Chapter 27 or something. Ok yeah just a warning this chapter's a bit more violent and stuff than the rest, maybe a temporary rating of M or whatever. Just a heads up. Please don't sue me.
The luxury convertible roared its way down the mountainous valley.
"We've been driving for eleven hours now, and I can't sleep," whined Ziad.
"Suck it up, Ziad. Enjoy the drive. The Altai Mountains are gorgeous! Look at that river crawling through the valley! What scenery! And those Germans really know how to engineer an automobile," shouted Dave as he gripped the steering wheel, wind whipping his hair back dramatically. Unfortunately his aviator sunglasses (stolen from an Indian military officer weeks ago during their escape) had been cracked during an unfortunate encounter with a Yak while in Nepal. So he was less cinematic than he may otherwise have wished.
"Yeah, I know. You've said that like, four hundred times." sighed Ziad.
"This car is the boss."
"Shut up."
At that moment the engine hiccuped, coughed, sneezed, farted, gagged, choked, and finally put a Luger in its mouth and blew its misery out through the back end.
"What were you saying about German engineering?" quipped Ziad as the car coasted to a stop.
"Oh, screw you Ziad."
Ziad grinned mirthlessly.
"I guess we're hiking it from here on out."
"How far is that?"
"How the hell do I know? I'm not a wizard."
Dave looked at him.
"Ok, well yes I am a wizard. The only one for thousands of miles, I'm sure."
Ziad's anger finally began to bubble to the surface. He raised his arms and gestured at the mountains around them.
"I am the Wizard of Altai Mountains!"
At that moment, a huge helicopter crested the mountain in front of them and roared above Ziad's outstretched arms before turning around and bearing down on Ziad and Dave.
"Oh, shit. Run!" yelled Ziad.
"Don't need telling twice!" responded Dave as they ran into the thin copse of trees that hugged the banks of the small river.
Surprisingly, a helicopter is far faster than a human. The running proved largely fruitless, as the helicopter hovered a few meters above the ground, depositing a pair of armed men. The helicopter then went to another point and deposited a few more soldiers. The process was repeated until Ziad and Dave were completely surrounded.
The helicopter finally landed one final time. One man got out this time, wearing an army uniform.
Captain Karpukhin.
He approached Ziad and Dave.
"Ziad Jarrah," he said in only slightly accented English, "How nice to see you again."
"Likewise, Captain," responded Ziad. "Wait, I thought The Man said you didn't speak English."
"The Man is not as wise as he pretends. Nor as well informed, I'm afraid. I grant you, the aura of mystery and intrigue certainly surrounds him, but mystery and intrigue do not necessarily equate directly with knowledge, power, and, dare I say it, a particularly useful sense of intuition when hiring assistants."
The man spoke like a bloody English professor, not a Russian soldier.
"Meaning...?" responded Ziad.
"Meaning I do not share the same goals as The Man or those he works for."
"Oh, great. I'm about to get roped into another scheme, aren't I?"
"Not unless you choose. I will remind you that The Man and his... more loyal minions still hold your friend, Shlomi Bar-Dayan."
Ziad cringed, "Yes, I know. That's why I'm here."
"I presumed as much. Now, our plans are, if you could guess it, remarkably similar."
"How so?" said Ziad warily.
"I have a sister. She..." he stopped, temporarily unsure of what to say. "She's... She can do magic."
"Ah."
"And she is, shall we say, being held for research purposes. In the same compound as your friend Shlomi. We have similar reasons for going there."
"And where is this compound?"
"Come with me."
Left rather without a choice, Ziad and Dave climbed aboard the helicopter. The doors shut behind them and they left the ground.
Captain Karpukhin briefed them further on the helicopter.
"The base is far more than what you saw before the Delhi Operation. It's mostly underground, and that's where the research laboratories are. That's where my sister is, and we'll be able to find Shlomi if we can get there."
"Fair enough. Can we get guns? Good ones preferably. I'm not having any of this 'sidekick gets the shitty little gun' crap."
Ziad weas handed an AN-94 rifle. Big, long, black, hard, and throbbing with hot... Ahem, um... Big powerful rifles, ok?
Ziad's grin was quite wide.
"That'll do."
Dave was handed a tiny little pistol.
"Oh, come on!"
Captain Karpukhin and his soldiers slammed magazines into their various massive weapons, coaxing as many clicks and clacks out of their tools as was possible. Jawlines were square, expressions grim.
Goddamn, it looked hardcore.
"We open the doors and don't start shooting until absolutely necessary. I want this to be quick and brutal. No unnecessary actions, ok?" he told Ziad and Dave, who had been provided with Russian army uniforms. Dave's luxuriously long blond hair had been unceremoniously shaved (at great protest, of course). A single tear rolled down his cheek as he set his jaw in a more suitably badass position. His hand idly brushed the army cap that covered his now mostly-bald head.
The helicopter touched down in the courtyard of the base, and the doors hauled open. The soldiers hopped out, faking casual normalcy.
Ziad and Dave followed, trying hard to blend in.
The Captain led them slowly and meanderingly through the base and down numerous sets of stairs.
The approached a heavy steel door, locked.
"Oh no, it's locked!" said Ziad.
The Captain pulled out some keys and unlocked the door, giving Ziad a funny look in the process.
"Hmmph."
"What?" whispered Dave.
"I really wanted to shoot a lock out."
"Idiot."
Behind the door was a row of prison cells. Only one was occupied.
Inside was Shlomi, lying on his bed, his hand busily-
"Oh God man, look away!"
"Stop... Fuck, man! At least do that under the blankets! Have some sense of decency!"
"Ugghhh fuuck youuuu Ziad!" moaned Shlomi, his face clenching.
Various gagging sounds erupted behind Ziad. He turned and saw the Russian soldiers covering their eyes and groaning with disgust.
"Shlomi, if you're going to rub one out, please do it well before the rescue attempt, ok?"
"If only you had told me earlier!" said Shlomi.
Captain Karpukhin unlocked the cell door, shaking his head and avoiding looking at Shlomi.
Shlomi hastily clothed himself and left the cell.
"Hey Ziad. I'd shake your hand, but..."
"Yeah, please don't."
They left the prison block and descended lower into the compound, meeting nobody.
Finally they came to another set of far larger locked steel doors. This time a simple key would not suffice.
A few pounds of C4 explosive, however, did. Half the soldiers took up positions, watching the now destroyed doors for reinforcements from their enemies.
The motley crew walked through the ruined doors into an atrium-type room, with a desk and two doorways behind it.
Sitting at the desk was a rather terrified young woman wearing an army uniform, presumably a secretary of some type. She babbled away in Russian at the Captain, who shut her up by shooting her with some kind of silenced pistol.
"Tranquilizers, don't worry. She isn't the problem."
Behind one door was a bunch of offices.
Behind the other door was a serious of doors with various things and symbols written on them.
They went through that door, obviously.
The Captain opened one door. Behind it was a laboratory-type room with various people in hazmat suits messing around with microscopes while surrounded by canisters and containers filled with some sort of viscous black fluid, that seemed somehow organic.
The Captain closed the door.
The next room looked like some kind of surgery unit.
The next room was a row of cells much like the ones Shlomi had been held in. Except these were clearly far more reinforced.
The Captain ran down the hallway, quickly glancing into each cell. He finally stopped at one, peering through the bars and speaking in rapid-fire Russian.
A small piece of C4 served to open the door, and an emaciated girl of probably about thirteen stumbled out to collapse into the Captain's arms.
A single manly tear ran down the Captain's cheek.
The sound of gunfire rang out from the atrium.
"We must leave." said Karpukhin gruffly.
They ran to the atrium, where the rear-guard had taken up defensive positions and occasionally fired into the area where the destroyed doors opened into the stairwell.
Occasional gunshots were returned from that area.
One of the soldiers turned to the Captain and said something in Russian.
Ziad turned to Shlomi.
"He said we're pretty much stuck here. There's too many up the stairs."
"I always find the most fun situations," muttered Ziad.
The Captain turned to them.
"We need to figure out an escape route. Search the laboratories, I'll search the offices."
"You know, Captain, is it not a little ominous that we haven't encountered The Man yet?"
"We'll worry about that when we need to, and no sooner."
Ziad, Shlomi, and Dave went into the laboratories.
The men in hazmat suits stopped their work and stared uneasily at the three armed foreigners (Shlomi had been given a pistol upon his release from the cell).
Shlomi pointed his gun at the men, and began shouting at them in flawless Russian.
The men didn't respond.
Shlomi said something again.
The men didn't respond.
Shlomi shot one man in the groin, and repeated his words.
The men hastened to respond, suddenly clamoring to help.
"Thought so," smirked Shlomi.
As Shlomi talked to the lab technicians, Ziad searched the room. There were a few surgical gurneys, stained with what looked like blood and the same black fluid as was in the containers.
At the far end of the room there was a curtained-off section. Ziad pushed back the curtains and found another surgical gurney, with about half a human body lying on it. The rest had been carefully peeled apart and placed into the same containers as the black fluid he had seen at the front of the room.
Something clicked in Ziad's head.
"Oh, God..."
He returned to where Shlomi was interrogating the technicians.
"Are they trying to distill the biological aspect of magic into some sort of formula, by taking apart people with magical abilities?" he asked.
Shlomi looked grim.
"Yup."
Ziad was left somewhat speechless. Then he found something to say.
"That's... That's pretty fucking metal."
"You could say that, yeah." responded Shlomi.
Dave was quietly vomiting in a corner.
Shlomi leaned closer to Ziad.
"Is that the Irish terrorist we sold Stinger missiles to back during the summer?"
"Yeah."
"He doesn't seem to have a very strong stomach."
"Nope."
They stood their silently, wondering what the hell to do next.
"Hiss... Gastrointestinal capabilities are clearly not equal to yours, Mr. Jarrah." said a cold, raspy voice in unaccented English.
"Oh, come on!" shouted Ziad, turning around and seeing The Man standing about ten feet behind him, gray suit perfectly fitted, eyes roving the scene, mouth locked in a faint hint of a bemused smirk.
Ziad turned his rifle around and squeezed the trigger.
The AN-94 has a fully automatic rate of fire of about six hundred rounds per minute. This means it takes only about three seconds to fire a full thirty round magazine.
Ziad did so, all aimed at The Man.
"Die motherfucker, die!" he shouted.
The Man collapsed in the hail of bullets, bleeding profusely from well over a dozen wounds.
Ziad reloaded the rifle and crept towards The Man's body, rifle at the ready.
The Man twitched as more blood poured onto the hard tile floor of the laboratory.
He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: "The horror! The horror!"
His head fell back onto the tile and a last breath escaped his lips.
"Well, damn, I didn't actually expect that to work." said Ziad. "Usually the mysterious know-it-all smug antagonists have some smirking plan to avoid being poked full of holes."
"Yup." responded Shlomi.
"I'm half expecting this body here to be a clone or something."
"Yup."
"You're not helping."
"Nope."
"Shut up."
"Ok."
They left the laboratory after tying up the technicians.
Outside Captain Karpukhin looked rather pleased with himself.
"I found a wand!" he said.
"What?" said Ziad, incredulous.
"I found a wand!"
"Yeah, I know, I heard the first time. Let me see it."
Karpukhin handed him the wand, clearly bristling with excitement. Gunfire pounded from the atrium.
Ziad examined the wand.
"Where'd you find it?"
"There was a smaller research workshop back in those offices, and this was in there. I think it was The Man's office, I'm surprised I didn't see him there."
Ziad waved his thumb over his shoulder at the door to the laboratories.
"His body's back in there. I shot him."
Karpukhin's face was slack with disbelief.
"No way."
"Way."
Ziad pushed open the door, and cringed as he looked at the floor, expecting it to be empty of dead bodies.
The Man's body lay there, skin rapidly blue-ing as blood pooled around it, soaking into the suit.
"Wow." said Karpukhin.
"He really does seem dead."
"Yeah. Can you make a transporter thing to get us all out of here?" Karpukhin asked.
"Probably. Give me a minute."
Ziad scrounged through the laboratory before finding a length of rope.
"Here we go."
He brought the rope behind the bullet-scarred desk in the atrium.
"Portus!"
The small flash of blue light.
"Grab on, guys. Let's get out of here, shall we?"
The soldiers grabbed the rope, followed by Dave, Shlomi, Karpukhin, and his sister.
There was a jerk behind Ziad's navel-
But it didn't feel quite right.
Author's Note:
It's getting pretty real up in here.
I'm actually kind of proud of this one. It's basically an entire chapter of references, if you know how to read it. Some very obvious, some less so.
Enjoy!