Wolverine: Weapon X Page 7

  Maybe the man should have given me a code word or something, so I’d recognize him as the genuine blackmailer.

  Despite his misery, Cornelius managed the slightest chuckle.

  A secret code. How ridiculous. And wouldn’t that make this absurd espionage melodrama complete?

  No code word was necessary, as it turned out. The man walked right up to Cornelius and lifted his head. As a brief waterfall ran off the tan wide-brimmed hat, Cornelius recognized the sharp refined features of the Professor, his square glasses speckled with raindrops.

  “Professor, I—”

  “Don’t speak. Just listen carefully. I have a proposition for you. Do not tell me how grateful you are. Not now. Not ever. For what I offer you is not charity.”

  “What do you want from me, then? I have no money, no reputation. What can I possibly—”

  “I have need of your special skills,” said the Professor. “That is all you are required to know for now.”

  “But—”

  “If you accept my proposition you will be spirited across the Canadian border within the hour,” the Professor continued. “If you turn me down, you are free to go with the assurance that I will not expose you to the authorities. But bear in mind, doctor, that it is only a matter of time before the Federal Bureau of Investigation catches up with you.”

  The Professor paused to let his words sink in.

  “By the way congratulations are in order.” The Professor’s eyes were empty dead flat as on the day Cornelius had first met him. “Did you know that you have made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list? The press release was issued just yesterday.”

  The news had not yet reached Cornelius. His guts twisted at the very thought.

  The Professor leaned closer, until Cornelius could feel the man’s breath on his cheek. “And did you know that the Syracuse branch of the FBI has been alerted to your presence within their jurisdiction? They staged a raid on that trailer you call a home… and at that warehouse where you work. If you weren’t here with me, you would be locked up in a cell by now.”

  Cornelius felt the panic quickly closing off his throat. He needed air. The Professor was crowding him, pushing him.

  “What’s your offer?” Cornelius snapped back. “I want to hear all of the details before I accept your, or anyone’s, job. I’m going with the highest bidder.”

  The Professor seemed surprised by the doctor’s obvious ploy—an attempt to regain a measure of control. A small smile lifted the edges of his thin lips. Under the glare of the street lamp, the Professor’s grin reminded Cornelius of a bone-white skull.

  “Come, come, Dr. Cornelius. Don’t be ridiculous… Do you really believe you have any choice in the matter?”

  “Professor? Dr. Cornelius? We can begin the procedure now.”

  The Professor nodded to Dr. Hendry then faced Carol Hines. “Has the REM interfaced with the subject’s brain?”

  “Interface has been achieved, Professor,” she replied crisply.

  “Dr. MacKenzie, deactivate the brain dampeners.”

  With the flick of a switch, the psychiatrist cut off power to the generators, and the steady stream of ultrasonic energy precisely tuned to a frequency that paralyzed Logan’s brain, abruptly ceased.

  “I detect a slight spike in the subject’s brain activity,” Dr. MacKenzie warned immediately.

  “It’s an error,” said Carol Hines.

  “You’re sure of that?” MacKenzie shot back, the shock of red hair on his head bristling. “There can’t be a glimmer of brain activity—not even dreaming—or the subject may be able to cling to certain facets of his personality even after conditioning.”

  “It’s an anomaly,” Hines insisted. “I’ve seen this phenomena before. Spikes occurred with test subjects at NASA, usually when their sleep was interrupted.”

  “What could cause such brain activity?” replied MacKenzie.

  Hines shrugged. “There are several theories, Professor,” she replied. “We might be seeing random electrical activity inside the hypothalamus—the area of the brain that controls bodily functions-or continuing chemical reactions within the pituitary stalk. But, of course, that’s only conjecture.”

  The Professor seemed satisfied with her explanation, though Dr. MacKenzie remained unconvinced.

  “The waves I saw on the monitor suggest activity in the cerebral cortex,” the psychiatrist insisted. “Most certainly not random electrical or chemical activity.”

  MacKenzie glared at Hines, who stood her ground. It fell to the Professor to break the impasse.

  “What do you see on the encephalographic monitor now, Ms. Hines? Dr. MacKenzie?”

  “Interface with the REM has been achieved,” said Carol Hines. “As of now, there’s no brain activity we don’t control.”

  MacKenzie hesitated, then nodded. “The screen is blank … now. Perhaps Ms. Hines is correct in her assumptions.”

  The Professor waved his hand. “Very well, then. Proceed.”

  “Stage One, people. Prepare to inject the nanochips,” Dr. Hendry said, eyes on Cornelius.

  Dr. Cornelius tapped the keyboard and his program sprang up on the monitor. Hunched over the terminal, he entered the code that released the injector.

  M-A-D-E-L-I-N-E

  The screen blinked: CODE ACCEPTED.

  Then: INITIATING INJECTION PROCEDURE.

  Finally, the monitor flashed: READY FOR INJECTION.

  Cornelius reached for the control, then paused, his beefy index finger poised over the release button.

  A moment passed. Then two. Still Cornelius held back.

  Suddenly impatient, the Professor rose out of his chair. “Doctor … proceed.”

  Cornelius felt the man’s eyes on his back—staring… always watching—and he punched the key.

  A hydraulic whine from inside the bubbling tank, and a razor-sharp needle came out of its sheath like a cat’s claw. Down it came until the tip caressed pale flesh.

  Then the pointed tip plunged through muscle and bone, deep into Logan’s beating heart. The figure in the tank jerked once, then thrashed about in a long, continuous spasm—an unanticipated reaction that set alarms ringing on a half-dozen monitors.

  Specialists and physicians darted between terminals and the lab filled with excited voices.

  Then Cornelius heard it, or imagined he did. A human cry that tore at his insides. A wail that drowned out the alarms and the shouts of the medical staff. The tremulous screams of a pain-wracked child, shrieking in uncomprehending agony.

  5

  The Mission

  Logan was falling, tumbling through a black void. A sustained blast of frigid wind battered his body and roared through his mind. He reached for memories, something to hold on to.

  Nothing there.

  Panic rushed into fill the void.

  The storm has me. The whirlwind.

  He moved his fingers, toes, and found himself enveloped in a smothering technological cocoon. He heard the rasping noise of his own breath, hot behind an oxygen mask that muzzled nose and mouth. He turned his head—to bump against the walls of a climate-controlled cybernetic helmet. On the other side of the visor, only darkness—and then a blinking cursor, flashing an inch from his left eye.

  Logan watched as the computerized Heads Up Display cycled through its initiation sequence, then interfaced with a geopositioning satellite in Earth’s orbit. Two seconds later, the HUD projected a map grid of the terrain below on the inside of his visor.

  Logan recognized the grid, the map, the all-too-familiar terrain, and his memory flooded back with crystal clarity.

  Must have bumped my head . . . knocked me for a loop…

  As the parameters of the mission poured back into his mind, critical data scrolled across the visor. Wind velocity airspeed, external temperature—a chilly seventy degrees below zero—his rate and angle of descent, longitude and latitude. The altimeter told Logan that he was in free fall from an altitude of thirteen thousand meters.


  Somewhere above him—and probably miles away by now—the unmarked MC-140 he’d jumped from was on afterburners in a race for the border. They probably had a couple of North Korean MIG-22s chasing their tail, too. Logan silently wished the pilots luck getting home.

  Only sixty-three seconds of free fall to go. At six thousand meters, the wings of the High Altitude Wing Kite harness would automatically deploy and the repulsors would fire to slow his descent. Until that time, Logan would continue to drop like a stone.

  He noted the local time: 0227—the middle of the night.

  “Terrain and objective,” he said in a voice dry and raspy from the pure oxygen he was gulping.

  The grid shifted. Outlined in sharp detail, Logan saw the digital silhouette of rugged hills and a narrow road that wound through them. To the north, an artificial lake restrained by a concrete dam. At the foot of the dam, a hydroelectric plant surrounded by double and triple fences, watchtowers, several wooden structures with detached latrines—probably barracks—and an antiaircraft gun emplacement.

  Finally, Logan spied his objective—a collection of circular structures on the banks of a shallow river created by the dam’s runoff. The three—and four-story structures appeared to be fuel storage tanks. But why store fuel near a hydroelectric plant? It’s the water that turns the generators; no oil was needed.

  More ominous, reports confirmed that dead fish had been turning up downstream, where the runoff from the dam flowed into a larger river. JTF-4 Intel believed that a toxic substance was the cause—a chemical, biological, or possibly nuclear pollutant. Intelligence concluded that the pollution came from the supposedly innocent power plant, which meant it was generating more than electricity. The North Koreans were probably producing weapons of mass destruction at that site as well. Canadian Intelligence wanted to know what types of weapons, and in what quantities—which is why Logan and his partner had been sent on this mission.

  On his visor, hovering over the glowing map, Logan saw a second blip. Invisible to the naked eye, another figure plunged through the night not so very far away—Neil Langram, Logan’s partner. The two men would come down in separate landing zones, then rendezvous on the ground.

  A muted alarm sounded inside Logan’s helmet, and his training kicked in. He stiffened his spine and threw his arms over his head as if he were high-diving into the dark, shining waters far below. Spine rigid, he spread his arms and legs wide to form the letter X

  The second alarm. Logan braced himself, muscles tensed, as the readout counted down.

  FOUR… THREE… TWO… ONE…

  With a sudden jolt, the “wings” deployed. Leatherlike membranes of a frictionless fabric burst out of hidden seams under Logan’s arms, along his torso, down his legs. Flexible ribs inside those wings instantly filled with compressed air, giving the membrane shape and creating an airfoil.

  But by design Logan was still falling headfirst, as his rate of descent had hardly slackened. If Logan tried to catch wind and level off now, the HAWK harness would be ripped away by the stresses and he would plunge to his death.

  A blinking cursor. Digital numerals. Another countdown.

  Then the Stark Industries Mark III Repulsor units kicked in. Each of the six saucer-sized, disc-shaped devices was capable of firing three one-second bursts before their energy supply was exhausted—more than enough to slow Logan’s descent.

  But when the units fired, Logan felt a sharp, stabbing pain, like a knife plunging into his heart. He folded in agony and fell even faster. Alarms sounded in his ears, and the noise merged with the wind’s howl. To Logan, black night seemed to turn a phosphorescent green.

  Suddenly, an explosion in his head—a red haze of pain. A moan was ripped from Logan’s lips. Through the agony, he wondered if his harness had somehow malfunctioned.

  Soon, the anguish receded and Logan was able to concentrate. He fought for more control of the now aerodynamic full-body flying suit against the shifting air currents. After some effort, he managed to level off at about two thousand meters. He was gliding parallel to the horizon at roughly three hundred kilometers per hour.

  “Target.”

  Instantly, a flashing pipper appeared on the map grid, highlighting a point on the slope of a low hill above the dam and the hydroelectric plant. Logan was still several kilometers away. He switched to infrared mode and suddenly he had a rouge-tinged panoramic view of the surrounding countryside.

  “Telescopic mode … magnify… magnify… stop.”

  His telescopic night-vision visor revealed every detail on the ground below. Though he was still far away, Logan could make out vehicles parked near the top of the dam and a previously undetected security gate. And in the valley below the dam, Logan could see guards manning the watchtowers, and other uniformed men with dogs walking the perimeters on both sides of the fence.

  Moving his arms, he slipped into a descending glide, occasionally adjusting for wind shear or updrafts caused by the hills.

  To Logan, this was the only good part of a HAWK harness drop—flying like a bird on fluttering wings…

  As he approached his target, Logan knew the fun was about to come to an end.

  His plan was to buzz the facility in an effort to determine the quality and strength of the security forces. Then, if all went according to plan, Logan would find his landing zone, land without detection, make his way down the hill, across the dam, down the valley, over the fence and into the hydroelectric plant—all while avoiding contact with the guards, the dogs, and any minefields or electronic surveillance systems that might be installed around the complex.

  “A freakin’ cakewalk,” Langram had called it.

  Roger that.

  Logan noted that the other blip was above and behind him now—Langram, still on target. Logan knew his partner would soon break off; to land on the opposite side of the lake. That way, if one of them were caught or killed, the other could complete the mission.

  He and Langram would maintain a strict radio silence during the entire operation. They would not meet until they were among the storage tanks, or maybe not until they reached the extraction point after the mission was all over.

  Of course, if things go really bad for either one of us, we won’t be meeting at all.

  Suddenly, a powerful updraft pushed Logan several hundred meters off course. Logan manipulated the HAWK’s twin repulsion jets—activated by sensors in his gloves and a button in the palm of each hand—to compensate for the wind shear. Within seconds he was back on course. His computer control system took over to keep him on target.

  Logan marveled at the quality of this new device, and how user friendly the next generation of HAWK harness had become.

  Not like the bad old days.

  Logan recalled that the first prototypes of the High Altitude Wing Kites were exactly that—powerless gliders made of leather, canvas, and spandex, deployed from standard form-hugging SHIELD battle suits. Those early models were not very reliable and lacked the amenities of the improved versions. Logan wondered how he’d gotten by without a pressurized helmet, heating unit, HUD, wireless computer control, GPS system, infrared night-vision visor—or even the repulsion units.

  The current HAWK even eliminated the threat of radar detection. Sheathed in nonmagnetic, wave-absorbing composite material—a flexible version of the coating used on stealth aircraft—Logan and Langram were invisible to all forms of electronic detection and hi-tech surveillance.

  Of course, one improvement had yet to be made. No one at SHIELD R&D had devised a way to make landing a HAWK harness easy. Logan hadn’t used one in a couple of years and regretted it, for as the ground hurled up to meet him, he began to wonder if he still had the chops to pull off a smooth touchdown.

  “It’s easy to land a HAWK. Even a four-eyed yahoo can find the ground in one of these birds,” Nick Fury once told him. “It’s making that landing without cracking up that’s tough.”

  A smirk tugged his thin lips. Logan could almost smell Fury’s chea
p stogies.

  You’d think a guy neck-deep in covert ops could get his hands on some contraband Cuban Monte Cristos.

  Logan concentrated on his approach. After calibrating the wind and angle of descent, the HUD displayed the flight pattern to the landing zone. But, first Logan wanted to make that reconnaissance pass over the power plant.

  Like a silent, invisible wraith, Logan dived lower and lower. Finally, he raced parallel with the horizon, less than sixty meters above the ground. He passed over a steel fence and shot over a guard tower—low enough to see inside. He observed a few tired guards, teacups, and a knot of men playing dice.

  Tempted to land right now . . . these guys are hardly awake. I could drop down and find out what’s in those tanks within five minutes… but that would be wrong.

  Logan had his orders. He was to land in the hills, bury his suit, and make his way down to the facility on foot.

  Anyway, if it’s too easy—where’s the fun?

  Racing silently over the hydroelectric plant, he noticed that a hangar-sized double door was open, a cluster of workers lounging just inside the pool of light. Beyond the plant, the area around the storage tanks was dark. Even in infrared mode, most of the details were lost in shadows.

  Finally, Logan banked and headed for the gray, featureless wall of the dam. He bent his head back and spread his arms as wide as he could, to create more wing surface and lift. Then he fired the repulsion jets.

  He rose like a bottle rocket over the dam. He spun in the air, then zoomed low across the dark water, his black suit shining like sealskin under the spray.

  Logan fired the repulsors one last time, cleared the shore, and raced up the slope. Ahead of him, the designated landing zone—a barren stretch of brown Korean hill that had been deforested to make way for power lines still under construction. As he approached the LZ, Logan noticed thick stumps sticking out of the ground and several fallen trees blocking his path.

  In preparation for the landing, Logan bent the harness to slow his airspeed. At eighty kilometers-per-hour, he loosened the harness so that he’d be ready to punch out of it the second he spotted a fairly level piece of real estate.