Hey hey, I'm not dead!
Like I promised, I have not given up on this story, but the last two months have been INSANE with schoolwork, and it's only gonna get harder from here as the first semester draws to a close. So sorry this took so long, and I apologize in advance for the cliffy, but here you go! Thank you guys so much for continuing to support this story and me through your reviews and PMs, and sorry I take so long. But don't worry, there will be more. ;)
Disclaimer: No, nope, not mine, nope.
(Other disclaimer, please do not try any of this at home. Ethan's medical procedures here are just what I would do if I was in his situation and should by no means be taken as legit first aid.)
Chapter Seven-Wish
About once every day, Ethan thought about Julia. What she was doing at that exact moment. It was around 11 at night in the States. Was she sleeping? Working late at the hospital? Out with her friends, laughing away memories of the life they could not have together?
Whatever it was, it was probably better than holing up in an abandoned shed on the outskirts of some obscure English settlement.
After about a half hour of circling the town with his lights off, Ethan finally found a place to hide the SUV. He'd decided to stash it behind a rise outside of town , out of view. Before leaving it, he raided the backseat and trunk for anything useful. He found four other guns, the smaller two of which he took, a med kit, spare clothes, and a ditchbag with food and water. He stuffed the med kit, clothes and a thin field-issue thermal blanket into the ditchbag and pulled on a fleece jacket before setting out over the farmland, toward the lights of Porlock, hoping the SUV would be there in the morning. He'd decided to take it on the Minehead, hoping that a car familiar to whoever hired the mercenaries may prove useful down the line.
Ethan poked around the fringes of Porlock until he found a decrepit old shed on the edge of a farm. After a glance at the house about a hundred yards away, confirming that all the lights were off, he elbowed the door open and snuck inside.
The shed was dark and smelled like mold and dead things. Ethan twisted on his Maglite and shined it around. The space was mostly empty, with a few rusty pieces of farm equipment shoved against the walls like forgotten toys. Cold wind whistled through the cracks in the weathered wood, but at least the interior was sheltered and hidden. Ethan pulled a picked up a piece of rebar and shoved it through the handles of the door. It wouldn't hold for very long if someone tried to break in, but it would wake him in enough time to lock and load and be ready to run.
He made his way to the back, pulled out the blanket, and laid it on the rough-packed dirt of the floor. He slung his backpack down and collapsed against the wall and onto the blanket with an exhausted sigh.
Wariness and adrenaline kept his mind awake, but every part of his body ached with fatigue. He couldn't sleep yet, though.
Turning the intensity down so it wouldn't show through the cracks in the shed, Ethan placed his light upright on the ground. The beam reflected off the ceiling and cast the small space in a feeble white glow. He rummaged through the backpack and medkit and pulled out what he would need. Water. Energy bar. Gauze. Antibacterial cream. Ace bandage. Painkillers. Tape.
There was little he could do about the cracked ribs he was now sure he'd sustained. He just hoped they didn't get any worse than they already were. His arm was sore and tender, but he couldn't afford to sling it yet. When this was all over, if he was still alive, maybe then he could let it heal. He swallowed the painkillers and hoped they would take the worst of the edge off. Now for the fun part.
Bracing himself against the cold, Ethan eased off what was left of his shirt. It was stiff with salt and peppered with burn holes; he muttered in disgust and tossed it at the wall. Then he smeared some of the ointment onto his hand and rubbed it gently everywhere he could reach on his back, biting down on pained hisses as his fingers came in contact with the burned flesh. First and second-degree, probably. Painful, would take time to heal and would probably scar in places, but he'd gotten through worse before. He would have to again.
He finished, gasping in relief even as a blessed chill eased into his wounds as the local took effect. He pulled out another shirt from the backpack, put it on gingerly, and followed with a sweatshirt. Then he leaned as gently as he could against the cold wall of the shed, sipping water and taking small bites from the energy bar.
Should he sleep? He'd driven for about an hour, which would put the time at around four in the morning. He still had a few hours until dawn. He could snatch a few hours, and every fiber of his body shrieked for rest. Still, the biting fly of his guard kept him thinking. He switched off his flashlight to preserve the battery and sat silently in the cold darkness, munching on the bar.
He ran over the checklist his mentor had drilled into him.
Location? Known. Outside Porlock, England.
Position? Defendable and secure with one escape route.
Weapons? Three handguns and a knife in the ditchbag. Hands. Head.
Personal condition? Toeing the line between shitty and all-around screwed.
Team? Ethan winced despite himself.
Would they try to come after him? Undoubtedly, and that scared him more than he cared to admit, for more reason than one. First off, whoever this shadow group was, they had people, connections, data. They knew who Ethan Hunt was, which meant almost without a doubt that they knew who Benji Dunn, Will Brandt and Jane Carter were too. If they could get to Ethan, they could get to his team, and his team would walk right into the lion's jaws if it meant recovering their leader.
No, not just their leader. Their friend. He winced again. That was the other thing that scared him. The last year had bonded the four of them irrevocably. And here he was, injured and alone and hunted, and there was a huge likelihood that they would end up in the same position before this was all over. Because of him.
Ethan pressed his forehead to his knees. He could not lose his team now. He knew, with an absolute, pit-in-his-stomach certainty, that after everything he had sacrificed–his wife, his safety, and a good chunk of his soul– that doing so would destroy him. His end would not come from a bullet or a bomb. It would come from an empty container of sleeping pills or the bottom of a whiskey glass, its drinker driven there by the ghosts of the family he'd once had, only to be lost fighting yet another war he did not fully understand.
Ethan sniffed before gritting his teeth against his demons. "Act fast, but use your head" was a tactic he usually reserved for when his life was in imminent danger and copious amounts of adrenaline were pouring into his system, but sometimes the only way to drive out the darkness in his soul was with the hard-edged logic his mind could produce. He continued down the checklist, marking off each one until he came to one that gave him pause.
Chip. He'd barely even thought about it. Every IMF agent, upon graduation into field service was chipped with an electronic ID tag about the size of a grain of rice, inserted just beneath the skin of their lower backs. Ethan used to have a more archaic version back in the nineties, but during the Job fiasco he'd had Claire cut it out. When he returned to service the agency rechipped him only to remove it again for his stint in that Russian prison to gather intel on Cobalt. As far as he knew now, we wasn't chipped at all, unless IMF had at some point drugged him and done it in his sleep without his ever knowing. Honestly, he wouldn't put it past them.
But it was a problem. Chips contained trackers, enabling the agency to find any operative in the world who was equipped with a functioning one. These days the chips were inserted so close to the spinal column that rogue agents could not remove them out on their own like Ethan had without risking paralysis or worse. IMF recovered a lot more rogues now than they had when Ethan first joined the agency. But he was MIA now, chipless and phoneless. He really had no way of reaching backup. For the first time in over a year, he was on his own.
Nothing but a ghost with a target. Ethan smirked darkly into his knees. He'd been there before. He knew how to play this game.
So why did he have such a bad feeling that this particular game had an element he could not see, one that would cause the outcome to be different from those he had played in the past? That this time, it was not chess, but a twisted Jenga, and if he missed something and pulled out the wrong piece of the puzzle, the world would come down on top of him?
Ethan started awake.
The wind had died down, and tepid light shone through the larger cracks in the shed. Ethan stifled a groan as he pulled his forehead off his knees, rubbing a crick in his neck with his good arm. His back felt better but was still depressingly sensitive to touch, and every time he inhaled it felt like his ribs were shattered glass that cut up his insides. His arm was wickedly sore, but more or less usable. He got carefully to his feet, scooping up his flashlight and repacking it. It was light outside, which meant it was time to move. He hadn't intended to fall asleep, and he grimaced at the presence of day. He'd wanted to be up and out before sunrise, but apparently his battered body had had other ideas. Tucking his gun into his waistband and gently shouldering his pack, he unbarred the door and peered outside.
Steely clouds hung low in the sky, veiling the sun and washing out the landscape. Ethan winced as his eyes adjusted. Clumps of forests and rolling expanses of fields, dotted here and there with houses, stretched to the horizon on three sides. On the fourth, buildings rose above the trees. A church bell chimed over the morning. Porlock.
He could only hope no one had found the SUV. Ethan closed the shed door again, pulled up his hood and started moving. His breath puffed in the cold winter air, and he was dimly surprised there was no snow on the ground. It sure felt cold enough.
Soon he came to the rise he had clambered up the night before. He crouched low to the tufty grass and belly-crawled forward. He heard nothing, which was a good sign, but someone had found the car and was waiting for its driver, Ethan didn't want to waltz right into a potential trap. He crept forward and peered over the top of the rise.
The SUV sat silent and solitary behind the hill. Apparently a seagull had decided it was a good perch for the night, but other than that the car and area around it appeared deserted. Ethan sighed quietly in relief and made his way down. The gull gave an angered squawk and flapped away.
Ethan opened the driver's side door, chucked his bag onto the passenger seat and climbed inside. The air inside the car was stale and smelled like old blood. He grimaced, back flaring in pain as he leaned gently back into the driver's seat. A small, hopeless voice deep in his brain inquired as to how he was going to storm the base when he could barely walk, but he pushed it down. Act now, think later. He fired up the engine and cranked the heat to full blast.
Five minutes later, he was back on A39, headed for Minehead. The GPS was still functioning, the black line of the mercenaries' route blazing invitingly. The agent, the hunter in him screamed to go, but as he drove he started thinking more about what exactly he was doing. He was injured, outgunned, and alone. He had very little chance of walking away from this one alive. And yet something in the pit of his stomach was driving him toward the flag at the end of that black line.
Ethan knew he should not rely on get feeling alone. Brandt, and even the Secretary herself had berated him in the past about being too impulsive, too spontaneous. They were both sure it would get him or a member of his team killed one day. But that instinct had saved him in the past many times, and he would not walk away from it now. He needed to end this, alone. These people had come after him, and he would not endanger the lives of any other agents to help fix this, especially those of his team. It was up to him now.
For the next half hour he kept his eyes on the road in front of him, and tried not to think too much about the dread building up inside him.
The checkered flag, morbidly cheerful, marked a remote farm outside of Minehead proper. Ethan drove the car off the road half a mile away from the house, hiding it on the edge of a thick stand of trees. He didn't cover it up though, lest he need a getaway vehicle. He left the pack but took every weapon he had and checked them. It wasn't much. Three handguns, two with full magazines and one with half, and an eight-inch knife, which he tucked in his belt under his jacket. Oh, well. It would have to do. The clouds were growing thicker overhead, and thunder threatened the distance. He should wait until dark to move in, but he needed daylight to scope out the facility. Ethan zipped up his jacket against the rising wind and started to move through the woods toward the farmhouse.
The forest ended a hundred yards away from the house itself, where it gave way to a wide, uncut lawn. From here, the house looked like it had been deserted for many years. The paint was peeling like blisters. The windows were broken, the interior dark and the perimeter silent. Hmm. Maybe this had been merely a meeting place for the mercenaries, and wasn't a base at all. Still, the feeling of dread persisted, a gnawing certainty in his gut that something was wrong with this place. He wouldn't leave yet. Ethan hunkered against a tree and waited. For what, he was not sure. He drew one of the handguns and rested it against his thigh. The trees were silent.
Then he heard the first scream.
The sound made the hairs on Ethan's arms stand up, and he resisted the primal urge to flee into the relative safety of the woods. His hand tightened around his gun, because the scream came from the house, and it was not a scream of fear, or surprise. He'd heard torture enough to know the difference. Someone inside there was in agony.
The dread in his stomach strengthened, bordering on nausea. He'd never felt this way before on a mission. Almost –compromised. He couldn't even explain why, but he did know one thing: he had to get in there. Every fiber of his being screamed it.
Ethan scanned the house again. There were no obvious guards, no sniper rifles peeking out of the darkened windows in the upper story. He prepared to run.
He was not being logical, and he was not thinking this through. For a moment his resolve faltered. He didn't even know whom it was that was being tortured. It could be some turncoat member of this shadow group, or a target with information. He had no reason to go charging inside, guns blazing.
But his instinct argued otherwise.
The scream came again, this time longer and hoarser. Ethan felt the familiar veneer of battle fall over him. He did one more quick scan for movement and sprinted across the lawn.
There was an open door on the porch. Ethan jumped silently next to it and pressed his back against the side of the house. He drew his knife. Whoever went down would go down silently. He had to be quick. He could hear voices now, low and accented. He pulled open the door without a sound and crept inside.
He really should have encountered more resistance by now. This was probably a trap, but if so, why no watchers on the third floor? Why such light defenses? Why not just shoot him when he came across the yard?
Unless they did not want him dead. Ethan grit his teeth. No, they had wanted him dead when they blew up the plane and sent mercenaries to shoot him off a cliff. He was pretty confident they wanted him dead. They really did not know he was here.
He followed the voices down the main hall. The house was old, the inside rotten, and he prayed desperately that the wooden floors would not creak under his weight. There was a thick layer of dust coating the floor, and in it were two sets of footprints. Between then was a single long smear. A drag mark. The tracks led down the hall to a door that was slightly ajar. Ethan advanced, gun in one hand, knife in the other.
He came to the door and crouched near it, listening.
"I'll ask once more and only once," snarled one voice. Austrian accent, male, probably late thirties. And by the sound of it, pissed off. "Where is he?"
A beat of silence. Then: "Ah, damn it, Jurich," said another voice. "You made him pass out again." Ethan was surprised. American, also male, but unfamiliar. Suddenly, powerfully, he wished Brandt was here.
"He's pretending," said the Austrian, Jurich. "He just does not want to answer us. I know he knows. He must know where he is."
"Wake up," snapped the American. There was the sound of an open palm on a cheek, and a quiet groan. "Answer us. Where is he?"
There was another moment of silence. Then quietly, painfully: "Go..to..hell."
Ethan's throat closed in shock. No way. It couldn't be.
"We've been at this for two hours, Williams," said Jurich. "We're not getting anything more from him. Let's just kill him already."
"No," said Williams. "He knows something we can use. Do you really think the bosses will be pleased if we come back empty-handed? Shock him again."
Ethan kicked through the door and charged.
He took in every detail in the fraction of a second. The musty walls of the room, the two men whirling around in shock, drawing their weapons, and the man tied to a chair behind them, head down.
Jurich drew a handgun. Ethan hurled his knife, and it sank to the hilt into the Austrian's chest. He went down without screaming.
"Jurich!" cried the other man, Williams. He snarled and turned to Ethan, bringing his gun to bear.
Ethan aimed down and shot him in the leg. Williams shrieked and collapsed, gun clattering out of his grip. Ethan kicked him in the temple and the man went limp.
Ethan moaned and clutched his arm close to his chest as the adrenaline began to ebb and the pain returned. He scanned the room for more threats, but it was empty.
Empty, except for the man tied to the chair, who had lifted his head up and was staring in shock at Ethan. Blood matted his hair and coated one side of his head and his face was pale, but his blue eyes were bright with sudden joy. His face cracked into a smile. "I knew it," he rasped. "Oh my God, I knew you weren't dead."
Ethan almost fell to his knees.
"Brandt?"