Operation Chaos (16 page)

As dawn threatened over the Santa Monica Mountain Range to the east, Colonel Tessler left the chopper and followed the Blacksnake Team Six leader across the park and into the woods. They walked down near the river, where the team had rounded up a dozen homeless vets.

Tessler studied the homeless vets living on the edge of nothing, men who needed something, purpose, another war. The colonel wanted to give them a chance to redeem their lives. “Gentlemen, you need consider your circumstance very quickly. You interfere in a matter of great importance to the government, to national security, to everything you men fought for.”

They stared back at him, sullen, hostile, lost souls, vagabonds who made up the floating war detritus in the underbelly of the nation. Men he’d been organizing with the likes of Metzler and Keegan. And there, the emerging crisis. It was all about loyalty.

“The greatest military and greatest nation on earth will be quickly and completely compromised if you don’t cooperate. If you do, you’ll find a place with us. We need you and you need us.”

Blank, dead stares of the lost. In a sense, the real walking dead.

“You’ve been taken off the mission by a rogue soldier. We’re going to take him and his associates down.”

He studied this ragtag group of lost souls. “We’re in a new war,” Tessler said. “Both global and internal. Most of you are soldiers abandoned by your nation. You did your duty and you were not properly taken care of. That is going to change in the very near future. Everything is going to change in the very near future. We need you. And you will reap your just due. We know the people we are looking for were here. They represent a serious danger. They are terrorists. We need to know where they went.”

Tessler stared at one after another, fixing each with a steely gaze. “Listen to me. That you men have been abandoned is a crime. A crime that is not going to stand. You want to be part of the future, and to do that, you must cooperate.”

They stared with empty gazes, as if he spoke a foreign language and was some foreign enemy that had captured them.

“But first, we must win the battle,” Tessler said, pacing back and forth in front of them. “This is no longer the world we knew. This is a new world. And we must band together, be strong, and be ready to take down the enemy within. We’re done playing around. There is no middle ground. You soldiers are on one side, or you are on the other.”

Still no visible reaction.

The colonel said, “The time to choose is right now. Be very clear in your minds about what is at stake. To build the future we want, we must tear down the present. You can’t build on top of a rotten structure. It must come down. And it will come down. What’s at stake is, once the structure is torn down, who will build the future.”

When there was no response, Tessler turned to the Blacksnake leader and nodded. He pointed out three men to be injected and interrogated.

He considered having one or two of these lost souls shot but knew he didn’t really need to do that. He would get answers.

Still, he was angered. “The drug you will be given will liberate what is controlling your stupidity and resistance. Those who survive it will be better for the experience.”

No response. A bunch of hard cases.

The men were separated and taken away, one at a time, from the others. The drug to be used on them was a very powerful neuro-disrupting agent that was like a chemical electroshock. It had a great success rate but also a high level of disasters. It was just the first wave of super-interrogation drugs. It worked about fifty percent of the time if the person’s brain health was able to withstand the assault. These men might not have a high survival rate, but he needed only one.

That goddamn woman, Tessler thought. She got to Keegan. She’s not the solution, she’s the problem.

38

A gentle hand shook Rainee out of a very deep and, she was certain, very short sleep, but the kind of sleep she had known for two decades, the so-called Edison nap after the man who, while doing some twenty thousand experiments before electrifying the world, was a famous short-term, frequent napper.

Shocked, she sat up and tried to get her mind back to whatever reality she was in. It was getting light. Her awakener was Keegan.

“Jesus, how long was I asleep?”

Keegan smiled and said, “Fourteen minutes. There’s a boat coming in that might be your uncle. Metzler says it’s definitely high-speed, and if it’s not your uncle, it might be the one we take.”

Rainee got out of the van. The nap, short as it was, had helped. “Let me talk to him first, get him a little bit comfortable with what’s happening.”

She went down the street and crossed the side yard of her uncle’s house, hoping it was Uncle Troy. When she saw the sleek fast-boat, its lights on, coming up the channel in the early morning, she was pleasantly surprised. It was her Uncle Troy.

She walked down along the quay as he pulled into his dock, secured the boat, took a duffle bag, threw it over his shoulder, and walked up to his porch as he lit a cigarette, an act that kept him from noticing her.

He turned as Rainee approached and stared at her for a moment, the flash of recognition in his eyes. “Rainee? By God, girl, good to see you.”

“Uncle Troy, how are you?”

“The devil shoulda got me by now, but I guess even he has standards. You look your usual beautiful self.”

He could always make her laugh and did so.

“Worse, I thought it might be some girlfriend past was sneaking up to shoot me for some sin or other. Real nice to see it’s you.”

“I’m sure there are plenty of them out there,” Rainee said with a smile. “And I’m sure eventually they’ll catch up with you.”

He grinned big with his sun-crinkled face cracked like dried earth, the result of years of sun, alcohol, and wild living. He was sixty-five but could easily pass for a lot older.

“What the hell, girl—last I heard, you were running some big brain program. Always the smartest one of the bunch. How ’bout a hug for an old dude with one foot in the abyss and the other up some bastard’s ass. Is this real, or a dream?”

Rainee gave him a hug. “It might be closer to a nightmare than a dream. I’m here to make your life even more of a mess than usual.”

“Finally, somebody in the family understands me.”

She loved this guy. Loved his sense of humor.

He said, “Hell, it’s not even full daylight yet. What brings you down here this early, pretty woman?”

“You didn’t get my message?”

The cigarette went to the side of his mouth as he fumbled around inside his pocket and pulled out a dated cell phone. “Never did hear it over the engines, the wind and sea.”

“I have some issues. Can we go inside? I need to talk to you about something.”

“Sure, sure. Hell, girl,” he crushed out the butt with his thumb and index finger, a soldier’s method of extinguishing a butt and eliminating ashes and paper. “I’m at your disposal anytime for any reason. C’mon.”

She followed him across the deck, inside the house, through French doors, and into his very efficient looking kitchen. The few bowls, plates, pots, and pans that he used were always out. He kept his silverware in a small, square basket on the counter.

“Coffee?”

“Please. Make enough for my friends. They’re out in a van.”

He said, “What’s going on? You got stress in your voice. What friends?”

“Former soldiers. We have some big problems and we’re going to need some help and fast and you’re the only one I know who can help us.”

His expression turned somber. He stopped what he was doing, the can of coffee suspended in his hand. “You know I’ll do anything you ask. Not much scares a broken-down old sailor like his brilliant niece looking like she’s in some big damn trouble. What’s going on?”

Rainee said, “This isn’t going to be something I can fully explain right now, but it’s big, maybe as big as it gets, and I hate getting you involved. I mean, I really hate reaching out to you. But I’m out of options.”

He filled the coffee holder and then put water in. He chuckled as if she’d said something humorous, then said, “You were about the only one in the family kept me in the loop. That’s big cred with me.”

She attempted to explain as best she could without too much detail. But, she realized as she talked how difficult it was to tell this man who saw her as a scientist that she was now part of a makeshift commando team looking to put an end to a massive conspiracy.

What helped her was that he’d been through the madness of life. He just listened without much expression, a man used to crisis, craziness, whose entire life was dealing with his lost war and the subsequent deep stresses that she understood all too well.

Those stresses were her life’s work. And he knew that. In some respects, she was closer to this man than to many in her very successful family.

When she finished with her briefing, he shook his head and gave her a sardonic smile and said, “Damn, Rainee, seems you got yourself in the middle of something. Whatever I expected, this tops it like a polar vortex tops a peaceful spring day. Jesus, all the crap that’s going on and you’re telling me what you’re telling me. These enhanced soldiers, they robo-types like in movies?”

“Not quite Hollywood yet. Heading in that direction.”

“What did you need from me?”

“We need your boat. You’ll be paid up front. The men I’m with—”

“Stop! I’m a bit offended. You come here with a problem and offer me money. Payment. Damn, girl, you know better than to bring money into it. Don’t—”

“I’m sorry. Really. I apologize. It’s just that I know how important your boat is and I wanted—”

“Hey. It’s wood, metal, and speed. You’re flesh and blood. C’mon, you know me better than that.”

“I apologize.”

“Accepted.” He smiled, laughed lightly. “Just how enhanced up are these guys?”

“They can communicate in ways we can’t. They can transmit just through thinking and seeing when their connections are turned on.”

“I hit the right stuff, I kinda get that way myself,” Troy said.

She gave him a grin. “I’m sure. Look, it’s all very complicated. But something went wrong in their upgrade. That’s why they got me involved. I developed much of the chip set in their brains. And what I call angel dust, which does much of the work that their damaged synapses used to do. Technical stuff. But right now, we need that boat to get down the coast, get into Baja, and deal with a problem.”

Troy nodded and said, “I had any sense, which I don’t, and never did, I’d run like hell. But, I got no time left in my life for runnin’. You got the boat. Whatever you need that I have is yours.”

There was a reason why she loved her uncle, even when many in her family condemned him. And this was part of that reason. “Thank you,” Rainee said. “I’ll introduce my colleagues. By the way, how’s the fishing been?”

“The junk, added to the residue from the Japanese nuclear disaster, and chemicals from all other sources, and the melting icecaps, haven’t yet killed them. Or the mutations. Sea life is a lot stronger than people think. We came from there, and we’ll probably end up back there and maybe later, work our way back to land in a million or so years that it’ll take for the nuclear residue to die off.”

He had a dark attitude that she couldn’t dismiss. Skeptical, sometimes cynical, yet with a strong logic. “You need to meet my friends.” She got up from the small kitchen table.

“I can’t wait. Where you going in the boat, if I can ask?”

“Just down the coast a ways. Not far. At least we’re hoping it’ll be a quick in and out.”

“Well, given the Coast Guard, the aerial surveillance, the crackdown that’s been going on, I hope your friends are sailors and familiar with the Baja coast.”

“Maybe you can update them.”

“One thing you didn’t clarify. Is this, by any chance, some sort of government special-ops deal?”

She hesitated at the door. “No. If it was, I’d tell you. It’s as far from that as it can be.”

“I’m beginning to like it,” he said.

She went on outside and headed back to the van. She was happy they had a boat and didn’t have to steal one, yet conflicted about getting her uncle involved.

Though Rainee considered herself a consummate professional, as were her parents, as were all the people in her wide circle, the truth was on some level, this uncle of hers, this black sheep, with all his issues, his rebelliousness, his irrationality, was one of her very favorite people on the earth. He endured. He persevered. And he was not normal on any level. Yet, in his wildness, his willingness to risk, to drink like Hemingway, to do what normal people wouldn’t, she understood in the darker part of her mind why the family bad boy had always been something of a hero to her. A man who didn’t blink from harsh realities.

Rainee wasn’t even born when he was wounded, both physically and psychologically, in Vietnam. Yet as she grew up, learned to know him as the outsider in the family, she grew to love his eccentricity. Maybe, on some level, she was who she was because of him and his problems.

39

Rainee returned to the van with a mounting sense of excitement and foreboding. The impossible little commando force with the goal of going after the head of the snake looked more and more realistic and dangerous. It finally settled fully in her mind that they were actually going to do this. Or try.

Keegan was outside, leaning back on the door, watching her approach. She spotted Metzler down the street a ways, talking to Duran. She saw Mora across the street. All of them headed back to the van.

“I believe we have a boat,” she announced.

Keegan nodded. “Great, I want to meet this former Riverine Force uncle of yours.”

The others liked the news as well. Everyone grabbed their backpacks and followed Rainee back to her uncle’s. He was up on the porch waiting.

“Rainee told me all about you boys,” Troy said. “I didn’t know whether to call the police or the feds. But, being I’m not fond of either, I chose to make coffee.”

They laughed, introduced themselves, and shook hands.