Mac seemed almost overly content with their slapped together cover as tourists.
They'd spent a fair amount of time perusing the larger exhibits, mostly trying to figure out if anything was hidden anywhere in the museum itself. Mac, who knew maybe better than Jack that bombers often targeted things that were important to people, or that would make a big statement in another acted downright offended every time they came upon something that could be used to conceal an explosive device but that was unique or beautiful or deeply culturally significant.
He also didn't seem to mind that this op was dragging out into a few days. Jack would never have pegged Mac for a history nerd. In college, in addition to playing sports, one of Jack's own extracurriculars had been as the vice president of the history honor society. Not that he was going to admit that to Mac. He had a much less intellectual reputation to consider. And because he'd spent so much time selling that reputation to his young friend, he wasn't sure Mac would buy it anyway.
But Jack also thought, the way Mac went into detail about many of the exhibits, that the kid could have put his favorite history professor to shame.
Jack knew Mac got pumped over stuff like physics and chemistry, but he'd never seen him geek out over anything that wasn't, as Mac put it, "hard science" related before. He just grinned and shook his head every time Mac went full Indiana Jones, "It belongs in a museum," on him when he'd suggest something was prime explosives hiding real estate. He also found how nervous stepping being the velvet rope to verify things were clean seemed to make his partner.
Personally, Jack enjoyed breaking the rules and touching every damn thing in the place he could lay his hands on without setting off alarms and drawing security, because he hated not being able to get up close and personal with exhibits when he went into a place like this.
When he tried to sit down on a random chair from some dynasty or another, he actually thought Mac might take a swing at him for a second.
Now, for the third day in a row, they were starting their day in the gift shop of the Egyption National Museum. Jack was trying to lift some keys, mostly because Mac was actually better at distracting the staff in this situation.
The way Mac was wandering around, picking up odd little trinkets, books, and maps, looking like every single one was an actual treasure kind of cracked Jack up.
If they didn't find anything today, Thornton was pulling them out of here though. And as Mac distracted the guy manning the case of what Mac thought were fascinating pieces of jewelry that were priced aggressively to fleece tourists of their cash, Jack finally managed to lift the keys to the storage area they hadn't been able to get into yet. If they tried to access it without the key, there was an alarm that would raise half the police in the city, and Mac wisely pointed out that with the protests going on, they wouldn't just be dealing with cops, they'd be dealing with stressed out, pissed off cops, in a country that wasn't always friendly to Americans, say nothing about Americans caught with their hands in the national cookie jar.
He made eye contact and nodded to let Mac know they could get out of here and do a search of the adjacent warehouse. Mac held up a hand in a 'one minute' gesture, and he fished out his wallet and paid for something shiny. The clerk slipped the item in a small velvet bag and Mac put it in his pants pocket. He crossed the store to the exit where Jack was now waiting impatiently.
"You done buyin' souvenirs now?"
Mac just grinned. "Today's our last day here. I might not get to come back. I'm not going home with nothing from a place I've wanted to visit since I was eight, Jack."
"You never struck me as a souvenir kind of person," Jack observed as they made their way through the somewhat chaotic streets to the warehouse they needed to clear before heading back to the airport.
Mac shrugged. "I never got to just do the souvenir thing as a kid. Now, I'm not one, so I'm gonna do it as much as I damn well please."
"What'd you get?" Jack asked, plainly curious as to what could have sparked the enthusiastic grin Mac was still wearing as though he'd just scored the crown jewels for the price of a comic book.
"I found a really cool pendant that pretty much spent the last of my local currency."
"I thought you were buying a souvenir, not a present for your girlfriend."
Mac shook his head. "It's not for Nikki. She wouldn't be into this sort of thing. If it doesn't have a sim card or whatever, she has literally no interest."
"Okay, well then, what'd you get for you?"
"It's a … well, it's kind of a phoenix."
"You unloaded your wallet on a bird."
"It's actually a representation of the Egyptian god Bennu. It's a symbol of immortality and rebirth." Mac fished it out of his pocket, took the pendant from its bag, and showed Jack, then quickly returned it when it garnered glances from an unsavory looking group of teenagers who looked inclined to liberate it. "In his bird form, Bennu is supposed to live at least five hundred years, and when he gets tired, he flies from Arabia to the City of the Sun here in Egypt. Then, he gathers cinnamon twigs and resin to build a nest on the top of the Temple of the Sun. The sun ignites the nest, and he dies in flames. Then he's reborn again from the ashes as a new phoenix." He shrugged again. "I like that. It's a cool story. Like something out of Lord of the Rings or Narnia or something."
"Those don't exactly seem like your usual movies, man."
Mac laughed. Definitely at him. "I guess the movies are okay. But I cut my teeth on the books. Gramps had all of them and they were pretty much the only fiction he kept at his place, so I read them over and over when I was a kid."
Jack raised an eyebrow at the casually shared detail from Mac's childhood and was ready to ask a follow up question, but found they had arrived at the back door to the warehouse they were looking forward to clearing so they could get home and maybe get briefed on what was going on with whatever DXS had made out of their new intel.
Mac waved for the keys and Jack handed them over. But when Mac put the key in the lock, the door swung open all on its own.
They exchanged a look and Jack drew his weapon, leading the way inside.
It became clear they were alone after just a few minutes, so Jack holstered his sidearm and started wandering around while Mac did his bomb nerd thing. With nothing that matched his skill set particularly well, and with Mac getting more tense by the minute because the open door smelled like trouble to him, Jack decided to do what he did best and get Mac out of his own head, if only by irritating the younger man.
It hadn't taken long for Mac to lose patience with him and Jack was trying to decide if he should go around the corner to use one of the phones in the museum to reach Nikki (since she was blocking radio frequencies for them) to get them a pick up, when Bozer called Mac's cell.
Mac handled it pretty well, even remembering they were supposed to be in Cleveland, which had honestly escaped Jack's mind. He had just enough time to think if Bozer calling was the worst thing that happened, things had really gone pretty okay, when it occurred to him that a cell signal shouldn't have got through to them at all.
Then they heard movement that didn't exactly sound like it came from museum types and they scrambled to hide.
It turned out that Bozer calling was not the worst thing that was going to happen in Cairo
0-0-0
The timer ticked steadily down.
Not that he could see it.
They'd though being stuffed into that sarcophagus was bad, and they kept waiting to just blow up, but after hours of being trapped there, Mac had managed to talk Jack (who was the one closest to the lid) through his idea to bust them out. And it had been so quiet, they thought maybe the bad guys had taken off.
Unfortunately, Farhad's men had jumped them again and tied them to the device which they immediately armed again. Or at least Mac thought it was both of them. He'd seen a bloodied Jack drop like a sack of potatoes after his shoulder was wrenched from its socket. He hadn't exactly had time to feel much worry or sympathy, because he was dealing with a bullet graze, a freely bleeding knife wound, and three extremists beating the living hell out of him. He'd tried desperately to shake them, to raise Nikki on comms since the call from Bozer said that signals were transmitting freely, but both efforts failed.
Things had sort of greyed out, and when his brain kicked back on, he was tied to the dirty bomb in the middle of what would otherwise have been one of the coolest warehouses on the planet. He decided to try again. "Jack! C'mon pal! You with me?"
When he got no answer this time, worry started gnawing at the edges of his awareness. Bullets, knives, fists had all been flying hard and fast for a few minutes. What if….
Nope. Don't even go there, MacGyver. Get yourself loose, then worry about Jack.
That was easier said than done. He was pretty banged up and the ropes were well woven hemp. Strong, so even if he could reach his knife (which he couldn't because it was in his back pocket), it might not cut through it in time. And if he could reach his lighter (a likelier proposition since it was in the pocket closest to his right hand) it would burn too slowly.
Burn….
Burn…
Burn?!
The smell of smoke stung his nostrils and he finally processed that his vision wasn't foggy from a knock on the head. He could hear rapid crackling, too. The building was on fire! A random Die Hard II quote ran through his head as the smell conjured images of his rescue in Afghanistan. "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"
But he didn't hear it in John McClane's voice. He heard it in Jack's.
"Dalton!" he barked in the closest approximation to their previous CO he could muster.
A muffled snorting snore followed by a stream of curses let Mac know he still had a partner.
"Jack! You okay?"
"Mmmmmm," was followed by sounds of momentary struggle. Then, "Is what I'm trussed up to what I think it is?" Jack asked through clenched teeth.
"If you think it's Farhad's dirty bomb, then yeah."
"Well, then I'm thinkin' I'm a long damn way from okay. Gimme a trash compactor on the Death Star any day."
"Careful what you wish for, pal," Mac said, and he couldn't help but grin a little. He didn't know why all the movie references or Jack's constant infuriating chatter were so damned comforting, but since his heart had already slowed to a lot closer to normal, he had to admit they were.
"Think you can use the Force to get us outta this?" Jack asked, sounding almost genuinely hopeful.
"I can't use the … Wait! Force!" Mac nearly shouted in bright realization.
"You just suddenly remember you're secretly a Skywalker?"
Mac only half heard him as he reached for a fallen scepter with his feet. "Uhhuh," he mumbled. He eased the decorative pole into the hand not covered in slippery blood and used a knee to help him guide it between his body and one leg of the cart they were tied to.
"Whatcha doin' for real, Mac?" Jack asked somewhat desperately. "Cuz I swear that bomb beep is getting faster."
"Using force."
"Like a Jedi? How hard they hit you?"
"Like a physicist," Mac puffed and leveraged his body weight against his very very antique lever.
The leg of the cart snapped at the same time as the artifact, and the ropes looped around the two of them loosened enough for Mac to slither out and get unsteadily to his feet to get eyes on the timer. "Aw, man. This is so not fair!"
"What's that, kid?" Jack asked as he joined him, leaning heavily on the cart to keep himself upright, and coughing, as thicker smoke reached them.
"Ninety seconds." Shit. "No time to defuse it." Mac got out his knife.
"Well then what're you doin'?" Jack shouted.
"Disconnecting the nuclear waste package from the explosive. The bomb's not that big. It's the waste that's the problem." He got a screw undone and glanced at Jack. "Get out of here, man."
"We've been over this. If you go kaboom—"
"You do too. I get it. But I'm not going to kaboom." He held up a smallish square covered with wires. "I'm gonna run!"
Limping, coughing, smoke-blind, and bleeding, they still made their way out of the building in record time.
Mac stopped long enough to give a quick look around and hobbled/ran toward a large reinforced dumpster behind a good sized restaurant.
"Where you goin'?" Jack called, needing to lean on a random car for a second.
"To get rid of the bomb!" Mac yelled and tossed it into the dumpster slamming the lid and running back toward Jack. "Go, go, go, go!" he shouted, waving wildly in the opposite direction.
Mac could still picture the timer ticking down in his head so he tensed even before the explosion threw him, Jack, and an awful lot of debris up the long alley. After several minutes of painful ear ringing and picking himself out of the debris, he saw Jack's motionless form lying under what might have once been the lid to the dumpster. Mac rushed over to pull it off him and make sure he was alive, but his brain also gave him a rapid lecture about miscalculating the blast force.
"Jack, you alright?" he asked, though it sounded underwater. "Jack?!" He could feel a pulse, but his partner was completely unresponsive.
Mac dropped down to slap Jack's cheeks to see if that got him anywhere. Jack coughed, but didn't wake up. Mac looked around, trying to decide what to do. He could hear something … but his ears were still ringing. He finally realized it was his phone. He pulled it out of his pocket with shaky hands. The screen was basically shattered and he couldn't hear a damned thing, but he answered anyway.
"Nikki?! Nikki? I need you to track my phone. Jack's … hurt." His hands shook so badly he almost dropped the phone and he realized the knife wound he'd gotten earlier was bleeding freely. Either it had never stopped or he'd torn it open further in the explosion. "And … um … me, too. I think."
Since he couldn't hear anyway, he put the phone down on the ground, hopeful that if the call wasn't Nikki, it was Thornton, and help was on the way. He sunk the rest of the way onto the dusty ground and pressed his hand hard over the cut he figured must be what had him feeling so shaky.
He didn't think he'd ever been more relieved when Nikki whipped around the corner and skidded their van to a halt in front of them.
She leapt out and ran over to them to help him haul Jack into the back.
"Sorry it took so long," Nikki said as they eased Jack down onto the floor. "Something interfered with my jamming and then something else was jamming your signal. Once I got you, I had to find a way around the protests."
Mac just nodded.
"You look like shit," she observed.
"Mmmm," he managed. "'Magine I do."
Jack groaned. His own injuries forgotten, he dropped down onto the floor next to Jack.
"Jack!"
"Are we dead?"
Mac laughed. "Not yet, pal! But you had me worried for a minute."
"Bet on ole Jack," he started and coughed again. "Where are we?" he groaned.
"Nikki's getting us to exfil," Mac said at Nikki's nod. She slammed the doors and climbed in the front before Jack spoke again.
"That's good cuz you're bleedin' all over, kid."
"Look who's talking, Dalton."
Nikki snapped from the driver's seat, "You're both bleeding. Don't start that stupid thing you do where you try to outdo each other with how okay you are! Neither one of you is okay! Farhad got away! And Thornton is emoting!"
"Emoting how?" Mac asked.
"Does it matter?"
"Good point." Mac swallowed.
A police car passed nearby, sirens blaring.
Jack coughed again. "I'm thinking we maybe oughta get outta here."
"Way ahead of you, cowboy," Nikki said, and peeled out of the alley.
Absolved of the responsibility of dealing with a dirty bomb when he'd thought they would be home working toward taking down O'Neil, and confident neither of them was dying, Mac leaned against the wall of the van. As the adrenaline wore off, the shaking returned, and his vision tunneled down to darkness.