Ripper (46 page)

Each man had been briefed on the rescue. They were going
into a scenario that few had ever trained for, the taking back of an underground complex that may be held by an opposing force that may or may not be genetically altered. Each man in the three teams took the mission parameters with a grain of salt. They understood that someone up the chain of command was either out of his mind or very near to it.

Major Garcia checked his watch one last time as
the Hercules climbed to their jump altitude. They would jump at 32,000 feet and low open at 2,000 feet from the desert scrub, hopefully below the radar of the Nellis tower.

He looked over at Sergeant Major Reynolds and winked.

“Major, I have one hell of a stupid question for ya,” Reynolds said in his Texas drawl.

“And what pray tell can that be Sergeant Major Reynolds?” Garcia said as he studied
the other thirty men inside the cavernous hold of the C-130J. He saw that most of them had their eyes closed, bored as always with the “getting there” portion of a mission.

“Who in the hell is in charge of naming these missions? I mean, come on, my fifth-grade niece could come up with something better than this.”

“Well, according to my sources Sergeant Major, this one comes from the very top.”

“Besides the name of the mission, I also noted a name that wasn’t entirely blacked out on the mission parameters. I guess it got through some egghead sensor.”

Major Garcia turned away and saw that no one else was listening over the drone of the four powerful engines.

“I saw that myself. I’m glad most of these boys are too young to have noticed and recognized the name, or maybe they just didn’t
care. But it did add a little element of surprise to the game.” He looked over at the smaller man from Texas. “I mean, if the man that trained most of the officer corps in this outfit is in deep shit, it definitely means we’re not headed for a picnic.”

The sergeant major nodded his head and adjusted the oxygen tank on his back. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep but leaned over and said, “Yes,
sir, if the Jack Collins I know is in trouble, there must be one large shitstorm where we’re goin’.”

The huge aircraft increased power as it slipped out of its planned flight path and climbed with its four engines screaming.

Operation Nerdlinger was nearing the sand and scrub of Nellis Air Force Base.

SPRING VALLEY HOSPITAL,
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

Jason Ryan was feeling the course of light-dose
morphine as it rushed through his system. He watched as the duty nurse administered the injection through the IV line attached to his right hand. For the first twenty-four hours the doctors had been worried about infection setting in, but since his three bullet wounds had been treated right away by the attending physicians in Laredo, that fear had been laid to rest very quickly. With the drugs running
through the naval aviator’s body, he had decided he hadn’t felt this good since his Annapolis days. And the nursing staff was on the receiving end of that feel-good situation.

The young nurse looked down at the dark, short-haired Ryan and shook her head as she finished administering the morphine into the IV tube.

“Look, if you persist, I’ll write your fantasies down on your chart and then you’ll
have to deal with the nurse we call Ratchet.”

“That doesn’t sound too good,” Ryan said as the warm feeling started streaming through his head. “Did you know I was shot taking down the largest drug dealer on the American continent?” he said as his hand wandered down to the nurse’s leg and “accidentally” brushed the white nylon stocking.

“You are so humble,” she said as she took a step back.

“Yeah, that’s me, humble and shy.”

She shook her head and wrote down her injection on his chart. “With any luck to the staff, you can leave here in a couple of days.”

“Ah, come on, I don’t want to go back to work. You don’t know my boss like I do.”

“I’m sure he knows you though,” she said as she left the room with a smile. Jason tried to sit up in time to see her hindquarters but was too late.
Instead of lying back down he reached over and grabbed the cell phone from his table. He had one of the younger nurses buy it for him in the gift shop and actually talked her into purchasing minutes for him on the promise that they would all be used talking to her. He opened the cover and dialed the security cover number for the Group. As the TV in the corner of the room showed some of the devastation
wrought by a massive explosion south of the border in Nuevo Laredo, Jason smiled. His smile faltered somewhat when there was no completion to his call other than a recording administered through the office of the National Archives.
The United States government offices you are trying to reach are temporarily experiencing technical problems with their phone lines. Please try your call again at a
later time.

“What?” he said as he tried again.

After receiving the same message again, he punched in Will Mendenhall’s cell number he knew by heart. Again there was no answer as his call went straight to voice mail.

“Ah, to hell with it,” he said as he set the phone down and changed the channel on the television. After perusing the channels three times he snapped off the set. He again picked
up the cell phone and tried Will and the complex once more. He closed the cover in frustration.

“Damn, this isn’t right,” he mumbled. He again opened the cell phone cover and dialed a number he had only used one time—Jack Collins. “Goddamn it!” he cursed as the colonel’s phone also went straight to voice mail. The hair on the back of the aviator’s neck rose as he dialed one number that was always
answered, Charlie Ellenshaw’s. As he listened, the phone rang ten times before he heard Charlie’s voice on the recording.
You’ve reached Charles Hindershot Ellenshaw the third. If I’m not answering, that means I either don’t want to talk to you, or my music is so loud I can’t hear the phone. Either way, call back later.

Jason’s face turned whiter than his lack of blood could account for. He swallowed
as he realized that something was wrong. He tossed back the blanket and sheet and then sat farther up in bed. He started to place his legs over the side, became lightheaded, and then paused while his equilibrium settled back down into its rightful place. Jason tried to reach over and pull himself to the right with his left hand, but the connected IV pulled his hand back with a slight stab
of pain. He cursed and yanked the needle out of his vein, tossing it to the floor. Then he slowly placed his right foot on the cold tile of the floor and hissed. His head felt fuzzy, but he persisted in getting his left leg off the bed. As he braced himself as best he could, he used his ass to push up and off the bed. He felt a sharp stab of pain from the bullet wound closest to his heart. It had
passed through cleanly between his heart and lungs, and the doctors said he had been far more than just lucky that there hadn’t been any more significant damage—that it had been a small miracle.

Right now Ryan wasn’t so sure about the lucky part as he realized he had never felt this horrible in his life, even after ejecting from an F-14 Tomcat over the Pacific Ocean five years before at over
a thousand miles per hour.

After holding on to the bedrail for as long as it took for his head to clear, he realized that his ass was hanging out of the back of his hospital gown. As he half turned he saw his reflection in the mirror attached to the bathroom door. He saw the white of his butt and tilted his head. “Not bad,” he mumbled as he attempted his first step. He actually felt that things
were going well as he raised his right leg and stepped. The one thing he didn’t realize until too late was the fact that he raised the right leg just a little too high and brought it down where he thought the white tile was located. He was wrong—about a foot off as a matter of fact. If he hadn’t been able to grab the rail in time he would have flipped completely over.

“Okay, let’s try that again,”
he muttered.

Still holding the bedrail, Jason cautiously tried again. This time his right foot came down where the estimation of distance and space had been calculated. Then as he removed his hand from the bed he tried it again, this time with the left foot. Success. Moving at a snail’s pace he reached out and again calculated correctly as he grasped the doorknob to the closet. He took a deep
breath and waited for his heart rate to slow and his mind to scan his wounds for any leaking that may have happened. There was none.

“Okay, step one complete.” Jason twisted the knob and pulled the door open, once threatening to continue on with the momentum of the heavy closet door but stopping and arresting his movement with a fancy balancing act. Once straight again he looked into the closet.
He immediately realized he was in trouble as he didn’t know how to cover his body with the ten wire hangers that hung there. “Houston, we have a problem.” Jason remembered that his clothes were probably somewhere in Laredo, Texas. He closed his eyes to think, even though he knew for a naval aviator that usually meant trouble. So before he could do some damage to his brain he slowly walked to the
door and opened it a crack.

As he scanned the darkened and half-lit hallway he spied the nurses’ station where he saw the tops of two heads as they sat working on the reports. A candy striper came around the corner and spoke to the nurses there for a moment and then turned away and continued her rounds. Jason managed to take a step out of the room and into the hallway. His eyes widened when he
saw a rack of clothes still in their plastic wrap from the dry cleaners. With his feet freezing and his coordination returning, he made it to the rack and quietly started going through the hanging clothes, hoping beyond hope for a doctor’s smock, surgical clothing, or anything he could find to cover his nakedness. He cursed when he realized as he moved the plastic-covered garments aside that he
was looking at nothing but nurse’s uniforms and candy striper’s dresses. He rolled his eyes and wanted to scream in frustration, that is, until he felt the cold draft rushing up his spine from his open hospital gown. Shaking his head, he removed the white nurse’s uniform from the rack. He realized that this must be the only hospital in the country that made nurses wear skirts instead of pants or surgical
greens.

“Las Vegas,” he said under his breath as he moved back into his room to change and grab his wallet.

*   *   *

It took U.S. Navy Lieutenant J.G. (Junior Grade) Jason Ryan nearly an hour to wind his way past the nurses and another forty minutes to travel the stairs from the third floor to the first. The trip hadn’t been all that unlucky as he did manage to at least snag some paper shoe
covers. Now he had his feet somewhat covered and the color did match the white of his skirt and the blouse with the small red cross on the breast. He also had a surgical cap on his head and knew he must look the sight as he stepped from the shadows of the hospital emergency room.

Another fifteen minutes passed as he waited for his cab to take him to the Gold City Pawn Shop where he would undoubtedly
find the Security Department running some kind of a drill that Colonel Collins was fond of designing. As he gave the cab driver the address he saw the man looking into his rearview mirror every five minutes. His eyes roamed over the nurse’s face. Ryan realized that although he thought he was a passable nurse, he forgot that he hadn’t shaved in three days.

“These long shifts are killing me,” Ryan
quipped and continued to stare at the cabbie’s eyes until he looked away.

The man with the dark hair and arrogant aviator’s walk, who guessed he looked at least decent in his nurse’s outfit, was in for a shock when he pulled up to a closed and locked pawn shop.

EVENT GROUP COMPLEX,
NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA

As Dr. Denise Gilliam waited in front of the elevator to take them to level thirty-four,
she felt the Frenchman’s eyes on her. She looked from the elevator to the airman who watched Henri and finally at Farbeaux.

“What?” she said louder than she intended.

“Hear that?” Farbeaux asked.

“I don’t hear anything. The gunfire has stopped.”

“That’s not the only thing that has stopped dear doctor.”

Denise looked around as the overhead fluorescent lighting flickered. Then she realized
what the Frenchman was referring to.

“What’s he talking about?” the airman asked.

“The bioalarms have stopped,” Gilliam said as she looked up and down the small clinic, not liking the empty feeling of it for the first time since she joined the Group.

“Not only that,” Henri said as he too glanced around, jingling his cuffed hands as he did, “that sexy computer you people rely on so much seems
to be on her lunch break.”

“Jesus, that isn’t right,” the airman said as he moved to the phone at the small nurse’s station to try to reach someone again. As he clicked the disconnect button several times, he knew they were in trouble. No radio, no phones, and worst of all, no Europa to tell them what to do.

“Where’s that damn elevator?” Denise said as she placed her hand on the scanning screen
to see if Europa would react.

That was when the lights went out.

“I hope this is budget cuts,” Farbeaux said as his senses started their small dance inside of his body.

“Shit,” Denise said as she wheeled the bed Henri was restrained to back around and away from the elevator. At that moment the dead circuit tripped the battery-operated lighting in the distant corners of the clinic. “This isn’t
right. The clinic and other facilities are on an emergency line. We have a separate backup generator. Why isn’t it kicking on?”

“Because Europa isn’t there to tell it to,” the airman said as she returned.

“Uh, may I suggest the stairs?” Henri said as he once more jingled the cuffs on both hands.

The pounding made all three go rigid. The noise came from several directions at once, the closed
elevator doors, the doorway leading to the stairwell, and even more strange, from the walls itself.

Farbeaux watched the doors to the elevator. In the semidark of the clinic his hackles rose to an all-time high on his danger meter. He again jangled the handcuffs.