Mac dragged his feet as much as he thought he could get away with as the man pressing a gun between his shoulder blades pushed him along to one of the warehouse's side entrances. Slowing this down was his best … his only … possible chance to get out of this.
Jack is on his way, he kept telling himself, but it did almost nothing to slow the triphammering of his heart. Mac didn't know much about guns, but he did know the one being jabbed into his back to urge him along was a FN Herstal Five SeveN.
He knew it because right around the time he'd been joining the Army, the military grade firearm had been in the news as a point of gun control controversy as to its appropriateness for civilians. He distinctly remembered the animation from CNN that showed what the high velocity round would do to a human target.
Mac had some hand to hand combat training back in Basic, and only heaven (and probably Boze) knew how many fights he'd gotten into back in school because slight nerdy kids with no parents tend to be a bully target. Once he'd realized he deserved to be treated better, had a right to defend himself, he'd gotten pretty good at getting even much bigger guys to leave him alone. So his first impulse was to try to fight his way out. Fortunately, even as scared as he was, he was mentally on top of things enough to know that was probably not his best play if he wanted to survive this curiosity-spurred lapse in judgement.
Mac figured he could handle himself if a run of the mill fight broke out, but unarmed here and now, he thought fighting this well armed burly dude who probably had at least as much military style training as he did would be a good way to reenact that simulation he'd seen in the news.
They were close to the door and there was still no sign of Jack. He decided to try again to talk his way out. "Look man, I don't even care what you're doing here. I was just following up on a Craigslist ad for a cheap car. I don't even need to call a cab if you don't want anybody around. I'll walk away and we'll never see each other again. I won't tell anybody I saw …"
Mac found himself slammed up against the wall next to the door. He was fleetingly grateful he hadn't tried to fight this guy just based on the sheer strength and weight crushing him into the hot metal siding. Bad breath and a heavy accent near the side of his face spat, "You won't tell anybody anything. No more from you, boy."
"Okay," Mac gasped as the man's gun barrel pressed hard under his ribs. "Sorry."
"I am certain you will be."
The door was yanked open and Mac was shoved inside, hard enough to make him stumble, but he kept his feet as he straightened back up in the dim warehouse interior. The difference in light was so marked, Mac couldn't see for a minute or two; spots danced in front of his eyes. He blinked hard and put his head down for a second, trying to adjust.
Then he could feel people approaching and a familiar voice snapped, "What part of just go get the car wasn't clear, Pazir?"
"This one was snooping around, Boss."
"Great," the man sighed. "Tell ya what, kid, you picked the wrong time and place to try to score a bag of weed."
Finally, Mac's vision had adjusted enough that he thought he could meet the man's eyes. He lifted his head. "Not exactly what I had in mind when I came down here," he said, suddenly feeling more angry than afraid.
The fact that this man had once slept twenty feet from where he had, had worn the same uniform, but had also almost definitely been responsible for at least four men on their patrol dying and the captivity and torture of others was … Mac couldn't really articulate exactly how to label it, but 'offensive' came as close as he needed it to.
O'Neill's eyes narrowed. "Well, well. Every time I turn around, along comes Hollywood to screw things up."
Mac always sort of knew he was an impulsive guy. Hell, he'd informed a drill sergeant that it wasn't possible to give more than one hundred percent on his first day of Basic Training. But even he inwardly cringed when he heard his voice (that had definitely not checked in with his brain) say, "The trouble with being a traitor is you almost always run into somebody who's going to get in your way."
"Is that what you're doing here? Trying to get in the way?" O'Neill asked coldly.
Despite the fact that Mac's hands were held out in front of him in a universally non-threatening gesture, his momentary pause before answering the presumably rhetorical question was apparently taken personally and the man O'Neill had called Pazir jammed the barrel of his gun into Mac's back hard enough to elicit a small noise of complaint from the young man.
Then Mac stammered, "I … I tried to get them to go back, tried to get anyone I could to listen. I thought you were one of us … and still a prisoner. Everyone else was so sure you were dead." He paused again, looking down at the floor for a moment. "Looks like everybody was wrong about you."
"Looks like," the man agreed with a shake of his head. Then he smirked when Mac looked back up. "Then again, not everybody misjudged me. My mother's family for example. Her people in Kabul seemed to understand me just fine."
Mac swallowed hard. Family over there. Well, he supposed that would explain it, or at least it could. But how the hell did the guy pass a security clearance screen if he had family connected to insurgent activity?
Then again, O'Neill hadn't been EOD. Mac supposed he didn't really know how thoroughly other MOS's were vetted or what clearances they might have. Besides, who knew if O'Neill was even this guy's name. Mac knew people used fake identities … He just had no idea how that might work if someone like the Army ran a background check.
Mac was starting to wonder if Jack had been intercepted by someone else involved in this, because it felt like about a year since Pazir had first growled at him in some bizarre combination of English and Pashto. He didn't even know how to respond to the admission that O'Neill didn't consider himself a traitor, but rather loyal to his mother's family and her country. So instead, both because he wanted to know and because he wanted to keep the man talking, he asked, "What happened to Big Z?"
"Zwickey?" he snorted derisively. "Kept him around until we wrang him dry of intel. I don't know what happened to him after that," he shrugged.
Mac swallowed. Because the alternative was throwing up on this guy's shoes. He'd tortured and killed the guy who'd slept in the bunk next to him, who everyone believed was his closest friend. Mac desperately wanted to say something else, get him talking, get him distracted, because he was positive Jack would be here any minute but it seemed nothing would come out of his desert-dry mouth.
O'Neill squinted at him, looking amused. "You always were a helluva an idea man, kid. Pazir, car, now. Airfield." Then he called out something to one of the other men who was loudly banging down off the metal stairs off to their left, but it was in a dialect that Mac could make almost nothing of, despite having naturally picked up a decent amount of the basics of the language while in Afghanistan. The one word he caught was 'prisoner' and his stomach dropped.
Pazir nodded and started back out the door. The other man jogged over taking a large zip tie out of his pocket. Mac's immediate impulse was to run, but the moment his muscles twitched he heard the distinctive click of a weapon slide.
He was still tensed but he looked back at O'Neill. The man had some small semiautomatic pistol aimed almost between his eyes. It took everything he had not to still just break into a run, but the expression on O'Neill's face said he'd be more that happy to shoot him.
"Hold up there, Hollywood," he said casually.
"Don't call me that," Mac spat, grateful that he sounded more angry than the practically piss your pants scared he felt.
"Ah, Hollywood, don't give me some that's reserved for brothers in arms bullshit. I served with you just nicely until my uncle needed me. Besides Angus doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?" Mac's eyes widened. He was absolutely positive he'd never told anybody there his first name. "Oh, I know all about you, kid. I knew everything about our whole squad. Which is why I'm kind of interested in seeing what sorts of fun explosives things you remember. No more knocking over aid stations for me and my boys anymore. We got ourselves some of the good make em remember you stuff now. Gonna light up this country like the Fourth of July. You showing up here is just a beautiful coincidence."
Mac stiffened as the other man zipped the sharp plastic closed around his wrists, but was at least a little grateful it was in front of him. He managed to ignore the gun in his face and glare at O'Neill. "There's no such thing as coincidence."
"According to who?" he asked with a smirk.
"Well, the law of large numbers for starters," Mac said, suddenly just a little less afraid. Why the hell was it that no matter how freaked out he was, if he thought about something concrete, like probability theory, it calmed him right down? "And," he went on, "you had to know one of us would come looking eventually. Stuff like that isn't easy to let go, Ron."
Mac didn't know what had possessed him to use the man's first name, but something a little less hard shimmered across his face for a second. Then he just gave Mac a shove in the direction of the door, so hard Mac almost went sprawling.
When Pazir pulled up and opened the trunk of the large late model sedan Mac felt almost blinding blistering panic. Being just blown up, captured, and beaten, that was one thing. And no denying it was scary as Hell. But knowing you were going to be taken away someplace and tortured for information, that was a special kind of dread the twenty-three year old who was currently pretty happy to be a lowly lab tech hadn't realized existed.
The worst part was he did still know a fair amount of definitely classified information vital to EOD and, if they could get it out of somebody, to the insurgent groups waging war against them. And everybody talks. That's one of the things he'd been taught in training. Everybody talks eventually. So would he, he was sure. His training about resisting interrogation had been cursory at best.
Mac was pretty sure he was going to just throw up.
Then a welcome familiar voice called out from an indescernible direction. "Hey there Tallahassee! Your sorry ass is absolutely surrounded. Why doncha put that gun down and let the kid back on up?"
Nothing happened for a minute, and Mac's face had almost split into a grin when, with no warning the shooting started. Mac dove onto the ground, scrambling to get behind the next nearest vehicle, struggling to move along the ground because of his bound hands.
Gravel bounced up and cut his cheek as a bullet hit the pavement near his face. Then he swore as something hot and angry tore his thigh. He couldn't hear himself over the noise though.
He got behind a truck and, ignoring the pain and the fact that he was bleeding as best he could, he got his shoelaces quickly tied around the zip securing his wrists. Using his feet and the friction of the laces, he'd cut through the ties in less than a minute. Then he got his knife out of his pocket and cut free his pant leg to check the damage. He almost grinned when his head supplied Jack's voice, "That ain't hardly a mosquito bite."
He got to his feet, preparing to look around the front of his cover to see what was happening. A heavy hand grabbed his shoulder and he jumped. The hand spun him around and it was Jack.
Seeing Jack's concerned face he realized the fire fight was over, his unprotected ears were just still ringing from the noise. Finally Jack's voice started to get through the high pitched buzzing. "You're bleeding, kid."
Mac nodded. "I think that's the least of our worries, Jack. I'm pretty sure those delivery trucks I told you about have bombs in them and maybe so does this warehouse."
"I made a call. I got people on their way and tracking down street cameras here so we can get somebody on it."
This time Mac shook his head and started back toward the warehouse, limping but not too slowed down, he thought. "They were in a hell of a hurry to hit the airport. I don't think there's much time. Call your people and tell them to focus on the trucks. We'll deal with the warehouse."
Jack looked like he wanted to argue but knew he couldn't justify it. He just got out his phone and started talking, following Mac at the same time. "Think tank my ass," Mac grumbled to himself as he started searching crates and boxes for the bomb he was 90% sure had to be here. Then he found a box with some very distinctive markings on the container inside and something O'Neill said suddenly clicked. "Jack? Tell them these bombs are probably dirty."
Mac's wide blue eyes belied his calm tone, but Jack just did as Mac said. He was putting the phone in his pocket when he saw Mac go a particularly disturbing shade of pale. "Mac? Buddy? Maybe you should sit for a sec and lemme get a look at your leg."
Max shook his head. "My leg is fine, just this bomb …" he trailed off.
"Is worse than a dirty bomb?" Jack asked feeling his own eyes go a little wild.
Mac shrugged and started walking again, toward the open metal stairs he'd seen the man with the zip ties descend a few minutes ago. "It is for me," he said sounding a little shaky.
He pointed up at the center of the catwalk that ran past the warehouse's duct work.
"Because it's up there."