Nerve Center (28 page)

He should have followed his instincts.

“We’ve improved the tests as well as the procedures,” said Geraldo. “Or at least we thought we did. Knowing this—knowing how he reacted at a point of great stress in the past would have influenced me. I might have eliminated him from the program. But the fact that he was able to keep such a secret—that is extremely worrisome. I would not have chosen him for ANTARES.”

“All right,” said Dog. “Unfortunately, it may very well be irrelevant now.”

Aboard Hawkmother
Over Central America
19 February, 2240 local

MADRONE’S THOUGHTS TWISTED AROUND THE computer’s, tangles of wires that ran through everything he heard and saw. They pulsed red and black; at times he tried to follow them through the tangles, but got hopelessly lost.

The elation he’d felt at escaping the Mexican airport and refueling the Flighthawks had dissipated. Hungry and tired, he vacillated between wanting this all to end and not wanting to give up.

Bastian and the others would blame him for killing Dalton and Kulpin, not to mention whoever had died at the Mexican airport. They’d charge him with murder, treason, theft of government property—they’d invent charges to persecute him with.

They didn’t need charges, the bastards. They wanted to kill him, the way they had killed his daughter.

Worse. They would keep him alive, hound him every day. They might even be manipulating this now—Geraldo and Bastian and Stockard had set him up, hadn’t they’? Made him join the program, then concocted a series of petty tests, waiting for him to snap. They knew about his daughter. They were probably working with the people who had made him kill her.

The bastards had planned it all. Why did they hate him? What had he done to them?

It couldn’t just be Iraq. It had to be Los Alamos, something there. He’d killed one of the tactical artillery programs, made a few generals look bad by pointing out the obvious.

Madrone needed only a fraction of his attention, a small slice of his ability, to fly the planes. His mind hungered for more, ranging across the universe of possibilities in a feeding frenzy.

What would he do? He would crash the planes into the rain forest, be done with it all, end their plot against him.

He saw Christina lying on the hospital gurney, frowning at him. “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy.”

A cheap shining gurney. The bastards didn’t even have the decency to give her a real bed. She’d spent her final days in treatment, between sessions, dying, dying, dying in the mold-stinking hall as she waited.

By the time they reached the children’s wing, her eyes were closed, and she would never reopen them. Even the doctor admitted it, the bastard doctor who wouldn’t even give her morphine when she began to cry, the son of a bitch.

He wanted to kill them. He would kill them.

Lightning flashed and the plane lurched onto her right wing. Madrone had entered another storm, but it was the chaos of his mind that sent the aircraft reeling. There were so many conflicting emotions and impulses—suicide, revenge, hatred, love. They slammed against each other, physically pushing his head back in the seat, literally tearing at the neurons and other cells of his brain.

The ANTARES circuitry spat back wild arcs of energy into the system, befuddling the Boeing’s control system; the plane began to yaw, threatening to slide into a spin. The Flight-hawks, set by C3 in a basic trail pattern, faithfully mimicked their mother plane, rocking behind her at 25,000 feet.

Madrone knew he had to end this somehow. The pain threatened to overwhelm him. He felt the faint pings at the corner of his temples that meant he was slipping out of Theta-alpha.

If he went out now, he’d never get back in time to prevent himself from crashing.

Part of him wanted exactly that. Part of him wanted to just crash into the jungle below—he was over Colombia now—end it all in a flash of flames.

But other parts of him wanted to live. And those parts won out. He saw the rain forest enveloping him, heard the music Geraldo had played. And he felt the dark woman approaching, the shadow who had come unbidden from the recesses of his desire.

Come to me,
she told him.
I
will show you the way.

Madrone’s rapid pulse eased. He felt his way into the cockpit of the big plane, stared for a moment at the holes the ejection seats had made, then took the controls firmly. The plane leveled off; he checked his systems, made a correction to deal with the fury of the storm.

He had less than an hour’s worth of fuel left in Hawkmother.

Landing at a major airport or military base was out of the question. But where?

The database in the navigational unit covered only the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. He wanted something in Brazil, in the rain forest.

Have the Flighthawks scout for him.

He took a long breath, his head rising as he held it, and saw himself inside Hawk One. Madrone pushed down, gliding toward the earth like a falcon.

He tucked his wings back. The canopy exploded below. The jungle was everywhere, thick with green, howling with the screeches of animals.

A long strip.

No good. Military planes.

A bulldozed runway. Too short; probably a smuggler’s haven.

The long river, winding past the marshes. Smoke curled in the distance, a fire fighting the drizzle.

Madrone shook violently as the skin on his face froze. He was back in the tower in the middle of the storm, pelted by hail. Lightning jagged all around him.

End it,
growled the jaguar’s voice.

He turned back.

End it.

The tower. He was on the range at Glass Mountain, siting the artillery, telling them where to fire.

No, it was the church where they’d held the service for Christina.

It was both of them together.

Kevin felt himself starting to fall. Concrete appeared to his right. Bulldozers. The runway was too short.

His temples stung. He held the stick of the 777 in his hand, smelled the incense from Christina’s funeral, saw Jennifer Gleason tearing off her clothes.

“No!” he yelled. “Land! Land! Land!”

Pej, Brazil
20 February, 0340 local

THE PLANE MATERIALIZED FROM THE DARKNESS, bursting down from the mountains and steadying its wings over the mountains. Lights on, gear down, it was obviously going to land.

An hour before, Minerva had been unable to sleep and had decided to walk around the base in the fading moonlight—an unusual decision, at least so early in the morning. Had she had some sort of unconscious premonition?

If so, of what? Disaster? Other people’s deaths?

She glanced toward the building where the security team she’d summoned on her radio was just now rushing into a jeep. When she turned back, the big jet, a Boeing 777 or something similar, lumbered onto the runway. Whoever was flying it was damn good, but still, he was trying to land in the dark on a concrete and packed-dirt runway. The plane’s nose flared as the engines slammed into reverse thrust. Dirt and gravel shot everywhere as the aircraft funneled toward the jungle at the far end of the runway. It thumped from the concrete onto the dirt, blowing tires as it skidded. There was a shriek and then a boom and then a drawn-out hush. Minerva waited for the explosion and fire, the dust so thick in the air that she couldn’t see.

Something whirled down at the top of the dust cloud. Two large birds fluttered above, buzzards expecting carrion.

As the dust settled in the moonlight, Minerva realized the Boeing had managed to stop at the end of the rampway. Even more incredibly, it hadn’t caught fire and its landing gear was still upright.

She began to run toward it, coughing from the dirt in the air. The plane bore no markings, not even registration numbers.

What an incredible thing, she thought; if she had been more superstitious, she would have sworn it was a sign from heaven.

A stairway opened with a tart whoosh from the rear belly of the plane.

Minerva unholstered her pistol, waiting as two members of her security team joined her. Then she stepped onto the stairway, peering up at the dim red interior of the plane.

As she did, the vultures fluttered down nearby. They weren’t birds at all; they were sleek black aircraft unlike any Minerva had ever seen. About the size of small automobiles, they seemed to her some odd offspring of a mating between F/A-18’s and UFOs. A small series of LEDs blinked along their noses, the lights flashing in a pattern that seemed to imply the planes were watching her.

There was a noise behind her. Minerva spun back to the airplane, holding up her pistol. A man in a black flight suit staggered down the steps.

“Help me,” he said before collapsing in her arms.

VI
GODDESS OF WAR

Dreamland ANTARES Lab
27 February, 1000

IT WAS DIFFERENT THAN ZEN REMEMBERED—MUCH different. Better. He strode across the plain, a light wind brushing his face. He walked—walked!—to the edge of the mesa and looked out over the valley.

“You’re in Theta,” said Geraldo somewhere far behind him. Jeff laughed. He spread his arms, then coiled his feet. His knees felt so damn good.

He wriggled his toes for the first time in a year and a half. He knew, or thought he knew, that he wasn’t really moving them—it was a hallucination, a dreamlike, vivid memory enhanced by ANTARES.

But what if the process somehow did make it possible for him to feel his toes? ANTARES made unused portions of the brain available—maybe it could do that with nerve cells and the spinal cord as well. One of the doctors who had examined him in the hospital thought the cord wasn’t one-hundred-percent severed; he thought it might be theoretically possible for Zen to feel something, if not today, then in the future.

The day he’d heard that he’d felt so much hope. Then he’d crashed back down as other experts disagreed and it became more and more obvious he felt nothing at all.

“Jeff?”

He leapt into the air and began to fly. The light pressure he’d felt from the wind increased exponentially. Pain shot through his head.

Stay in Theta, he told himself.

The bony plates of his skull tore apart. His head spun and he fell. When Jeff opened his eyes, he was back in the ANTARES lab.

Geraldo stood in front of him.

“Good,” she said. “You were in Theta for two hours.”

“Two hours?”

The scientist smiled.

Jeff waited while the others recorded his vital signs and brain waves now that he was out of Theta. The changes in the system since he’d been involved in the program the first time were incredible. It wasn’t just the circuitry or the drugs or even Geraldo’s preference for using Eastern-inspired mental-relaxation techniques. Connecting to the ANTARES gear in the past had been painful—this was extremely pleasurable.

He could walk. He knew it.

ANTARES, or perhaps the drugs that helped enhance his connection with it, stimulated the crushed nerves in his spinal cord. The damn thing was going to make him walk again.

“Let’s work with the Flighthawks,” he suggested as Geraldo’s assistants began removing the body monitor wires.

“No, Jeff, not today. It’s not on the agenda. You said you wanted to start slow, and I agree.”

“Well let’s take another turn in Theta,” he told Geraldo. “Let’s go for it.’’

“Major. Jeffrey.”

Geraldo’s frown reminded Jeff of his grandmother’s. She glanced at her two assistants; without saying anything they left the room.

“Jeff, you know we have to go slow,” Geraldo told him after they had gone. “For one thing, Colonel Bastian hasn’t given his approval for you to devote anything beyond minimal time. And I do have other subjects. Besides, the drugs are only starting to reach potent levels in your system. They’re very new, and since you didn’t use them before, I’d like to have a good, firm baseline to use as we proceed.”

She had obviously conspired with her assistants against him, Jeff realized. Why? What was she up to?

“Is there something you want to say to me?” the scientist asked.

“In what sense?”

“In any sense.” She folded her arms in front of her chest, studying him.

“Uh, no. You staring at me for any particular reason? I got boogers coming out of my nose or something?”

Geraldo finally laughed. “No, Jeffrey, not at all. Come on. Have some tea.” She turned and walked across the large room, going through the open doorway and entering the small lounge area. Light jazz played in the background, music that Jeff had selected last week before his first attempt—failed–to get into Theta.

She’s trying to seduce me somehow, he realized as he rolled his wheelchair toward the table area. Geraldo took a bag of cinnamon-apple herbal tea and placed it in a cup as she waited for the kettle to boil. She didn’t disapprove of coffee or “real” tea, but she advised against it. As a physician, she said, she had some doubts about the long-term effects of caffeine.

“Jeff, do you remember the accident when you lost your legs?”

“I didn’t lose them,” he said. “I have legs just the same as you.”

“They’re not the same. Though I did misspeak,” she said, correcting herself.

Geraldo was a viper. She came off like a grandma-type, but beneath it she was always plotting.

“I remember the accident,” he said.

The electric teapot whistled. She poured out two cups. “Do you think about it often?” she asked, waiting as the tea steeped.

“No. At first, sure. But not now.”

“Would you say you’ve accepted it?”

“Who the hell accepts something like that?” Zen struggled to keep his anger in control. Geraldo was trying to provoke him. “The thing is, see, you don’t accept it. Not really. Never. But you, it’s like you move to the next problem. A pilot, see—a pilot knows there’s a checklist.”

“Losing your ability to walk isn’t the same as missing an item on the checklist.” She stopped stirring the tea for a moment. “Do you think you’ll ever walk again?”