A/N: Hello again, my friendly readers! Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed last time…I promise that this chapter will be better than the last one! I also hope it clears up some of the lingering questions that this poorly-crafted story has left behind. I apologize for any confusion. Over and out-Maddie.
" Man, this sucks." Deeks stared out the window at an eight-foot-high snowdrift. " I mean, I know this is Russia, but come on!"
Kensi sighed. " Deeks, the key word in that sentence was Russia. This is Russia, in the middle of winter. And you did sign up for this when you joined NCIS."
Deeks turned away from the window. " Touché." He shook his head. " It's funny, though. Somehow, I imagined that all our missions would be like those first few undercover ops…you know, staking out exclusive nightclubs and pricey jewelry stores."
" Oh come on, Deeks. You were a detective. You had to have done worse than this." Kensi replied, crossing the room to stand beside him. Her partner glanced her way, his eyes dark behind his fringe of blond hair. Kensi stared at him.
" Deeks, what's wrong?" He was acting oddly, impatient and restless.
" I hate this. Hetty never told us why we were sent here, all that she said was that we were taking over some mission. She said that we would be here for six months to a year, she warned me it might be dangerous, but she never told us why. And how is this even dangerous? All that we've done for the past four weeks is sit in this stupid hut on the edge of some god forsaken forest!" Deeks' breathing had accelerated, his eyes looked slightly wild. " Without a cell phone signal or internet access, we can't even talk to anyone at home. Does anyone in that office tell us anything?"
Kensi found herself, for the first time in her life, feeling alienated from her partner. Deeks was usually a cheerful guy who accepted whatever crap life threw at him with little complaint. She knew that he had suffered a rocky childhood and that he didn't have many friends outside of work, but she had never bothered digging into his personal life much. And while Kensi had seen her partner get angry or frustrated when they lost a suspect or a case turned cold, she had never seen him like this.
" Looks, Deeks, let's look at the case files again. Maybe they'll tell us something that we didn't pick up before." She suggested, crossing to the table and picking up a manila envelope. Deeks snorted.
" Kensi, didn't you read them? The important stuff is all censored out, like we don't deserve to know what we're running headlong into."
" Deeks." Kensi handed him a file. " It's not like that, and you know it. This mission is top secret because if word gets out that the feds have infiltrated the arms smuggling ring, it will scatter and we'll never catch anyone."
" Yeah, but who are we going after?" Deeks leafed through the files. " There's no names mentioned, no cities…nothing. Not one mention of the Navy or Marine Corps. I don't see how the hell this fell to NCIS jurisdiction."
Kensi wanted to have an answer; she wanted to be able to tell him. But she didn't know the truth either.
Two hours later, Kensi found something. It was buried in the back of a file, hidden amongst a sea of blacked out sentences.
" Deeks, look at this." She pointed. " A 27 year-old Petty Officer was murdered in Moscow four years ago, but the killer was never found. Three years ago, a Lt. Colonel was on leave in LA when he was gunned down by a suspected member of a known arms-dealing ring. Look at this!" Kensi gestured. " Four deaths, all Navy…all somehow related to the Russian arms dealers."
Deeks shoved back his chair and paced angrily across the room. " That's it! I'm calling that guy…what's his name, the agent in charge of this case…?"
" Crosby." Kensi replied. " But he said that we should wait…"
Deeks ran his hands through his hair. He looked desperate, like a trapped animal. Kensi had seen this look before on her partner, when he had lost his old partner and friend Detective Traynor.
" Hey." Kensi stood and put a hand on Deeks' shoulder. " It's going to be okay."
Deeks hung his head. " Kensi, we have waited for four weeks and nobody has even attempted to make contact. No arms dealers, not the team…not even Crosby. It's like nobody knows we're even here."
…
" Off the radar?" Callen leaned against the wall of the OSP tech room, looking worried.
Nell and Eric exchanged nervous glances.
"Gone might be a more accurate description." Nell said. " It's like they just dropped off the face of the Earth. The agent in charge over there, Agent Brewster, was supposed to call us from Moscow when he knew they were safely settled in over there."
" And he never called?" Sam guessed. Eric shook his head.
" Oh no, he called all right. But get this…Deeks and Kensi's flight landed on time and they were definitely on board, and they definitely arrived at the airport, but they never met Brewster at the airport. I know because I talked to him this morning, and he said that they never arrived in Moscow."
Callen raised his eyebrows. " So, what happened?"
" That's just it." Nell stared at the computer screen, frozen on a street map of Moscow. " We have no idea."
" And this is Russia we're talking about." Eric reminded them. " We don't have access to anything over there. No cams, no computers…nothing. And they've been gone for a month now. Would have been nice to know earlier…but hey, what are you going to do? Anyway…until one of them makes contact, we have to consider them missing in action."
….
" Deeks, there's probably a good reason Crosby hasn't made contact yet." Kensi assured him. The LAPD liaison didn't look comforted. Instead, he looked worried.
" Four months is way too long, Kensi. We should have heard something by now!"
Kensi closed her eyes. This was actually turning into something of a nightmare. Sure, she had faced some tough times in her career as an agent, but this was pretty bad. She had barely made it through one month of being stuck in the farmhouse, she didn't think that she could last five more…or, God forbid, eleven more.
" Deeks, I'm sure it will be okay. Crosby said that we should wait until someone contacted us or until he himself made contact." Kensi heard her voice rising. She, too, felt that something was slightly off about this mission, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
" Oh, so we should just sit around and wait for what…another four weeks? Until the dealers murder another four members of the United States Armed Forces? Kensi, these men had lives, they had families, and they were slaughtered because they got into something they shouldn't have, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They didn't deserve to die, and it's our job to find the monsters behind this and shut this arms dealing operation down!" Deeks shouted. Kensi stared at him, meeting his eyes with her own. His expression was one she didn't often see: fear and angst.
She stood up and gave his shoulder a little shake.
" Hey, Deeks. Stop it."
Deeks looked away, and tried to pull his arm away from her hand. Kensi narrowed her eyes and leaned in closer, so that her lips were almost touching his.
" Deeks. Do you trust me or not?"
Deeks groaned and sank against the wall. Kensi remained where she was, even when Deeks turned so that they were only millimeters apart.
" Yeah, I trust you. Now the only question is…do you trust me?"
…
Nearly twelve hours had passed since Deeks and Kensi had been listed as 'missing', and the rest of the team wasn't taking it too well. Callen was pacing back and forth in the bullpen, while Sam sat at his desk and stared at the pencil that he twisted between his fingers.
" This doesn't make sense, Sam. They were on the plane, which means they got to the airport. But they never met Brewster there. They never made it to the meeting spot." Callen held up a photocopy of Deeks and Kensi's fake passports, identifying them as Ronald Huddle and Megan Crass, respectively. " They used fake IDs, it's unlikely that anyone would have followed them there and somehow prevented them from reaching the meeting spot."
Sam shook his head. " Unless they were ambushed at the airport. If someone knew they were coming."
Callen ran one hand across his forehead. " This doesn't make any sense at all. Hetty said that nobody knew about the mission-only her, Deeks, Kensi, Brewster and the big dogs on the Hill. So how the hell would someone be able to ambush them?"
Sam gave his friend a sad glance. " I don't know, Callen. I really don't know."
…
Upstairs, in the tech room, Eric and Nell sat side by side as they combed through hundreds of hours of footage from airport security camera tapes sent from the Moscow airport that Deeks and Kensi had landed in. So far, they had found nothing.
" This is pointless." Eric shook his head. " There are thousands of people on these tapes. Deeks and Kensi could be anywhere, or not even on here at all."
Nell turned to him, her amber eyes bright and sad in the bluish glow of the screens.
" We have to keep trying. They're our friends." Her voice snagged a little. " Eric, what if they're hurt?"
Her fellow techie turned back to the computer screen.
" Then we'll do whatever it takes to find them and bring them home."
A/N: Oh, gosh. Well, I hope that cleared up a few things. Let me recap, for those who are still maybe confused. Deeks and Kensi are assigned a dangerous mission to shut down an arms dealing ring run out of Russia that has been responsible for the deaths of several US Navy and Marine Corps personnel. They arrived in Moscow, where they meet a man named Crosby who tells them to go to a remote village where they will wait for contact from a member of the arms dealing ring. They wait for four weeks, but never hear anything. During this time Deeks and Kensi become romantically involved-okay, it would be kind of hard to miss that. Back home, it is revealed that while Deeks and Kensi arrived in Moscow, they never met the real NCIS agent, Agent Brewster, in Russia. Now the team must try and locate Deeks and Kensi before they find themselves in deeper trouble. Well, I know that I just broke the whole 'show don't tell rule', but hey, if someone's confused I have to clear things up. I know that the earlier chapters were unclear, and I'd like to apologize with all my heart for that. Again, feel free to tell me in a review if someone doesn't make sense! Love, Maddie