Operation Chaos (11 page)

Were Metzler’s men trying to shoot the chopper down?

Duran had his finger on his earpiece, then said, “Doc, follow me. You’re going to meet Metzler. Then I think we’re going to get out of Dodge before they get more teams in and we get into a real war.”

“What about Keegan?” she asked.

“He’ll have to come with us.”

“Where?”

“Downriver. Problem is, we’ve all had our tracker chips removed. He hasn’t, and that’s why the Blacksnake team got here as fast as they did.”

They left the building, went a short distance down the alley, then stopped as two men grabbed a slab of cardboard leaning against a wall of an adjacent building. They pulled back the cardboard and there was a hole in the wall.

She followed Duran inside. She heard some conversations ahead. Metal doors open and shut. Then, as they moved forward, they were in low lights, and then through another door and down into a tunnel.

She saw rooms, little underground dorms, women as well as men sitting on boxes, chairs, talking, their rooms lit by small lamps. And they had plenty of guns. This was looking like the underground vet headquarters.

They moved on toward a larger opening.

“Wait here,” Duran said, nodding to Mora to stay with her. Duran went on ahead.

Rainee turned to Mora. “Don’t the authorities know about this?”

“They surely do. Which is why they don’t come anywhere around this area. They know it’s here and don’t want any part of getting into a battle with vets. That wouldn’t look good on any level.”

Rainee had long heard the rumors that former gangs in cities like L.A. had been recruited into something that was referred to as a super gang run by former soldiers. Now she was seeing the reality. One of those scary realities people didn’t like to think about with all the other troubles in the world.

It was a few minutes before Duran returned, behind him came two men, both in green T-shirts and jeans, both carrying submachine guns over their shoulders and pistols in their belts.

Duran said, “You’re going to meet the man.” He said it with near worshipful admiration.

She and Mora followed Duran past the guards and into what looked like an underground war room with a bank of computers manned by three men.

She saw Keegan talking to a guy who had his back to her, but she knew it was the former patient they’d come to deal with.

Metzler, almost as tall as Keegan, bald, intense, wearing khakis and a loose tan shirt. He looked over at her for a moment, nodded, and then went back to his intense discussion with Keegan.

Metzler was another of her favorites. He had undergone procedures after suffering his injuries from a raid in Northern Africa, a place she thought he’d returned to when he left her program.

Duran, keeping his voice at a near whisper, said “Keegan’s in a tough spot.”

“Metzler?”

“No. The death of the Blacksnake leader and his men leaves him hanging in the wind. There’s no going back for Keegan no matter what he thinks.”

“What does he think?”

“He’s still arguing about some sort of negotiation. Thing is, the guys way up top aren’t exactly negotiators. Especially in this situation.”

“Metzler’s not buying it, I assume.”

“No. Metzler is the man. He runs everything around here. But he knows that you’re leverage.”

“How so?”

“They want you at the Facility in a bad way.”

“To fix the problem.”

“Yes. And now there are more Blacksnake teams on the ground and on the move. This is not a good situation.”

Metzler finally broke away from the others and came over. “Long time, Doc.” They shook hands. “Sorry about the hard welcome.”

“Consistent with my day,” she said. “What happens now?”

Metzler said, “I want to avoid a war. That means getting the key figures out of here, that being you, me, and Keegan.”

“To where?”

“Downriver to one of the camps and figure things out from there. Once it’s known that we’re gone, then the Blacksnake teams will come after us.”

“That’s good?”

“That’s necessary. But we have a little problem that must be taken care of real fast. Keegan’s got an embedded tracker. Everyone here has had their tracker chips removed a long time ago. We have a clinic and it’s pretty well equipped. You get that tracker out, or disabled, we’re good to go. There’s some chance, where Keegan’s concerned, that the newer models might have a rider. They can be dangerous.”

“I’ll know that when I can see it,” Rainee said.

“Great. Sit tight for a moment. We’ll clear the route and get going.”

Metzler returned to Keegan and some other men.

All these trained-up soldiers, led by those who’d become enhanced warfighters, and all the weapons that were available, and the country divided. Rainee began to see a nasty future.

Duran got a signal. “We’re clear. Let’s go.”

25

They moved out once again through the backstreets of L.A. She followed behind Keegan and Metzler, with Duran and Mora and two other men behind her.

They cut through an alley and onto a side street near a large brick building. She saw men back in the recesses watching them like a protective shield.

Then several more joined them. It was almost pitch black in this part of town.

The city smelled of smoke and tear gas heavy, the night wailing from sirens, the sky filled with layers of choppers.

They stopped at the side of the brick building. It was boarded up and looked like no business was there. A security detail appeared at the end of the alley.

A man went up to a door with heavy locks and started to open them.

Mora said, as they waited, “I knew one of the nurses at UCSD’s telemedicine training center who’s working on her degree. She wants in your field. She told me a lot about your work.”

“Who?”

“Joan Becker. She’s really into the cool cognitive ergonomics stuff.”

“Yes, I know her well. Brilliant young girl. How did you meet her?”

“At a beach party last year. Hell of a party. Lasted like three days. Surviving it was worthy of a degree of some sort.”

Rainee smiled. She liked Mora’s humor. She felt like she was back in a combat theater. Like in some sense she’d never left the wars any more than they had.

Mora said, “She said you created the symphony.”

“I didn’t create it, so much as use it.” The symphony was a way of describing transcranial magnetic stimulation. Mora was very up on things. “In complex implanted electrodes, the symphony part refers to neuronal activity on a higher plane than is normal.”

Mora nodded. “Sounds kinda above my neuronal activity.”

Finally, when they keyed some heavy padlocks on a steel door and went into two adjoining rooms at the back of the building was the nature of the place evident.

It was astonishing. A lot of equipment, X-ray, sonogram, surgical bins, and much of it pretty sophisticated. It was up to most of the better urgent care facilities.

“Not bad, Doc,” Mora offered.

“Not bad at all,” she admitted.

Mora gave orders to a couple of the men to get the operating room and equipment ready. She found the whole setup extraordinary. Like a small, secret hospital.

“Where did this equipment come from?” Rainee asked as she went through the wash-up procedures.

“We have sources,” Metzler said. “A lot of medical facilities and hospitals went out of business, and we had some benefactors who decided the best care would have to go underground, for people like us. We have two doctors who come in on regular shifts. Pro bono.”

Then he showed her the prize: a handheld digital X-ray gun with sonar-assistant capability. Something like this was available in only a few sophisticated hospitals.

Rainee had been very vocal and influential in creating clinics specific to the war veterans, and this passed most tests. She washed up while Mora wiped down Keegan’s back with antibiotic wash, then applied an antibacterial gel.

“Like old times, Doc,” Mora said. “Old soldiers never die . . . they just fade into the mean streets of history. Wasn’t that what MacArthur said?”

“Something pretty close,” Rainee said.

She worked Keegan’s muscled and scarred back with the sonogram, then switched to the digital reader and worked down his right shoulder, to where Mora said most of the trackers were located, near the under hang of the shoulder blade.

Rainee got the signal that indicated a chip, and the only one likely to be there would be a new Banning T-tracker. “You’re right—I do believe we have it. Now I need to see what it looks like.”

The handheld X-ray showed his right wing bone, his scapula, with a tiny embedded chip, the kind that could be shot into the body.

The newer Banning models would have been inserted by pneumatic gun in the same way brain chips used to be shot in behind the ear, into the brain.

But the advanced military design of chips was far more complex and came in bio-sets.

“We got the little bugger,” she said. “Now we either disable it or remove it altogether. But, there’s the rider issue.”

It could be a death rider, or a cognitive-erase model.

It had been the big DARPA vision that the enhanced bandwidth of soldiers’ brains, with added RAM for info-dense environments, added to them like a cognitive prosthesis, would need the capacity to be selectively erased on capture.

But the testing was discontinued, at least to her knowledge, because of the disruption of the memory base and the inability to be selective.

Now she believed nothing had been discontinued. It just went dark and, without restriction, dangerous.

A death rider was what she really feared. Rainee hesitated. I can’t do this, she thought.

“We need to get this done quick,” Metzler said.

She looked Keegan in the face. “This could be dangerous.”

“Leaving it in isn’t an option,” he said.

She studied the digital read, went down along his shoulder blade, the second best place, and re-identified the bio-tracker chip’s configuration.

“It’s coming out, whatever is riding on it,” Keegan said.

“Yes, but this is an unusual set. I’m not really familiar—”

“Doesn’t matter. Get it out.”

And they had no time for problems as somebody came in and talked to Metzler, who informed everyone in the room, “Four Blacksnake teams are in the vicinity. We gotta move. Or get in a war with no good outcome.”

“Go for it,” Keegan said. “It kills me, that will solve some of the problem. We can’t negotiate anything if we’re trapped here. You brought me back to life, so you’re the appropriate one to take it away if it comes to that.”

“I like irony as much as the next person,” Rainee said. “But I have my limits. You die on me, it’ll really piss me off.”

“Then I guess you’ll just have to kill me twice, my little Pashtun. It’s the eyes.”

“You flirting, soldier?”

“You bring out the best in me. Or the worst, depending on your interpretation.”

“The jury is still out.”

That got a round of chuckles and relaxed her a little, though not much.

26

She knew enough of the architecture to identify the basic chip as a 6-ladder Banning. There was no way to know what it was capable of by just looking at it, and that was scary.

This was the man she’d saved. The idea that she would now kill him was almost too much.

Mora stepped over beside her. “I can do it.”

Rainee nearly stepped aside, but then said, “No. I’m okay. It’s my job.”

She approached the chip with a thin-bladed extractor, saying, though with trepidation, “I think it’s most probably an enhancer to give the tracker greater accuracy and distance in underground areas to broadband satellite connection.”

“Doc,” Keegan said, “you still look a little like a Pashtun chick in this light.”

She smiled, but inside, her gut was tight and she had to take a deep breath as she went in under his shoulder blade. These revamped men had a molecular structure on their wounds, and Keegan had a lot of work on his back, most of the skin regenerative.

It was done quickly. Keegan lay still as she finished the extraction and dropped the chip in a plastic bag that Mora was holding.

His eyes were closed. He didn’t seem to be breathing. She was about to get ill, until the bastard opened his eyes, turned on his side, looked around, and said, “If this is my entrance into heaven, with one exception, you’re some ugly fucking angels. So I assume the opposite.”

“You’re too mean to go to heaven and too toxic for hell. We’re stuck with you,” Duran said.

“I’m sure all his women have the same complaint,” Metzler added.

Mora applied the bandage amid the laughter.

Rainee now allowed herself to breath more freely and enjoy the humor.

Then Keegan sat up, put on his shirt, and grabbed his backpack like nothing had happened.

“We have use for the chip,” Metzler said. He told Mora to give it to one of the men. He told the recipient to drop it in the sewer. “Let them chase that around. Give us more time.”

Nice, Rainee thought.

Before leaving, one of Metzler’s soldiers provided Rainee with a sophisticated earpiece, telling her that she was now part of the communication.

As they locked the doors to the inner rooms, Rainee had no idea what was going to happen now, but at least they were intact and on the move.

She turned to Mora, “What’s that?”

They moved a few more blocks before stopping to wait to be cleared ahead by the point team.

The men with their backpacks and cargo pants, their weapons and their history, were part of L.A.’s underground army. They were a myth that turned out to be very real.

Then they headed toward the L.A. River and a very questionable future. At this point, she had no idea how anything could be worked out, no matter what Metzler and Keegan agreed on. What she wanted to know was the bigger picture. She had a very bad feeling what it might well be but had to have her fears verified.

She glanced back at L.A., at the fire and smoke, at the breakdown, and wondered where her country was headed.