"We are not having this conversation," Cameron Mitchell announced as he shook his head with vehement protest.
"You know as well as I do that I'm the only logical choice for this operation," Jack said with a sigh as he pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
"You almost had a heart attack, Jack!" The younger general cried. "Your wife is alive, but in critical condition, your daughter-in-law is in the hospital too, and your kids—"
"My kids are most likely with Daniel and Teal'c." Jack interrupted. He took a breath before he looked at Mitchell with a strangely calm and sober eye. "Mitchell, you said that you couldn't, in all good conscience, send another team to the coordinates that we sent Daniel and Teal'c to. I'm not another team. I'm retired."
"You're a retired three-star, Jack." Mitchell said with another forceful shake of his head. "I don't care how retired you are, the reporters won't look past the three-star part."
"Reporters never heard about top-secret missions when I was active-duty, and I don't intend to change that now."
"Reporters, politicians, the Joint Chiefs," Mitchell continued as his voice grew louder and louder. "It doesn't matter who sees the report. The point is that sending a retired three-star alone to do a job that I wouldn't even send my own teams to do won't cut it."
"Are you afraid they'll down-size the SGC and call me back to active duty?" Jack asked somewhat facetiously.
"This is serious, Jack." Mitchell said. His eyes indicated how unamused he was by the idea. "You're suggesting going down to this underwater facility in a sub, somehow getting into the facility undetected, and shutting down whatever is interfering with the Asgard beam on the George Hammond. Even for the fittest of soldiers—"
Jack raised an eyebrow at the younger man's implication.
"And the healthiest of men, this would be a difficult mission." Mitchell finished. "For cryin' out loud, Jack, they took down a Navy SEAL team in under five minutes!"
"Because we had bad intel!" Jack reminded him. "We won't make the mistake of trusting the intel this time."
"We don't even have a clue about how you could disrupt whatever is creating the interference!"
"That's what Lee and his team are for." Jack countered. "That's what the phone is for—to call my wife in Washington."
"She's supposed to be playing dead, not helping us with this investigation." Mitchell pointed out.
Jack sighed. "Do you have a better idea?"
Mitchell opened his mouth and then closed it again. "No."
"So, you'll call Bill?"
Mitchell nodded. "Yeah. And I'll also call Reynolds and have his team standing by."
Jack's eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"What?" Mitchell asked as he gathered up his papers. "You didn't think I was actually going to let you go, did you?"
"Actually, I kind of thought—" Jack began.
"Regardless of the other reasons I should or should not be doing this, I refuse to be the one to tell Sam that you went on a mission this soon after a cardiac episode." Mitchell interrupted. "I may be not be the brightest crayon in the box, but I'm not that stupid."
"So, what's the plan?" Daniel asked as he turned to Teal'c and the Navy SEAL commander.
"Get out of here and complete the mission," the commander said simply.
"Okay." Daniel said with a slight nod. "But how are we going to do that?"
"Undoubtedly, they'll send someone in here. We'll take them out before they can lock us in, and we'll go from there."
Daniel inhaled sharply. "Yeah, how about a plan that won't get us or the kids killed?"
"We don't even know for sure that the kids are here, Dr. Jackson." Someone piped up from the corner of the room.
"Exactly my point," Daniel said with an accentuated motion toward the SEAL who had just spoken. "We need to know a lot more about the situation than we know right now."
"And you think they're just going to walk in here and hand over the information we need?" The other SEAL asked with an eyebrow raised in skepticism.
"No, of course not, but I'd like to think that we haven't exhausted all of our resources." Daniel said with a brief shake of his head.
The commander looked at Daniel with a sober look in his eye. "Do you have a better plan?"
"I'd just like to look at all the alternatives before we choose that plan, that's all." He said with a noncommittal tone.
"Dr. Jackson, we're Navy SEALs." One of the other men said, soberly. "We don't suggest something unless we're almost positive that it's going to work. And we don't quit until it does."
Daniel turned to the other man with a small sigh. "And I respect that. I really do. But you have to admit, you're a little out of your element here. I mean, this is what I've done everyday for the last fifteen years."
"Daniel Jackson is correct," Teal'c said simply.
"If you knew what you were doing in this scenario, you wouldn't have called us to help." The commander reminded him. "And I'm still in command of this mission. It's my call."
Daniel sighed heavily. "You're right, of course. I just mean—"
"I know what you mean." The commander interrupted. "Now, unless you have a viable alternative, this is what we're doing, okay?"
Daniel nodded in resignation. "Okay."
She wanted to reach out to Jacob and ease his fears—to let him know that everything was going to be okay. Then again, he was five years old and more likely to blow her cover before she was ready to take action.
She reached out with her mind. This time, however, she hoped to make note of the mechanical and electrical objects in the room instead of the people.
She tried to almost imagine the people she knew were there and what items they might have on their persons in order to test her theory.
The doctor beside her was wearing probably wearing a watch of some kind. She poked and prodded the information to which her brain had access before she managed to discover that it was an expensive digital watch, a gift from the doctor's wife on their last anniversary.
Her mind almost burst with the realization that she couldn't have known that from just connecting herself to the object itself. She had actually found what she was looking for in the recesses of the doctor's mind.
She let herself "fall" back into the doctor's mind. Did they have another Anti-Prior device here like they'd had in the other room?
The doctor turned his attention to Jacob, and she felt a sudden wave of relief. Confused at the source of such a strong emotion, she prodded at the thoughts which had come before the feeling.
Images of a circular device like her mother had shown her in the vision of her work at Stargate Command placed at the base of Jacob's gurney appeared in her thoughts.
Was it that easy? She asked herself as she retreated from the doctor's mind as carefully as possible.
When she had successfully extracted herself from within his thoughts, she contemplated the experience for a moment in an effort to determine just what it meant. She could rifle through another person's thoughts and memories at will.
I wonder what else can I do, she pondered as she reached out to the doctor's mind again.
