Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern (17 page)

“Yes, sir,” answered the youth, visibly relaxed.

Mal watched the private disappear back into the small guard booth positioned to the left of the hydraulic gate arm barrier Zuz’s car had stopped in front of. The cyborg’s enhanced senses picked up Adorno calling Denman’s office on the hard wired land line phone mounted in the tiny shack. The man quickly repeated Mal’s request to see the Colonel.

A moment later, Adorno had hung up the phone, raised the yellow and black barrier, and pointed Zuz towards the large, five-story building housing the offices for Lieutenant Colonel Denman.

“See?” chirped Mal as the Nissan puttered and spat its way through the gate and down the road surrounded by mothballed military vehicles to their destination. “No one got shot. You’re fine.”

“You may be fine, but I need a new pair of underwear,” responded Zuz, easing his car into a visitor’s spot and sliding the gear shift into “park.”

Waiting for them just outside the entrance to the National Training Center’s main administration building was Denman’s assistant, Corporal MacAnders, a short but stocky man whose height pushed five feet six only with a lot of imagination, and close-cropped hair so red in color it made his scalp look sunburned. The most interesting thing about the man was the beat-up dark hard leather holster and antique six-shooter strapped to his right hip and looking rather out of place on a twenty-first century soldier.

“Is that an M1917?” Zuz asked the man, nearly hopping in excitement. Mal was completely confused by the change in his friend’s demeanor. As far as he knew, Zuz wasn’t a big fan of firearms. “It looks like an early Colt model.”

“Good eye, Mr. Zuzelo,” smiled the man as he took them through the double glass doors that lead to the administration building’s air-conditioned interior. “It was my great-grandfather’s sidearm in the First World War, and my grandfather’s in the Second and Korea.”

A ridiculous smile split Zuz’s face and he pointed at MacAnders’ holster as the trio mounted a large flight of stairs leading from the lobby to the offices on the second floor, further confounding Mal.

Comprehension finally slammed into Mal’s brain when Zuz mouthed the words “Indiana Jones” while pointing at the sidearm. They were escorted down a tiled hallway and passed a row of office doors by the Corporal before finally stopping in front of heavy wooden door flanked on one side by an American flag and wall of pictures, and by a tidy steel desk on the other.

Gesturing for the visitors to wait, Corporal MacAnders leaned over his desk and pressed a button on his phone, activating its intercom.

Waiting for the beep, MacAnders spoke clearly into the machine, “Colonel Denman, sir?”

“Yes, Tommy,” came the slightly static-y voice of an older man over the intercom’s tiny speakers.

“Captain Malcolm Weir and Mr. David Zuzelo have arrived.”

Half a tick later the door swung in and powerfully-built man in his mid-fifties, dressed in the same digital-camo patterned uniform that seemed to be standard attire at Fort Irwin, stomped out of the office, a look of disbelief shone out of the two granite-gray eyes set deep in his face.

The man, whose height topped out a good inch or two above Mal’s own, stared down at the cyborg, thick black brows bunching into a single, furry caterpillar above eyes, for a full thirty seconds before the salt-and-pepper whiskers of his mustache parted to reveal the yellowed teeth of a lifelong coffee addict in an expression Zuz could only assume was a smile.

“Hol-ee shit!” bellowed Colonel Denman, clapping Mal roughly across the shoulders. “If it ain’t my favorite ground pounder!”

“It’s good to see a friendly face, Colonel,” Mal grinned, shaking the man’s hand. “Even one as ugly as yours.”

“Time was, a soldier could be court-martialed for saying that.”

“I’m not a soldier anymore, Colonel,” countered Mal, deadly serious. “Tell the truth, I’m not sure what I am anymore.”

Denman nodded grimly, understanding that something had happened to his former soldier.

Casting an askew glance towards the Zuz, who was busy trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, Denman quizzed, “So, who’s your girlfriend?”

To Zuz’s annoyance, Mal chuckled, his mood lightening up at the good-natured ribbing from his once-commander.

“I’d like you to meet David Zuzelo, my best friend—only friend in the world right now.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Zuzelo,” Denman reached out with one of his giant, calloused hands and gripped Zuz’s tight.

“You too, Colonel Denman,” responded Zuz, politely trying to extricate his fingers before the big man crushed them.

Corporal MacAnders pretended to sort papers as he watched the exchange from the vantage point behind his desk.

“What brings you back to my corner of the world, son?” asked Denman.

“I need to know what happened in Dahuk, Colonel,” answered Mal. “What happened to me—to my men.”

The Colonel’s face darkened at Mal’s request.

“Let’s go inside my office and talk, Captain” said Denman, cutting off Mal’s line of thought and pushing the two visitors through the door. Denman called back to Corporal MacAnders that they were not to be disturbed and Mal thought he caught a flash of paranoia in his former CO’s face as he allowed himself to be led into the office.

The door slammed hard behind the group and the Colonel loomed over them, eyes blazing in barely restrained fury.

“You’ve got ten seconds to prove to me that you’re Captain Malcolm Weir before I have you arrested,” growled Denman, hand tightening around the textured grip of the Glock-22 holstered at his waist. “If I don’t shoot you myself first.”

Both Mal and Zuz were stunned by Denman’s the sudden reversal in attitude.

“I don’t understand, Colonel.”

“Son, I was sure as Christ you were dead,” the Lieutenant Colonel responded, pure amazement coloring his tone. “How is God’s name are you up walking around—even a year later? It’s impossible. No one comes back from what you went through. Not as a whole man.”

“No one said I came back whole, sir.”

Mal slowly removed the jacket he’d been wearing and showed his former commanding officer the full price of his miraculous recovery.

“Dear God,” was all Denman could say as he took in the sight of Mal’s nanotech arms, watching as they changed shape, grew spikes, and turned into living weapons. “What did they do to you, Weir?”

Allowing his arms to return to vaguely human shape and size, Mal responded, “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me, Colonel. I woke up yesterday in a secret government lab with a hole in my memory. Tell me what happened in Dahuk.”

“How much do you remember?”

Mal laughed, “I’m CRS, sir. Can’t remember shit after our chopper was hit.”

Denman told the men to take the two padded wooded chairs facing his desk and the large bank of windows behind it. The old soldier sat on the sole clean spot on the ancient oak desktop, rubbing his chin slowly, eyes narrowly slits as he decided where best to start his tale.

Grunting, the Colonel looked up into Mal’s face as the words began spilling from between his lips.

“Our regiment had been stationed at FOB Sykes for less than a week when rumors of unrest in the outskirts of Dahuk came over the horn. I ordered your unit out to scout the area and get back with a sit-rep. A trio of black hawks carrying your men lifted off at nineteen-hundred hours on April 3rd of last year.

“Your birds must have been coming in too low to the ground when they were hit by enemy-fired rocket-propelled grenades and crashed just inside the Dahuk city limits, well outside our area of control. Most of your men were killed on impact. As far as the boys in intel could determine, only yourself and the two sergeants—Douros and Jay—walked away from the crash.

“We were able to set up a CASEVAC point at an abandoned hotel about a mile from where you went down, but communications broke down and we lost track of you boys. I can only guess that you were ambushed on your way to the dust-off location.

“Regardless of whatever happened after the crash, by the time the black hawks arrived to pull you boys out, the extraction point was a hot mess. All three of you were torn to shit. Word was Sergeant Douros was already down with a bullet through his ACH. Staff Sergeant Jay was wounded, spitting blood, and barely able to stand.

“From what the medics told me, you should have been dead, Weir. You’d already lost an arm, and your torso was shredded—one lung was collapse and most of your spleen and one kidney were blown to hell. You’d taken an insane amount of shrapnel to your chest, neck and face from an IED.

“The evac team said it was a free-fire zone when they arrived and that you were still kicking, surrounded by dead hostiles. You’d propped yourself up in front of your men, with your M16 set to rock-and-roll, still trying to fight when they pulled your team out.

“Once the docs had you and your men stabilized, you were all packed up on a C-17, pretty as you please, flown to Edwards Air Force Base and taken to the hospital there.

“They did their best to patch you up, but you were messed up—worse than dead, really. Paralyzed and stuck in bed, eating through tubes and kept going on life-support—conscious, but that was it.”

“What about the other two men from my unit—Douros and Jay?” asked Mal after digesting the information he’d been given.

Colonel Denman exhaled a slow, deep breath of sadness and responded.

“Sergeant Steven Douros was a vegetable. Unresponsive, no brain activity,” Denman dropped his eyes as his continued, voice cracking. “Staff Sergeant James Jay died on the table in surgery a day or two after you were brought stateside.”

Reaching down onto his desk, Denman picked up a pale folder filled to the bursting point and bound with a red rubber band. Tossing the documents to Mal, he added, “It’s all here in the reports.”

Mal passed the thickly packed folder to Zuz without looking at it and nodded for Denman to continue.

“One day, about two weeks after you boys got back in the world, I had a had a couple of the boys fly me out to the air base—told ‘em it was a training mission.

“That’s where it all got weird.

“You see, when we got to the hospital, you were gone. All three of you. And the medical staff couldn’t tell me how, where or why. Just that’d you been removed on orders from somewhere up the food chain. Somewhere over their pay grade.

“Official word was handed down to me when we got back to base. You were all classified “removed for medical reasons” and being pulled from the Rangers…all three of you. Including Staff Sergeant Jay. And that’s the bit that struck me all sorts of queer. I had always thought dead was dead and there was no reason to set up an RFM for a dead man.”

Denman slammed his fist down, still upset by what happened and his inability to find out why.

“Any idea what they did with me? Where they took me?” Mal asked, his own frustration echoing Denman’s.

“No idea at all, son. All I could figure out was that you were gone and it was on the order of some asshole from Washington named Kiesling.

“When I tried to investigate I was shut down—with extreme prejudice.

“Hell, that’s how I got stuck out here,” snorted the Colonel. “Supervising training and as far out of the way as possible. Someone wanted to make sure no one was looking too closely at your case. After banging my head against a wall of red tape, I had to give up and leave it alone. I was told it was that or my career.”

“Hey, Colonel,” interrupted Zuz. “This report mentions a fourth man wounded in the operation and classified as RFM along with the others. It says he disappeared from the hospital at about the same time as Mal and the two men from his unit.”

Denman thought for a moment before his face lit up in remembrance.

“Yeah,” the old soldier said, sitting back down at the chair behind his desk. “He was a member of the evac team sent in to pull Mal’s unit out of the hot zone. The man was wounded in during the escape. Near as I could find, he died…the same as you, Mal.”

“Do you remember the man’s name,” asked Zuz, flipping through the thick manila records folder, searching for more information.

Zuz held up a familiar photo for Mal to see as Denman finally answered.

“Captain Marc Morrell.”

“Captain Morrell isn’t any more dead than I am, Colonel,” spat Mal through his teeth. “Morrell is still alive.”

“What?”

“He’s alive, got a house out in the burbs, a two-car garage,” confusion and anger fought for dominance in Mal’s head. “The best part is: he’s married to my ex-fiancée.”

“When you get yourself into shit, you sure do make sure it’s deep, don’t you, Captain?”

“I’m in it over my head this time, sir.”

“You need to get your girl out of there. Get her somewhere safe and hunker down for a bit. We’ll see if we can figure it out together, son,” Denman reached down and punched his thick finger hard into the white intercom button on his phone. “Get your ass in here, Corporal, we’ve got trouble.”

“This means a lot, Colonel Denman,” stammered Mal, grateful. “I didn’t know who to trust.”

Mal lost the Colonel’s response as his internal computer began screaming out in alarm, alerting the super-soldier of an impending attack.

Before the cyborg could react to the warning, the soft pop of a bullet punching a hole through glass filled his ears and he watched as Colonel Denman’s head exploded into a fine red mist.

CHAPTER 14

Gore covered nearly every inch of space in front of Colonel Denman’s desk, sent there by a high caliber sniper’s bullet blasting its way through the soldier’s head. Realizing what happened, a shriek tore itself from Zuz’s throat as he looked down to find himself covered in blood and brains and tiny fragments of skull.

Mal held up his metal hands, now coated crimson in the cooling plasma of his friend. The cyborg’s computerized brain continued its alarm, notifying Mal a split second before Denman’s assistant burst through the door.

Taking in the sight before him, Corporal MacAnders saw the headless corpse of his boss and snapped, assuming the two unexpected visitors were Colonel Denman’s killers, caught in the act.