“This helmet,” Magneto informed him quietly, “is the only thing that’s going to protect me from the real bad guys.”
He snapped his fingers, and the lighter flew from John’s hands to his. With a practiced flip, Magneto ignited a flame.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“John.”
“What’s your name, John?” he asked again. John almost made the mistake of thinking the old git was deaf or senile, or stupid, asking the same question twice, until a flash of intuition told him it was some kind of test.
John reached across the aisle, extending the tip of his forefinger to touch the small flame and lift it from its cradle. Fire never burned him; the most he ever felt from the flames he manipulated was a warmth that reached deep inside his body. In his imagination he’d tell himself that it was the same kind of glow the sun felt high in the heavens. It was his secret, his special pleasure, and he’d always resented the fact that Charles Xavier’s telepathy might have pried it from him without his knowing.
“Pyro,” he said, absently rolling the flame between his fingers like a coin.
“That’s quite a talent you have, Pyro,” Magneto said. The way he said John’s code name gave the boy a thrill of pleasure, like it was a title of some kind. But outwardly, his mouth twisted downward in irritation.
“I can only manipulate the fire,” he confessed. “I can’t make it.”
He closed his hand around the flame, and it was gone.
“You are a god among insects,” Magneto said. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
With that, he opened his own hand and used his magnetic power to float the lighter back to its owner.
John didn’t flick the cap anymore, he just held the lighter and stared at his blurred reflection in the stainless-steel surface. Xavier had never said such things to him. At the school, the endless official mantras were “responsibility” and “control.” He was almost a grown man, yet when it came to his mutant powers it was just like being in kindergarten. The teachers weren’t impressed with the things he could already do with fire, they were more concerned with ethics and behavior. They were afraid of what they were, they wanted to hide.
He snorted—helluva lot of good that did. Maybe, if the soldiers had known what he could do, what Bobby could do if he weren’t such a terminal wuss, what any of the kids could do, they’d have backed off and left them alone.
Magneto wasn’t scared. That was obvious. He was ready to fight for what he believed in. Even though Charles Xavier was responsible for his capture and imprisonment, he was flying with the X-Men to the rescue. How, John wondered, Pyro wondered, could that possibly make him one of the “bad guys”?
And if Xavier were wrong about him, maybe the kids were wrong in their assessment of Xavier.
At Alkali Lake, William Stryker reviewed the security procedures from the control room. He wanted nothing left to chance. Electronic sensors were on line, video surveillance active and tracking, sentries posted, fast-reaction combat teams armed and ready.
He couldn’t employ an AWACS here as he had over Westchester, but he had sufficient ground radar capability in place to create a secure airspace better than a hundred miles in diameter, backed up by Doppler imaging systems that would detect the heat signatures of any jet engine or the ripples in the air caused by its wake. He was confident nothing could approach them undetected, even so advanced a stealth airframe as Xavier’s.
He didn’t acknowledge it as the door opened behind him. He didn’t have to. As Lyman and his escort entered the room, Yuriko Oyama stepped out of the background shadows to put herself between them and Stryker, poised on the balls of her feet, her fists clenched.
“Sir?” Lyman called to announce himself. Stryker shook his head ever so slightly at the faint tremolo to the man’s voice. Yuriko had that effect on people when she was at ready to fight. They didn’t know what to make of her, only that she was supremely dangerous.
Stryker spared a glance at their reflections in the inactive display screens mounted on the wall before him. He didn’t reply at once, while he and Wilkins, the duty officer, continued through the checklist, and when he did his tone was curt and dismissive.
“Your men can wait outside, Mr. Lyman.”
“Sir,” Lyman acknowledged, and the others took up station outside. At a cue from Stryker, Yuriko stood down as well.
“The machine has been completed to your specifications,” Lyman reported.
“Good.”
“If I may ask, sir . . .” Lyman paused as though he’d come to a kind of inner crossroads. “Why are we keeping the children?”
In quick succession, Stryker activated the monitors. Six screens, six holding cells, six mutants, none of them very happy to be where they were. By contrast, Stryker was almost jubilant.
“I’m a scientist, Mr. Lyman,” he replied. “When I build a machine, I want to know that it’s working.”
Lyman didn’t understand.
“Consider them a . . . control group. Our living benchmarks. What happens to them shows us what’s happening outside. If necessary we can adapt settings and protocols according to their reactions, for greater efficiency, greater potency.”
“Sir, they’re children,” Lyman blurted out, a reflex that was more surprise than actual protest, and the instant Stryker met his eyes he regretted every word.
“They’re mutants, Mr. Lyman,” said the older man. “And this is war.”
At that moment, the plane Stryker was so concerned about was sitting within a few miles of where he stood, in a patch of snowy woods. Yes, he’d modified his systems to compensate for the Blackbird’s stealth capabilities, but he hadn’t taken into account the fact that Magneto’s power deflected the radar pulses long before they reached the aircraft. Or Storm’s control over the weather, which allowed her to smooth the air behind them and counteract the heat of the jet’s exhaust.
They’d come in low and slow, taking the notion of nap-of-the-Earth flying to its extremes as they skimmed treetops when they had to and dropped beneath their branches when they could. Helicopter pilots would have thought twice about some of the maneuvers they employed. Jean spent most of their approach with her teeth gritted with determination—and her fair share of delight—because they were in violation of so many fundamental flight safety protocols that the computers refused to handle the approach. She was forced to fly the plane manually. At the same time, she’d cast her telepathy ahead of them, much like her own personal form of radar, to prevent them from stumbling over some stray sentry or other.
Once they were down, the stealth netting was once again deployed to cover the plane, to hide them from both visual and electronic detection. Internal systems were kept to a minimum to guard against any stray emissions. Given the terrain, the likelihood of them being spotted was minimal, but recent experience had inspired them all to be prudent.
Aboard, they integrated the data stolen from Stryker’s offices by Mystique with the information Logan had brought back from his visit to construct a three-dimensional map of the installation, then projected it as a hologram for all to see.
There was nothing aesthetic about the dam, no attempt at the grandeur of Grand Coulee or Glen Canyon or Hoover. Engineers had thrown a massive wall across the valley, and that was that, although they’d constructed the dam in the shape of a shallow L. There were two active spillways along the long face of the dam, and another on the short leg, pouring a continual flow of water downriver. As well, two huge concrete trenches had been dug on each bank. One was dedicated to the hydroelectric generators that had originally provided power to the base; the other, which began where the short leg of the dam ended, was for safety, to allow for a controlled release in the event of a significant snowmelt.
The X-Men turned some of the government’s technology to their own purposes by tapping into one of the same keyhole surveillance satellites that had spied on the mansion and downloading current pictures of Alkali Lake. Presumably, when t
he complex had been abandoned, the emergency spillway had been intended to bleed off the excess capacity of the lake behind the dam. However, over time, it had become blocked by an accretion of broken timber and boulders from a succession of rock falls. Water hadn’t flowed down that trench in a long time, and as a consequence, Alkali Lake itself had risen to dangerous levels.
The power trench looked clear, but the depth of snow that was visible made it plain that nobody had opened those gates in quite a while, either. Beyond, in an oval of land that had been stripped bare of trees, lay the surface structures of the Alkali base that Logan had explored only days before. As with every other aspect of the valley, there was an obvious air of abandonment.
“Surface scans are cold,” Storm reported. “No electronics emissions, no power, no heat signatures. As far as the keyhole is concerned, this place is dead. Apparently for years.”
“We’re shielded,” Jean pointed out.
Storm shrugged, tapped the control keypad, and the scene before them changed, presenting a different perspective of the base.
“The first image was a topographic representation of the area. This one”—she indicated various points on the display—“shows the density changes in the terrain. The lighter the coloration, the heavier the repetitive activity.” To the naked eye, the right-hand spillway, the power trench, was covered with virgin snow. Under the enhanced imagery of the spy satellite, however, a vastly different picture emerged. The trench was covered with literally hundreds of colored lines, running the length of the spillway and up a ramp to the single road that terminated at the Alkali base. It didn’t need a glance at the legend for everyone to realize that this was extraordinarily heavy activity, not simply in terms of raw numbers of vehicles but of their weight as well.
“Somebody’s been very busy,” murmured Jean.
“And it’s fresh,” Storm echoed.
“That’s the entrance,” Logan told them. When both women looked at him in curiosity, he shook his head. “I remember, okay? Sue me.” Instead, they chuckled along with him.
Once more, Storm switched perspectives and focused on the spillway. Below the dam, the trench was displayed in varying shades of blue, whereas the surrounding landscape appeared in those of white.
“The legend tells us the depth of snow and ice that cover the ground,” she said. “There’s been recent water activity.”
Jean sounded worried as she leaned close to the image. “If we go in there, Stryker could flood the spillway.”
Storm looked to Nightcrawler. “Kurt, could you teleport inside?”
He shook his head. “I have to be able to see where I’m going. Otherwise, I might materialize inside a wall.”
Logan stretched, cracking his joints in sequence. “I’ll go,” he said as casually as anyone else might announce they were going out for a carton of milk. “I have a hunch Billy will want me alive.”
At last Magneto strolled into the cone of light thrown out by Storm’s holograms.
“Logan,” he said with so natural an air of command that all present automatically gave him their full attention, “whoever goes inside that dam needs to be able to operate the spillway mechanism and neutralize any other defenses. What do you intend to do, even if you knew what to look for and where to find it? Scratch the box with your claws?”
Logan almost told him—he almost gave the man a practical demonstration—but decided against both, contenting himself instead with hunching his shoulders and glowering, precisely the wounded response Magneto would expect from him. Magneto’s game, he knew, was chess. Logan preferred poker, and he’d yet to meet anyone he considered his equal. He knew when to play a hand and when to keep his cards well hidden and needed no thought at all to decide which choice fit this moment best.
He glared defiant fury and growled, “I’ll take my chances.”
“But I,” Magneto told him in a tone that brooked no argument, “won’t.”
This time Logan didn’t try to hide as he made his approach to the base. He took a leaf from Magneto’s book and walked up to the ruined and broken gates like he was monarch of all he surveyed, without a care in the world and with even less fear. He followed the ramp down to the base of the spillway and headed for the mouth of the tunnel they’d seen on Storm’s hologram. The spillway followed the same brutally practical design scheme as the dam itself. There was no consideration of the surrounding environment: this was man imposing his rule on nature without regard for any consequences, only for the fulfillment of his desires. The spillway itself was as wide as a four-lane highway; you could drive a quartet of semis side by side with room to spare. The walls themselves rose as high as a small skyscraper, better than thirty meters, a hundred feet, and their appearance was more in keeping with a fortress than any dam Logan had ever seen. He’d never seen a more perfect killing ground.
He saw no sign of any cameras.
“Stryker,” he called at the huge entrance to one of the tunnels. It reminded him of the Jersey entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel as his voice echoed and reechoed into the darkness.
He called Stryker’s name again and added, “It’s me, Wolverine!”
In the control room, Wilkins dialed up the speaker volume in time to catch the name and played with the controls on the panel in front of him to bring the intruder into focus. He turned two additional cameras to catch alternate views of the X-Man, and immediately started a diagnostic sweep of the external monitors to make sure he hadn’t brought any friends.
“Look who’s come home,” Stryker murmured from above and behind Wilkins’ chair. “The prodigal son returns—what is he doing?”
Apparently, from the evidence of the cameras, he was strolling down the entry tunnel.
“Is he alone?” Stryker demanded.
“Appears to be,” Lyman replied. “All our scanners are clean, camera fields, too.”
“Keep looking,” Stryker told him, and then, “Send your team to collect him.” He rounded on Lyman, poking him with a knuckle to the chest for emphasis. “Don’t allow him inside until he’s shackled—knuckles to chin! Once he’s secure, bring him to me in the loading bay. Carefully, Mr. Lyman,” he added, stopping his subordinate before Lyman had taken more than a step. “Very carefully.”
Lyman nodded, remembering what had happened at the mansion. He’d do as he was told, he was too good, too well trained, a soldier to do otherwise, but if it was his call, he wouldn’t have gone near the little man in the tunnel until his troops had shot him to pieces.
Ten meters ahead of Logan, a section of the tunnel wall suddenly opened and three troopers broke into view, leveling two HK MP5s with laser sights and a Smith & Wesson automatic assault shotgun with the big thirty-round box. He heard more movement behind him as another fire team took position, the troopers setting themselves in a triangular formation, with him in the center, allowing them clear fields of fire. Less danger of shooting their own guys. The shotguns were there to knock him off his feet, with a rate of fire comparable to a low-end submachine gun. Once he was down, their tactics told him, the others could finish him at their convenience.
He smiled. These guys were good, they’d learned from their last encounter with him.
“Don’t move,” yelled one of the troopers in front of him. “Stand where you are, hands in the air!”
Logan was impressed by their fire discipline and what that told him about their commander. Tone and body language made clear to Logan these troopers did indeed remember the fight at the mansion, the comrades and buddies they’d lost to his claws. They were itching to pull the trigger. All they lacked was the slightest excuse to justify it.
Instead, to their surprise—and disappointment—he did as he was told.
The troopers weren’t gentle with him. Even though he offered no resistance, he collected a share of surreptitious punches and kicks as his hands were shackled together with his knuckles pressed up tight to both sides of his neck. The idea here was that any use of his claws would essentially cause hi
m to decapitate himself. Stryker’s curiosity was leavened by his malicious sense of humor—could Logan’s claws, forged of pure adamantium, cut through his own skeleton, which was an amalgam of adamantium and bone? Could they slice through his vertebrae? He actually found that amusing, the tradition that worked for vampires possibly doing the same for this otherwise unkillable mutant.
The vehicular entrance to the loading bay was blocked by a set of sliding blast doors more appropriate to a bank vault, armored steel better than a foot thick. That’s what Logan had noted during his initial reconnaissance, that the base had been designed as the ultimate prison. And that whatever had been incarcerated here during its heyday represented a serious threat. Couldn’t have been Magneto, though, way too much metal. Or anyone like Cyclops, who could project beams of force. This place dealt with purely physical strength or—and here Logan’s eyes flicked sideways to his imprisoned hands—weapons. That was the constant with these doors, they were all thicker than the length of his claws. He might be able to cut them, but not easily cut through them.
Custom built, perhaps, for one specific class of mutant—and then abandoned when the manifestation of other kinds of powers had rendered it obsolete?
The floor of the loading bay continued the same oversized scale of the rest of the installation, with room to spare for a convoy of full-sized semitrailers. A dock ran across the length of the wall opposite the entrance, allowing access to the interior corridors of the base. A couple of military-painted Humvees were parked flanking Logan and his escort. Both vehicles carried powered miniguns, whose six-barrel Gatling configuration allowed them to unleash five thousand rounds per minute. They were manned, and the tension on the gunners was obvious. One false move, they’d fire until the barrels melted.
Their laser sights were aimed right at him.
Waiting on the dock were Stryker, Yuriko, and Lyman, whose hand rested on the butt of his holstered Beretta. He wasn’t taking any chances, either.
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