“Whatever it is, clean it up, and fast. I’ll get you wide clearance in L.A. airspace. We don’t need this.”
Tessler left, not happy that his two best soldiers, Keegan and Metzler, were fast becoming his two biggest problems.
He climbed back on-board his chopper and gave the order. His pilot would get him into L.A. airspace in less than an hour.
L.A.
was a mess with the flash mobs and Metzler’s homeless vet underground army. Keegan and Doctor Hall had been their one chance to get Metzler to stand down, stop the insanity, and come in and get help. Metzler had been one of Rainee Hall’s most successful patients and he idolized the woman.
But first Tessler had to find a way to communicate with Seneca, find out what was happening, and find a way to deal with it.
What he didn’t want was Landra, head of the sniper Blacksnake team, involved. He was a hothead and quick on the trigger. L.A. was already enough of a mess.
If it went bad, the whole damn place could blow up into a war. Metzler controlled thousands of homeless underground vets up there. It could get real ugly real fast.
Tessler hoped that wasn’t the case. They were his finest soldiers and like sons to him in many ways. But the mission couldn’t be compromised.
Though Tessler was a devoted fan of the necessity of the metabolically enhanced warfighters, he knew the program had some major problems, and those problems could potentially be a nightmare, and one loomed ahead. He had to stop it one way or another before it exploded in their faces.
PART TWO
17
Traffic slowed to a crawl when I-5 intersected with the 405. Then it became stop and go. Keegan was constantly glancing at one of his smart cards, touching his earpiece, looking in mirrors. The ultimate multitasker, Rainee thought.
“They won’t try and stop us on the freeway, will they?”
“Depends on their orders.”
Keegan checked his smartcard. “The freeway is closed into downtown.”
“How do we get there?”
“Traffic is being forced east and west on the 605. We’ll take Firestone to Alameda. That gives us options.”
“How bad are things in L.A.?”
“Getting worse by the hour.”
The sad part of that was L.A. was such a sketchy city a decade ago, full of empty buildings, dangerous streets, and not even considered important. Then it turned around and became something of a wealth magnet. Now what? They were going to burn it down?
He made a quick move to get ahead of some slow traffic. The black Charger was now moving up and not more than three cars behind them.
“The man you want me to talk into coming out of the dark—you have some reason why he would listen to me?”
He glanced in the mirror and then made another lane change. He checked the weapon he had tucked in front now for easy reach. “You’re the only one he wants to talk to about his issues because you may well be the only one who understands them. You don’t talk him down, then they’ll send in a Blacksnake team, if they haven’t already. Either he’ll be terminated or, if he decides to go to war, those flash mobs and gangs running around will be child’s play when his underground vet army gets into it.”
“What’s a Blacksnake team?”
“They’re assassination specialists who get sent in to handle serious problems. He’s a serious problem.”
“How big is this underground army of his?”
“Four, five thousand. There are around ten thousand homeless vets in L.A., more than anywhere. And piece by piece, they’re being brought into the underground. They’re a mix of former contractors and vets from the wars.”
“And he’s okay with you coming in, bringing me?”
“Yes. We worked together for a couple years. We went through much of the same transition. I put him here in charge of the L.A. cell. Then something happened to him.”
This little bit of information, added to whatever his ID was that had so impressed the checkpoint guard, changed everything. She wasn’t just riding with a soldier. She was riding with an operative on a much higher level.
They were forced to pull over when highway patrol, bar lights flashing and sirens screaming, led four National Guard trucks up the freeway.
“Not a good sign,” Keegan said.
“Even if we get in,” she said, “how do we get back out if they close off the city?”
“A chopper will pick us up. We’ll be going to the Facility in Baja. Raab has a full clinic there. No more questions. I have to concentrate. You’ll learn everything soon enough.”
Lester Raab had a vacation home in Baja. That was probably where this Facility was.
The idea that one of her former patients was running some kind of rogue underground vet army in L.A. wasn’t as shocking to her as it might be to those outside. What was really disturbing was the inescapable realization that this was connected to something she had helped create.
Nobody liked to talk about the number of gangs that had formed in the military, or after that were involved in the major drug, gun, and turf wars. But this was way above those low-grade organizations.
Keegan was again monitoring something and she could see his facial muscles tighten. He didn’t like whatever he was hearing. And now the traffic on the San Diego Freeway was more stop than go.
She asked, after he made some speed moves, one up the side of the road to pass a camper, “What’s happening?”
He said, “We have a difficult situation ahead. We need to get off the freeway soon. Whatever I ask you to do, do it fast. Don’t ask questions. Don’t think. Just do what I tell you when I tell you.”
“Yes, sir,” she said with heavy sarcasm. He gave her a glance and said, “You outrank me in the regular military, but not here.”
“Yes, sir,” she said with a more conciliatory tone.
He did something then that she liked a lot. He smirked to himself, a little grin of acknowledgement of their relationship that gave him a “human” emotional nuance.
Farther up the highway, without warning, he broke the silence, as if needing to talk about something that was bothering him. “You developed the Z-chip concept and then you backed away from what he said was your greatest idea. Then you testified against its development and helped bring down the program. Why? We’re in one of the most dangerous times in our history. We need every advance ahead of our enemies that we can get.”
“I guess I didn’t see Raab and his band of merry men as the answer.”
“Maybe that was a mistake.”
“Maybe.”
After a moment’s silence, he said, “Had you stayed with the development, maybe none of what’s happening would be happening.”
“I don’t know what the problems are, but I knew that if pushed too fast, there would be problems. Apparently, I was right about that.”
He glanced at her. “Well, right or wrong, that’s why you’re here. To deal with that problem.”
All those arguments with Raab, the hearings. The generals determined to build the robo-soldiers entering drone-leveled battlefields led to this.
Rainee said, “Look, the original purpose began as a way to stimulate and control neurogenesis, restoring functionality on a high level by downloading new nanotechnology software, not creating super warfighters. The program was hijacked by the obsession of certain military people who were pushing the enhanced-warfighter program beyond what we were ready for. My goal was primarily therapeutic.”
He said, glancing at her, “Maybe they understood the need to outpace our enemies. Maybe, on a national therapeutic level, that’s the real issue.”
“That’s clever,” she said, “but that’s all it is: clever. Look, I quit because they were going way out of bounds. They were obsessed with metabolic dominance. They were willing to use soldiers a guinea pigs. I wasn’t, for both moral and practical reasons.”
Going up the freeway toward a city under siege with a guy who killed quickly and she was having an argument with him. It was crazy, yet it was politics, and it seemed everything in America had become politics.
Keegan, obviously a true believer, said, “When survival is at stake, you do what you have to do. In this world, there’s no alternative. Risks, and extreme actions, are necessary.”
She backed off, not wanting to get into a knockdown, drag-out battle with this guy. So she shifted gears. “Where did you get your work done? I know just about everyone who went into advance programs at Walter Reed or the San Diego Naval Hospital in Balboa Park.”
“I came later,” he said as he moved aggressively through traffic, getting a few angry horns. “I was in the hospital in Virginia for a long time. But your program was where all of us were eventually going. My main work came at the Facility. I was a wreck. I came back at a higher functional level. It was your chip set that did that. But now, in the upgrades, something is happening. We need your help. All your former patients who are in the program need your help. And it’s at a really critical time.”
“If I can help, I will,” she said, but with a lot of questions and concerns that she would deal with when the time came, when she understood what was really going on.
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.