thou
gh. He could easily make a distraction and escape, even in a place like this. He searched the crowd for a moment, looking for someone, something. There were alleyways every few buildings that he could use to escape through. He wondered if whoever was tailing him would have more people helping him. His training told him that people did not work alone, especially in cases such as this: big city, big man, too many variables.
And there was one of those headaches. Like someone had thrown a ton of bricks at the back of his skull. John’s head felt as if it were going to explode.
In the blink of an eye, John acted. He grabbed a middle-aged man as fast as lightning, ripped his throat out with the short knife he carried and ran off into the crowd shouting. The man had barely hit the ground, blood spurting from his ruined neck, before the crowd went into a wild frenzy. If the man was alive there was nothing anyone could do for him, so only those who were brave or stupid stayed to help. The rest were too busy worrying about their own lives to notice a dirty man of European descent running through the crowd.
No one had seen John act; he had done it too quick. His blade pierced the side of the man’s neck and ripped out through the front in the blink of an eye. Knowing Mandarin, John screamed into the crowd as he ran accusing another innocent person of the heinous crime.
With his diversion complete, John took the opportunity to vanish.
He was just in time to catch the door to an apartment building that had been closing. The man who had opened the door paid no attention to John as he slipped in. He was more interested in the commotion in the street. John was just not as interesting as the dying man, writhing in the street as people ran chaotically by.
He slipped quietly through the building, past a staircase and two elevators. The hallway down the side of the building was narrow and utilitarian without so much as a courtesy desk. John simply walked through to the other street where no one had any idea what had just taken place. He took the precious seconds in between to hide the soiled knife and wipe the small amount of blood off of his hands.
The adjacent street on which John emerged was quieter than the other, much more open and spacious. The buildings were not as crowded here and down a side street close by was a major highway. Lucky for John, the area was also crowded with taxis waiting for a profitable fare.
He flagged the first taxi down, jumped in and was off without a trace. The poor man who had been tailing him would be in over his head trying to figure out what had just happened. It served him right for messing with John anyway.
An uneasy feeling settled upon him as a haze lifted from his eyes. He felt, suddenly, as if he had done something he never meant to do. His hand had acted of its own accord and John had slit an innocent man’s throat. The blood of the kill stained his shaking hands. He tried futilely rubbing it off before concentrating once more.
“How have I gotten to this point?” he wondered.
The grunge of the city gradually lifted as the taxi made its way through traffic down the highway and out of the major parts of the city. The view was all buildings for the most part, but off in the distance was a beautiful mountain range. Though not high, the mountains poked up over grassy farmland like sentinels watching over a sleeping city. It was beautiful here; John would be upset to leave.
A small basement apartment John had been using as a safe house was about the equivalent of twenty-two blocks away in the outskirts of the city. He paid the taxi driver when he pulled up in front of the building and hopped out. The area was much quieter and John felt a sense of reassurance that he would not be bothered.
He walked around the back of the restaurant that stood on top of his apartment and used the basement entrance. The heavy wooden doors swung upwards away from the steep staircase from the street level. John unlocked the heavy padlock he had used to secure them and went down in. The lighting in the basement was nothing but a single fluorescent bulb flickering above a pallet John had set up. His gear was neatly packed, as usual, at the foot of his bed; a single large black backpack.
The corner of the apartment was where he kept his special cargo. It had a small cupboard just the right size for the crate holding the golden orb. He kept it out of sight for more reasons than that of secrecy. John hated the thing. He could feel its lure like an alcoholic can feel a bottle of Jack hiding in the cupboard. It spoke to him, told him so many promising things.
Beside it was the new addition; a golden knife.
It seemed to John that nowadays he could only think clearly when he was touching the sphere. Now the knife was giving him problems, too. He obsessed over the two relentlessly. In fact, as hard as he tried he couldn’t remember where they had come from. He could hardly remember anything about the last few weeks of his life. It was all one big haze, like watching life through a fog that lifted only so often.
“Give me a few days and I’ll get us out of here,” John said to himself.
“The tape came to us through a local agent,” Henry Bauss was saying to Marcus. “He was lending his talents to the Chinese Government when the case was brought to his attention. Apparently American Special Forces agents are easily recognizable.”
“Who is the local agent?” asked Marcus out of curiosity, rewinding the tape again. It was poor quality, only five to six frames per second, but it told the picture nevertheless.
“His name is Jeff Chang. He was born in China and speaks fluent Mandarin. He was raised in the states, though, and his rating is around a three out of ten.”
“At least he knew to send this home,” Gregory said, gesturing toward the monitors. “Let’s get down to the nitty gritty here. There are more than bullets and dead men that make this case so special.”
A new screen popped up with a few flicks of Gregory’s hands over his keyboard. It was a satellite image of Afghanistan. Among the names littering the topographical map, Badakhshan was highlighted. It was a northeasterly province in the huge country.
“The exact hour and day the Special Forces team was taken out is unknown,” Gregory said. “It is believed to have been about two weeks ago. Call it coincidence but our SEMFD (Satellite Electromagnetic Frequency Device) picked up a very strong ping from this general location around the time the team is believed to have been killed. It was a strong enough alarm to have activated a team. However, the reading was gone before the team could register its exact location and strength.”
The Satellite Electromagnetic Frequency Device was conceived and immediately deployed after the events of September 11th, 2001. The machine’s specific mission was to locate and track weapons of mass destruction through various levels of electromagnetic discharge. Nuclear devices continuously emit such frequencies, so conceiving the device was a no-brainer; creating it, on the other hand, was much more difficult. Given the amount of terror-causing devices the United States government estimated lie in Iran, Afghanistan, and neighboring Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the billions of dollars spent on the project seemed well worth it.
It turned out the device was defective. Either that or the world was much more evil than the United States had ever anticipated.
Nearly every city within the United States had been flagged with possible weapons caches on the machine’s maiden use. The closest weapons cache was none other than downtown Washington, D.C.’s favorite local antique shop.
Within hours, a team of DOD agents were dispatched, armed with everything but the kitchen sink. The team did not bother with knocking on the front door of the antique shop; they merely busted it down. Poor Annie May, the ninety year old owner, almost died of a heart attack at the intrusion.
It was known from the start the team would most likely find no weapons. The flags were too conspicuous, too public, and too easy. The local Smithsonian Museum, every museum, had been flagged. Twenty seven different antique shops, three hundred buildings and forty seven thousand homes were targeted as possible WMD cache locations. It took investigating two locations to figure out something was definitely wrong with the equipment.
Calibrating t
he satellite was futile. Adjustments only created more and more sites of possible weapons caches. The entire program was junked and the Unusual Operations Division found itself a new piece of billion dollar equipment.
More specialized agents were sent to the two previous locations with smaller pieces of diagnostic equipment. Geiger counters and Electromagnetic Frequency Detectors like those ghost hunters use were just a few pieces. Annie May was much more cooperative the second go around, given the unique situation the government had found themselves in. With her entire stock bought for research purposes by the Unusual Operations Division, she had since retired.
She told a story about a particularly old piece of furniture she had been sold years ago. The chair was old as dirt and came from some rural province in Ireland. Someone very important had been assassinated in it long ago. Small spatters of blood could still be seen through its thick lacquer. It had an intricately designed metal inlay that decorated both arm rests. The design stretched from top to bottom, eventually ending at a circle near the headrest.
The general consensus was that the chair was ugly as sin.
The story didn’t interest the Department of Defense. The fact that electromagnetic pulses poured consistently from the chair was much more intriguing. Especially interesting was the fact that these particular electromagnetic pulses didn’t affect any electronics. Usually, such strong pulses would drain watch batteries or stop pacemakers. These had no discernible effects.
Items like this could be hiding in public places for centuries and no one would be any wiser.
Case studies; modern science could not live without them. Random objects exhibiting the strange symptoms of overcharged electromagnetism were collected from around the world and placed, in secret, around Washington, D.C. They were placed in areas that surveillance cameras constantly observed, making it impossible to miss any result. Places like the Lincoln Memorial, where visitors flock from around the country, or the memorial for Martin Luther King, Junior, were used for both diversity and numbers. The site was observed for a set amount of time to see its effects on, well, anything. It was thought from the beginning that nothing would be seen.