Chuck & Sarah vs. the Third Omaha Part II—Chapter 1

This chapter is dedicated to LongLiveChuck, he's an awesome writer and I hope he recovers soon :).

~Disclaimer: Chuck belongs to NBC and Warner Bros., not me. If it is for sale, please let me know so I can buy it. However, until then, I make no money from this. Please don't sue me!~

"So," Chuck said, sitting on the couch next to Sarah as she earnestly told him about Cole, "that's all that happened?"

Sarah looked away from him, out towards the window where the pattering rain obscured the shimmering lights of Washington at night behind a curtain of rolling water. She blinked a few times as Chuck looked intently at the side of her face, a worried frown on his own.

"Sarah," he began, reaching over with his hand and touching her arm.

"Then you," she paused choking on her words slightly, before continuing, "um, you broke up with me." She stopped for a moment, before lilting her to one side in faux amusement with a heart wrenching chuckle. "Well, fake broke up. Again."

Chuck slid along the couch, so that he was pressed up against her side, and turned her face to look at him. "Sarah, I—"

She cut him off with a soft kiss, and pulled him into a tight hug, wrapping her arms around him. They stayed like that for a while, before Sarah spoke, not moving her head from his shoulder. "I know it was my fault—"

"Sarah—" Chuck interrupted.

"No, Chuck, it was. I pushed you away. I was scared. I told you there was no chance for us," she paused for a second, before continuing a small whisper, "but it didn't make it any easier. Those tears weren't fake, the first time it happened, you know. You said you were fooling yourself, but so was I. I was pretending, hoping, believing even, that the cover was real, and it was killing me to have to do what I did." She squeezed him even tighter, "I'm so sorry."

"The tears were real?" Chuck asked th a frown, pulling out of the hug and looking at her.

She looked at him with her big, bright blue eyes and nodded.

"But, then, with the truth serum—" he stammered.

"I lied," she said simply cocking her head to one side.

"You lied?" She nodded. "Whilst under the influence of a truth serum?" Another nod. He raised his eyebrow in response and wrapped her up in his arms, "you, Sarah Walker, are an enigma."

She simply sighed and buried her head into his shoulder. Of course, this was the moment the phone chose to ring.

"Urgh, it's Beckman," Chuck groaned, reaching over to his phone that was on the coffee table. "She wants you," Chuck he added once he had picked it up.

"Yes, General?" Sarah mumbled into the phone in a groggy voice. Chuck watched her as she was talking to the General; her golden hair, still disheveled from their embrace, falling down over her slightly red and tired eyes as she spoke in Casey-esque monosyllabic grunts to Beckman. "Now?" she exclaimed after a while, her eyes snapping open and all hints of tiredness disappearing. With a sigh, she put the phone down, and smiled tentatively at Chuck.

"What's up?"

"The analysts at Fort Meade have found the new weapons factory in Ukraine," she replied, trailing off.

"And..."

"Beckman wants me to head out there now, with Casey, before they find out we've traced them." Chuck's face fell, and he averted his eyes down towards the floor, but she leaned in and pressed a kiss to his lips before he could get up. "I know," she whispered, "I'll be back soon," she finished with a small smile.

He looked back up at her, getting up from the sofa and pulling her up with him, "I know, I'm sorry. Let's go down to the airport."

|CHUCK|

Sarah sat next to Casey in silence, reading through the brief Beckman had faxed to them soon after the plane had taken off. The factory they were currently watching was on the outskirts of Kharkiv, and as Sarah looked out of the windscreen of the the surveillance van, she saw a column of five trucks leave the building, which was currently bathed in a glow of yellow flood lighting. NSA satellites had tracked similar convoys of trucks to known weapons trading conventions, including the infamous WEAPCON, but they still didn't have any proof it was participating in illegal activities. "How do you want to do this?" she asked, turning to Casey.

"We need to get some proof that they're doing something illegal."

"So, we need to go in undercover and try to get some intel? That's going to take a long time, Casey."

"Or you could just sedu—"

"No," Sarah cut him off sharply, "don't even think about it. We'll do it the long way."

Casey grunted. "We don't need to do a long term cover op, we just need some intel from some computers, a few snaps of their 'produce', and we can be out of this commie hell hole."

"Why don't we try going in as government inspectors tomorrow, see if we can download anything and send it to Chuck?" she replied with a sigh.

Casey grunted again, and sat back in his seat, watching the five trucks trundle past, with their brown tarpaulin sheets flapping in the nighttime breeze as their headlights swept across the potholed, uneven road. "What's up with you, Walker?" he said after a while.

Sarah jerked her head up. "Nothing, Casey. I just want to get this over with, this mission's been dragging on for far too long."

Casey grunted, again. "It's not like you to be so anxious to get a mission over. I remember stories of a wildcard enforcer who went for two years straight without taking a vacation..."

Sarah sat up ramrod straight, and looked straight ahead, out at the factory. "I'm not Langston Graham's wildcard enforcer anymore, Casey. I have a life now."

Another grunt.

|CHUCK|

TOP SECRET - CODEWORD OMAHA - UKUSA ONLY
Inter-Agency Report on Initial Safety Testing (I.S.T.) of the INTERSECT in preparation for limited trials with live Agents: June 1990

Section I - Introduction
'Project Omaha' is the development, testing and deployment of the Inter-Neural Transient Exchange Relay for the Systemic Expedition of Cross-agency Transfer (INTERSECT). The INTERSECT was originally designed by the United States of America's (U.S.A.) Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) analysts codenames 'Orion' and 'Pegasus' (ORPEG), and was created to streamline the interaction of the four main intelligence gathering bodies of the UKUSA group (see UKUSA Agreement, #SUKUSA/1/0/0); the United Kingdom's (U.K.) Secret Intelligence Service (S.I.S.) and Government Communications Headquarters (G.C.H.Q.), and the United States of America's (U.S.A.) Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) and National Security Agency (N.S.A.).

Chuck's eyes glazed over the first paragraph of the document. Having already read the contents page (and Beckman's cover letter, explaining that the delay in delivery was due to his intervention in the Logistics Department), he knew that there were detailed schematics of this Intersect—which he presumed was the 1.0—in the report. What he was trying to find was the reason that the entire package, which seemed as if it contained all of the SIS's records of its involvement in Project Omaha, was sealed and redacted. Placing the first report back down on his desk, he looked over at the bulging brown envelope that contained three other, thick, documents. One of them had to have the answers he was looking for, right?

At least the unexpected arrival of an envelope so large the security team ran a full X-ray analysis on it to ensure it wasn't some sort of letter bomb had kept his mind off of the point that Sarah was not here. Mostly. He looked up at the monitor on the wall to his left, were a small red dot showed him that she was sitting in a van just on the outskirts of Kharkiv, outside a factory; presumably where the illegal weapons were being traded. It wasn't weird that he was watching her, was it? He decided it wasn't, since he was a member of the team. How could he be expected to provide remote backup if he didn't know where they were? Suddenly, the blip began to move away from the factory and back onto the main road. She was heading back to the hotel. With a sigh, he looked back down at the desk and picked up the first report again, and began to read through the rest of the introduction. One section down, he didn't even want to try to count how many were left.

~Author's Note~

I'm sorry this took so long. Essentially, these next few chapters are quite important in terms of plot development and I wanted to make sure that I got it right.

Secondly, just to quickly clear something up… In the "Next Time On" thing, I mean in the next 'episode,' which is next the next three chapters. I should have probably made that more clear, sorry :).

Thirdly, because I'm a huge nerd, I've actually written that report out in full (well, the first section is done, the rest in in progress), and I can upload it if you guys want me to...

Finally, I have twitter: QuantumGautam. This is my personal twitter account, and probably won't have any writing related tweets (though it may have Chuck related tweets). However, do follow me if you want to, or drop me a DM.