Operation Chaos (4 page)

It was a horrific crash site and still under fire when her medevac chopper landed. It was a matter of pulling the bodies out and then selecting survival potential. Those decisions were the worst. She knew those not chosen were going to die, as would some of those they took out, and they appropriately called them
Sophie’s Choice
decisions.

I’ve been inside this soldier’s brain, she thought. He’s one of mine.

There were many levels of intimacy between humans, but none quite so delicately intimate as pulling fragments from a brain, halting bleeds, reconstructing pathways. Operating hour after hour. Then again. And again. Replacing skull with metal caps.

So many she’d treated, both in war zones and in the States, yet this one was special. Johnny Cash was one of the exceptional saves. Every surgeon at Afghanistan’s Bagram had drifted in at one time or another to assist or just watch.

It’s got to be him, she thought. And if it was him, if she was right, that might give her some angle to work to get more out of him, find out who this former patient was that they wanted her to bring in. And “in” to what?

And would this finally answer the question of what had happened to so many of her patients who suddenly disappeared? The soldier they wanted her to see was one of them, so maybe the mystery would finally be solved.

7

Her soldier returned, an angry expression on his face.

From his backpack he removed a small medical kit, opened it, and brought out a syringe and a small bottle.

“You don’t need that,” she said. “I told you I’ll answer whatever questions you have. I have nothing to hide from you, whoever you are. Whatever you want.”

“Standard procedure,” he said.

“Hey, standard procedure isn’t what any of this is about. I don’t need to be drugged. I’m not going to fight you, dammit. I just need to understand what it is you, or whoever you’re working for, wants. Let me understand my role.”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters because, for starters, I know you,” she said.

He paused, the bottle suspended in one hand, the syringe in the other. So old fashioned, she thought. Like some movie of the last decade. But she knew what it probably was and wanted no part of it.

“Yes, I know you,” Rainee said. “Maybe I know you better than I know many people on this earth. You’re the patient at Bagram we called Johnny Cash. JC.”

He stared at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We know each other from the war,” she said. “I was one of your doctors.”

He studied her intently for a moment, like he was trying to understand what she was talking about.

But then he was distracted by the argument in the other room. “No, you don’t know me and I don’t know you.”

But he didn’t inject her. He had other problems to deal with. He put the syringe and bottle in the case and then started to go into the next room, but something stopped him. He looked back at her, disturbed by her as much as by the men in the other room.

Got you, you enhanced bastard, Rainee thought. But she needed to get into his brain, trigger something, bring up old buried memories if they were still there. And she knew the key. It would work, or not. But it was the best she had.

“Lima Nine Four,” she said. Nobody on the face of the earth would react to that unless they were, in fact, Lima Nine Four.

It was like she’d slapped him.

But then, unexpectedly, he reacted to something else. He reached into his cargo pants and came out with some kind of device.

He touched it a couple times, and for the moment she lost him. He was dealing with something beyond her.

Then, as if nothing had transpired between them, he went into the next room, shutting the door behind him.

She heard the man she thought was JC yell in his deep growl with that reconstructed larynx of his. It was a very scary sound when he was angry.

Absolutely, that’s him. That’s JC, she thought. But what worried her was the intensity of the argument in the next room. She couldn’t make out everything, but it was clear that the other guys weren’t happy that he was taking so long. They were belligerent, demeaning, calling him robo-soldier. From what she’d seen of him, she didn’t recommend getting into a conflict with this guy.

In her life, she’d never known the physicality of a male as thoroughly as she knew this guy, from stem to stern.

The operations on him were as intense as any she’d ever encountered. He had surgeons trying to save his lower extremities while she was inside his skull.

He was the hospital’s great save.

Then the argument in the next room reached a nasty level and she came back to her reality, her predicament, and decided, much as she wanted to know what was behind all of this, she needed to get out of there. The relationship between JC and those men wasn’t a good one. Nothing about the situation boded well.

She inched toward the backpack. He had a medical kit, which meant scissors or a cutting tool of some kind.

8

Two surgeons fought her about Johnny Cash. “He’s too far gone. There’s no saving him. We can’t use resources and time and doctors when we have more and more coming in.”

“He can be saved,” she insisted. ”I’ve evaluated his wounds, and his ability to fight. I brought him in because he’s strong—he’ll make it.”

She was so insistent and determined that she knew she was putting herself on the line. And she was willing to use whatever powers she could, including the head surgeon at the Naval Hospital during that time. He happened to be her father.

She got her way and she had to win. And she did.

She thought back to Bagram, that moment of celebration when they were finally about able to send Johnny Cash off to the more advanced Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

They only saved four of the nine men involved in that terrible incident. Even now, she could remember the smell of burned flesh and the incredible scene of one of his fellow soldiers using his helmet to protect the open patch of skull that Johnny Cash had, a soldier who bled to death even as he gave aid.

The heroism and horror of that experience came flooding back to her now with full force. A weapon she had to use. She had to get to this guy.

The difference between high-order explosives and the low-order explosives and their pressurized waves was one of the most critical elements of saving lives and something she’d specialized in.

By the time she got to him, having worked with so many after two years at the most intense stage of that war, with both Afghan children and soldiers, she’d learned how to quickly assess multisystem life-threatening injuries.

Rainee later wrote an acclaimed article on blast-wave varieties. How to assess abnormalities in the middle cerebellar peduncles, in cingulum bundles, and in the right orbitofrontal white matter, just by understanding the type of blast wave.

A good portion of her life, she’d slept and woke with the science of the brain on her mind. But then, later in her career, she began to deal with the therapy so necessary to the brain injured, joining an expanding group of neuroscientists who believed the mechanics of the brain—understanding how it worked from an electronic, synapse, cellular-communication standpoint—weren’t enough. They didn’t deal with the living, feeling, thinking mind.

The signature wounds of the longest lasting of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left scars that were as deep in their way as the scars of Vietnam on those vets. And it wasn’t enough to deal with them on only one level or another. They had to be dealt with in totality. Brain and mind.

And now one of those enhanced had kidnapped her, and that was her leverage.

She thought about the physical level with this man. The delicate removal of those metal fragments, his labored breathing, the tubes in his mouth, his nose, the background medical chatter. Bright, fierce lights. A face distorted by having been ripped up. A once strong, probably very handsome face nearly obliterated. A large, once cognitively strong brain torn and damaged.

They were trying to bring a dead man back to life, and when it happened, that fantastic moment when he became conscious and was there, really there, focused, nothing for Rainee Hall could compare. How he would deal with what had happened on a psychological level convinced her that they had to work with the whole patient, not just the physical damage.

She remembered that moment, for it was indelibly imprinted, locked: “If you hear and understand me, blink twice.”

He did. He was finally conscious and he had a functional brain, at least to that level.

But the shock of him speaking, something she didn’t expect given the damaged larynx, was even more incredible. And it also became his signature tone.

“My men . . .”
his lips asked.
“My men . . ?”

That’s how they were. It was all about their team.

She told him the truth. “Four, counting you, survived.”

It took him time to digest, to come to grips with the extent of the disaster. She saw the depth of the shock. But you don’t lie to soldiers like him.

Only then, after taking it in, processing it however he could, did he turn to himself.

“I can’t feel my legs.
Do I have legs?”

“Yes. They are intact. You will feel them once the drugs wear off.”

Then, in something she could never forget, that she’d joked about for years, he said, “
Penis and testicles? I can’t feel them.”

“Believe me, you have them.”

The muscles on his shattered face were still able to smile. It was a
M*A*S*H
moment, both darkly funny and very tragic.

“I’m going to live?” His voice was like a broken exhaust on a motorcycle.

“Yes. It appears that you will. You’ve had multiple operations. We kept you under for fifty hours. Shortly, we’ll move you to Germany. Then the States. There’s an unreasonable chance you will make it.”

She remembered having squeezed his arm. She knew the shape of his skull like the back of her hand. Being one of the top neurosurgeons in the combat zone, the challenges just got more intense, but no more so than Johnny Cash.

Two years later, she returned to the States to run one of the most sophisticated programs for traumatic brain injury. She inquired about him but was unable to learn anything.

Dealing with TBI became her life’s work.

And now, all these years later, Johnny Cash had surfaced and he was operational in a whole new, enhanced way. She wanted to know what kind of work had been done on him and what he was doing and for whom and what had happened to her missing patients.

She’d been kidnapped and interrogated about those missing men. And was told they needed her. What did that mean?

He knew what happened to her soldiers. They were her family. More, in some respects, than her actual family.

Yet that wasn’t strong enough to relax her. The one thing she had in her favor was that she was important. He kidnapped her because somebody in some big, dark, military program needed her.

And I need to convince him I’m the reason he’s still on this earth.

Rainee Hall knew she had to dig down in and get to him. He’d been one of her greatest saves. A relationship that would last both of their lives. He just needed to remember. If, that is, he and his associates worked out their issue.

Then the door opened and she knew it was time to get through to this guy.

9

When her kidnapper returned, closing the door with his left hand, his right hooked into his cargo pants, he had a hard look on his face from whatever had transpired in the other room.

Immediately he glanced at his backpack and nodded, as if seeing the evidence of her attempt.

She braced herself and said, “You remember. You know that name we gave you. You’re Johnny Cash.”

He stopped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Doc. Look, I have some questions—”

“I know you,” Rainee said. “And you know me.”

He took the syringe and the bottle back out of the pack. “I don’t know who you are other than what your resume is,” he said. “We’ve never met.”

“I don’t want that. I’m going to cooperate. And you do know who Johnny Cash is. He’s you.”

“You’re wrong.”

“No, I’m not.”

He held up the syringe after filling it from a bottle. “And this is necessary. I can’t take chances. It won’t knock you out if that’s what you’re worried about. It’ll just make you compliant. Answer questions that need to be answered.”

He came to her side and knelt down.

She said, “Don’t do that. It’s unnecessary and I’m not going to be as compliant as you think if you do. And that shit is dangerous. I know what it is. And I know you’re Lima Nine Four. I know your scars inside and out. You survived because you were chosen to survive. Most of your team didn’t.”

It took a moment for him to react. When he did, it was like she’d hit him across the face. That told her he hadn’t had memory destruction from synthesis inhibitors that weren’t available until recently and weren’t really as good a choice for TBI as they were for severe PTSD.

“You remember.”

He studied her. He might have received some of the new class of propranolols that relaxed the emotionality of traumatic events, but that wouldn’t matter. The memories were still there, even if dulled.

He stopped, syringe suspended, a confused, disconnected look on his face. She’d found an opening that triggered something in his suppressed memories, struck a synapse bundle, dormant as it might have been for a long time.

Rainee said, “You need my help with some rogue soldier in L.A., a former patient of mine. That is the mission. And nothing matters to a soldier but the mission.”

It was all about suppression, reorganization, redirection in PTSD, but in brain damage, it was a trickier situation. And with someone with major work, she didn’t know what she was dealing with. But there was no doubt she’d hit something. The memories might be partially destroyed, or locked, but not all of them.

Rainee pushed forward because she had no other way to go. “You wouldn’t be here doing whatever you’re doing if I hadn’t made some critical visits into that brain of yours. You were a mess. Remember Bagram? You were something of a miracle survivor. You know who you are. Where you came from. Lima Nine Four.”