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Chapter 132 – Study Tour GroupAlex woke up Saturday morning and tried to get in all her exercises and martial arts practice before Shar woke up, but didn’t quite make it. She was in the middle of her upside-down stomach crunches when Shar sleepily asked, “How come I don’t get ta do that, too?”
Alex kept going on her crunches, but gritted out, “You … never … asked … before.” She got to number fifty and stopped. “And they’re hard.” Boy, maybe she should have stopped at forty. Her stomach muscles were going to be sore all day.
But Shar was insistent, so Alex stopped her workout so a little cutiepie in pajamas could float upside down by her feet and try to do a crunch. Even if Shar couldn’t do one, despite a lot of very cute grunting and groaning. “This is too hard!”
Alex told her, “You need to practice doing lots of sit-ups every day before your tummy’s going to be ready for this stuff.”
“How many sit-ups were you doing every day?”
Alex admitted, “I got up to two hundred fifty before I started doing crunches like this.”
“That’s too many.”
Alex smiled gently. “Well, you could start with five or ten.”
“Okay! Jo has me doing more than five sit-ups on Sundays. Uncle George has to do a lot more, but he says it’s because he’s got more ‘sit’ to get ‘up’.”
Alex managed not to laugh out loud.
So with Shar ‘helping’ it took Alex maybe twice as long to do the rest of her workout. But the kung fu practice with Shar was fun, and Shar was so cute moving through the individual steps of the katas.
Alex smiled. “When you get your black belt, I bet you’ll be the best firebender ever.”
After she got Shar through breakfast and clothes and everything, Ray came over. Alex wanted some private time with Ray, but Shar really wanted to hear about the basketball game the night before, so Ray ended up sitting on the couch with Shar on his lap telling her how Jackson got just red hot and the other team just didn’t have anybody to cover him when they already had their best defensive guard on Ray, so everyone kept feeding Jackson the ball every time he was open, and he scored forty-seven points and they won by a huge amount.
Shar asked, “Will he score that much next week?”
Ray grinned. “Pretty sure he won’t. There were scouts in the crowd, so the teams next week are going to be working hard on shutting him down.”
Alex sighed a little to herself, because Jackson was a pretty good shot, but he wasn’t as great as he liked to think he was. Their team had five starters, and every one of them was capable of dominating a game if the other team didn’t guard him a lot. She just trusted that Ray would handle it all, and he’d give Jackson the ball at the right time, and he’d give it to someone else the rest of the time.
And in the middle of things, just when she thought she might get rid of Shar for a bit so she could get in some necking with Ray, her tPhone buzzed with a text from Jack. 1300 yr time
Fortunately, she was able to go with the old standby. “Shar? You wanna go watch ‘The Iron Giant’?” That got Shar occupied for an hour and a half. Even if her dad kept drifting through the living room so she didn’t really get as much necking time with Ray as she wanted. And Shar came back to get Alex to clean her DVD because it wasn’t playing perfectly.
Alex reminded herself that they were going to have to buy a new copy of “The Iron Giant” one of these days, because Shar had watched her copy so many times, and it had picked up some scratches and stuff.
Still, Ray stayed for lunch and Alex made burgers for everyone. Her dad got involved and grilled the hamburger patties and the buns on the grill, so they were extra yummy. Alex maybe ate one or two more than she was planning on. But it wasn’t her fault, because they were really good!
Okay, so she had three more than she was planning on eating. It wasn’t her fault. That last cheeseburger was just not going to be as good if it got refrigerated and then eaten some other day. That was what she told Shar, anyway.
So she got Shar busy with Uncle George, and she kissed Ray goodbye, and she went into the home office for her one o’clock conference call with Jack.
“Terawatt here.”
Jack answered, “Teams One and Two on already, along with Sergeant Harriman and Action Girl and Klar. We’re just waiting for those slovenly Iowans.”
There was an audible click. “Finn here with Valentine.”
“Ahh, the latecomers. Is that Iowa time, or Jamaica time out there?”
Alex was glad she wasn’t the last one on, because she would have been the one who got teased.
Riley staunchly said, “Sorry, sir, but the CDC wanted some more of my blood. I should ask Sam if there are any suspected vampires working for them.”
Alex complained, “I really hope there aren’t any real vampires in our universe, because they’re really strong and really fast and magically tough, and they spread like … like a virus. And all those stupid ‘pretty vampire’ books would make people want to protect them and get bitten by them and other sicko stuff.”
Jack sarcastically asked, “And just how many real vampires have you killed, Miss von Helsing?”
Alex had to stop and think about it. “Umm, maybe fifty? Seventy? I didn’t really count. We were kind of in a war zone and we had way bigger problems on our hands.”
“Whoa. I take back the crack I was about to make. Okay, if vampires ever turn up, Tera’s our go-to girl.”
Alex told him, “I’m pretty sure we’re safe from magic-based vampires and demons in this universe, but some of that t-virus ick is pretty close.”
Jack groaned. “Yeah, I’m never gonna be able to watch a zombie movie again.”
Alex groaned right back. “I’ve got all these friends reading about Anita Blake, or Bella and Edward, and I can’t tell ’em why I don’t want to even talk about those stupid things. Because vampires? Not like that, even if other-Willow said other-Buffy had serious girlfriend-boyfriend relationships with two of them. Eww.”
Klar cut in, “My mom’s still reading the junk magazines and watching the entertainment news, and she said this world’s Buffy has a history of really bad boyfriend choices, so maybe there’s some kind of connection there.”
Jack snarked, “It’s handy having a hard-working researcher who’s studying the trashy stuff and keeping up to date so we don’t have to.” He paused and said, “Which brings up one of today’s fun topics. Burn, what did our loose Orphans have to say when you gave them your little heads-up?”
Willow’s Autotuned voice answered, “Well, Mister Gotham was sort of rude and said he’d already figured out he might be a target since he didn’t want to play by their rules. And Miss Hollywood said ‘thanks for nothing’ and she told me she’d rather get killed than get dragged into either side of our little war, and she doesn’t want us to call her again no matter what. So maybe Terawatt should’ve made the calls.”
Alex disagreed, “I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have helped. Gotham really doesn’t trust me, and Hollywood’s afraid I’m gonna mess everything up for her. Me making the calls would’ve just made things even worse.”
Jack moved on. “Okay, now on to Clare’s little surprise package. How about if Lieutenant Marshall gives us the 4-1-1, as the hepcats are calling it these days?”
Alex could hear that someone on the call was snorting with laughter.
Lieutenant Marshall said, “Well, colonel, it’s probably fairly bad news. It’s not a normal prion. It’s a prion synthetically tagged with what we’re theorizing is a fraction of an antibody for specific targeting. It’s completely unlike what Umbrella’s people came up with, which means we have a completely different lab developing it.”
Jack muttered, “Those Collective types just don’t stop, do they?”
Lieutenant Marshall agreed, “They don’t seem to. And this one is a lot more like some of the older research done by Maggie Walsh on retrovirus behavior, so I think we can conjecture this is not the American bloc, but whichever part of The Collective that Dr. Walsh —”
“Wacky Maggie,” Jack insisted.
“— Wacky Maggie is helping. Or directing. The prion is in a preservative that keeps proteins stable, but doesn’t have any other properties we’ve detected. But the prion is a serious problem. We irradiated some of our sample so we could track it, and we tried testing it on chimpanzees. It goes straight through the blood-brain barrier and creates specific lesions. There’s a lesion between the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex, so the victim loses the ability to recognize the people he knows as the people they are. So he loses all friend-or-foe identification.”
“Like Capgras Syndrome?” Alex asked.
There was a big pause. “Umm, yes, exactly like some forms of Capgras Delusion, down to the usual location of the brain damage. I didn’t realize Terawatt has a biomedical background.”
Alex started to say, “I just got it from —”
But Acid Burn interrupted. “— from a discussion we had on some unrelated science areas.”
Alex frowned, because that was fibbing and making her sound way smarter than she really was.
The lieutenant went on, “To make things worse, lesions also appear on the hypothalamus and prefrontal cortex in places we associate with control of aggression and predation.”
“Aaaand this means …”
Lieutenant Marshall concluded, “We end up with a chimpanzee that will attack any threat without hesitation, and it will not recognize anyone or anything except as a threat. We ended up with four chimpanzees that would just sit perfectly still and then launch themselves at anything that came their way, and would not stop until the threat was gone or extremely dead. After a while, they weren’t interested in food or sleep or sex or anything but waiting for a threat to attack. I think this means exposed people would become killing machines. They wouldn’t do anything except kill everyone and everything in their range, and then they’d hunt down everything else and try to kill them, too.”
Jack asked, “And is this the same thing that hit Beirut? Because it sure sounds like it.”
Lieutenant Marshall replied, “Maybe. Based on the medical and physical forensics we’ve gotten from your Russian contacts on that warehouse complex, it has to be what got those Russian mobsters who sold the sub. They’ve all got the brain lesions, and there are chemicals in their cerebral fluid that are probably from the decomposition of these tagged prions. Also, your Russian police contacts found a broken champagne bottle behind a desk. It has chemicals in the champagne that we can now figure out. I’d say they’re the breakdown products of these tagged prions and the preservative.”
Jack said, “Yeah, I thought the one broken champagne bottle was weird, so I asked. They think someone delivered a case of the champagne, based on the marks in the dust in the main kitchen, and then cleaned up after themselves to hide the evidence when they came back to recover the payoff. If you have no conscience, killing everyone is definitely cheaper than paying them millions and millions of rubles.”
Lieutenant Marshall pointed out, “But the entire city of Beirut wouldn’t be drinking tainted champagne.”
Riley asked, “The prion just needs to be in liquid?”
“Right.”
“So it could be dumped into the city water system, right?” Riley suggested.
Lieutenant Marshall thought for a second. “Ooh, that’s good. That’s really good. For an entire city, you’d need a factory’s worth of the stuff, not just one little vial. And you’d want a way to introduce it into the water mains just downstream of any water treatment systems. If you put enough prion in, you could affect hundreds of thousands of people, and the effect would be permanent. The brain lesions are irreparable.”
Jack groaned. “So where did our pal Clare get this stuff?”
Lieutenant Marshall said, “No idea, sir.”
Jack said, “Walter, call Big Cheese and Little Cheese and give them a full FYI. Get the DHS and the FBI on this ASAP. We need to find where they’re making this crap before they dose another city — this time, an American one.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack muttered, “Don’t these guys take vacations?”
Willow grumbled, “This probably is Wacky Maggie’s idea of a vacation.”
Jack went on, “And speaking of no vacations, how’s Iowa?”
Riley announced, “We’re ready to go. Lieutenant Valentine was not trained in undercover ops, but that’s not going to be crucial.”
Jill said, “The Umbrella op is static now. We’re not seeing any signs of new outbreaks, but we don’t have any guarantees it’s definitely over, and the Corps of Engineers is still in their planning and equipment-testing phase. So we can leave for a short time.”
Jack replied, “Good, good … Team Two?”
Lieutenant Lupo told him, “We’re ready, too, sir. Captain Fisher and his group came up with really nice disguise materials for us, and I think they’ll work for long enough. Az is complaining about her disguise, though. And Sergeant Carlson’s wife is a little cranky about him going on a mission with a Hustler centerfold.”
Az? They were bringing Azure Crush along on this op? Alex didn’t know whether to be happy about it or panicked.
Sergeant Carlson huffed, “A little cranky doesn’t begin to cover it, colonel. I’m probably gonna be sleeping in the RV for the next month. Rinne has … issues about her looks and her self-confidence.”
Jack smirked. “Well, tell her you’re also going to be on the op with Lieutenant Lupo.”
“Thank you, sir, that’ll get me in even more trouble. If I tell her who else is going to be on the op with me, I’ll probably be getting divorce papers before I get home.”
Jack said, “Okay, I gotta admit it. Lupo, Valentine, Azure Crush, Terawatt, and Action Girl in the same field of operations is sort of piling on. I’ll call Mrs. Carlson personally and see what I can do.”
“Thank you, colonel. It would’ve been really helpful if her brother didn’t have naked Azure Crush pics posted all over his rec room walls.”
Alex checked, “And Terawatt?”
Jack smirked again. “And Terawatt! It’s time for you to go on a study tour group. To Korea. The big meeting in Panmunjom is scheduled to start at 0800 their time Monday morning. I’m shipping all of you there tonight. Mister Finn and Miss Valentine are escorting three high school students on a tour of South Korean architecture and history. Mister and Mrs. Carlson have a South Korean tour guide showing them around so he can look at sweat shops he may want to use so he can put wholesome American workers out of jobs. That’ll put all of you within assault distance in case anything happens. Personally, I’m expecting the big attack will be Monday, because it’s the anniversary of one of the famous North Korean victories of the Korean War. But you eight will be on duty until they pull something or the meetings fall apart.”
Alex groaned, “My school is really getting tired of me pulling these disappearances.”
Jack just told her, “Then it’s too bad they agreed to let Corcoran College do this stuff. Fly down to Edwards this evening. Our Cessna will meet you there at 1900. Team Two will pick up Azure Crush in L.A. at the same time. You’ll both land in Camp Casey, meet up with our contact, and you’ll just happen to be near Panmunjom during the talks. Everyone’s going to be in some level of disguise, and you’ll be Annie Farrell, the teen version. So clothes more teen-ish, but the Farrell wig and glasses, and whatever else Fisher’s dreamed up. We’ll have your gym bag and a small suitcase of Annie-wear.”
Alex asked — it wasn’t a whine, it really wasn’t — Jack, “Why do we have to go so early?”
Jack snarked, “Don’t we remember our lessons from our trips to Russia and Japan? They’re not seven hours behind you. They’re across the International Date Line, so they’re seventeen hours ahead of you.”
“Ugh.”
“Hey, look on the bright side, once you hit daylight savings time, it’ll only be sixteen hours ahead!”
She really wished they were all in one conference room, so she could stick her tongue out at Jack.
Riley asked, “Colonel, will they have weapons for us, or are we bringing them?”
Jack said, “We’re supplying the hardware, and we’re not telling anyone we don’t have to about what we’ve got. We’re bringing M203s, a couple heavy machine guns, a couple M32s, two tranq rifles with darts and a variety of loads, some melee weapons for the more violent members of the team, you know.”
Wow. It sounded like Jack was preparing for a small war. Alex asked, “Umm, what do you think we’ll be facing?”
Jack admitted, “No idea. They’ve tried this bit before with a few hundred infantrymen, but I’m thinking this time it’ll be more like a two-hundred-foot spider, or maybe a two-hundred-foot octopus. Or a stampede of thirty-foot spiders. Maybe with an infantry battalion using heavy weapons to shoo the stampede in the direction they want.”
Willow complained, “That sounds intensively of the icky.”
There was a lot more stuff on the conference call. Jack wanted to hear about the doctors’ opinions on Riley’s health, and he wanted to be sure Jo’s Korean was good enough for her to play ‘tour guide’, and he wanted Graham to make sure Sergeant Carlson’s wife wasn’t really going to go bananas because he was undercover for a few days with a big-boobed bimbo who was mainly known for being a centerfold and a supervillain. And Jack wanted to stress that keeping Azure Crush separate from the ‘study tour group’ was important for protecting people’s secret identities. But Alex was kind of distracted, because she didn’t want to start off the spring term by missing more school, and this op sounded pretty open-ended, which wasn’t a good thing.
And then, right after the conference call ended, she got another call on her tPhone. It was from Willow.
“Burn? Are you okay?”
Willow burbled, “Oh, sure, but Jack told me how great your pictures were, and I totally didn’t think you’d have much of the good because I’m just me, and then Eleanor Clift called me, and today I had a phone interview, and they’re doing a big thing on me with a side interview and your pictures, and there’s a whole thing about Clare Tobias and the creepiness attempt at the computer meeting! And I hope I don’t come across as a Valley Girl with a room temp IQ, because you know how I babble when I’m nervous.”
Alex teased, “Is that room temperature in Kelvin?”
“Umm, that would be a no, because room temperature in Celsius is like 20 to 25 degrees, approximately, so in Kelvin that would be roughly 293 or 298 degrees, and plenty of IQ systems have an arbitrary cap of 200, which is totally reasonable, since that’s almost seven standard deviations above the mean, which you’re just not gonna hit all that often, and they don’t really have ways of accurately measuring IQs that high, I mean, they say Stephen Hawking’s IQ is around 160, which I totally think is of the low given the work he’s done, and then there’s a bunch of scaling systems which take your IQ if you’re under fifteen and multiply your IQ estimate by 15 divided by your age, which I think is totally bogus and there’s no way a mathematical model like that is a decent description of the process, but it means if you’re ten and you rack up a 120, which is only a little more than one standard deviation above the adult mean, they report your IQ as 180, which is so totally of the wrong!”
Willow was kind of ranting, so Alex wondered if maybe there was something personal in there. “So … what did they say your IQ was when you were ten?”
Willow cautiously asked, “Is this something you got from other-Willow?”
Alex admitted, “No, I got it from the way you were just talking about scaling IQ scores.” Okay, it was really more of a rant than a talk, but she wasn’t going to say so because that would be mean.
Willow confessed, “Well, my mom had me tested when I was ten, and I got a 153, so it got reported as a 230, which was just stupid, because a ten-year-old genius isn’t going to grow mentally the same way as a normal ten-year-old, and that’s not going to be linear anyway, so it’s a bad scaling system. But it meant I didn’t have to take any more IQ tests, so that was of the good. And anyway, there are decent IQ testing mechanisms for people under 18, and that’s what they should’ve used on me. And besides, I think that people with really high IQ scores need to go through multiple IQ tests so they can get a rational metric and not just go with one insanely high number. Plus, Stephen Hawking thinks people who brag about their high IQ scores are losers, and I agree.”
Alex smiled to herself, but just said, “Well, I think if the reporter makes you sound dorky, he’s just a jerkhead, because I know how awesome you really are.” And she had a feeling Jack would make his unhappiness felt if anyone at Newsweek was deliberately mean to Willow.
Still, getting to talk to Eleanor Clift had been awesome. Mrs. Clift might be a little old lady, but she was mega-famous as a reporter and writer, and she was a board member of the International Women’s Media foundation. So that phone call had been like talking to Woodward and Bernstein! Or George Will! Or …
* * *
Alex took a shower and ate a huge early dinner before she changed into her uniform and flew off to Edwards Air Force Base. She wasn’t looking forward to wearing the Annie Farrell wig and glasses all day, but at least this time she wouldn’t have to wear a pound of makeup to make herself look like she was in her twenties. No, she was just going to wear the wrong color foundation so she’d look sallow and washed-out. Maybe she’d add an ugly mole on her nose with some eyebrow pencil, so it would be hidden under her Terawatt mask. Anyway, guys would totally ignore ‘Annie Farrell’ when Jill and Hanna were around.
Her mom and dad had totally not been thrilled with the SRI news, or where she was heading. And her dad was pretty unhappy about her maybe fighting thousands and thousands of North Korean soldiers, too. Maybe she shouldn’t have told them where she was going to be working. Shar wasn’t happy about it, either, but was insisting it was Piki who didn’t want Alex to leave.
But everyone saw her off, and hugged her bye, and told her to be careful. Shar even volunteered to tell Ray where Alex was going, but Alex managed to convince her that Auntie Willow would do the job just fine.
Then, once Alex was down at Edwards Air Force Base, she used Willow’s GPS app on the tPhone to lead her to where the Cessna was parked while it got refueled. She flew onboard and sort of gaped in surprise.
There were two nerdy-looking adults and two nerdy-looking teens.
Riley was wearing a dark blue suit that was maybe a size or two too big for him so he looked sort of overweight and lumpy. He had his hair slicked down and combed weird so he looked especially dorky, and he was wearing black-rimmed glasses that were the wrong size and shape for his face, so he looked like a doof. Well, he looked as much like a doof as you could make Riley Finn ever look.
Jill was wearing a really ugly, baggy brown suit that hid her curves, and the suit had a skirt that looked too long, and a pair of really ugly brown shoes that were the wrong shade of brown for the suit, so they made things look worse, and both clashed oddly with her brown hair. And she was wearing false upper teeth so she looked horsey and like she had a terrible overbite. Plus she was wearing too much foundation and nothing else, so her eyes looked small and her face looked sort of ‘flat’. And she had insanely thick glasses and her hair was up in a really weird bun.
Grover was wearing some kind of latex mask and gloves, so she could see him for a change. She wondered if that was what he used to look like. With what looked like prescription sunglasses on and with his mouth closed and with a bad haircut on his wig, he looked like an extra-nerdy science nerd. Plus he was dressed like he was about eight years old and his mom picked his clothes out for Sunday school. Even Wade dressed better than that.
Hanna was wearing some kind of padding under an ugly long dress. Whatever it was, it made her look like she was toting an extra fifty pounds around her waist and hips. Then her hair was dyed an especially flat color that was sort of mouse brown, and it was put up in feathered twintails so she looked weird. And she had some kind of pouches in her cheeks that made her face look fat.
Boy, and she had been figuring Hanna and Jill would look extra hot so no one would look at ‘Annie’.
Riley smiled. “We’ve got Annie Farrell clothes for you, plus a padded bodysuit to wear under them. Go ahead and change, so you can get used to wearing it.”
She flew into the bathroom and looked at the stuff. Besides a long dress in a really ugly green color and some ugly black shoes, there was a thing like a short-sleeved leotard. A really fat short-sleeved leotard. It had cotton batting sewn around the waist and stomach. She puddled out of her uniform and into the thing, and she looked at herself. The leotard was only about two or three pounds, but it made her look like she was about fifty pounds heavier, and not where guys wanted girls to gain weight. She pulled on the dress and shoes and wig-cap before she applied the bad foundation. Then she put on the wig and the ugly glasses, and she looked like the overweight teen version of Annie Farrell. This was not a girl who was going to get a lot of dates.
She sat down in her seat and looked over at Riley. The eight-seat Cessna was sort of cozy. It had four narrow seats on each side of the narrow aisle, but each pair of seats was facing each other. So she was sitting in one of the front seats, and she was looking backward right at Hanna, and at Grover who was across the aisle from Hanna, and also at Riley and Jill, who were sitting in the back row. She smiled. “Hey, Grover, it’s nice to finally see you.”
He grinned back. The latex mask stuck to his face enough that she could see when he grinned or whatever. But when he opened his mouth, there wasn’t a normal visible mouth in there, so it looked weird. “This is a lot like I used to look, only without the sunglasses, and I wasn’t ever Brad Pitt, but I really didn’t have hair this bad.”
Alex made a mental note to ask Cindy if she had any pictures of what Grover used to look like. She said, “Hi, Hanna.”
Hanna flipped her head from side to side, so her twintails flopped around. In a really good Valley Girl impression, she bubbled, “Oh, yeah, it’s totes awesomeness to make with the in-person-y, and isn’t this just beyond rad?”
Wow, that wasn’t just a great Valley Girl impression, it was kind of scary. It was like Hanna had stopped being Hanna. Alex had a feeling that Hanna was going to rock when it came to undercover ops.
Riley said, “We’ll be Mister Frank and Mrs. White. We should have two secure rooms in the visitors’ quarters at Camp Casey, and we won’t be eating in the regular mess either. I’ll have Grover in my room and Jill will have you two or else we’ll put Tera on the couch so she can take off her disguise makeup. We’ll have a Hyundai Entourage to load our gear into, and we’ll be driving around looking at Korean religious sites, talking about their history and architecture. My Korean is good enough, and Hanna knows enough to get by in an emergency, so make sure you stick with one of us at all times. Annie, you can make your own way back to base if you have to, but I’d rather you didn’t have to.”
Jill asked, “Won’t it be a problem if Terawatt is seen flying across the sky just south of the DMZ?”
Riley nodded. “We’ll try to avoid that.”
Jill added, “And I can tell Annie Farrell’s a cover ID. I can also tell Terawatt’s younger than everyone thinks. When do I get read in?”
Alex said in her Annie Farrell voice, “Even half of Teams One and Two aren’t read in yet. I didn’t even tell my family for four years, and that only happened because of a supervillain emergency.”
Jill’s eyes bugged a little at that.
Riley gave everyone a crash course on religion and history in Korea, and how North and South Korea had a major ideological divide. He even talked about the North Korean strategy of asymmetric warfare, because they had tons of troops but not the same level of technology as South Korea’s army, or the ROK as Riley called it. Then he talked about how Panmunjom was the name people often used when they were talking about the Joint Security Area, even though the JSA was smack on the Military Demarcation Line and Panmunjom was actually north of that, in North Korean territory.
Grover asked, “Just how tense is this going to be?”
Riley frowned. “Let me give you an idea of how tense things are normally. The ROK soldiers are required to wear sunglasses so they can’t make eye contact with any North Korean soldiers and possibly provoke new conflicts.”
Alex gasped. “You mean just some soldier glaring at some other soldier could start a war there?”
Riley just nodded. “Yep. The Military Demarcation Line is known to an inch across the entire peninsula, and it’s the most heavily guarded border in the world. The line runs right through the middle of the meeting room, right across the middle of the conference table.”
Grover muttered, “Whoa. That’s crazy.”
Jill told them, “Just going to the wrong side of the room can cause an international incident, so we’re going to have to be really careful. The DMZ is four kilometers wide, and the JSA is smack in the middle, so we can’t be within two kilometers of the meeting without risking causing a problem. Except for Grover.”
Riley said, “Our contact’s in the ROK. Every morning they need to drive to the JSA as part of a security audit, so we can sneak Grover past the North Korean soldiers to take a quick look around. But you’ll have to make it quick. Our contact can’t stall. It’s a one-hour audit. At the end of the hour, they’re out of there, and you’ll be walking back home.”
Grover nodded. “But two kilometers is only one point two miles. I can cover that easy.”
Riley frowned. “If you have to. I don’t want you to have to. They call it the Demilitarized Zone, but it’s not. It’s the most heavily militarized zone on the planet. The roads are monitored. Plenty of the fields are mined. They have barriers up all over the place. It could be the worst place on earth to get stuck, even if you are invisible.”
Alex was feeling even worse about this op.
* * *
It took eight hours to fly across the Pacific. Eight hours when Alex’s body was telling her it was night and time to go to bed. Riley had everyone taking timed naps so they would be able to cope when they got to South Korea but they would still be ready for bed at a reasonable time there. And he gave a couple talks on Korean food and Korean customs that were pretty interesting. Alex was really hungry by the time he finished the talk on Korean food, even if some of the things he talked about were totally not appetizing.
The jet landed at Camp Casey outside Seoul. They stayed on the Cessna as it taxied into one of the hangars, which was then closed up so no one would be peeking in on them. A brand-new Hyundai Entourage with tinted windows drove up. Two South Korean soldiers got out. The driver was like a sergeant, but the passenger was a colonel or a general or something, with a lot of medals on his uniform. The colonel marched over to the Cessna, while the driver moved off to inspect the hangar for something. Maybe for spies.
Riley clambered out, looking kind of lumpy and awkward in his oversized suit. “Colonel Park, it’s good to see you again.”
The colonel smiled and said something in Korean that made Riley laugh. Alex figured Riley’s Korean had to be really good if he could get jokes in Korean. Riley grinned. “Not this time. We have to make this look convincing. And we need to off-load our gear.”
The colonel told him something else in Korean and handed him a map. Riley said something back that was probably a thank-you, based on how he was standing. Then the colonel and his driver walked out through a side door. Alex flew over and peeked through the little window in the door. There was a Humvee waiting for the colonel. The two South Koreans hopped in, and it took off.
Riley said, “Let’s get organized.”
The back of the Entourage had been stripped. The front seats and the first row of back seats were there, but everything else was yanked out. Riley opened up the Cessna’s cargo hold, and Alex peeked in at the gear. There was a suitcase for each of them, which she floated out. There was the usual gym bag for her, but that was still inside the Cessna. She grabbed that, too. There were cases full of weapons. There was a big plastic case holding three M203s. There was a plastic case holding two M32 multiple grenade launchers. There was a big case holding two M240Gs that Hanna had to tell her what they were. There were two smaller cases, each one holding a tranquilizer dart rifle and darts and a bunch of loads for the darts. There was a box that held two big swords and a huge mace. Then there were cases of ammo for the weapons, and three tac vests with web belts: one each for Hanna, Jill, and Riley. Hanna’s had those grapple guns, too. Alex figured Grover was a lot more dangerous without anything that could be seen by the enemy. Okay, Grover had his leather pouch that he’d had in Iowa, so he could be heavily armed if he wanted to be. This was a lot of stuff.
Riley tossed a tarp over all that stuff, put their suitcases and bags on top of the tarp, and had them pile in. Alex slid in between Hanna and Grover in the back seat, while Jill got behind the wheel and Riley took the other front seat with his map.
They drove off to one edge of Camp Casey and found their quarters. It looked like a duplex in a row of duplexes. Jill parked the car in the double garage, and they went inside.
Riley directed everyone, “Okay, we have a stocked kitchen and two bedrooms. Tera, you can take over the den as your bedroom if you don’t want Jill to get any more intel on you. The colonel said it’s your call. Otherwise, you three have two queen-size beds to share in the bigger bedroom. Grover and I each have a twin in the smaller bedroom. We’ll be getting up at six ack emma local time tomorrow morning, and Grover needs to be dressed invisibly to accompany Colonel Park when he swings by here at 0630. The rest of us will move out at 0700 in the SUV, in disguise, with our loadouts in the back and Tera’s gym bag ready for her. We’ll meet up with Grover and the colonel and let Grover change into his disguise in the SUV before we start our study tour. I’ve got maps, guidebooks, and a list of sites we’ll go see. I figure we have three days’ worth of sites to go study. If we’re still on duty at the end of the third day, we’ll move to a second three-day tour we laid out, and then we’ll repeat sites if we have to. Right now we need to eat, stay up until eight or nine local time if at all possible, and then get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow could be a big day, or it could be a really long, tense day with nothing happening. Any questions?”
Jill asked, “Can I take the den? Then Tera and Action Girl can have the bedroom to themselves.”
“Sure.”
Alex felt really embarrassed as she told Jill, “Thanks, because I’m really worried about protecting my family and my friends. Even General Hammond doesn’t know my secret identity.”
Jill asked, “Who does? Other than Hanna and Grover and the major?”
Alex admitted, “Jack and Graham. And Walter, I’m pretty sure, although it’s never come up. Oh, and Jo. And Lieutenant Bailey figured it out just the other day while he was doing a security audit for Acid Burn. But definitely not Azure Crush.”
Jill nodded. “Right. Because people who tried to kill you with a station wagon aren’t on your ‘trust’ list.”
“Not even Jack’s IT guys know. But Acid Burn knows, because I enlisted her before Riley and Graham ever tracked me down.”
Jill thought out loud, “So your private team, your two superheroes, and six SRI people. That’s a pretty tight team. I guess I shouldn’t feel left out.”
Riley said, “Four of those six were part of the colonel’s group that investigated Terawatt in the first place, and Lieutenant Lupo found out because she had to share private quarters with ‘Annie Farrell’ during our Berlin op. We’ve been keeping it as tight as we can, because we have The Collective and Orphans and the NID all threatening us.”
Jill frowned. “And I’m one of those Orphans. Right. Carlson doesn’t know, either?” Alex shook her head no. “Okay, I can live with this until I’ve proven myself.”
Alex whispered, “Sorry.” But she really felt like she needed to stick to her guns on this one and protect her loved ones, even if it turned out not to be fair to Jill.
Jill stopped and stared at her. “Jesus, you’re just a kid, too, aren’t you?” She turned to Riley. “Why do we have teenaged superheroes doing a shitty job like this?”
Riley just looked at her and said, “Because they’re all the superheroes we have. Even Azure Crush is just barely legal. You and me and Carlson and Lupo? 25 to 31. After that, you’re pretty much looking at Sergeant Harriman, who has an inhuman tolerance for paperwork.”
Alex was pretty sure Riley stole that line from Jack. She added, “And Danielle Atron, who has powers like mine, and Maggie Walsh, who’s maybe the smartest person on the planet when it comes to biology and genetics.”
Riley looked her way. “Walsh may be the smartest person on the planet period. Look at what she’s designed in just the last few years. And Marshall says she’s done more to advance genetics and the related fields than any other four people. If she wasn’t busy being a supervillain, she’d be walking around with two or three Nobel Prizes right now.”
Alex asked, “I have a question. What’s for dinner?” After all, it was evening in Korea.
The kitchen was stocked with a bunch of Korean and Japanese and Chinese dishes, along with a bunch of American food. And it turned out Riley was pretty good in a kitchen, so he helped Alex and Jill and Hanna make bulgogi and bibimbap, while he opened up a big jar of kimchi and put seasonings on the table. Everything tasted great, even if she thought the kimchi was a little too spicy. Riley liked it, but Hanna really didn’t. Alex wondered if really sensitive taste buds went with a really good sense of smell.
Then while Alex got Grover to do kitchen clean-up and she made a couple of big batches of brownies, Hanna and Jill and Riley pulled all the weapons out of the SUV and field-stripped them and checked them all over. It just looked weird seeing someone Hanna’s size wielding an M240G like it was a toy gun, but if you had soldiers who were way stronger than normal, it made sense to give them heavier weapons with more stopping power. And if they were going to have to stop a stampede of giant spiders, Alex wanted some really heavy weapons. Like maybe a couple Vipers and a couple Warthogs. And a B-1 bomber.
Even with the naps she had on the jet, she was exhausted. She still ate a dozen brownies, which everyone said were really good. But then she was conking out.
Jill took over the den for her bedroom and everyone went to bed. Alex went ahead and showered and washed her hair to get ready for the next day, so Hanna did it, too, even if she had to use a special shampoo so the color wouldn’t wash right out. And she had to unclip the two weird twintails first, since they weren’t really her hair.
Then the two of them got in their beds. Alex fell asleep right in the middle of something important Hanna wanted to ask about, like prom dresses.
* * *
Alex woke up when her alarm buzzed and Hanna just about sprung out of the other bed. There was only one shower in the place, so everyone had to share, so Alex was glad she got her major stuff out of the way the night before. She could totally do her bad foundation and wig in the bedroom mirror.
Breakfast was all American food. Alex made pancakes while Jill set the table. Riley made oatmeal and grumbled about how they didn’t have the right kind of oats and stuff for really good oatmeal. It still tasted really good to her. Grover had to drink a big bottle of clear Pedialyte instead, because he had to be invisible in just an hour or so. Alex didn’t know what she’d do if she was stuck having to drink Pedialyte instead of getting to eat yummy stuff. Bleh.
And it totally wasn’t her fault that Jill just stared at her when she got two more bowls of oatmeal and another stack of pancakes. Jill finally said, “I never thought about the amount of calories you’d burn through on a daily basis.”
Alex shrugged. “It does make it pretty hard to hide who I am on undercover ops.”
Colonel Park came by and picked up Grover. Then Alex and Hanna packed about twenty sandwiches in a cooler that was in the pantry, along with five things of ‘blue ice’ that had been in the freezer and a dozen bottles of water and soda. They all went and put on their disguises, put Alex’s gym bag and Grover’s pouch and Grover’s bag of disguise clothes in the back of the SUV along with their loadouts, and checked that they were ready to go.
Riley was just about to start the SUV when Hanna perked up. “The phone inside is ringing.”
“Uh-oh,” muttered Riley. “That can’t be Colonel Park. And Colonel O’Neill would call me on my cell.”
He rushed back in. Hanna followed him, so Jill did, too. Alex figured she’d better go also. She got there in time to hear the voice.
“Major Finn? This is General Hammond.”
“Yes, sir,” Riley said crisply.
“I have Colonel O’Neill and General Jackson on the line as well. I’ve got bad news. Turns out the State Department has had an angry North Korean general tucked away in Tokyo, and they just sort of neglected to tell anyone else up until a few minutes ago.”
General Jackson cut in. “At which point General Flagg chewed some asses down to the hipbones. State’s little defector snuck over into South Korea about three weeks ago. He’s furious at the higher-ups for not treating his soldiers properly. They took all those biochemicals and radioactives we were sweating about, and they didn’t use them on spiders or squid. They used them on their own soldiers.”
Oh, crud.
Riley asked, “How many soldiers did they treat, sir?”
General Jackson said, “This is why the NK general is so pissed off. They took 680,000 active military, military reserve and paramilitary troops, including a large proportion of the female soldiers, and dosed them.”
Most of a million soldiers? Oh, crud!
The general went on, “Apparently, fewer than 7,000 of them aren’t already dead or currently dying horribly of radiation poisoning or biochemical poisoning or weird biochemical side effects. That’s why their numbers on food imports changed so dramatically. They had most of a million fewer mouths to feed.”
Riley asked, “Sir, how many of the survivors got powers?”
The general admitted, “We don’t know. The NK general got cut out of the loop when he protested the treatment of his people. All he knows is that some of them did, but not enough to form a battalion. So we’re talking somewhere between two supers and a couple hundred. So I hope for your sake that we’re talking low-level powers, and not a hundred Terawatts.”
Mega-crud!