Chapter 49 – Hunt

Alex stayed close to the rooftops and flew in a big circle so she could come back to the base on the side where the officers’ quarters were. She went silvery so she could change shape, and when she got back on the base, she dropped down to a foot or two above the ground to fly in to the buildings. She had to hop a few security fences and dodge an armed patrol, but it wasn’t hard. Not when she was flying at ninety miles an hour and she was a barely noticeable blob in the dark.

She flew into the HVAC ducts on top of the officers’ quarters, fixed the filters she had moved out of the way a couple of hours earlier, and flew back to her room. Jo was patiently sitting there with an automatic in her hand, just waiting for someone dumb enough to try to bust in. So Alex gave her the full treatment. She flew into the room as a blob and went normal, hovering upright a foot above the floor.

Jo’s jaw dropped open, and she said some words that would have gotten Alex’s mouth washed out with soap.

Alex put her hands on her hips and said in her Terawatt voice, “Excuse me citizen, but that sort of language is not appropriate, and I would appreciate it if you refrained from using language like that around impressionable children.”

Jo laughed out loud.

Alex went silvery, dived into the gym bag, and changed back to Lieutenant Annie Farrell. She had to go check her makeup and wig, though. While she was fixing her too-heavy makeup and putting her ‘Annie’ glasses back on, she told Jo what she had found at Herr Knepler’s house.

Jo said, “If she really is well enough to travel, she could have covered up the injury, put on a clean blouse and pants, or maybe a skirt, and hitchhiked north. She’s a pretty girl. She wouldn’t need to steal to get meals or have a place to sleep. And she might be hanging out with other teenagers in a youth hostel or something. She could be at the coast already, looking for a ship to take her back to Finland.”

Alex said, “Well, at least if she gets to northern Finland, she can be in places where there aren’t lots of innocent bystanders.”

Jo frowned. “Yeah, but that means the Company can let their Hunter-Killer teams really crank it up. Full military gear, full military support, maybe APCs or choppers. It could be … messy.”

Alex said, “And then maybe we’d have even more countries really mad at us.”

“That, too.”

Jo made sure the M.P. that Jack had put on their door wouldn’t move until they came back. Then they went off to find the colonel and see what he was going to pull out of his sleeve next.

They still hadn’t found him, when Alex’s Terawatt phone went off in her pocket. She was in public, so she hunted for an empty conference room. She had to use her telekinesis to open the door from the inside, and then she put it on speakerphone so Jo could hear, too.

Willow’s AutoTuned voice said, “We found something. The Finns have someone looking into a possible stowaway. A freighter from Stralsund, Germany up to Oulu, Finland, which is really high up in the Gulf of Bothnia, docked there and after unloading everything and getting ready for return cargo, they found signs that someone had hidden in one of the holds for the entire trip. It would’ve been freezing cold, with no food and no light and no potty. But the stowaway left food wrappers and two jars of … umm …”

Jo said, “One of piss and one of shit. We got it.”

Willow asked, “Who’s that?”

Alex said, “Lieutenant Jo Lupo, Special Forces. Jack’s new hire.”

“Oh!” Willow said. “Captainmal said she was a real bad mammajamma and she could kick Special Forces guys’ butts, and Jack was trying to get her into a Navy SEAL training course this summer, which was like impossible because the SEALs only accepted super-macho he-men who’d have a cow if some girl your size kicked their heinies.”

Jo’s face lit up. “Wow! They told me no way. He’s doing that for me? I’m not even officially on the team yet.”

Alex said, “Jack takes really good care of his people. He already told me he can either get me into the Air Force Academy guaranteed, or else he could get me into the top photojournalism programs in the country.”

Willow purred, “And he’s really hot, too.”

Jo frowned, and Alex said, “This is Acid Burn. She’s Terawatt support. No connection with the military or the DHS.”

Willow said, “Okay, so anyway, I kind of ‘lost’ the electronic version of the report on the freighter so it won’t get to where it’s supposed to go, so maybe the CIA dorks won’t be able to trace her. But they’ve already moved out of Germany because the whole German police force got mobilized to look for Hanna, so they’ve got both teams on a ship of some kind in the Baltic, and it’s not Navy because it’s not on the official military broadcast bands, so it’s some sort of CIA cover deal, and it’s already moving toward Finland, so they may have given up and just be moving to her house ’cause they already know where that is.”

Jo said, “She should know that and not go back there.”

Alex said, “But she’s been shot. And she’s hurt. And she doesn’t have anywhere else to go in the whole world.”

Willow said, “And the blood spatter Terawatt photographed? It matches a blood drop falling from about navel height on your average-height sixteen-year-old girl. So if she’s been shot in the guts she may be really sick by now and in tons of pain, and not thinking too clearly. You better figure she’ll need a ton of antibiotics and analgesics as soon as you find her, plus major abdominal surgery as soon as you can get her somewhere safe. And if she’s as strong as we think, she’s probably a danger to any nurse or doctor working on her, and she’ll probably shake off sedatives and anesthetics way faster than a normal girl.”

Alex said, “Roger that, Burn. Over and out.”

Jo waited until Alex put the phone in her pocket to ask, “Does she breathe?”

Alex grinned. “She’s just a babbler.”

Jo said, “So she’s your super hacker the colonel was talking about. And she speaks Finnish. And she knows field medicine. Who is this woman?”

Alex said, “She’s just really bright. And I’m sure she’s using a computer translation on the Finnish. Well, partly, anyway. She taught herself German and Finnish, I think, when she read ‘Lord of the Rings’ and she wanted to learn to speak the elf languages.”

Jo checked, “And this Hermione Granger is another super-genius with amazing skills, too?”

Alex nodded. “And once you’re fully read into the SRI and you’ve signed everything Jack wants you to sign, I’ll tell you how I really found her and Hermione. And four other women. And you totally won’t believe that story.”

Jo said, “So we may get to go take out a couple of Company HK teams, and then face down a super-powered threat so we can get her to a hospital where she’ll be a danger to everyone? This job is either the best job on Earth, or the worst.”

Alex said, “Danielle Atron is on the loose again, and Maggie Walsh disappeared, so she’s probably working on something horrible, and we need to go investigate the Desert Research Institute once we’re done here, so if you’re looking for the most important job anywhere, I think you found it.”

Jo asked, “What about counter-terrorism?”

Alex grimaced. “How long do you think it’ll be before terrorists figure out the best way to be a terrorist is to get superpowers first?”

Jo said, “But they won’t be able to get the superpowers.”

Alex said, “Danielle Atron will sell it to ’em. She doesn’t care who gets hurt, as long as she gets paid.”

Jo asked, “You really think the superpower problem will get that bad?”

Alex said, “Worse. Danielle Atron was going to sell GC-161 enhanced foods and drinks all over the country. Only a couple of people and the FDA stopped her at the very last minute. How many countries have an FDA as strong as we do? Sooner or later, we may have a country-wide epidemic of superpowers somewhere. Once that happens, it’ll be a bigger crisis than the Mideast. If it happens in North Korea, it’ll instantly be the start of a world war. If it doesn’t happen in North Korea, countries like North Korea will pour everything they’ve got into making it happen so they can win the wars they’ve been dying to launch.”

Jo carefully said, “You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?”

Alex nodded unhappily. “A lot. For a really long time.”

Jo asked, “How long have you had … this?”

Alex admitted, “Since the first day of seventh grade.”

Jo was so startled she stumbled and nearly fell. But Jo was fast and agile, so Alex didn’t need to use her telekinesis to catch her. “Damn. That’s either awesome or horrifying.”

Alex admitted, “Or both. A lot of times, it was both.”

*               *               *

The next morning, Alex and Jo rushed through their showers and everything, and still didn’t beat Jack to the mess hall. While Alex ate, Jo filled the team in on Acid Burn’s news. Alex ate everything on her plate plus hash browns from Riley, pastries from Jo, ham from Graham, and a big piece of pie from Jack. She noticed that the mess had blue jello, and Jack wasn’t sharing that.

Jack said, “Okay, boys and girls, we now have a clear majority of voters, so we’ll let the meeting room stick it to me. Then we’ll spring our little surprise on them, and yell at the CIA bozos some more. After that, we’ll go hop in our little Cessna and head up to Rovaniemi, where Walter’s arranged for a winter-equipped chopper to meet us.”

Alex raised her hand again, keeping it down where only her team would see.

Jack said, “Rovaniemi. Northernmost Finnish air force base. Got some nice American fighters and other hardware. Seems I know someone who knows someone, so they’re fine with us flying in to rescue a Finnish citizen from an evil CIA plot.”

“Thank you, sir,” Alex said in her Annie Farrell voice. She wished she knew more geography stuff and military stuff. She didn’t like being the dumb kid in the group.

She grabbed her valise, made sure she had half a dozen protein bars hidden down in the bottom, and checked her tablet once more. She said, “It looks like both CIA teams are moving through northern Finland now, sir. Maybe they didn’t get the message.”

Jack said, “Or maybe that naughty Marissa handpicked her teams.”

Riley said, “Or she gave them an order so they won’t stop until they get the right counter-phrase. I’ve seen intelligence officers operating under scenarios like that. It keeps them from getting knocked out by disinformation, but it’s a disaster if things go wrong back at HQ.”

Jo said, “And Weigler’s never going to be giving these guys a countermand now.”

Jack smiled. “Unless you guys figure out what it could be.”

Alex immediately sent Willow a message asking her to work on the problem.

Jo said, “If we narrow a list down to, say, half a dozen code phrases, and we guess the wrong one first, the teams may not stand down when we get to the right one, because it’ll seem like we might have extracted the intel instead of having Weigler’s cooperation.”

Jack nodded. “There is that. But I figure we ought to take a crack at it. What can it hurt?”

Riley said, “If we can come up with half a dozen possibles, maybe we could give them to the CIA operatives at our table and they could try before we have to engage our own people.”

Jack said, “Okay. Let’s have our half dozen possibles.”

Alex glanced at Willow’s reply and quickly said, “Galinka. Locke. Walsh. Zadek. Oncogenesis.”

Jack smiled. “My girl’s wiping the floor with you people.”

Riley handed Jack a handwritten list on a small piece of notepaper. Jack looked over it. “Oh, nice work, Finn. You picked three out of Acid Burn’s five. Plus ‘hominidae’ and ‘Heller’. I think you win the free pie at lunchtime.”

Alex asked, “Would Weigler really want to remind everybody of people she murdered? I wouldn’t. I kinda doubt ‘Locke’ or ‘Zadek’ would be it.”

Jack shrugged. “They’re all possibles. If Weigler’s going off a different sort of list, we’re stuck anyway. So we’re good to go. Be sure to look surprised when the room hits me with the big command, and probably a timeline we can’t possibly make. I already told our pilots to have the Cessna ready, so go pack your bags right now and run ’em out to the Cessna so we’re ready to make our dramatic exit.”

Alex and Jo did a fast walk back to their room. When they got there, they found Jack still had an M.P. on the door, and Jack’s hanging bag was shoved inside already. Alex had everything packed into her hanging bag even before Jo did, and her gym bag was already set to go. They hauled it all out to the Cessna and saw Graham and Riley already on their way back to the conference room. By the time they got near the right hangar, the Cessna was already out of the hangar, being refueled, and going through another maintenance check. They rushed back and still got to their seats a good two minutes before the CIA guys came trudging in.

Jack blocked the CIA guys’ path. “Hi, there. I know you already got the order to pull your HK teams out of the field. Guess what? They’re still out there. My computer analyst is still finding encrypted signals reflecting off that milsat. You may need a secret countermand to stop them. Here’s our little hacker’s list of possibles. Give all of them a try. You might get lucky.”

The CIA guys weren’t exactly grateful, but they didn’t wad up the list and throw it on the carpet, either. And one of them took the list and walked off to a corner of the room to make a fast phone call, so maybe they were even listening.

Jack took his seat and waited impatiently. He started taking sheets off the notepad the meeting organizers had provided, folding them into paper footballs, and trying to ‘kick’ them through the goalposts, meaning between Riley and Graham. And Alex couldn’t use her telekinesis to block them, as he knew full well, the big stinkbug. She figured it would be even more frustrating if she was one of his officers.

He carefully lined up another paper football, got his flicking finger ready … And she gave one side of the football a tiny push so it went flying off to the side and nearly hit one of the diplomats.

Jack pretended he did it on purpose. One of these days, he was going to be in so much trouble.

But Alex kept watching him, because he made two more paper footballs and tried to catch her looking somewhere else so he could flick one at her. She pretended she was looking at her tablet, so she could catch him at it. As soon as he lined the next one up at her head, she used a tiny telekinetic block on the other side of his football, and that one went flying off past Riley and nearly hit some French guy. Jack had to stop it when everyone else came into the meeting room.

She really wondered what Jack was like when he wasn’t the guy in charge of the team. Did his commanding officer have to yell at him a couple of times a day?

The German diplomatic lead got to start things off. “Guten morgen. I believe we all know what we need to decide this morning. Many of you have come to me about this, and several of you told me that Terawatt appeared last night to ask for support in protecting this girl.”

He went on and on for a while, before he finally asked for a vote on whether to ask for sanctions against the CIA. Naturally, everyone wanted that, except the CIA and the U.S. State Department. At least Jack abstained, even though she knew he wanted to vote for it.

Then the guy blathered on for a while longer before asking if the room wanted the SRI to take over, with a set time limit before they needed to retire from the field. Everyone wanted that, except the CIA guys. Jack asked for three weeks, but she knew he was just yanking everyone’s chain. The rest of the room wanted to give him between four and ten days, so they ended up with seven days. It was pretty clear everyone thought they were shafting Jack with a time limit like that.

So the German guys summed up that the CIA had to withdraw all their people, and Jack had 168 hours starting right then.

Jack stood up and said, “Thank you, everyone. Last night, Terawatt found that Hanna Heller was shot in the abdomen by Marissa Weigler, patched herself up with some sewing needles and thread, and hid in a basement for three nights. While you were voting, my computer hacker found out where Hanna Heller went after that. She stowed away on a Danish freighter that landed in Oulu a couple days ago. We have reason to believe we know where she’s headed, and we hope to have her on the way to a hospital well within that seven-day margin. So, guten tag and thanks for all the fish.”

He stepped away from his chair, gave his team a tilt of the head, and they all marched right out of the room.

Jack quietly said, “Let’s move it before someone gets the bright idea to ask for everything on the tarmac to be grounded for an emergency inspection or something.”

Alex checked her tablet as they hurried off to the Cessna. There was a message from Hermione that was a thumbs-up, and a couple of messages from her hackers. James, Jean-Pierre, and Alejandro were all cheering her on. The Sour Kraut was letting her know he was giving up. And the CIA hackers were pretending they hadn’t tried to hack a fellow American’s computer.

They were in the Cessna and off the ground in under ten minutes. The pilots really cranked it up, and they were rocketing into the sky like someone had told them they would be in a huge hurry.

Jack said, “Okay. Rovaniemi will have a chopper for us. Walter made sure our standard winter gear will be there when we land. But that only covers Finn, Miller, and me. We’ve got gear for you two, based on Lupo’s sizes. But Annie gets no firearms. She can carry her tablet, some spare charge packs, our sat phone, our central comm unit, and extra rations. Plus her Terawatt gear.” He pointed at Alex. “Can you cross-country ski or downhill ski?”

She nodded. “Sure. Some. I’m better at downhill, but I’ve done both. But for fun, not for all day and packing a heavy load. I probably need to do it Terawatt style.”

Jack said, “Stewie sent us some IR gear, so we’re going to try and spot her even when she’s hiding from us. Same for spotting the CIA teams. Any word from IT on the CIA teams?”

Alex quickly checked, and she said, “Not really. They now have one team up around the Arctic Circle and one team moving north probably in the Gulf of Bothnia, but those are as good as Acid Burn can get from the satellite reflections.”

Jack said, “Swell. Let’s assume HK team one is hiding out around Hanna’s house. They know that location. HK team two is probably sweeping north toward there, hoping to catch our girl in between. If we can get a GPS lock on the house, we can start there and head south.” He looked at Alex. “Any chance of that?”

Alex sent a note to Acid Burn and captainmal and jackryanrules: can we find the GPS info the CIA got when Hanna and Erik signaled the CIA to start this mess?

She instantly got a note from Acid Burn: on it

And then a note from captainmal: CIA won’t spill, we’re looking for options

Alex said, “Sir, the CIA won’t tell our IT people the GPS coordinates.”

Jack grimaced and said, “What a surprise.” He took the sat phone, called Walter, and in seconds, Walter was re-directing his call, to Samuel Daystrom, who was one of the executive assistants to the director of the CIA.

“Samuel Daystrom here.”

“Hey, this is Jack O’Neill of the SRI. I just pulled you guys’ fat out of the fire in Berlin, and now I find your people have the GPS coords for Erik Heller’s house and won’t tell us. Do I need to go straight to the State Department and the head of the DHS and get you guys buried under a GAO audit of the whole Marissa Weigler mess?”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little harsh?”

Jack snapped, “Harsh? HARSH? Fer cryin’ out loud, harsh is Marissa Weigler killing every single goddamn CIA agent on Project Galinka except the one that rescued a kid and got away, and she framed him for murder so he couldn’t come in again! Do you have any idea how many people she’s killed — that she wasn’t supposed to — in the last seventeen years? Do you have any idea what the American public will do to you guys if it gets out what Project Galinka was?”

“Wait a minute, even I don’t know what Galinka was, and I have Top Secret clearance.”

Jack said, “And that’s reassuring. Because she got a mad scientist to experiment on human embryos to try and turn the kids into little super-soldiers. Even better? The moms probably had no frigging idea they were lab rats! As soon as this gets out, every single CIA officer with more than twenty years in will be tarred with Weigler’s brush! So … get me those goddamn coordinates in the next hour or I’ll call the President myself!”

He hung up and sat back in his chair. He smiled. “Ahh, that was cathartic.”

Alex was just glad she’d done enough studying for SATs that she knew what that meant.

Meanwhile, they were zooming northward. The flight app Willow had on the tablet assumed fastest possible takeoffs and landings, and flights at 725 miles an hour on optimal flightpaths. So that app was telling Alex they would be flying for less than two hours total to get to Rovaniemi. And Rovaniemi was one hour ahead of Berlin.

Jack’s intimidation score was still pretty much maxed out, because that Daystrom guy called back in forty minutes with the GPS coordinates.

Alex entered them in her tablet and started pulling up maps on her tablet. “Sir, I figure Hanna’s house is a little over a hundred miles north-northwest of the Rovaniemi base.”

Jack said, “Sweet. Okay, here’s what we’ll do …”

*               *               *

When they landed in Rovaniemi, it was sort of cold, even though it was summer. The thermometer outside the plane said it was fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, and that might have been from the warm, sunny tarmac instead of some shady, natural spot. She didn’t bother looking at the Centigrade numbers, because she wasn’t any good at converting that stuff in her head. The tablet said the high for the day at the airport would be about sixty-three, with a low tonight around fifty. There was still a bunch of snow on the ground, even if there wasn’t nearly as much as there would have been a month ago, when Marissa Weigler started all this up again.

They moved inside the hangar and changed inside a couple of offices where no one could see them. Alex was glad they didn’t have to put on the full Nordic gear that the guys brought along just in case, because that stuff was like being prepared to be at the South Pole. And she had a front-pack that held a portable sat phone, the tablet, the comm control, and extra protein bars for her. Since the sat phone only weighed about ten pounds, the total weight of everything including the pack was only about twenty pounds. Easy as pie. She had that, and her gym bag. The others were loaded up like they were going to be in a small war. That did not make her feel better. Riley even had a sniper’s rifle in a heavy case over one shoulder. And Alex knew Jo had a P-90, a sidearm, a combat knife, two throwing knives, and a hideout derringer. Plus way too much ammo. Graham was carrying a rifle with an M-203 grenade launcher slung under the barrel, and a bunch of ammo. She was really, really glad they weren’t hunting her.

They ate a rough lunch and piled into the helicopter Walter had procured for them. Then they flew straight to the GPS coordinates for Hanna’s house. At ten thousand feet up, Jack was studying it through a fancy telescope. He said, “Yep, they’re dug in around it and probably hiding inside it.” He sketched out the house and the possible outside defensive positions.

Jo said, “Sir, taking that position without destroying the house is going to be … difficult.”

Jack just gave her a big smirk.

“I’m Terawatt” to the tune of “Supergirl” by Saving Jane

I’m in Paradise Valley
I’m delaying
Danielle Atron will catch me
and she’s not playing
One, two
There’s so much I need to do
Two, three
Everyone depends on me
Three, four
I don’t know what is in store
Four, five
But at least I’m still alive
I’m Terawatt
I’m everywhere
My lightning bolts
You’ll stop and stare
I’m flyin’ high
In super-clothes
I’m overhead
And nobody knows
I’m, I’m
I’m Terawatt
There’s a fiery disaster
You can’t stop him
Comin’ faster and faster
But I’ll drop him (but I’ll drop him)
One, two
Now there’s more I need to do
Two, three
There’s a guy no one can see
Three, four
Is he getting in your door?
Hold on, cuz we know there’s several more
I’m Terawatt
I’m everywhere
My lightning bolts
You’ll stop and stare
I’m flyin’ high
In super-clothes
I’m overhead
And nobody knows
I’m, I’m
I’m Terawatt
I’m talking on my wire
Stop a guy on fire
Save a teenage liar
Oh, oh, oh
I’m Terawatt
I’m flyin’ high
In super-clothes
I’m overhead
And nobody knows
I’m Terawatt
I’m everywhere
My lightning bolts
You’ll stop and stare
I’m flyin’ high
I’m overhead
And nobody knows
I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m
I’m Terawatt
I’m, I’m,
I’m Terawatt
I’m, I’m,
I’m Terawatt

 
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