Run image sequence. Julia, this time. Don’t push too hard.
Ian felt like he was choking. Run! Can’t move. His mouth was being spread open, his teeth clamped on a bite block.
Lights flashed on. Spiders. Where did they come from? Crawling out of the goggles into his eyes. Digging. Pain. A bat. Menacing. Had to get out of here. His eyes blinked to clear the sweat.
Heart rate 155.
Then he stood in the clouds looking down. He was going to fall. He rocked the chair to stabilize himself. I want my Mum! No! The knife was moving closer. Where was he?
Increase the current to 300 microamps. Use interleaved recording.
He felt his footing giving loose. The knife was in his throat. He could feel the doctor’s glove against his tongue. “Ahhh!” Ian cried out weakly. A sharp pain, like liquid fire in his throat.
Drowning. Couldn’t get air. Sinking. Blood in his mouth. He tried to buck, to fight back, but his muscles were paralyzed. The hand in his mouth, twisting, cutting.
We’ve got it. Shut it down. Julia.
Give me a sec, Chang said. This is perfect. Increase to 350 microamps.
Couldn’t stop them. Out of control. Searing pain. Couldn’t breathe. Drowning in blood. His throat. Nooo! I said, stop it!
Heart rate 170.
Stop it!
This is crucial data, Julia. Too valuable. Increase to 400 microamps.
The memory changed, like a TV changing channels.
Crouched behind a rock. Machine gun fire all around him. They found us! We’re going to die. Hold your ground, soldier! He could taste blood in his throat. Sharp pain.
New clusters in frontal lobe. Right dorsomedial.
Chang. Stop it! That’s too much current – you’re going to fry those cells! That’s an order.
But we need this.
Now!
Ian jerked with the impact of the bullets. He screamed.
Negative current. Reduce to 200 microamps.
Cold sweat. Ian reached up and ripped the goggles off his face, threw them against the wall. He blinked, took a deep breath. He could see Julia, her face flushed. Chang slouched behind the desk with a sullen look, typing in the computer. The nightmare snapped off like a light switch in his mind. He looked at his hands, still shaking.
#
“Check it out, Ian. She wants you, man. ” Kendall took a swig from his bottle of Fat Tire. “Must be the tenth time she’s tried to catch your eye.”
“She’ll have to come get it.”
“What about her friend? Think I’ve got a shot?”
“Anything’s possible.”
Ian stared down at his glass. Did they have to put the bloody lime on the glass? Not a single bar in Adams Morgan with a decent gin and tonic. Practically have to ask them not to put an umbrella in. He was looking forward to getting back to Africa. Still felt like home in so many ways.
“We ship out tomorrow,” Kendall said. “Nice ass to remember. One checking you out isn’t bad, either.”
“Yeah, tomorrow.” Ian took a drag on the cigar, then put it back on the ashtray.
Today had been physical labor, running through mud and an obstacle course. He was wrung out, but that was just muscle fatigue, no big deal. It had been a welcome relief from the mind games of the last few days. And yesterday, that memory of his tonsillectomy, dredged up from God knows where.
“What do you make of the briefing?” Kendall asked.
Ian raised an eyebrow.
“Come on. You think that lard at the next table is a Blackwing spy? You want to go talk in a soundproof room?”
Ian mulled it over. “I think Markov’s full of shit.”
Kendall leaned in. “I’ve told you that from the beginning.”
“But he’s smart and full of shit. Don’t underestimate him. He’s been doing this for twenty years. He was a real agent. Walked in our shoes not too long ago.”
“So why won’t he tell us anything?” Kendall took another swig of beer, then shook his head. “I just got a bad feeling about it.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know.”
Kendall lowered his voice again. “He doesn’t know? Come on. They’re not going to send us out with this kind of intel without knowing. Infiltrate a military base? Don’t know who owns it. Don’t know what they’re doing there. But it sure as hell is important. So we’re risking not one, but two of our best with ten million dollars in technology to go chase it?”
“You heard Markov. This comes from way over his head. Even CIA Director Price didn’t seem to know much more. I hear he’s taking orders directly from Sarah Redd.”
“The Director of National Intelligence? She’s involved?”
Ian shrugged.
“Say she is. So it’s important. All the more reason to give your guys the full scoop. I don’t even know what to look for.”
“Need to know, brother. Need to know.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“You’re wasting your time, second-guessing these political types,” Ian said. “They’re all full of it. Every last one of them. And if you think too much, you get that way too.”
“So it’s just ‘sir, yes sir’ with you? You’re not worried?”
“That’s our job. Sir, yes sir.” He took another drag on the cigar. “We’ve had worse.”
Kendall nodded. He buried his short, black hair in his hands and massaged his temples, then looked up with a grin. “Telling you man, she wants you.”
Ian smiled back. “You never get sick of this do you? The hunt. Women.”
“Sir, no sir.”
Chapter Three:
Ian Westhelle was equipped with fifty thousand dollars, two fake passports, a small arsenal of weaponry, and nagging thoughts that he might not live through the day.
“You good?” Kendall Rose shouted over the noise of the truck.
Ian had known Kendall for nearly fifteen years, had known him in Los Angeles in high school, before the two had joined the Green Berets after a stint with the Rangers, then taken positions with the CIA. It had been an odd friendship, with Ian the white South African son of a militant racist and Kendall the son of a black U.S. army major.
“Ja, boet! Why?” Ian hit a pothole and almost slammed their heads into the roof.
“Seems like you’re treating each pothole as a personal insult. It’s okay to drive around the big ones, you know.”
“Just anxious,” Ian said over the sound of the engine revving as he downshifted to climb a hill. “We’ve been driving all day at fifteen miles an hour. Sooner we get there the better.”
“Take it easy, last thing we need is another bent axle. And anyway, GPS says we’re two miles from the checkpoint, if intel’s good.”
It was just past dusk and the heat bled from the air here where the Skeleton Coast met Kaokoland in Namibia’s northern interior. They’d gone from sweltering to windows up and chilly in less than an hour. The terrain passed from scrub to hardpan, to huge red dunes, back to scrub. The headlights reflected the eyes of animals that watched from the shoulder of the road.
Six hours since they’d seen another vehicle. There was a direct route to the camp. This wasn’t it.
Ian glanced at Kendall, who was bent over a map with a flashlight. “Now where the hell is that wash? We’ve got to ditch these .50 cals before we meet our new friends. Grenades, mines, all of it’s got to go.”
Ian’s attention jerked back to the road as he swerved around another hole in the road. When he turned his head, it felt like a ghost image would follow a second later. Like he’d had one too many gin and tonics. Even when he stopped moving, he had the sense that someone else was steering the truck. Was that the implant, or damage to his brain? He shook it off. Implant wasn’t even on – wouldn’t be unless he activated it. He was just being paranoid.
He reached a hand to his scalp, just above the hairline. The skin was raised, still sore and itchy. His first memory after the surgery was Dr. Julia Nolan bending over him to adjust his mask.
He remembered feeling blinded by the bright lights, floating, consciousness creeping in around the edges. Some part of his disinhibited brain must have decided that now was a good time to make an ass of himself. “You have fabulous breasts, Dr. Nolan.”
She laughed. “You don’t know anything about my breasts. That’s just the isoflourane speaking.”
“No, really. I can totally see down your blouse.”
Julia stood quickly and adjusted her scrubs. He imagined that she was blushing, but his vision was still cloudy around the edges and he couldn’t tell for sure. Julia was almost as much fun to tease as that tight little nurse who did the blood draws in the clinic. Ian made a mental note to hook up with the nurse when he got back.
He’d had surgery once before, after taking shrapnel in Afghanistan. Couldn’t remember a thing, just waking up in the hospital with pain in his knees, asking for drugs. Why could he remember so much this time–was it the implant?
Kendall folded up the map. “You keep scratching at your head and you’re going to get us killed.”
“Thought the implant was undetectable.”
“Sure, unless you draw attention to it. Look, this is it.”
Ian stopped the Land Rover and killed the engine and lights. The two men got out and moved around to the back of the truck. The sounds of the desert came into sudden focus, a variety of whistles, croaks, and screams. Something heavy moved in the brush to their right. The two immediately flanked the truck, gazing from opposite sides over the brush-covered dunes.
“Nice,” Kendall said. “Fly all the way to Africa only to get eaten by lions.”
“Probably just an antelope, brother,” Ian said.
They each hefted one of the eighty-pound .50 caliber machine guns and struggled up the hillside from the wash. A veil of stars draped across the sky. There was no moon, but the light was enough, with occasional use of the flashlight.
Intel was good. From the top of the hill they could see the lights blinking on the desert camp. Their target. Technically, the M2 could reach the camp from here with a sniper scope and ball ammo, but that wasn’t the plan. They had come to infiltrate and reconnoiter. The weapons—well, that was just good planning.
They returned to the Land Rover and retrieved the tripods, the ammunition, and the various mines and grenades they’d picked up outside of Windhoek. There was no logo on the green duffel that held the spare magazines. No trace, no names. It took several trips.
“SOCOM have a cache in South Africa? Where’d all this crap come from?” Ian asked.
“You know as much as I do. Markov didn’t tell me a thing.”
“Got to be local. Nearest base is in Djibouti.”
“SOCOM’s got tentacles in every cesspool in Africa.”
“Easy brother. You’re talking about my home.”
Kendall hefted a box of .50 cal ammo. “Djibouti? You gonna do that, you may as well ship it down from the moon. There are covered units all over southwest Africa. What do you bet CIA talked to State, who hooked up with AFRICOM?”
Officially, Ian knew, the State Department took the lead at AFRICOM, the recently established joint military command structure for Africa. It’s mission was officially diplomatic influence and assistance for African governments and militaries. But over the last few years, the U.S. had negotiated joint training and counter-narcotic missions that had quietly introduced U.S. troops and aircraft into smaller bases outside the larger, more visible presence in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. Special Operations Command—SOCOM—may own the good stuff, but AFRICOM was the CIA’s tool for getting at those resources.
“I’d hoped for more info once we hit the ground,” Kendall said. “All I know is that there is a serious military presence here, and we’re supposed to find out why.”
“Hey, don’t look at me. I’m just a grunt. You’re the one with the brains, the authority. Course, nobody asked me, or I’d have told them you were bosbefok.”
“Screw you,” Kendall said in a good-natured tone.
Ian followed Kendall up the hill with the last of the ordinance in a duffel bag.
On the way back down, another animal crashed through the brush just off to their right, which gave Kendall a start.
“Dammit, that’s freaking me out,” he said. “Isn’t it freaking you out?”
“Not really, no.”
Ian had an African body. Didn’t matter that he hadn’t set foot on the continent for fifteen years—God, was that half his life?—he’d felt it as soon as the two men queued at customs with their fake passports.
The English spoken in Namibia wasn’t quite the same as what they spoke in Cape Town or Johannesburg, but it was close enough and in only two days his accent had blossomed like the Veld after a heavy rain. The feeling only grew as they drove north and the smell of sand and brush came in through the open windows with the dust that soon covered everything and everyone.
They’d stopped at a roadside mechanic north of Walvis Bay, on the Skeleton Coast to repair an axle damaged by one too many slogs through dry washes.
The mechanic—a mixed-race South African—warned them of bandits on the road, not knowing that the two men carried enough firepower to wipe out every bandit between Cairo and Cape Town.
“Tree kilos down za drag. Zay got a broke-down bakkie and zu’ll tryin’ a stop ye fer help.
“Thanks, broer.”
“What was that you guys were speaking? Afrikaans?” Kendall had asked when they were back on the road.
Ian had thought at first that Kendall was making a joke. But the look of confusion was genuine. “That was English.”
#
Kendall grabbed Ian’s arm as soon as they climbed back into the truck. “You okay? Seriously.”
“I’ve just felt a little weird since the surgery, that’s all.”
“You mean the really intense dreams? Yeah, I’ve had them too.”
“What dreams? No.” Ian shook his head. “I can’t explain, I feel like I’m not in control. Out of sorts.”
“Julia said there’d be side effects,” Kendall said. “When the brain gets unexpected information it makes shit up, like a dream. But it’s not supposed to happen unless the implant is receiving data or running a program.”
They’d had weeks of exhaustive, fourteen-hour days to train both the implant and the brain. There had been everything from mental puzzles, to reading aloud, to the endless hours of watching small drifting lines through specialized goggles. They’d learned how to activate the implant through a series of complex finger taps or put it in modified sleep state, a highly compressed data mode during periods like this, when there was little to record. They’d learned that electrical interference from muscle contractions interfered with data recording, that for recording important information they should remain as still as possible.
There had been plenty of physical training, too, but it was the mental stuff that left him exhausted, wrung out by the end of the day. Not that he’d have mouthed a word of complaint to Dr. Nolan, who they’d started to call Julia even before the surgeries.
Julia must have known how much it took out of them. She pulled a few strings, got a 58” plasma TV brought into their lounge and convinced Markov to pay for a particularly well-endowed massage therapist who gave them a welcome break every afternoon.
With all that training, he shouldn’t be having any trouble now.
“But I’m not doing anything,” he told Kendall, “I’m not even in full record mode.”
“Maybe it’s just nerves. I can give you something to settle you down.”
“Nerves?” Ian scoffed. “After Tora Bora? I don’t feel nerves. Never have. Do you?”
“Of course. Especially after Tora Bora.”
They almost died on that mountain. Should have died. Friendly fire. That last JDAM had exploded and they’d have identified Ian and Kendall’s remains from bone fragments.
“You were scared,” Ian said.
“Damn right and I’m not
afraid to admit it.”
Kendall could talk all he wanted about being scared, or whatever emotion was on the surface. That wasn’t Ian’s style, so he surprised himself when he admitted, “Yeah, me too.”
He regretted saying it almost at once. So they’d both been scared in Afghanistan, almost killed in air strikes by American jets, so what? It was not the time or place for a bonding moment.
“Thing is,” Kendall said, “we haven’t been in combat since then and I don’t know, maybe something changed. Maybe you’re starting to think too hard.”
“I’m not thinking too hard,” Ian said. “That’s you, not me. No problem. Just get in the truck.”
“Fine, but I’m driving.”
Back in the Land Rover, they continued along the road toward the camp. Five minutes later, they connected with the main road, and shortly after that two bright lights swung from the side of the road to blind them through the windshield.
“Let’s go to full record,” Kendall said.
Training kicked in at once and Ian twitched the fingers on his left hand in sequence—thumb, pinkie, pinkie, index finger, thumb, pinkie—to toggle the implant to its highest recording state. As Ian looked around, he tried to make the rest of his body as motionless as possible.
Men with AK-47s stepped into the cone of light. One came to Kendall’s window and rapped on the glass. These were no bandits; they wore tan jackets and dark berets with a swooping black falcon embroidered on front. Blackwing contractors. Kendall rolled down the window.
“Do you have papers?” the man asked.
He had a French accent and a scar over his right eyebrow. It was Paul-Henri Dupont, formerly of French Special Forces.
He took their papers and studied them by flashlight before looking up with a nod. “Bill Jones and Dave Smith is it?” A snort, then a shrug. “Well, if recruitment was okay with those names, then so am I. You’re the African?” he looked at Kendall.
“No, that’s me,” Ian said.
“Afrikaner or English?”
“Father is Afrikaans, my mum is English.”
“White African, eh? We’ve got a few around here.” His voice was pleasant, reasonable. But Ian had read Dupont’s dossier and knew what the man was capable of.
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