Operation Chaos (5 page)

“No. Be quiet. That’s gone. I don’t know you. And even if I could remember you, so what? It’s not relevant. I’m here to take you to L.A. so you can help us with one of your patients. That’s all. And things are deteriorating there and we have to hurry.”

“If you want my help, you have to help me. And the first thing is to connect to what happened—”

“I don’t think so. Like I said, it doesn’t matter. I have no idea what you’re referring to and we need to get going.”

He put the small bottle down on the floor and started to take her arm to inject her.

She showed no resistance until he was about to insert the needle, then she made a violent turn and brought her knees up and tried to knock his arm away.

He pulled the needle back with one hand and stopped her attempt with his elbow.

She said, “Listen to me, damn you. I was in the air heading back to Bagram when the call came. We weren’t authorized to go in. But we did. Into a bad place, because we had a doctor on board, me, and two highly trained combat medics.”

“I’m not interested in whatever you’re saying. We don’t have time to reminisce.”

She said, “We do. Believe me, we do. I helped pull the bloodied-up mess that was you out of that wreckage. I pulled you up out of the fucking grave. You talk to me, recognize me, goddamn you, and then we’ll go do whatever you, or your bosses, want to do. You inject me, you’ll lose me. I know what you’re going to use and I’m pretty much immune.”

“I doubt that.”

“Don’t. I know more about what that shit is than you do and I don’t want any of it in my body, and I know how to fight it if it is. I rebuild human wrecks. I rebuild brains and I know the effects of pretty much every chemical there is, so don’t kid yourself, soldier.”

He let go of her. He seemed momentarily confused, distracted, maybe even a little startled by her aggressiveness. Then he said, quietly, “We need to go and I need answers. I can’t have you making my job harder and that’s why—”

“No. I’ll go and I’ll be cool about it because I want to find out what’s happened to my people. Look, I chose you in the Swat Valley disaster because, for some reason, on some level of my trained medical instincts, I thought we could save you. I gambled on you. I might have gambled on one of the others, but I chose you.”

He studied her a moment. “If it was as you say, of course I must appreciate that, but in this context, it doesn’t matter. We’re not there, we’re here.”

“No, we’re both there and here. War is a permanent imprint, a permanent part of the present. It doesn’t sink away like most of life’s experiences. It is the big impact, the permanent resident. Civilians have no idea.”

Rainee pushed harder, deeper. “The man next to you wasn’t just there being your buddy, he was dying while trying to save you.”

“I don’t need to hear about this.”

“You do. He had his hand on the side of your head because a piece of your skull was missing; all the while, he was himself bleeding to death. And you weren’t holding your stomach because you ate a bad meal—you were holding your intestines inside.”

He looked off toward the door and muffled voices in the other room.

Rainee pushed against his resistance. “I had to choose then and now. You have to remember. You have to give me something in return for saving your life.”

She thought she had his full attention, but suddenly, he disconnected and walked to the other side of the room, his back to her, and the device out in his hand again. He was there standing very still, almost rigid.

“I know you remember, damn you,” she said. “And you know me, and we’re bound as tight as any human beings can be. You died, I brought you back. I gave birth to your second life and you owe me mine. We are inseparable on a level only soldiers and mothers truly understand.”

She waited for him to deal with this. His response would tell her a lot about her ability to deal with him.

10

Her enhanced-soldier kidnapper said, “You must cooperate without arguing with me, Doctor Hall. We’re taking too long. I need to know more from you about your activities in San Diego with detectives. I think there’s a lot you haven’t told me. I don’t want to inject you for the sake of interrogation, but you need to cooperate.”

I got you, you otherworldly bastard, she thought. “I’m telling you the truth. It’s you who’ve told me nothing. You who’ve held back. You want to know the truth, start talking to me.”

His reaction was strange. It was like she’d talked in some foreign language. He seemed perplexed, showing agitation and confusion. He looked for a moment angry, then not, then in suspension. She understood some of what he faced. His buried history, and those circuits in that damaged and resuscitated brain, now enhanced by a plethora of chips, struggling to put it all in a clear picture.

How much work was she looking at? This former mess was enhanced in very powerful ways and she wanted to know all about that.

Rainee had developed the Z-chips, the most sophisticated in the business of brain rehab. They were at the very core of the enhanced warfighter program before it was shut down because of activities of some of her colleagues. But now she wondered if it had really been shut down.

For a long time, he stared at some inner world, with no sign of recognition or interest, as if the processer was shut down, or asleep.

That was when Rainee got a really bad feeling about the situation but had no choice but to keep going forward into his past to try to reach him. “You lost half your men,” she said. “They didn’t make it back. We couldn’t even recover the bodies. They were removed by the enemy and humiliated and destroyed.”

It was cruel, nasty, but she felt she needed to give him some verbal electroshock. Get him back to her in an emotional and remembering way.

He stared, blank faced.

“Listen to me,” she said quietly, but with a blade in hand, ready to cut. “We are linked in ways that matter. You can’t ignore that.”

The reconstructed eye opened alarmingly wide for a second, then narrowed as if completely independent of the other. The syringe rested on his thigh. Suddenly, he had a fast blink rate. He swallowed.

“Your team was lost,” she said, going for the emotional jugular. “One of the very best teams ever assembled. Maybe it was a bad operation to start, going in on the wrong type of aircraft without support.”

Rainee needed to break through the resistance, through the drugs, the chips, the deadening of the traumas and quickly dig up some emotional connection to the trauma, get it active enough that he at least remembered her.

All inhibiting agents have limits. If the core integrity of the cognitive functions were intact—and for him to have come this far, that had to be—the memory modules could be reached. That was the creative flexibility and adaptability of the brain.

But this was a last straw in the moment and she knew, looking at his face, that deep inside that brain, synapses that hadn’t been talking, that had lost connection, were scrambling back into some uncomfortable form of communication.

“Your face was badly burned,” she said. “You have some nasty scars. Inside and out. I know them.”

“You talk a lot,” he said. “But you don’t answer my questions.”

“It’s you who are being resistant to remembering why you’re even alive, soldier.”

Somebody in the next room yelled angrily, threateningly, in a mix of English and Spanish.

He glanced that way, then back to her, and said calmly, “What can you tell me about me that somebody who worked on me might know, but nobody else would? It wouldn’t be in some report. I’m sure you’re familiar with thousands of cases.”

“A piece of metal cut across your right hipbone down almost to the pubic area and opened your stomach. It looks like you were cut with a serrated blade.”

“I don’t want to hear details others know from the report. I want something unique.”

“When you first woke up, you stared at me with your one good eye. I had on a surgical mask and you thought you were looking at a Taliban. You mumbled in Pashtun. I said I was American and I didn’t have brown eyes like most Pashtun women. I wasn’t sure you were seeing color in that good eye. You said I could have been Taliban with Russian heritage, or a genetic line from Alexander the Great’s march through Afghanistan, or English. Afghan girls have beautiful eyes, a gift of the many invaders who wished they’d never come into that graveyard. That’s when we knew the most important cognitive faculties had survived.”

She’d struck a nerve. She had him now. He couldn’t hide his reaction.

But just then one of the Mexicans came it with an aggressive demeanor and said, “
Pongamonos en marcha!
C’mon man, let’s get the fuck outta here.”

Johnny Cash, a cold look on his face, said, without even turning to the man, “We go when I say we go.”

The Mexican shook his head. “You’re messin’ up, robo-soldier. You gotta get moving real soon or this is gonna be a problem.” He left them, closing the door.

11

Rainee asked, “Those men are former soldiers like you?”

“No,” he said emphatically, and with a bit of contempt. “They’re assets. But we need to move along. I’m not believing you.”

“If you don’t think I’m telling you the truth, pull down your pants, I’ll describe the scars under your testicles. Maybe then you’ll stop doubting me.”

That shocked him and he actually couldn’t resist a bit of a smile. Got you, she thought.

“You know goddamn well who I am,” Rainee said. “So tell me what this is really about. Like I said, I’ll cooperate, but if I’m needed for something, I need to know what. You try and inject me again, you being someone whose life I saved, I bite your fucking throat like a lion and kill you.”

She said it in a darkly humorous way, yet being serious at the same time.

Rainee could see that he was restraining a smile. A good sign.

In the silence that followed, a poignant memory came back to her. “I contacted your family and Skyped them to you because I thought that was necessary.”

His attention shifted to an argument in the next room.

Rainee said, “You went through the Warfighter Enhancement Program. But not with me. Where? Virginia? Who was your mentor in the program?” Getting him into himself, away from the mission as he saw it.

He didn’t answer that because one of the “assets” came in.

“Amigo,” the man said, “the pickup is not happy with this. The delivery team needs to take you and the lady now. L.A.’s a mess. So get your robo-ass in gear, bring the package, and let’s move it. They’re waiting by the freeway. We got to make delivery.”

“Get out. We go when I say we go,” her kidnapper said angrily. “Don’t bother me again.”

“Hey, dude,” the asset said, “we’re paid to deliver, not to play fucking games. The pickup won’t wait. They want us there now. Let’s go. Bring the
concha
—move, asshole. We’re done messin’ around here.”

The other “asset” came in and said, “Let’s go, robo-soldier.”

What then happened was a blur of violence, stunningly fast. One of the “assets” made a move to grab Rainee. The other one pulled his shirt up and reached for his weapon but never got it into play, as Johnny Cash shot him in the chest from about eight feet away, then turned and shot the first man in the temple.

Both men fell almost at the same time and lay with their heads only a few inches from one another.

Rainee had spent plenty of time in bad places, seen her share of terrible events, but the speed of this was shocking, stunning.

Johnny Cash, gun in hand, checked the two men. He showed no particular emotion.

But when he turned to her, his jaw was clenched tight and she feared for a moment he would shoot her.

Instead he walked out, leaving the door open, and she saw him go out through the front of the house, leaving that door open as well.

He walked a short distance, then disappeared from sight.

Rainee rolled over and sat up and could see through the open doors the back wall and the back of a van.

She didn’t know what was happening in the enhanced soldier’s brain but knew it wasn’t good. He’d killed two men, ruined whatever op he’d been conducting, and it was all on her. He’d see that. She would be dead very soon.

All she could think of now was to get the zip ties off her wrists and ankles, then get a weapon before Johnny Cash came back.

What she feared as much as being killed was not knowing what was really going on and how it connected to her former patients, and who was behind this.

12

Lima Nine Four . . .

Lima Nine Four . . .

Come in, Lima Nine Four . . .

Like lightning strikes. Over and over in Seneca’s agitated mind, electrical pulses hitting.

Something was going wrong. He was spinning out of control. He fought to get back in control.

His breathing intense, mind roller coasting, the smell of smoke and burning metal searing his nostrils, and the cries and the incoming rockets . . .

Seneca closed his eyes, forced calm, and took his breathing down. Finally, he stilled.

He turned, looked back through open doors to the back room. That damn woman had ripped into a locked box of memories, brought back something he hadn’t experienced in a long time, and it came with an intensity he wasn’t prepared for. His assets were dead!

He hated those moments when the beautiful control slipped away and some wild madness rose from the depths. And it was happening more and more frequently. He feared becoming like Metzler, the man who was causing all the problems. The goddamn Z-chips.

He couldn’t go the way of the others. No. No. He was stronger, in control.

There was no way he could disappoint his commanding officer and the operation. Colonel Tessler had been like a surrogate older brother to him during his “resurrection,” as Doctor Raab called bringing soldiers back online in an enhanced form.

He clenched his face muscles as he walked in the harsh afternoon light of the walled-in backyard.

Why in hell did they send him on this mission if they knew she was the doctor who’d saved him? Maybe they didn’t know. That was years ago in the war zone. Records of men like him were always sealed. They didn’t know!