They did the unthinkable this time…
They left Michael in the field to die…
I was horrified...along with others, but I was arguably the most taken aback by their decision. How could they just leave him there? Why did they not try and bring him out? Why was there not a recovery attempt? Wasn't his life more valued than any of ours? Was he not just as important to bring back as any intel we could have gotten from the warehouse?
Was Section that cruel?
I was out on my mission when Michael's team was sent to Eastern Europe to detonate a petroleum warehouse used to manufacture chemical weapons and other harmful substances that could be used for warfare. We all suspected Operations was only going off of a hunch as there was little evidence that the plant was actually being used for that reason, but nonetheless, a team was sent in to blow it. Michael drew his usual company with Nikita as his Second. Michael ran his own point leaving the rest of the team to lay cover and secure the egress point.
It should have been an easy target. It was a run-and-gun designed to be quick and stealthy with a small margin for error. The time given was less than 6 minutes and in that time, Michael was able to place 5 charges which could be detonated remotely. All was going to plan when the team started for the exit. Michael hit the remote but none of the charges responded. Instead of sending one of the other members back to fix the problem, my beautiful Michael decided to do it himself.
Granted, it was probably for the best. Michael was much faster at troubleshooting an explosive problem than any of the others and had it not been that his base fire team bailed out of the kill zone first, he might have made it out without a scratch.
But his team were all pussies and only cared about making it out with their hair and did not give two shits about what happened to Michael…
Fucking pricks...All of them.
Someone said they drove off just as Michael made it to the gate. He had been shot several times and was barely able to stand on his own. Even with his wonderful body riddled with bullets, he still managed to hobble his way to the egress point only to see his salvation disappear into the night.
Not even Nikita stayed to help him.
Some good she was. In the thick of it all, her true colors showed through and I hope that he saw her for what she really was.
A coward.
It took Madeline to come out of retirement and insert herself back into the field for them to finally bring Michael home. I heard that the only reason they even bothered to extract him was so they could also pull out another deep cover operative. That was probably true seeing as how they were perfectly alright with leaving Michael in the dirt to die. Never really mattered if you weren't a Level 5 Team Leader or a Level 2 grunt, if Section saw you as a liability you might as well be trash underfoot. They were quick to scrape you off if you started to stink.
I guess in that regard, Michael was just like the rest of us.
Discardable.
And the longer he stayed around helping Nikita, the less valuable he became.
Weaker.
That alone made me hate her more than I could hate anyone. Not only was she impossibly naive about the way Section worked, but she was dragging it's best down with her. I was sure that Operations would finally see what she was doing to his most revered and talented operative and put a stop to it immediately. She was becoming cancer to the whole organization. Even though she completed successfully each mission she was assigned, it was not without considerable help from the small circle of friends she managed to recruit. Not only did she have Michael under her spell, but she seemed to also acquire help from Walter, the old weapons curmudgeon who was more interested in telling crude jokes than following protocol. Seymour Birkoff, the Head of Communications, was also her ally, though at times it was unclear if he was really on her. Lisa and Eric in Surveillance were also said to be part of her entourage, but after Eric was caught trying to escape Section with Nikita, anyone suspected of talking with Surveillance personnel in or out of Section was immediately contained.
I will say the Eric situation was interesting for all of us. No one knew anything about the people that worked in Surveillance, the Watchers. No one really ever saw them outside of Section, and if you did manage to get a whiff of their presence, it was also with an air of suspicion and caution. If you saw one, you could be assured they were likely tailing you and reporting back to Madeline your every action. I heard that Eric was assigned to watch Nikita after she nearly botched the Suba mission. He had always had her on his list of operatives to check-in with periodically. We all were on someone's list, but Nikita was especially watched because of her insistence to be a "good girl" despite what Section required her to be.
Can't say that I haven't caught the odd feeling of being watched myself. I knew I was probably going to be on someone's radar after my last performance review. Can't say that I took the news well being left on Beckett's squad. I, at least, kept my feelings and opinions to myself until I made it back home. I damn near tore my apartment to pieces and cried all night.
It just wasn't fair.
After all that she had done, all the missions she nearly screwed up, got wrong, or even just flat out disobeyed, they still would not transfer her off his team! Why were they keeping her there? Why did they continue to allow her to bring down the best operative they had in the entire organization?
Why didn't they just kill her?
