Operation Chaos

by Watkins, Richter

  He was silent for a moment, and whatever he was receiving from whatever source, it was getting him in a coiled frame of mind, the skin on his face tight.

  “We’re going to get off at the next exit,” Keegan said. “We have company, and they’re getting close.”

  “The black Charger?”

  “No.” He was touching his neck, looking then at a thin smartcard of some kind. “We have lots of additional company.”

  Then he seemed to be communicating with somebody.

  Keegan said, “They know we’re coming? We’ll be secure if we can get to the pickup point. Get ready to go—we’re going to ditch the van.”

  “On the freeway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what?”

  “Just do what I tell you to do.”

  She refrained from sarcasm, as this now was in a critical stage and she saw no good outcome.

  18

  The traffic was near a standstill. Keegan was getting ready to do something. She could only wait and see how this was going to play out.

  Rainee had lived much of her adult life both in combat zones and later on the edge of the dark, postwar world of America’s biggest internal problem: soldiers suffering from mental and physical wounds.

  She had both worked to fix the problem and yet build her entire career on those problems, and that was on some level the contradiction she now faced.

  She’d ignored the truth of what was really going on until the investigations. Now she was dropped into the middle of something she and many of her colleagues had feared.

  San Diego, one of the world’s premier military operations centers, also had many of the world’s top neuroscientists. It was the place to be. And a place to get caught up in DARPA research grants that fed all the major programs conducted by dozens of military contract companies in the area.

  With a huge biotech industry, it was ideal for brain-blast research, and there had been an ever-growing population of wounded warriors to provide subjects for testing electronic-stimulation advances, drug interactions, therapies of all kinds. It was the most exhilarating time for a neuroscientist like Rainee. Until now.

  Then Keegan said, “You ready?”

  “As I’m going to be.”

  Rainee, convinced of approaching disaster, stared ahead at the bottled-up traffic and wondered how crazy, how bloody, the end game would be. This was no TV hero next to her. No Hollywood character. This was an elite, metabolically enhanced warfighter—a killing machine. And she had not only saved him in Afghanistan but had, with her Z-chips, helped create what he was now.

  If investigators hadn’t come when they did, if her colleagues weren’t as nervous as they were, how far would she have taken it?

  In truth, she’d loved the program until it ensnared her in legal dilemmas.

  She remembered her mother telling her about the first time she landed her F-18 on the deck of a carrier. She said it was like a reverse orgasm. No outward sigh of relief. Instead, a powerful, somewhat painful, inward sense of survival and achievement. That’s how Rainee had felt about the advancements in neuroscience.

  Her killing-machine warrior was looking not only in his mirrors but in the air. Were they being tracked by drones?

  Helicopters?

  This is where it ends?

  And she was in the midst of those fears, riding toward riot-torn L.A. with something that had arrived a little early from the future.

  But he was distracted and not interested at the moment in her angst.

  Keegan maneuvered the van in and out of the slowing traffic and then rode the shoulder as he headed for an off-ramp ahead of them.

  She saw a car come fast down the on-ramp and surge up the shoulder. Here we go, she thought, her hand instinctively gripping the Glock.

  Keegan floored the van and they raced down the shoulder of the freeway at crazy speed, running over some debris that rocked them violently.

  He sideswiped a pickup truck, careened close to the guardrail, and then before they reached the off-ramp, a car ahead of them slowed and Keegan, trying to get through, sideswiped the car hard.

  But it forced them to miss the off-ramp and the traffic ahead was stopped dead.

  It ends here, she thought.

  Without warning, Keegan forced his way to the shoulder of the freeway, banging a pickup truck loaded with construction equipment out of the way, metal scraping metal, horns blaring.

  “Get ready to bail!” he said, his voice calm but stern. “Bring the weapon.”

  When another vehicle pulled off the road ahead of him, Keegan swung back out, causing more problems. He jumped out past that car on the shoulder, then pulled in front of it and stopped.

  “Let’s go.”

  19

  He grabbed his backpack and was out of the van before she had the door open.

  Rainee, weapon in hand, slid out the passenger side, shutting the door, and ignoring that rational part of her mind that told her to run the other way. Instead she hurried in a sprint to catch up with Keegan as he was about to go over the guardrail.

  Keegan glanced at the sky to the west.

  Rainee found the object of his concern, a chopper heading their way, but still a good distance away, a mosquito in the sky growing larger.

  Keegan went over the guardrail and she followed but then tried to hesitate because of the steep drop.

  He turned, grabbing her arm. “Go! Dammit, go!”

  She tried to get hold of some scrub as she slid, but he just pulled her and forced her to go sailing down with him.

  He had hold of her and cushioned her when they slammed into the bottom gravel and rolled up against a concrete wall.

  He picked her up. “Run!” he yelled. He turned and exchanged gunfire with somebody up on the highway.

  Rainee bent low and ran in a full sprint for the underpass as bullets snapped off the concrete walls. She ducked into cover, then looked back.

  One of their pursuers came down the embankment, slipping and falling as they had. Keegan shot the man before he could regain his feet.

  Cars going both directions under the tunnel spun, hitting one another until at least five cars were gathered up in the accidents.

  She followed Keegan as he ran on ahead out in the street. He stopped a Mercedes by pointing a gun at the driver while holding up his badge.

  The driver got out, hands in the air.

  To the driver, he said, “You’ll get your car back and an explanation. Call a cab and go home.”

  “Get in,” Keegan said. She did.

  “You hit?” Keegan asked as he slid his legs under the wheel, put the car in gear, and did a U-turn up on the sidewalk and back into the lane away from the freeway.

  “I don’t think so.”

  They tore down the street, wheels squealing, jumping lanes, cutting off cars at the intersection, so fast, it was like riding with a crazed NASCAR driver unleashed on city streets.

  Rainee looked back. There were no signs of pursuers.

  Keegan then slowed, slipped back into his zone, nodding to himself as he cut down a side street, then onto another main avenue.

  He said, “We’re going to be met when we get into the city by some of our people. Or they were.”

  She glanced over at Keegan. The “or they were” wasn’t exactly an encouraging notion.

  He cut down a side street that led onto Washington Boulevard in the lower belly of L.A. Almost no traffic now as they headed into the besieged city. He seemed to getting updates on which streets were closed ahead, forcing them down alleys, back to the boulevard, then onto another side street.

  He pulled one of his cards from his cargo pants, looked at it, and then put it back.

  When they reached Alameda Street, he turned off and stopped. “From here, we’re on foot.”

  Five. She’d been running at five in the morning. That she was still running was enough to make her laugh. But seeing men die around her, and maybe more to come, took some of the levity out of it. The r
abbit hole she’d gone down was getting darker and more dangerous by the minute.

  20

  They abandoned the Mercedes and headed on foot into a sketchy southwest fringe of downtown as the sun, blocked by the smoky sky, cloaked the city in a false twilight. The acrid tinge of burning rubber greeted them with its harsh burn in the nostrils and throat.

  Rainee knew much of this area from having come here during Stand Down projects, those desperate attempts to get vets off the streets. Most of the programs ended up abject failures. Too little, too late.

  When they turned onto a main street, she saw smoke tendrils in the distance rising from numerous fires. Circling the buildings below like bugs, several layers of choppers and, no doubt, drones.

  What looked like a roaming gang emerged from an alley a block ahead of them, like thugs from a dystopian Hollywood flick.

  Keegan steered her down a side street behind old warehouses. They cut up toward Olympic Boulevard and they came on what appeared to be a flash mob.

  Keegan checked out the clip in his 9mm and she did the same, not wanting to get into a shootout but not willing to be taken down either.

  “That’s how it will start,” he said.

  “It?”

  “Everything.”

  He didn’t follow up.

  They crossed a debris-laden street and traveled up the sidewalk.

  In this violent arena, she was happy to be at the side of a walking Samurai sword, compliments of advanced-warfighter technology.

  They paused. She waited as he did his thing, listening to whatever was coming across his inbuilt grid.

  Rainee said, “I think it’s time I know who we’re going to meet?”

  “Bad boy Billy Metzler.”

  “Metzler!”

  “The one and only?” Keegan gave her a look.

  Billy Metzler was one of her most interesting patients and one of the most decorated of Seals. When he disappeared from her project, she thought she’d never see him again. He was functioning well enough to go into one of those high-end private security teams he wanted to join that guarded ships in pirate-infested waters off Africa. Instead, he apparently had gone into Raab’s world. “What’s going on with him?”

  “That’s what you’re here to find out. He suddenly decided to go rogue on us. He’s got control of a huge part of the L.A. vet homeless. Running his own show. And there are others showing signs of some kind of meltdown.”

  She’d created the template for the Z1 and Z2 and the theoretical base for Z3 that was, apparently, no longer theoretical. It had been used before it was ready. It was like everything she’d worked for, dreamed of, had been taken from her and turned into something never intended.

  They moved forward, but a bit slower now. The glow of fires laced the sky above L.A.’s office buildings.

  Just as they were coming to an intersection, Keegan hesitated, his hand signaling her to back away.

  She saw the three men clad in black who had come out of nowhere.

  Keegan showed his semi-auto to the newcomers. “Move out! Salir de aqui!”

  The young men took one look at him and his weapon and decided there was nothing worth dying for and slid off into the shadows.

  Then Keegan led her down a narrow side street across from old train yards, Keegan’s backpack slung on one shoulder, the gun in his hand along his thigh.

  She hoped nobody tried anything with this guy. They wouldn’t live to tell their family about it.

  Two men at the next intersection gave some kind of signal like they knew who Keegan was and were apparently expecting him.

  They followed the men to a place where groups of homeless were gathered.

  She was in a new world. One that wasn’t a surprise. She’d known these worlds in San Diego, in L.A., and knew they were in every major city in America.

  They had formed a tent and cardboard-box city in every back crevice and on the sidewalks, a world apart.

  With nearly three million vets back from the longest wars in American history, and over half a million suffering with various levels of TBI and PTSD, they had overwhelmed the bureaucratic, corrupted mess that the VA had become.

  And these lost soldiers were forming massive underground communities. L.A. was home to the largest population of homeless vets in the nation, and maybe far more than they had any way to count.

  Even more daunting, when contractors, who outnumbered veterans in the wars, were added, along with the regular homeless, the numbers were staggering. Numbers nobody wanted to look at, let alone deal with. Now it was coming back to haunt the society that didn’t bother to reintegrate them or give them the therapeutics they needed.

  She and Keegan waited what seemed like a long time for the clearance. When it finally came, they followed these men, who were soon joined by a half dozen others.

  One of them turned now as they approached. Thin, yet a big-shouldered Latino. He smiled and said, “Doctor Hall.”

  She was close enough now to realize she knew this man well. “Sergeant Duran?”

  He nodded. “Indeed. How are you, Doc?”

  “I’m good,” she said. “You disappeared without so much as a goodbye note. I was worried about you.”

  “Sorry about that, Doc.” Duran turned to the man with him. “This is the Doc that Mora brags on, who trained up a new generation of combat field-medic procedures that saved a hell of a lot of people.”

  “Danny Mora is here?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Duran said. “He’ll be thrilled to see you.”

  “Where’s Metzler?” Keegan asked.

  Another man stepped out of the dark. He was flanked by heavily armed men and obviously somebody of importance in this world.

  He came up to Rainee. “Metzler’s dealing with something. He’s nearby. He’s looking forward to talking to you.”

  I’ve found them, Rainee thought. She was thrilled yet also filled with apprehension as to what “they” now were. An eager intensity surged through her that was almost overwhelming. Her lost patients weren’t lost.

  To her, they were extended family. She could hardly wait to see Metzler. Her interest wasn’t talking him down, it was finding out what was really going on.

  “What’s he dealing with?” Keegan asked Duran.

  “One of your Blacksnake assassin teams is in the immediate area. Metzler wants them out of here.”

  “They’re independent of me,” Keegan said with some snap to his voice. “Take me to Metzler.”

  Rainee wasn’t happy to hear that exchange.

  Again she was forced to wait. Already the false twilight was giving way to the real coming darkness, both in the sky and in her mind.

  Her dilemma was growing bigger by the moment. What if she couldn’t talk Metzler down? Or didn’t want to? What would happen then? What if she decided with Metzler and against Keegan and his bosses.

  She hadn’t had a lot of time to think things through, but now that she did, there were no clear options. She wanted to help her former patients if they were having serious problems with the chip sets, but at the same time, she didn’t want to help them simply to make them better soldiers in whatever madness was being orchestrated by Raab and his powerful friends.

  Rainee smiled sardonically to herself. She was clearly in an impossible situation.

  Be careful where you go jogging, she told herself with a sense of dark sarcasm. Yet, being who and what she was, and what her obsessions were, she wasn’t unhappy to be here within striking distance of finding out what had happened to her soldiers and what was going down. She assumed the worst knowing Lester Raab was at the center.

  21

  Duran rejoined her and they moved out with the staggered discipline of a combat patrol down an empty, dark backstreet of this city under siege.

  More men emerged, made hand signals, and then disappeared. To the newest of enhanced warfighters, voice and hand signals were obsolete. But here on the backstreets of L.A., that level of sophistication only existed in a few, w
hose very thoughts could be transmitted from one to another.

  Rainee, her weapon tucked in her running pants, her shirt pulled over it, felt like she was in a combat zone.

  Everywhere they went, street to alley, she felt the presence of Duran near her at all times. Her bodyguard.

  Keegan had vanished some time ago. She assumed he was dealing with Metzler.

  Unlike other big cities, the center of downtown L.A. was never considered to be the real heart of the city until the renovation of the Staples Center.

  For a long time, when she was a student at UCLA, the trendy places were Brentwood, Hollywood, Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and Westwood. They were the real L.A. Downtown was always looked on by many as a kind of Third World city where English was rarely spoken except in the big business buildings. That perception changed with the changing demographics and the endless stream of homecoming vets. Downtown, on the way to becoming increasingly uptown, was now in the hands of something very different.

  They stopped. Duran had a finger on his earpiece. He then turned to her. “Making sure we’re clear. There are dozens of gangs in the city and we don’t control them all.”

  By we, she assumed he meant Metzler.

  Just as they were moving again, gunfire broke out somewhere ahead.

  “This way,” Duran said, directing her down an alley behind a warehouse and back out onto the street. Now they were quickstepping, almost in a jog.

  Three men emerged from the dark ahead. One of them came forward and spoke with Duran in Spanish. She couldn’t see him in the dark, but then he came over to her.

  “Hello, Doc.”

  “Danny Mora,” Rainee said, a big smile on her face as she shook hands with the former combat medic. “Haven’t seen you since the Stand Down projects.”

  “Pleasure’s all mine,” Mora said, smiling back. “We’ll have a reunion talk in a bit.” He hesitated, touching his earpiece, and then said, “Right now, I have to go. But it’s real great to see you.” He turned to Duran. “Take good care of the doc.”