Okay, you’re back, he tried to tell himself. She’s the solution to our problem. Take her to go to L.A. and she can deal with Metzler.
That’s what this was about. Convince Metzler to return to the Facility, where she could solve the problem they were having. That was the mission.
Yes. Okay.
Who had the assets been talking to after the last argument? The control would send a team! Protocol.
These and other seemingly random thoughts raged in his overheated brain as he turned back to the house.
No, he told himself. You will be okay. Fulfill your mission.
I’m trying to save Metzler and the ones who are Level Z3 enhancement, he reminded himself. I’m in control. This is my operation.
Soldier, get your act together. Keep focused, he commanded himself. The fate of your country is your mission.
He approached the porch and hesitated, facing a fierce inner debate that threatened to overwhelm him.
There is no argument, he insisted. Go on with the mission. He had to get her to Metzler in L.A. to bring him in. He wouldn’t deal with anyone else but the woman who’d been his neurosurgeon and mentor.
Nothing has changed, he told himself.
We need to do this before they have to send in Blacksnake teams to take Metzler down. That would trigger a war that would destroy not just L.A. but might threaten the whole national operation.
Seneca gathered himself. He knew that some of the metabolically enhanced features of his brain had issues, but he felt he could control them.
13
Rainee stared nervously at the bodies of the dead assets.
This is not good, she thought. He’s screwed up big time and he probably is going to have no choice in his mind but to blame me, kill me, and then create some kind of cover story.
She had to get free and get out of there. Being a witness to the death of two men by an efficient killing machine took away any confidence she had at making a positive connection to this guy.
She struggled frantically to get to the bodies and search for a knife. One of them had to have a knife and then, hands free, she could handle a gun.
Her wrists behind her had no give. Her ankles were likewise locked with a very good zip tie.
She moved in wiggles, adjusted, then worked over the body of the first man, pushing against him and realigning herself. She needed to get her hands and legs free before even considering going after one of their guns. But the idea of having to kill her greatest save didn’t sit well with her.
I’m sorry for any disrespect, she told the dead man. C’mon, you bastard. You have to have a knife.
She rolled over him onto the next body. Worked her way between them and struggled to find a knife in pockets, belts, but it was hard to move her arms, push her hands inside pockets.
Then she found a knife in one of the dead man’s front pockets. But even touching it with the tip of her fingers, she knew it was a folding knife. Getting it out, getting it open would be no easy task.
Then, between two dead men, she stilled for a moment, listening. She felt a growing panic.
You can do this. Be calm, sweetpea, you’re a fucking soldier and a neurosurgeon. You live at the top of the can-do food chain.
She now thought she’d made a big mistake disturbing the dormant memories and emotions in this enhanced warfighter.
Her intent had been to get him to awaken to the past so she could communicate, but that had gone terribly wrong.
He represented the problem neuroscience and the military faced. This was no comic book future, no Hollywood fantasy of the future.
This was right now.
This was taking men who had been seriously damaged and using them as guinea pigs, building something they weren’t really ready to build and society wasn’t ready to deal with.
Rainee Hall believed absolutely at this moment that she would most likely soon be dead.
Finally, she worked the pocketknife to where she had her fingers on one hand holding it so she could pull the blade open with the other. But opening it and finding a way to cut the ties had, so far, cut only her hand.
Cool, calm, and collected. Get it together.
She swore bitterly to herself, fought off any panic, and struggled to get the blade locked somewhere so she could use it without having to hold it.
C’mon! C’mon, dammit!
Then she tried to get her feet buckled up behind her so she could grasp the knife with her heels, then run the zip ties on her wrists over the blade.
She finally managed to get the handle locked in her ankles and had enough leverage to get a little bit of cutting done.
But it was too late. The light creak of porch boards told her that the big cat was back.
I’m a dead woman, she thought.
And the bizarre reality was that she was going to be killed by a soldier she’d once saved.
He walked in and he didn’t look friendly. He saw her, the knife, what she’d tried to do.
14
Rainee, certain of imminent death, blurted out, “Your mission, soldier, doesn’t end because of this incident. You need to understand this. I’m not going to be killed by the man whose life I saved. That’s unacceptable. Unthinkable.”
That damn prosthetic eye fixed on her like a gun sight.
She squirmed away from the dead men, who were already emitting that death smell.
Then he glanced at the dead men, at the knife she’d left on the floor between them.
She said, attempting to stay in command voice, “You’re taking me to see one of my former patients that you say has a problem that I can help with. That is your mission. What happened here, with these men disobeying your orders, coming for me, forcing you to do what you had to do, doesn’t end the mission. It keeps the mission on track. I have to find out what is wrong with the soldier. That’s my job.”
He gave no response.
“C’mon, goddamnit, soldier, listen to me. You have to register this. You have to connect to me, to the mission, your mission.”
The tension pulled hard at the muscles in his face. He was struggling with what he’d done. And what he’d remembered. And what was now his next move.
Rainee said, “You know above all else that you can’t kill the person who saved your life. And you know you can’t quit on your mission to take me to the soldier, or soldiers, who are having problems with the Z-chips.”
He didn’t respond.
She pushed harder. “I pulled the bone fragments out of your damaged cerebrum. I kept the blood flowing. I kept the oxygen where it needed to be. I just hope whatever the cause you’re involved in, you won’t have any trouble with killing the person who saved your life.” She searched his face for some kind of emotional response, finding little. “I worked for days to do it. I worked with a fanaticism. I was determined. You fought to live, and I fought to keep you alive. Now we have something we have to do together.”
He nodded. “Yes, I know you. I know what you did for me. What you did for so many of us.”
“Then let’s do this together,” Rainee said, trying to be cool and calm.
He stared for a moment at the dead men, nodded to something in his mind, and then he pulled a straight-blade knife from his ankle holster.
Jesus! Rainee seized up. He came to her, cut her arms and then legs free of their restraints, and helped her feet.
“This is a mess,” he said. “You coming to L.A. with me to deal with the problem?”
He’s asking, not telling me?
“Yes,” she said, saying it with a note of absolutism, yet she still hadn’t taken much of a breath.
Now she did. As he stripped the men of their weapons, cell phones, and a key ring and grabbed his backpack, leaving the syringe and bottle on the floor, she realized she wasn’t kidding. He was the door she had to go through to find out what happened to those patients of hers.
“Hey,” she said as they left the back room, “I need the bathroom before we leave.”
Rainee quickly emptied her bladder, washed her hands, looked at herself in the mirror, then glanced at the half-open window.
Then she looked at the door lock, thinking she could lock the door, get out the window, run like hell to the street, and flag down whatever traffic was there. She could make the break that she’d been trying to make.
Did he allow this purposely? Did he want her to run?
Rainee Hall stared at the window and told herself to be reasonable, take what he had offered, just go, get the hell out of there.
Sixty seconds or so later, she found herself following her kidnapper out of the house into a walled-in backyard. It was like he never even considered that she would actually run. Or felt she should at least have the opportunity. But she favored the former. He knew she wasn’t going anywhere if there was a chance to find her missing soldiers. The ones she’s worked so hard with, and then they just vanished on her. Now she wondered if they went voluntarily or were kidnapped. And what, then, happened to them?
She knew her logic for going with this killing machine, her way of thinking, was not rational by any normal civilian standard of sanity. But in her world, it was the only right decision. You don’t lose your people and you don’t leave them behind. Simple as that. Neuroscientist, combat surgeon, lecturer, soldier.
He clicked to open the doors of the van as they approached across the desiccated, grassless lawn.
The sun told her they were already heading into late morning. It surprised her that she’d been in that house for so long.
As they approached the van he said, “Doctor Raab has great admiration for you, for your work.”
A very odd thing to say, she thought. Like it was present tense, when in fact Lester Raab had been dead for years.
She replied, “Well, we had our disagreements for sure. When he died, I wasn’t sure if that was a loss or gain for civilization. I remember hearing about the boating accident and I didn’t really react. I didn’t know how to react.”
“He’s not dead,” her kidnapper said.
What the hell was this? “Doctor Raab, the neurosurgeon?”
“Yes. He’s very much alive.” Johnny Cash opened the driver’s side door. “All the men, the TBIs who disappeared, were taken into the program at the Facility run by Doctor Raab. That’s where we’re going after we bring our problem in.”
Rainee was so shocked, she didn’t know for a moment how to react. This was crazy. “You’re not talking about the advanced warfighter program?”
“I am. He and the program are very much alive.”
Rainee stood for a moment holding the door open, trying to get her mind around this and having a great deal of difficulty. This rabbit hole she’d been pulled down into was getting crazier by the minute.
She then climbed into the passenger seat as her kidnapper, her former patient, the miracle save, got behind the wheel and started the engine.
That Raab was alive and his program still operational, and this soldier was part of Raab’s world, a product of that world, was beyond stunning.
She had, under heavy questioning at the congressional hearings, admitted that there was enormous pressure from the military to push research into the future of war fighting beyond any oversight.
There were so many programs, some so dark that using former soldiers as guinea pigs was almost a given and the fundamental reason she’d turned against them.
Her testimony had been very honest and had been accepted as such. Her record, her military background, and her military parents kept her free of condemnation.
Nice, but apparently, it hadn’t eliminated the experimental activity by some of her colleagues and some of the secret programs under DARPA.
Doctor Raab, her sometime associate, was the one they were really after, but his reported death ended that investigation.
But that was then, and right now, she was in the passenger seat of the van she’d been kidnapped in with a man who was both the past and the future.
He didn’t leave yet. He was receiving some sort of input. He touched his wrist. He pulled out what looked like a smartphone from his pants, something no doubt much more sophisticated than anything available on the market. He stared at it and then put it in his shirt pocket.
She didn’t get where he was. But he looked tense.
“We’re likely going to have company real soon,” he said. “The assets’ pickup team is coming to check out what the problem is. They’ve been warned and now can’t get in contact with the assets, so they’ll assume the worst and come in hard.”
She didn’t bother asking him to explain how control knew. This was not the normal world.
Well, Rainee thought, if I have to be with somebody under extreme threat, this guy is probably the best I could ask for.
She was still so stunned by the idea that Lester Raab was alive and well and running some secret program that she had a hard time focusing on the looming crisis they might be dealing with.
At the same time, she couldn’t avoid being excited at finally getting answers about her former patients. Even if she wasn’t going to like those answers.
15
When he pulled out of the enclosed yard into an alley and turned onto a narrow street, Rainee realized they were in Barrio Logan. Below San Diego’s downtown buildings and the Coronado Bridge lay directly in front of them. And the I-5 freeway.
“How long did you work with Doctor Raab?” he asked as he turned onto 28th Street, heading down to I-5.
She thought that was an odd question given the circumstances, so matter-of-fact, like they were heading to a picnic at the park. “About three years, right up until the investigations and hearings started to get serious.”
“The congressional investigations where you turned on Doctor Raab?”
“Yes. I did. He was a problem. But before they could bring him in to testify, his yacht was found empty floating twenty miles out to sea. He was presumed dead. That metabolic-enhancement program was shut down.”
“Well, he’s alive and well,” Lima Nine Four said as he eased slowly to the alley, “and so is the program.”
“Where?”
“The Facility, as we call it. It’s in Baja a few miles south of Tijuana.”
For all that he was a product of science, the military, that he’d kidnapped her and killed his assets, there was an appreciation, given where he’d been after the disaster that nearly killed him, for how functional the guy was. How enhanced. He was like the poster boy for the entire advanced-warfighter program.
He held up his hand and said, “Keep an eye on the intersecting roads. It’ll be a black Charger.”
A car shot out of a side street and turned toward them, a black Dodge Charger. It attempted to block the street, but her kidnapper swerved up on the sidewalk, knocked aside a shopping cart with someone’s belongings, and swerved back out onto the street and raced down the hill toward I-5.
She looked back in the side-view mirror. They had gotten a few blocks’ separation, but a van had no chance against a Charger.
Rainee held on as they barreled down the street, weaving around traffic, blowing through an intersection toward the on-ramp.
Rainee caught a last glimpse of the Coronado Bridge, which curved high across the bay to one of the most important bases in America’s arsenal: the Naval Amphibious Base, home of multiple Seal teams, Special Boat Team 12, and the Naval Special Warfare group. A place that was close to her in so many ways because it was where many of her patients had been trained. And where many of her military and intel contacts were. What would they think of this?
Johnny Cash took the van down the on-ramp to the freeway like coming off a sled run and then merged and slowed. Then he took another device from his pocket and did a bit of what appeared to be some sort of messaging.
All the while he was holding the wheel with his left hand, passing cars, changing lanes
in the treacherous curves past the downtown and Little Italy turnoffs as he worked the instrument in his right hand.
The road straightened now as they passed the airport and headed north towards L.A.
They passed the La Jolla exits. Traffic was heavy but moving at a good pace going north. Her driver was tracing the mirrors and speeding up, passing, getting some offended horns. Then he suddenly slowed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Highway patrol,” he said.
She looked everywhere ahead and behind and saw nothing until they passed an off-ramp and then an on-ramp and, sure enough, a motorcycle cop shot down and headed up the freeway ahead of him, the chip sitting ramrod straight, as all highway motorcycle patrolmen did.
The reality that everything that had plagued her over the past years about missing patients, men with severe TBI, now had an answer that meant she was going to stay with this enhanced soldier regardless of the risks. It was her program that had started the Z series. She had a responsibility to see where it went, even if she’d opposed the overreach.
“There’s a weapon under the seat,” Johnny Cash said. “In case we get into a bad situation.”
She looked over at him. Was he for real, or was this a test? No, he was serious. He wanted her to have a weapon! It was like the man who’d kidnapped her and shot his assets had flipped a switch. She was, apparently, and maybe, actually, his partner.
When Rainee reached under the seat and pulled out a flat container, she found inside an H&K laser nine with advanced infrared tracker. It was a beautiful weapon and exclusive to the most elite forces. It had a technology that allowed the shooter to lock onto a target and control the targeting.
“You okay?” he asked.
“So far,” she said with a bit of a sardonic bite. She checked the clip and chamber. “I’m not shooting at law enforcement under any circumstances.”
Operation Chaos Page 5