FLAGG'S REVENGE
Washington, D.C., The Present Day
It was a typically hot and humid summer day in Washington. Somewhere deep within the FBI headquarters building, Dana Scully found Fox Mulder at his desk, looking at an old newspaper headline on his computer screen.
"Your call was rather cryptic, Mulder," Dana said as she pulled up a desk chair and sat down next to her partner. "What was so urgent that you couldn't tell me over the phone?"
"Dana, how much do you know about the Korean War?"
"Well, my father served in it when he was still in the Navy. It ended with a truce in 1953, although we're technically still at war with North Korea. Why?"
Fox pointed at the screen. "This is an article from the Washington Post that I found in the National Archives. It's about one of the MASH units that operated in Uijeongbu, South Korea. Take a look."
Dana studied the article. It came with a photo of a group of doctors and a woman, identified as head nurse Major Margaret Houlihan, who were standing in front of a signpost which had wooden arrows with the names of what she assumed were their hometowns written on them.
"Doctors honored posthumously following enemy shelling," she read out loud. "General Mitchell awarded Congressional Medals of Honor to Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce, Captain B.J. Hunnicut, Major Charles Emerson Winchester, Major Margaret Houlihan, Corporal Maxwell Klinger, and their commanding officer, Colonel Sherman Potter, in a ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. The officers and enlisted personnel were all killed during the final hours of the Korean conflict." Dana looked at Fox. "It's very sad, Mulder, but what does this have to do with the X-Files?"
"The final report of the attack was written by a Colonel Samuel Flagg, who apparently had a personal grudge against Captain Pierce. It seems Pierce was a bit of a malcontent, in his words, but who was also a brilliant surgeon and who had a reputation for being irreverent, especially towards superior officers. A few weeks ago I got a letter from a man named Walter O'Reilly, who served at the 4077th as its company clerk until he was shipped home. He was very good friends with Captain Pierce, who was known as 'Hawkeye.' According to Mr. O'Reilly, there was no way that the attack happened as reported. There were no bodies and none of the doctors' remains were ever recovered."
"Well, that's not unusual in wartime, Mulder. We're still discovering the remains of soldiers and pilots who disappeared during Vietnam."
"Yeah, but there's more. O'Reilly went back to Korea a year after the war to see if he could find out for himself what had happened and got stonewalled by the Army and the CIA. But he did find out that the entire camp had been intact when the shelling stopped-only the camp wasn't there the next day."
"Mulder, I know those units bugged out frequently during the war, but an entire camp couldn't disappear overnight."
Fox nodded. "I know, Dana. That's why I think it's an X-File. How do you feel about taking a trip to Iowa?"
Walter O'Reilly shook Mulder's hand as he and Dana greeted him on his family farm. He was a short, friendly man who wore glasses. "Thanks for coming," O'Reilly said. "Please come in." The agents followed O'Reilly into his living room, where he looked at Dana and said, "Yeah, I met Colonel Flagg when he came to the 4077th a few times. I thought he was weird back then but I was still a corporal, so I couldn't say anything. Hawkeye sure did, though." O'Reilly gave a short laugh.
"How did you know I was going to ask you about Colonel Flagg?"
"Oh, I sometimes know what people are going to say before they say it," O'Reilly apologetically replied. "They called me 'Radar' back in Korea because of it."
Fox sat down on Walter's couch. "I studied the official reports the Army gave you. Unfortunately they weren't much help. According to the CIA Flagg continued to work for them until he retired in the early 1970's. He passed away not long afterwards."
"Flagg was one of those paranoid types the CIA had over there. I was finally able to track him down after his retirement. He hadn't changed much. He still wouldn't tell me what had really happened, only that it was his revenge against Hawkeye." O'Reilly looked at Fox. "If you could help me find out what happened to my friends, I'd really appreciate it. Hawkeye was like the older brother I never had."
Mulder nodded. "We'll do whatever we can."
Once they were back in Washington, Fox made inquiries at the CIA while Dana checked with the State Department. Flagg had dropped off the radar after the war, having been stationed in what was then West Berlin for the remainder of his career. They both got the impression that the assignment was more like a demotion than a transfer, especially after they read Flagg's personal file. Apparently, his bosses had decided that he was becoming something of an embarrassment, but Mulder did discover something at the Defense Department that caught his attention.
"Scully, have you ever heard of the Philadelphia Experiment?"
"The movie with Michael Pare?"
"No; this was the project the movie was based on. It involved an attempt at making a ship invisible to both radar and the naked eye."
"Mulder, you're not going to tell me that the same thing happened to the 4077th, are you?"
"Maybe not quite the same thing, but something close to it. It makes sense, Dana. As a CIA operative Flagg had access to the actual experiment's files. Towards the end of the war he went back to Korea on what was officially a 'fact-finding mission,' except that he spent most of his time with a Russian scientist who had defected and was living in Japan at the time. This scientist was a physicist who had apparently worked on a similar Soviet program, only theirs used a fleet of MIG fighter jets. The jets allegedly wound up disappearing and were never seen again." Fox showed her a stack of papers. "These reports were declassified after the Soviet Union broke up. You'll note that Flagg's name is mentioned several times."
"And you think Flagg and this Russian scientist duplicated the experiment and made the 4077th and everyone in it just…vanish? But Mulder, even if that were physically possible, where did they go?"
"That's just it, Scully. I don't think they went anywhere. I think the 4077th is still at that same location, just trapped in a time warp. As far as everyone inside is concerned, it's still 1953."
"And you're basing this on…?"
"On a series of satellite images I was able to get from a contact in NASA." Mulder turned towards his computer screen, where an image of the Korean peninsula was displayed. "Now, watch what happens when I enhance the area where the 4077th was stationed." The screen zoomed in on a canyon. At first glance, Dana couldn't see anything unusual. As Fox enhanced the image further, this time using infrared overlays, she saw a startling change. Where there had once been only an empty canyon now had several tents and two larger structures…and the ghostly images of men and women standing still.
"Mulder, what is this?" she asked as she stared at the screen.
"A time-space distortion that was invisible to the technology of the early 1950's but not anymore," Fox explained. "The only reason it hasn't been found before is because everybody naturally assumed that the area was empty all these years."
Dana drew a deep breath. "And you're saying that they're all still alive, just suspended in time?"
"It sure looks that way." Fox looked thoughtfully at the screen. "It all comes down to relativistic effects. Like being caught near the event horizon of a black hole…a minute there could be a year on the outside."
"So now what do we do? Even if what we're seeing is accurate, how do we free them?"
"I don't think we can, Dana-and I don't think we should try. If we were able to free them, they'd be more than fifty years out of touch. Everything and everyone they knew would be gone. But, I talked to my friend at NASA, and he thinks there's a solution that can be tried. We know from our own experiences that time travel is possible. If we could get the field to somehow fold back in on itself, we may be able to send everyone in it back to their own time. The field would collapse from the paradox and Flagg will never get his revenge. As far as the people inside the field are concerned, nothing unusual would have happened. Their lives would go on as before."
"But Mulder, assuming your friend can pull this off, isn't that interfering with history?"
"Not necessarily. The field would never have been created, so there wouldn't be anything to change. "
Dana looked at the screen. All those people, trapped for so many years… "You're right, Mulder. These people deserve a chance to get their lives back."
The next few days were anxious ones as Fox and Dana waited for the results of the experiment that Fox's friend had wanted to try. Mulder didn't giver her all the details, but it involved positioning a satellite armed with a transmitter that could "Fire" what Mulder's friend called a "Quantum tunnel" at the field. The tunnel would cause the field to reverse itself and form a wormhole back into the past. The effect would be instantaneous and, as Mulder said, nobody inside the field would notice the difference.
Finally, Mulder got a response. Not from his friend, but from O'Reilly. It was an email of O'Reilly standing with a man who was obviously an older version of Captain Pierce. "This was taken during one of the last times I saw Hawkeye before his death," O'Reilly's email read. "I never told him what Flagg had done. I'm just glad he and the others were free. Thank you for helping them get home."
"Any time," Fox softly replied as he read the letter. He printed the photo and put it on his bulletin board. "I just wish all the veterans of that war had been so lucky."
THE END