Don't own Chuck. I do have a model of an SR-71. There is a heap of trouble heading Team Bartowski's way, but first they need to be reunited.
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This morning, if you had asked Chuck how he would be spending his afternoon he would have answered with a generic supposition about eating junk food and worrying about Sarah. He would not have guessed that he would find himself in a special forces mission insertion pod in the bomb bay of a near-hypersonic aircraft. The aircraft was beautiful. Long, thin, but surprisingly wide and flat at the front rather than pointy. But even better than the airplane was the pod. Designed to fit a two-member special ops team side-by-side, or three people if you had one in tandem in front of you. Chuck assumed he really didn't want to know why they needed that – the nerd imagination was strong enough. The pod itself reminded him a bit of Casey: rugged and useful, a work of art with a seven-point harness locking him against the backrest. The best part about it? Even though the pods could take two people, Casey was in a separate pod and couldn't bother him for nerding out in spite of the dangerous mission ahead of them. He and Casey had spent the drive carefully studying satellite images, but they knew they were still mostly going in blind. Sarah's transmitter had been checking in at regular intervals, but fell eerily quiet a few hours before they had departed from the airfield on their 'test flight'. By Chuck's watch they were about fifteen minutes away from the drop zone.
Seven hundred and fifty or so miles. Huh, still the entire state of California away.
It was a very strange sensation to be loaded into the bay of an aircraft when everyone thought you were some new sensor pod. The scientists treated your shell like glass, the technicians triple-checked everything, and the pilots hit the burners and rent on the system with more force than the scientist could manage if he threw his entire body weight at it. Then came the vibrations. Being stuck in a black cocoon disconnected one from most sensations of speed, but you could tell something was different. Maybe it was the roar of the engines, or the warmth that seemed to seep into the pod in spite of the thermal protection. Perhaps it was the slightly uncomfortable fit of his mission suit that definitely had not been made for him, but would do well enough for what they needed. It could have been that Sarah had not come home like she said she would, and now he was literally flying faster than a speeding bullet to get her back.
"Bartowski! Wake up Cinderella, five minutes to drop. Latest satellite tracking shows we will beat those stinkin' commies by about fifteen minutes. Get in, get Walker, out. Got it?"
Chuck looked down at his hands, and even in the dim catch light of the pod displays he could see his hands shaking and feel the clammy skin stick to the control panel. He tried to answer Casey, but all he could do was squeak out a pathetic confirmation.
"Hmm." Casey was not fooled, but who expected him to be? Chuck was hoping to rescue Sarah, not get a miracle.
Come on, get it right. Bring her home.
The mission clock showed ten minutes. No time for changes, no training wheels. He had needed to write some of the software that determined their landing point and it had never been tested. If the parameter importance evaluation algorithm was calibrated incorrectly they could land in the middle of a hazardous situation rather than in a safe position.
People aren't allowed to serve in the same unit if they have a relationship, but my first planned mission is to safe the lo-my girlfriend? She is supposed to be the one protecting me!
Eight minutes out and live video of the drop site. Still clear, mission go.
'Stay in the car Chuck, it's safe there. What? Don't look at me like that, it is safer there.'
Oh Sarah, I stayed in a safe place this time, but you didn't come back. How am I supposed to let you go alone? You and Casey are the only ones I trust in this heartless community.
Six minutes left. The smooth slip of steel-on-steel sings its song of warning: Casey is coming, locked and loaded.
I am not safe today Sarah, you are not here and I am not safe. I have a tranq gun and a PSP, not the reflexes of experience. Your painful past keeps me alive, you know the cons so I am not conned, you block the bullets meant for me, your trust substituted my tremblings with tingling.
Three minutes to drop. They pilot would now be slowing the craft down so they could launch without ripping into pieces.
I need you. Stay alive for a few more minutes, we are coming.
Chuck wanted Duck Hunt and Morgan and a night of games 'till six AM, but he needed peace, and peace was currently freezing to death below them. He flexed his fingers back until they ached, sucked in a shallow breath, and locked his arms into the pod restraints.
No turning back now.
"Yeah Casey, I got it."
"That's better. Shoulders straight soldier! We have a mach-4 surprise for them and I know you love to throw surprise parties. Hoorah!"
The initial drop from the aircraft was anticlimactic, composed of a sharp jolt and nothing else. The landing was a different experience completely. For Chuck, it answered the question of 'how do you slow a ton of metal and flesh down rapidly' with 'not gently'.
Man, I have so much more respect for ODSTs now.
The pod slammed into the ground, opening the door and dumping him into the sub-zero ice land without ceremony, knocking Chuck to his hands and knees.
"Common moron, can't move fast enough like that." Casey called out with a grin, apparently having no trouble landing on his feet.
"Yeah yeah, I'm – wait. Don't take this the wrong way, but why aren't you shooting anyone right now?"
"Don't know, maybe your dramatic entrance scared them. Don't care. Find Walker, remember? I deal with the commies." Casey smiled as the itching on his trigger finger lulled.
"Right, let me just-" Chuck fumbled with his PSP for a moment before it showed him the live thermal feed from a weather satellite. "Over here, one warmer heat signature in the midst of a bunch of – Oh no. No. Casey, all the dots are below the temperature a human body should maintain, and almost all of them are dead. Three, maybe four are still alive."
Chuck didn't think any further as he launched into a sprint, watching his own thermal dot approach the others at an agonizing pace.
Casey grunted, muttering under his breath, "Always runs off. He could give me a compass heading, GPS coordinates, or even shout 'this way', but no, just run off, works every time."
Opting for his louder voice, Casey called out, "Hey! Bartowski! Slow up, we stick together, remember?"
Chuck wasn't really listening. He had crested an ice dune and begun to skid down the opposite side. From where he was he could see that the ice around the figures was a shade of pink. Normally quite pretty on a valentine's day card, this pink was interspersed with blotches of white and crimson red betraying the morose nature of the dye. Chuck could see the bodies, but without the tracker he could not tell if Sarah was one of the fallen. So he ran. Body to body, counting to a baker's dozen and then a few more. Being the nerd he was, his brain found the pattern quickly. The bodies on the outside of the group had all been died from headshots: centered, and clean. Further in the targeting became more erratic, some clean, some lopsided, and a two were only grazed – they were lucky; if they survived the cold they would have survived an encounter with the Ice Queen herself. Taking a quick guess, Chuck ran away from the gunshot wounds and towards the smashed noses, dislocated shoulders, and broken necks. A flash of silver and flax and he found her, face up with her snow goggles askew. There was frozen blood dripping from her nose, but no pool of blood. Her suit had been sliced open in a few places, but she looked okay. He quickly checked for broken bones and praised a deity he did not know that she was whole.
Slipping down to sit on the ice, he pulled her to him so she was resting on his body instead of the solid ice. He could see her breath coming out in small clouds of ice crystals, but he wanted to see her eyes, to see that they invited him in instead of closing off and holding the hurt, the pain of death inside.
"Sarah, come on baby, wake up, Casey and I are here, you are safe now. Please be okay, we need to get you out of here." He pulled her hood around her face in hopes of preserving some of her body heat
"Casey, I think we need to carry her out of here, can you help me get her up?" Chuck shouted over to his approaching partner.
Casey had finished checking over the bodies. Two of them were still alive. Even a commie didn't deserve to get frozen to death, so he had pulled their jackets over them and left them. Now he wished he had just picked up Walker and run for it.
"She's alive?" Chuck nodded in affirmation. "Good. Chuck, you are going to have to carry her by yourself. There must be someone still alive in there because as soon as we landed, the transports sped up. We have 3 minutes left until they get here.
Chuck sighed. Time was never looking out for them. Ever since they first met, timers counted. Up on a digital recorder, down on a bomb, down on a Brycicle, down 'till the intersect computer came back online, down, down, down.
"Sure Casey, let's get out of here. Should only take us a few minutes to get to the pods."
They needed only a moment for Casey to put Sarah in Chuck's arms and they were off, reaching the pods just as the still air shook with the throaty roar of aircraft engines. In spite of the restraints, Chuck held Sarah to his chest tightly as they locked their pods shut and drowned out the engine noise with their own rockets, blasting them up, up, up and away, out of reach of the earth-bound soldiers below them.
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Chapter 5 A/N – Chuck & Casey fly from the middle of Nevada to above the north tip of Alaska (~3000 miles) in roughly 45 minutes. That means they would fly at somewhere around mach 4. The fastest acknowledged air-breathing craft is the SR-71's parent – the A-12 – with a recognized speed of mach 3.35. However, no red-line overload speed tests were ever released (for the SR-71 or the A-12, but the A-12 was a CIA bird, and we know how much they like to share), and a Blackbird pilot stated that once – when running from a missile, I think – he had pushed the throttle to the limit and left it, seeing 'mach numbers he had never seen before'. The pilot has refused to discuss just what that number was.
About placing Chuck & Casey in pods rather than high-altitude suits. The bomb bay is likely to get very hot – SR-71 crews melted some personal objects they tried to transport that way. I figured they would be more comfortable this way.