The Last Operation (The Remnants of War Series, Book 1) (27 page)

Daniels lit a propane camp stove and heated a meal of Dinty-Moore beef stew, Deeno's favorite. They could do nothing but wait. Daniels hoped the man would show, but felt nagging disquiet. Nothing had prepared him for this quasi-supernatural experience laden with the mysticism of the Everglades. The moon had traveled most of the sky when they both fell asleep on the cushioned benches of the Catamaran.

* * *

Daniels awoke instantly. He'd always been able to do this, coming up out of a deep sleep instantly. He guessed a part of the sub-conscious stays alert, takes in the environment and wakes you when something is not right, a primeval warrior's instinct. He sat up slowly in the boat with only the faintest rustling of noise. The moon had vanished and it was close to dawn. A few stars remained visible against a backdrop tinged by hints of lightness in the east. The mangrove stands of the island were dark and impenetrable like the inside of a tunnel at midnight.

He felt something different, strange and out of place. A presence lurked out there, close. Then he realized what had awakened him: the silence. A sudden stillness of the jungle when the big predators are hunting in the night and the elements seem to hold their breath.

The Everglades are never silent on the stillest of night, not at any time. Now, on the edge of dawn, the quiet was a palpable force, something you felt like a burst of wind on your face. Daniels looked over at Deeno who slept with occasional soft snoring sounds. He covered him with a light plastic blanket, more against the insects then any lack of warmth. Deeno let out a hushed groan and turned on his side.

When he was sure the young man would not awaken, Daniels stepped outside the Catamaran. His bare feet squished in the ground, the mud like soft and warm primordial soup. He carried no light. Somehow it seemed wrong to break the moment with beams of artificial light. He knew how absurd this would sound if he ever tried to write it down. But at this moment, the feeling of the atmosphere, the unnatural stillness and quiet of the great swamp, the overwhelming sense of the presence of something different, never encountered before, drove every movement he made.

Perhaps he should have been afraid or cautious. He didn't even have the 45. Leaving it on the boat had seemed right somehow. He didn't feel a sense of danger or the lurking feel of malevolence that raised invisible hackles on his defensive senses.

He'd only taken a few steps, barely ten feet in the dark overhanging Mangroves when he saw it. The sight wasn't clear, more like a shadow that stood out darker then the surrounding darkness. He felt it's aura, it's presence more by perception or perhaps a message of primitive intuition.

Daniels took a step forward in the hushed night. He held his arms out straight, palms outward, the universal posture of one who is unarmed.

"Who are you?" Daniels whispered. "Are you the one Deeno calls John?"

He waited. The jungle surrounding them seemed to hold its breath. When the answer came, the voice held the sound of grinding alien tones, the humanity far away and struggling to retain control. Rough and coarse like a mixture of grinding machine and animal tones, yet hushed at the same time. It seemed to Daniels as if the speaker struggled to make the human speech through vocal chords that were no longer human.

Chapter 38

Daniels stood, his feet sinking in the brackish mud as he waited for the reply from the hulking creature facing him.

"Yes. You are the one the boy calls his uncle," came the reply from the dark Indigo outline.

"That is correct. I am Richard Daniels."

"You are one of those who hunted me two nights ago."

"I was told you were a menace to life. We were trying to capture you alive."

"Alive is not how they want me. Things are not always as they seem, are they?"

No they aren't. They never are, thought Richard Daniels.

As the sky lightened, He could pick out a few more details. The massive form facing him became more distinct from the rest of the shadows in the Mangrove stand. Daniels realized the sheer size of it. About seven feet tall and bulky like a massive gorilla with features that seemed unnatural, out of place even though it was still too dark to make out the details. Daniels now understood that the man, undoubtedly it was a man, could see in the dark. With the mutations, he had evolved night vision.

"No things are often not what they seem," replied Daniels. "I was told you were part of an experiment to develop a bio-engineered soldier, a sort of super soldier. I was told you were berserk and had to be stopped."

"The bio-engineering part is true," said the man, "In order for a lie to be really effective, it must have an element of truth. I was the first successful part of a program called BEE: Biological Engineered Enhancement. I was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when word came down they were looking at a select group of men. They sought volunteers among us to participate in a program to develop a new type of soldier. Warriors for the millennium they told us, new soldiers for a new kind of world. I volunteered. I went through a battery of tests. Cell Types, DNA, Microbiological, you name it they did it. In the end only five of us qualified. But that's all they needed."

Daniels listened in silence as he spoke. He could feel the struggle of the man to control his vocal cords. It carried on the alien sound waves from whatever mutation his throat had endured. The night was rapidly disappearing, replaced by a dim glow from the East, the first rays of the sun would soon be breaking and in the burgeoning light, Daniels began to make out the details of the bio-enhanced soldier named John. The horror of it held a savage fascination. It was a view of nature run wild, like thousands of years of evolution piled together like so much cordwood.

The arms had stretched, elongated so they reached almost to his knee. Normally that would give an apish appearance, but this was far from the case, for his were not normal arms. The shoulders and where the biceps would normally be, were rippled with a knotted musculature that reached to the elbow. Just below the elbow was a massive ring of flesh with protruding barbs and below flat thin forearms with hard bone-like ridges sharpened like knife blades into formidable weapons.

The hands seemed to be the most normal part of him except for their size. He was wearing what appeared to be tattered jungle fatigues torn through in spots to allow the protrusion of the natural weapons his body had developed. His skin was covered with layers of armored scales. The eyes were large, round and luminous below bony ridges. It was like nature had decided to build its own tank, armored and impervious. In spite of the unnatural quality of the tones, the humanity in his voice came through as he continued.

"For two years we endured the trials and changes. They told us they had perfected the procedures through animal experimentation, but it wasn't true. We were the first human subjects and we stepped into uncharted territory. They performed what seemed like endless experimental medical procedures. They grafted DNA, the growth and adaptability factors of certain reptiles, animals and even fish life into our bodies. They accelerated the normal evolutionary process. In the end I was the only one of the original five who survived. It seemed like the whole concept was doomed if you have to kill four to get one bio-enhanced. I didn't know at the time that all they needed was one—just one bio-enhanced soldier to do their bidding. They don't care how many they kill in the process. Life, compassion, loyalty, all that has no meaning to them."

"Who are you talking about?" asked Daniels. "Is it that group that calls themselves Subsidiary Data Acquisition, SDA?"

"There's no such group, they're not a government agency. That's just what they told you. It's a cover for a powerful group of rogue agents within our own intelligence community. They act on their own and have almost unlimited financing and access to government resources. They have carried their own agenda for God knows how many years."

"How did you get on to this?"

"What they didn't know, couldn't have known, was some of the effects of the mutations on the human mind, on how we think and what we become susceptible to. Along with the treatments I was being given steady doses of Lithogentricol."

In the growing light Daniels saw more details. The man's legs were thick with muscles like cords of high-tension steel, the thighs heavy with power. The immense unnatural strength of those legs would give him the capability for prodigious leaps and bursts of speed. Daniels remembered two nights ago, in the commando boat, when he exploded like a powerful rocket out of the murky depths and wreaked havoc.

"I'm not a pharmacist," Daniels said. "I have no clue what Lithogentricol is."

"Even if you were a pharmacist, you still wouldn't know. It's a secret mind control drug they developed in their own laboratories. They were feeding it to us. Everything seemed logical and normal at the time. I couldn't pick out the inequities of what was going on. The drug kills normal human suspicion. You sort of accept everything that comes your way like the most natural thing in the world. I was falling into it, turning into an obedient and deadly robot. It was one of their technicians who pulled me out. A young man they'd seduced with obscene amounts of money. Except, unlike them, this one had a conscience. He tampered with the doses and gradually, as the bio-enhancements started taking hold the weaker doses of the drug began to lose its effect. They had no way of knowing because I was the first successful human bio-enhancement they ever had. You see Richard, along with the physical enhancements come the mental adaptation. The brain becomes sharper, more in focus. But you pay a heavy price for all that. By that time, I knew there was something rotten. That young technician kept feeding me bits and pieces of information when he could. He was making a record of it himself, trying to figure out how to stop all this and keep his life. In the end, he failed on both counts. They murdered him and dumped him in the Everglades."

The body that Bobby-Ray found that night, being devoured by alligators, thought Daniels, that's who it was.

The man coughed, a ragged unnatural savage sound as if the effort of keeping human speech was taking a toll on mutated alien vocal cords. A shuddering ripple went through the massive frame and he waited until it stopped before speaking again.

"But I kept silent. I continued to act as if the drug was still in effect. It all came together when I got my first assignment."

As he spoke Daniels started to see glimmers of understanding. So many things about this affair had bothered him. Yet, there was not one thing he could point to like a smoking gun. It was a series of things. Why one man in the Everglades? Why only one unheard of hush-hush agency? Christ the government had screwed up often enough, it was almost expected. It also explained the undue pressure that had been placed on Daniels and the filthy way they had used the people around him to coerce him into doing their dirty work. As he listened to this deadly hulk of a monstrous man, Daniels was beginning to piece it together, connecting all the dots.

As Daniels saw the man clearly in the growing light, he also saw a victim. He felt the irony, the untold longings, the hopelessness and despair as waves of anguished yearning rode on the man's alien voice.

"You see my first assignment was to murder a member of the United States House of Representative," said the man.

"What?" Daniels said, as a surge of repugnance went through his mind like a tide of slimy cockroaches. What kind of people were they that held such contemptuous power? They had killed eight men in these obscene parodies of scientific medicine. Four volunteers who had died believing they were serving their country. Then four brave soldiers killed trying to control what they had created from the survivor. And that was only the ones he knew about. There were probably many more. All this so they could murder members of our government and anyone else who stood in the way of whatever it was they wanted to do and whatever power they wanted to seize.

"He was the Honorable Joshua Palumbo, Democrat, Maryland," continued John. "He headed the oversight committee that apparently was closing in on some improper use of Agency funds and other irregularities by this small group of CIA agents. The legislator was due to participate on a three days hunting trip in the hills of South Carolina. I was to track him down and kill him and his entire party of four—just another mysterious disappearance. I played along like I was still under the influence of the Lithogentricol. I could see what was happening. God knows where they got these huge funds from, but the entire bio-enhancement project is theirs, this small group of agents, they're running this whole show. Once they control a few bio-enhanced soldiers they plan to turn them into their own private army of controlled killers. They will eliminate anyone or anything in their way. Nothing could stand or protect against that kind of power. Something like me, like what I've become, could penetrate any Secret Service security. There would be no such thing as protection. No one and nothing would be safe."