"The CIA pulled us together, assembled a team coming out of El Paso. No doubt, this was one of the most elite units ever to grace this Earth, but even so - we weren't sure if it was gonna be enough. They came to me first, and I had to call in every favor, every contact, to get this crew... but the job dictated nothing less."
"Come to find out I didn't need to go through much trouble to bring these guys in, they all had received the same letter I had. 300 hours to find and stop some of the worst people the world will ever know, and if we didn't they were gonna make Hiroshima look like a roman candle. It's like it was a game to them, the way they sent us challenges, the way they invited us to hunt for them.” John continued.
“We'd agreed to split off to search for leads based on some mumbo jumbo intel the CIA had - clues hidden in the letters. We took an oil refinery out in El Salvador, cleaned the place out, and that's when one of our team found his wife tied up in a room. The whole thing about went to hell right then and there, as we found out the real stakes of the game we were playing."
Sergeant Jacobs leaned forward in his chair. "Was she okay?" A nod, and he felt a knot in his back unravel he hadn't even known was there.
"How did the team respond John?" He watched for a gulp, dropped eye contact maybe - but that cold face gave nothing away.
"Not well." John said simply.
"Our boys were good - the best - but what they walked into at that refinery wasn't a firefight, it was a message. No one carries a phone in this kind of op, you know? We couldn't know if our families were safe."
He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. "Maybe this was just the unlucky bastard who got found out first, or maybe each of us would get home and find the door kicked in, all our belongings thrown across the floor and our loved ones disappeared. That she wasn't dead was a miracle, but when we got her out, got her calmed down, we figured out why. She was carrying a message."
John hesitated, and Jacobs realized this next bit of information was what John had been holding back. He sat there, waiting in silence, for the other man to speak. After a long moment of weighing him, John shifted in his chair and continued, voice low like an engine idling.
"I remember that girl looking at her husband, looking around at our hardened crew, some violent swirl of fear and relief stitched across her face, and she said one word.
"WarGames."
The instant she said it her eyes rolled back, her head jerked, and she was gone.
He hung his head. We found out later that it was a microbomb, no bigger than a pill capsule, injected up the nasal cavity. I've heard a lot of sick things in my years but the sound that came out of Mason at that moment... I'll never forget that sound."
There was a pause. "Do you need a moment?" Jacobs asked, voice barely a whisper.
John shook it off.
"At that point, Mason turned on us. We didn't know how, or why, he seemed to know more than the rest of us but he did. He insisted it was one of us, that we had a mole in the operation. We stood around like fools arguing in the dirt and heat, tempers flared and ego's bruised. Of course, it was all fear. Fear for ourselves, fear for our families. Mason drew his gun, but he never would've fired it I don't think. It doesn't matter though..." He cleared his throat.
"He was a good man, but he had five bullets in him before you could blink. I remember helping bury him and his wife, in an unmarked grave off a dirt path outside El Salvador. We searched him just to be sure, but there was nothing on him. “
The steel in John's gaze cut like a blade. "Thing is, there was no question in my mind. It was one of us."
Jacobs felt his pulse jump. "How do you know?"
"I'd seen a symbol on the door we found her in - a big zero - but it only clicked when she said 'Wargames'." He gave a long, meaningful pause. "Patient Zero. Wargames. Everyone who's served as long as this group would've thought of the military exercises, but me? I thought of the movie. The nukes, the threat — a false flag. No one could’ve found us, grabbed that girl, and set this up without someone in the Agency knowing. No way. This whole operation was designed to bring us together."
"Meaning what?"
John leaned in.
"Meaning someone in this team, someone we trusted, wasn't who they said they were. An imposter. One of them playing hero in our ranks... This wasn't some outside op. Jacobs. We were compromised from the start."
Ironeyes - John Mason - Sean Connery - The Rock, Town Vanilla has been lynched.
It is now night one. You have ~22 hours to submit actions.
