Christopher Golden Read online

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  CONTENTS

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

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  THE DEADLIEST MISSION. THE DEADLIEST WOMEN.

  Wolverine. Sabretooth. Silver Fox. Wraith. Maverick. Together, they were Team X, the best covert-ops team NATO had to offer. But a mission to retrieve a disk from a pair of Soviet agents proved to be more trouble than they bargained for. A Soviet operative codenamed the Black Widow, a mutant Interpol officer named Sean Cassidy, and shape-changing freelance spy Mystique were also all after the disk.

  Years later, Wolverine is a valued member of the uncanny X-Men. The Black Widow defected and became a respected American super hero. Cassidy is Banshee, mentor to the next generation of young mutants. Mystique and Sabretooth are reluctant members of X-Factor, the government strike force. Wraith is still a covert-ops agent. Silver Fox is dead, and Maverick is dying of the Legacy Virus.

  Each of them is kidnapped, one by one—starting with Sabretooth, by far the deadliest member of the former Team X. Wolverine must find out the terrible secret from that old mission—a secret that has remained hidden for years, and could spell death for all of them!

  Cover art by Luis Royo Interior illustrations by Darick Robertson

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  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Special thanks to Ginjer Buchanan, Michelle LaMarca, Steven A. Roman, Howard Zimmerman, Mike Thomas, Steve Behling, and Ursula Ward.

  X-MEN: CODENAME WOLVERINE

  A Berkley Boulevard Book A BP Books, Inc. Book

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Boulevard/Putnam hardcover edition / October 1998 Berkley Boulevard paperback edition / May 2000

  All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 1998 Marvel Characters, Inc.

  Edited by Keith R.A. DeCandido. Book design by Michael Mendelsohn of MM Design 2000, Inc.

  Cover art by Luis Royo. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: BP Books, Inc.,

  24 West 25th Street, New York, New York 10010.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com

  Check out the Ace Science Fiction/Fantasy newsletter, and much more, at Club PPI!

  ISBN: 0-425-17111-6

  BERKLEY BOULEVARD Berkley Boulevard Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY BOULEVARD and its logo are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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  For Connie, past, present, and future

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank my agent, Lori Perkins, my editor, Keith R.A. DeCandido, and Ben Raab and the people at Marvel Creative Services for answering questions I needed answered. Thanks also to Ginjer Buchanan, Nancy Holder, Jeff Mariotte, and Tom Sniegoski.

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  Long shadows stretched across the arid landscape of the Arizona desert and merged with the shimmering heat to create mirages. You could drive for hours in the desert without passing another car. Go a few miles off the road, deeper into the merciless desert, and for all intents and purposes, you’ve left the world behind.

  There are those who believe the desert isn’t empty, but a vast Roman forum where ghosts and monsters erupt from interdimensional portals for the amusement of alien visitors. Reality is far more harsh and unforgiving. There is nothing amusing about the Arizona desert. Beautiful, yes, but deadly.

  Except perhaps for the odd scorpion, or a lizard baking in the sun, nothing moves during the day unless it is driven by the wind. But as the long shadows stretch themselves across the sand and scrub—farther and farther until their tendril fingers interlock, merge, and become night—the desert world begins to come alive.

  The predators come out to play.

  When the stars came out, cold and distant in the black sky, Victor Creed emerged. Since midday, he had been hidden by the shadow from a jagged cleft in the side of a pillar of rock and earth, one of many mesas which jutted up from the barren ground as if built there by gigantic children.

  Silent as the scorpions that had stung him as he lay waiting for dusk, Creed padded across the desert floor toward his objective more than two miles distant. The man called Sabretooth was savage, a primal beast for whom killing was a pleasure. He could rend human flesh with fangs and claws provided him by a genetic x-factor in his DNA that made him a mutant. Could, and did, when the mood struck him.

  Six and a half feet and two hundred seventy-five pounds of slavering, stalking death, Sabretooth was still, nevertheless, human. Which made him all the more dangerous. For the human was the most cunning animal ever to walk the Earth. Animals lived on instinct, and Sabretooth had the singlemindedness of the beast. But he also had his own agenda, long-term plans, and secrets.

  Sabretooth was the perfect weapon.

  Even now, he moved swiftly under the stars to fulfill a mission given to him by his captors, the United States government. Once he had been in a killing frenzy, free to do as he pleased. When he was finally stopped, any sane government would have put him to death. That was what Creed himself would have done. Instead, they put him to work.

  A restraining collar around his neck would choke and shock him into unconsciousness if he disobeyed orders. Then there was the unspoken promise that if he did not play along, execution was still possible. For the time being, it suited him to cooperate. The government made him a part of X-Factor, its own little mutant police force. Mutants hunting mutants for the good of the world.

  It made him want to puke. Not to mention that, at one time or another, he’d tried to murder nearly every other member of the team.

  But sometimes the government pulled Sabretooth for special jobs. Jobs that X-Factor might be a little too queasy for. Like this one.

  Three and one-half miles from the nearest paved road stood the compound of the Southwestern Free Militia: one large wooden building and several ramshackle structures thrown together with canvas and odd lumber. The SFM’s headquarters wasn’t much to look at; that was certain. But fanaticism was dangerous, and the SFM specialized in domestic terrorism— bombs, assassinations, kidnappings.

  There was a kill order on this mission, which didn’t mean he had to kill, but that he was free to do whatever was necessary to bring the militia down. That could have been accomplished with an air strike, though, and would have been if it were his primary goal. But after the fall of communism, post-Soviet Russia was having a fire sale on technology and weaponry. The SFM had come into possession of a very dangerous biochemical weapon, coded S-111.

  The bosses didn’t want the germ destroyed. They simply wanted it. Which was where Sabretooth came in.

  Barbed wire was strung from post to post in a pitiful attempt at security. Sabretooth quietly sneered as his claws sliced roughly through the wire. It sprang back and away, and he was in. Despite their distance from the rest of the world, the SFM apparently maintained a high level of paranoia. The two armed men strolling the compound bore automatic rifles and alert, darting eyes.

  Creed almost laughed out loud at the
comically surprised expression on the face of the first guard as he snapped the man’s neck. But he controlled himself. It was wise to maintain stealth as long as possible. Once he’d been discovered, it would be a massacre.

  Sabretooth loved a massacre, the salty spray of arterial blood, the fear in the eyes of the prey. But the mission came first. For now.

  The second guard hadn’t even noticed that anything was amiss. He continued to walk the perimeter of the fence, and would do so until he came to the spot where Sabretooth had torn his entrance, if Creed waited around for him to find it. He did not. The guard was, in fact, of so little concern to him that he didn’t even bother to kill the man. He loped silently across the compound to the first of the ramshackle tent buildings and sniffed at the air.

  Gun oil and cordite on the slight breeze, along with sweat and beer. More than likely, they were all asleep, but they had their weapons nearby, ready for a war with invisible enemies at any time. A wry grin, malevolently punctuated by fangs, stretched across Creed’s features. Their paranoia had finally borne fruit. The invisible enemy had arrived.

  Sabretooth continued past the flimsy structures toward the main building. Even that, despite its wooden frame, was shabby at best. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in, he thought. Victor Creed had always rooted for the wolf, even as a child.

  The wind shifted, and he caught a scent behind him. He heard a cough and the sound of a zipper sliding down. One of the terrorists emerged from the tent to relieve himself. Creed spun and spotted the man, just behind him. All the militia man had to do was look up and the alarm would be sounded.

  Sabretooth sprinted at him, his speed extraordinary. Too soon, the man glanced idly up and his eyes widened in terror. Creed swung a hand, claws extended, to tear out the man’s throat. But he was too late to stop the scream. Even as the terrorist’s corpse hit the ground, the cries of alarm rose up from within the tents. Lanterns came on, guns clattered as their magazines were checked. The guard at the gate came running up behind him, spotted him, but held his fire for fear of shooting into the tents.

  He considered simply killing the guard, and taking his weapon. But for Sabretooth, the days of bullets and blades had long since passed. A kill wasn’t even worth counting if he didn’t do it with his own hands or teeth.

  “Intruder!” the guard screamed. “Kill him!”

  Sabretooth sneered at the armed fool. Obviously, Arizona was one place where his reputation did not precede him. The first of the terrorists his presence had awoken exited through the open canvas flap that served as a door for the flimsy structure, automatic rifle in hand. Creed had disarmed him and torn open his chest in a heartbeat. He spun the man around and ran him back into the shelter. Bullets punched into the injured man almost immediately, and his feet stopped propelling him along. Sabretooth shoved him forward into his comrades, blocking their weapons for a vital moment longer.

  Then he was on them, clawing and ripping, snapping and crushing. Ten of them, perhaps twelve. Creed lost count after the fourth or fifth.

  Inside the wooden house, not much more than a shed, in truth, Aaron Pirkle panicked. Frantic, he slipped his pants on and picked up his treasured ArmaLite rifle. It could empty its twenty-round clip in just over a second. Aaron grabbed two more clips and shoved them in his pockets. He nearly stumbled as he scurried in a crouch across the room, taking care to avoid being seen through a window. He turned and hissed at Cindee to follow him.

  “Aaron?” Cindee LaMagdeleine inquired in a frightened little girl’s voice that he’d once found quite seductive. Now it merely annoyed him.

  “Shut up,” he hissed, “and follow me. It’s like Waco all over again. Don’t you get it, you little twit? The feds are here, and they’re going to kill us all. Me and you’ve got to get out of here with the bug, hook up with one of the other militias, and start over. It can still work.”

  Pirkle scuttled another few steps and turned to scold her again. She startled him, she was so close, and his heart skipped a beat. He’d no idea she could move so swiftly, so quietly.

  “Don’t call me a twit,” she whispered, but Pirkle wasn’t paying any attention. Outside there were shouts of anger and alarm, screams of agony, pleas for mercy. The rapid fire of automatic weapons slowed, and after a few moments, stopped altogether. Every ten seconds or so, a renewed burst would begin, but stop almost as suddenly.

  His men were being slaughtered.

  “Aaron?” Cindee asked, and he hushed her again.

  “Come on,” he whispered, and they moved to the rear of the building, where a hinged plank opened easily. They slipped through, and the open desert lay before them.

  “Hold this,” he said, handing Cindee the ArmaLite.

  Pirkle knelt down behind the building and began to scoop dirt from a depression even a tracker would have been hard pressed to notice.

  “It’s nighttime,” he said. “About four miles due west is the road. We can’t afford to take a car from here, but I’ve got a Harley hidden by Sandcastle Butte. We’ll be okay if we can just reach that.”

  Aaron slid a small metal case about the size of a child’s lunch box from the ground and brushed it off. It was sealed tightly to avoid contamination, but he didn’t have to open it to know what was in there. His ticket to the big time. His place in history.

  The ArmaLite’s muzzle poked painfully at the back of his head.

  “Don’t even breathe,” Cindee said, but the plaintive, little girl tone was gone from her voice.

  Sabretooth had cleared himself a path, but the SFM had more members than he’d thought. And they got smarter as more of them died. Now they were waiting for him to make a break for the main building so they could pick him off. Little did they know that he could smell each and every one of them with a little focus. Could hunt them, one by one, even if it took until morning.

  But he wouldn’t. Let them shoot, he thought. It wasn’t far to the building, and his true objective was there. His passion for violence had been sated for the moment. Creed was bored with the killing.

  From the shadows near a shanty, he sprang into the open area around the headquarters. Instantly, several of the terrorists appeared and began to fire on him. He moved too fast for most of them, but not all. Sabretooth didn’t even wince as the bullet clipped his side.

  “Not another step, Creed!” a voice shouted.

  Sabretooth looked up, ready to strike. He didn’t like to take orders from anyone. His lips curled back from his fangs, and he saw Aaron Pirkle, the leader of the SFM, holding an ArmaLite automatic rifle and a small metal case that he knew must contain the germ. His goal.

  He almost lunged forward and slaughtered Pirkle right there. But something forced him to stop. Something … a scent.

  “Cease fire, all of you, and come out!” Pirkle shouted. “I want you to see what kind of animal we’ve caught in our midst.”

  Slowly, and most of them doubtfully, the few surviving terrorists began to emerge. There were nine of them, including Pirkle. Each had a British SA-80 assault rifle aimed at Creed, but he paid no attention to their weapons.

  Sabretooth merely stared at Pirkle and the ArmaLite he held. The muzzle of the terrorist leader’s weapon swung up to aim at Creed, and the bullets tore from its gullet. He grunted twice as twin holes were punched in his chest, burning embers in his body that passed through to the other side. Sabretooth went down hard.

  But Pirkle didn’t stop there. With his men all staring at the downed Sabretooth, the leader of the SFM slaughtered his own soldiers in cold blood, without even a single pause for remorse.

  Even as the corpses struck the ground, Creed was pulling himself to his knees. Blood flowed from his already closing wounds. Rapid healing was one of the genetic gifts of the mutant x-factor in his DNA. But bullets still hurt like hell.

  As he rose to his feet, Creed stared at Pirkle.

  “You shot me,” he growled dangerously.

  “A diversion,” Pirkle replied. “And b
esides, you were in the way.”

  “Don’t do it again,” Sabretooth snarled.

  “I’ll try to remember,” Pirkle said idly.

  Only it wasn’t Pirkle anymore. Face and body morphed fluidly, changing from Aaron Pirkle to someone else. From man to woman, human to mutant. Pale skin and fair hair to blue flesh and long auburn tresses. Her name was Raven Darkholme, also called Mystique. Along with Sabretooth, she was a former criminal, an enemy of the federal government, now enslaved in service to that very same enemy.

  Once, there had been something that bound them together. An intimacy neither was fond of recalling. Now they were merely reluctant teammates, each with bitter memories of the past.

  “I should have known they’d put you on this mission, too,” Creed growled. “What was I, just a threat to flush Pirkle out, make him reveal where he was hiding the germ?”

  “You’re not as primitive as you look,” Mystique purred, shouldering the ArmaLite and holding the metal case on her outthrust hip.

  “Savage, not primitive,” Creed agreed.

  “I replaced his little girlfriend Cindee yesterday,” Mystique explained. “Then it was just a matter of waiting. I could have simply tortured him, but they wanted to play things this way.”

  Something unspoken passed between them. A fury, really. For like Sabretooth, Mystique wore a potentially agonizing, possibly even fatal restraining collar. That, at least, they could share.

  “That’s mine! Give it back! You’ve stolen my place in history!” a shrill voice cried.

  Sabretooth glanced up to see the real Aaron Pirkle, clad only in long black pants and heavy boots, emerge from behind the main building. The man stumbled, blood dripping on his forehead. Sabretooth could smell the blood from where he stood, even with the wind relatively still.

  “You didn’t kill him?” Creed asked, surprised.