Black Hawk Day Rewind: An action packed spy thriller (Mark Savannah Espionage Series Book 1) (25 page)

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At midnight Mark made another coffee, drank it and got dressed to go out for a walk in the night. He’d had no sleep at all and needed to get his brain working, and a walk of a few miles would definitely get his gray matter in motion. He had got into the habit in London and he did it every time he had to prepare a mission in detail.

When he returned home after a couple of hours, he wrote a detailed report on the analyzed data on 35 patients at the Southwestern County Medical Center. He decided to talk to David the next morning face-to-face and not to put the document in the department’s important communication archives.

At 4:00 am, exhausted, he fell asleep on the couch still dressed.

Mark felt the tension rise, people were running through the streets screaming, he heard loud explosions and gunfire very close by. There were Bravo rangers, Delta Force and Navy SEALS in action, the confusion was total. It was no longer a simple operation by raiders, but a real battle against militants.

His mission in Somalia was over and he just had to get to the base as soon as possible and take off from what had become a fiery hell. A U.S. helicopter was veering over his head; all of a sudden, Mark realized that the helicopter was falling to the ground. He saw the propeller shatter, kicking up dust, dirt and rocks that obscured his view, next the tail broke and sent dangerous fragments everywhere.

He remained close to the wall, trying to figure out what he could do: he saw the fuselage flexing under the force of the impact, he felt the vibrations that shook the metal as if they were a hi-hat. He could see the bodies of the aircrew whipped by the safety straps that cut into their skin, while the noise of the rabid turbine marked a tempo that seemed to never end.

Mark then opened radio contact and heard an incredulous and excited voice say, "The Super 6-1 was shot down! I repeat, the Black Hawk was shot down, the Super 6-1 is on the ground!" But where was his father, Turner C. Cooper?

Mark Savannah suddenly awoke sweaty, sore, his heart pounding: the same nightmare that haunted him again and again had come back clear, after a very short latency period. This time he had seen Richard Reed, carrying an RPG on his shoulder, as he ran to the side of the road to hide.

It was 7:30 in the morning and Mark took a shower to wash off the sticky nightmare that prostrated him when he least expected it.

By 8:30 am he was already in Marshall’s office.

"Hello David, how did it go yesterday?"

"Coffee? Cake from Mario and wife?"

"Sure, thanks. I need to talk to you. I’ve analyzed all the data."

David Marshall called the bar and, as usual, Mario answered and was only too happy to send the breakfast. Finally, David turned to speak:

"They replaced the faulty batch of Neuroxenia, and then Harris and Bain visited the patients and wrote the report."

"Outcome?" asked Mark.

"I closed the procedure; in effect, the waves have stabilized and the frequency hasn’t increased further. Only three states received a bad batch that was to be delivered to another project."

"Let me guess: Texas, Colorado and California."

"Yes...but how did you know?"

"David, they are the ones that you called the other day to see if they had any problems and, curiously, Harris was also the investigator. Believe me, you have been deceived really well."

"Mark I don’t think that..."

"Listen to me, they’re carrying out a trial involving a large number of people, they have patented a neuronal tissue that allows the complete psychomotor recovery of those who have suffered major trauma, the scaffold that they have developed gives no rejection phenomena, and in addition the molecule that supports the therapy comes from their research and development laboratories.

“But come on, you also have to consider that it is a project they are industrializing and exporting abroad and not least that it is being followed very closely by the media.

“Suddenly one day all the patients, except one, undergo an increase in frequency and intensity of their brain waves, they become aggressive towards their own kind and don’t respond to pain stimuli, but do you know that all, and I repeat all of our patients don’t react to pain and are not afraid of anything?

“Do you know that they eat almost twice the amount of food that they used to eat and that putting them through an ECG stress test yields almost the same results as a baseline ECG? And, I haven’t finished, do you know that all of the scientific directors of the accredited centers are part of the Department of Defense with the exception of Harris, who, however, works for the CIA?

“How do you explain all this? And how did you end up on the project, since you don’t work for either of the two institutions?"

"I don’t know what to say,” David was flustered by Mark’s long angry speech. “I was Ronald Barth’s deputy, I took his position when he died in a car accident a year ago."

"Good heavens! David, do you realize what kind of situation this is? And perhaps it wasn’t even an accident! The truth is that Reed has lost control of the situation, he doesn’t know which way to turn and is trying to gain time to find a solution and prevent fatal leaks."

"What do you intend to do?" asked David.

"I want to understand what is really going on before..."

"Mark, I'm not convinced."

"Davis knew about this in advance or he suspected something."

"You know that I cannot contact Davis," Marshall replied annoyed.

In the midst of the discussion, Mark’s pager began to ring: it was the emergency room.

"Hello, this is Stearman, Did you call me... I'll be right there."

"Marshall, there’s an urgency in ER, I gotta go. If you don't mind, we can continue later."

"I'll wait for you to come back, but you have to know that your idea doesn’t please me at all."

Mark quickly went to the emergency room: a man was lying on the bed waving and speaking in incoherent sentences.

"Dr Stearman! He’s a car accident victim. We have found a mild traumatic brain injury and a few bruises, but the patient has tried to attack us several times. He keeps insisting we have taken the form of doctors but in reality we want to kill him! We had to give him a sedative to calm him down, but with little result."

Mark approached the man: he was about thirty-years old, and he had dog tags around his neck.

"Good morning George, I'm Dr. Stearman, you have been lucky. Can I speak to you for a minute?"

"Captain, why the fuck disguise yourself as a doctor. Shouldn't we start the training in the jungle?"

"I'm not your captain, George. I'm a doctor."

"How the fuck were you able to replace my battalion with doubles that fucking do nothing? Answer me, Captain!"

"Ok George, that's enough, let me take a look at you. How the hell do you not remember that I’m both your captain and a medical officer?" replied Mark, who was interested in understanding his state of health.

"You are right. I'm sorry, sir."

"Hold still. I must probe your vertebrae, beginning with those in the neck. Don’t move."

Mark began the visit and lingered on a point in the neck that was thicker as if it had a large cyst.

"Do you feel pain here?"

"No, have you finished?"

"Now take a deep breath."

"You are a pain in the ass, captain, and I don’t care if you put me in isolation. Haven’t you finished probing me, fucking hell!"

"Adam," Mark said, turning to the doctor on duty. "We have to carry out an MRI quickly. Call a nurse, and I'll be right there”.

While Adam went in search of a nurse, Mark took the gum he was chewing out of his mouth and applied it to the dog tags without being noticed then he put the gum in his pocket.

Mark stayed with the soldier during the entire MRI then, when the radiologist left the room, he sent a copy of the file directly to his device.

"What do I have?" George asked seriously.

"I checked the cyst that you have in your neck."

"You also took a blood sample, didn’t you? Do you think I'm under the influence of drugs or bloody alcohol?"

"These are routine examinations, George. As for the cyst, we’ll know in a couple of hours. You can rest for the time being; fortunately, I have not seen anything serious."

The patient was taken to a room to keep him under observation.

"Adam," Mark said to the doctor in the emergency room, "I saw something strange, but I need to see the scan before I can be certain. I think this man has symptoms of Capgras syndrome, which may have been caused by the accident. I would like to keep him under observation for at least 24 hours to understand his mental state. The peculiar thing is that he hasn’t used drugs and is not in a daze. I'll be back in half an hour, after reviewing the MRI for a possible therapy."

Mark had seen a strange image on the patient’s MRI and decided to analyze it in peace in his office. There was also something wrong in the soldier’s reactions, he was under sedation but was still talkative and aggressive.

Mark sat down at the desk and took out the gum with the imprint of George Turner’s dog tags, then he transcribed the identification number of the department along with the patient’s name and surname, then he threw the gum in the trash.

As he was about to examine the MRI, he heard someone knocking on the door: it was Adam Murray, the emergency room doctor.

"Dr Stearman!" he said in a shaken voice. "Look at this, I'm going home but I had to show you this..."

Mark read the paper that Adam was giving him and then asked: "So presumably he’s taking an experimental drug that is not on the market, and you haven’t been able to determine what the drug is?"

"Exactly! And as if that were not enough, ten minutes ago, four soldiers came to my office, they demanded all the medical records including copies, all the analysis and the MRI. We had to hand over all the information regarding this George Turner. Then they picked up the patient and took him away."

"But you just let them to do it?" asked Mark incredulous.

"I couldn’t do anything but run a check on one of them at Fort Bliss, and the feedback was positive. I had to release the patient to a medical officer. I'm sorry, you won’t get the outcome of the               MRI."

"At this point it doesn’t matter, he's gone. He was sure strange. Adam, leave me the analyses please. This question intrigues me anyway."

"You can keep them. I don’t need them anymore, goodbye Dr. Stearman."

At that point, Mark was sure that the Fort Bliss Armored Unit Training Base officials were hiding something, so he opened the file with the images of Turner’s magnetic resonance by connecting his device to the screen that he had in his office.

"Holy shit!" Mark exclaimed to himself, reflecting on what he was seeing.

The images showed a thin scar that had healed between the frontal and parietal lobes and what looked like a metal object stuck under the skin of the neck.

Mark enlarged the picture and for the second time he let out a colorful exclamation.

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!! Yes, it is an RF-ID micro-transponder tag, and the scar, the aggressive behavior..."

He picked up the phone and dialed David Marshall’s phone number.

"David? This is Mark, can your team analyze a sample of Neuroxenia, please?"

"Your voice sounds different,” said David in alarm. “What’s happened?"

"I'm not sure for the moment and I don’t want to worry you. Can you please arrange the analysis? It's very urgent. I'll tell you about it as soon as I clear my ideas."

"I’ll send you the file immediately. Bain brought me the analysis of the samples from Harris and Baker and compared them with the normal dosage of the drug. He wanted to show me that even the samples we have in stock have the same problem because they belong to a mistakenly sent batch. You should have received it in your private directory, call me as soon as possible."

Mark opened the file and it didn’t take long to realize that it was the same molecule; and at that point, he thought of Pavel, he must still be awake.

"QRV Digitrevenant69?"

"QRV, hello, Mark."

"I’m afraid there’s a parallel project covered by military secrecy, the twin of "Transtem 1.1", and this would explain the involvement of the Defense and the CIA. It also explains why both institutions have pushed the media to take an interest in the project: they want to give social significance to the activities of Biosketch Technologies Inc. If I give you a code and a name, do you want to have some fun and do a little digging into the Defense archives?"

"Of course, just me, no one else can be involved, too dangerous."

"Payment for success."

"As usual. Goodbye. Is it OK in a day?"

"Run like the wind, Pavel! I have the feeling that time has already expired. Thank you, my friend, see you soon.”