Kevin Lee Swaim
Project StrikeForce: Exodus
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to all the active and retired military members who helped with this endeavor. Any mistakes contained herein are entirely mine. Special thanks to my beta readers. Your feedback was invaluable.
Chapter One
John Frist glanced around the dining room. “Shouldn’t she be here by now?”
The woman at the nearby table glanced up from her wineglass. A few strands of silver threaded their way through her shoulder-length black hair, and she brushed her fingers around her ear.
“I’m worried,” Valerie Simon whispered into her earpiece. “Something is wrong.”
John inspected his teammate. Valerie had laugh lines around her eyes and cheeks and could pass for late thirties without much effort. The rich blue fabric of her low-cut dress was just tight enough to draw men’s eyes to her breasts, but not so tight as to make her appear wanton.
She looked sultry, John decided, and it definitely worked for her. He wished he could enjoy it, but it was hard to do when she was involved with the third member of their team.
Valerie sat alone at the table, and her eyes occasionally swept the room. Valerie had picked the restaurant Oepfelchammer because of its proximity to Katrina Reinemann’s hotel, the Florhof.
“Her hotel is close,” John said. “It’s just a quick walk. Deion? Are you ready to call it?”
His earpiece crackled and their third member, Deion Freeman, said, “Another five minutes.”
John drained the last of his drink and wondered how a beer renowned for the bitterness of the hops and the creaminess of the head could taste so… off.
Then again, the whole world was off. In just a few short years, he had gone from bombing the Red Cross in Fairfax, Virginia, to being recruited by the Office of Threat Management.
Deion had been part of the team that had captured him and held him prisoner in Guantánamo. When he closed his eyes, he still remembered how they had stuffed him inside the sweltering wooden box, and how the smell of his sweat and urine had choked him almost to the point of vomiting.
He shoved the memory down deep and inspected the restaurant. The patrons were drinking and quietly enjoying an early dinner among the dark wood tables and paneled walls.
Identifying the Swiss was easy. They were relaxed and smiling. Their clothes were not quite European, but neither were they American.
The tourists, with their middle-aged and doughy bodies and their brash clothes, stood out like a sore thumb.
A man in a dark blue suit glanced at Valerie. The man’s eyes lingered just a moment too long on her bosom, but he turned back to his dinner companion, a woman just a shade heavier than Valerie, and a touch older.
Deion was running the operation from a van parked down the street. “John? You see anything?”
John tried not to smirk. “Some married guy just gave your girlfriend the once-over.”
A smile flitted across Valerie’s face, quickly replaced by the same bored look she had sported for the past thirty minutes.
Deion grunted. “Funny guy. Do you know what I do to funny guys?”
“Force them to choke down a quart of beer while also checking out your girlfriend?” John asked innocently. “I just noticed a beautiful woman. It wasn’t like I was checking out Val’s cleavage.”
“Can we not talk about my cleavage?” Valerie whispered.
“Right,” Deion said. “Let’s talk about your asset.”
John quickly sobered. They weren’t in Zürich to sightsee. They were in Switzerland so that Reinemann could pass Valerie information about a consortium of oil speculators.
This is supposed to be a low-stakes investigation. “You think she’s not coming?”
Valerie sighed. “You’re right. Something is wrong.”
“It’s time to get gone,” Deion muttered in his earpiece. “The meeting is blown.”
John followed Valerie through the halls of the Florhof. The building was Old World Swiss on the outside, but warm and comfortable on the inside, the walls a tasteful white that bordered on eggshell, and plush gray carpet that made him want to take off his shoes and wiggle his toes against it.
My remaining foot.
He was still bitter about the mission where Abdullah the Bomber’s improvised IED in the steam tunnels of New York had almost blown his foot off. Even with it hanging on by thin patches of skin and sinew, he had finished his mission and stopped Abdullah’s dirty bomb.
The Office of Threat Management had amputated his foot above the ankle and bolted an appliance to the bones of his calf. The prosthetic gave him near-normal movement, but there was a drawback.
No matter how much I rest, and no matter how carefully I treat it, it still hurts.
It had all gone horribly wrong in Iraq. An IED had struck his Humvee just a few weeks before he could rotate back to the United States. It had killed his teammates, O’Neill and Gutierrez, and seriously scrambled his brain.
He had listened as his teammate, Hernandez, screamed in agony as soldiers pounded on the frame, trying desperately to pry open the door.
The soldiers had finally gotten them out, and John had watched as they tried to stop the bleeding from Hernandez’s shoulder, a shoulder that was missing an arm. His own thigh was cut down to the bone and soldiers worked on him, stabilizing him for the flight to Ramstein Air Force Base in Landstuhl, Germany.
Hernandez had lost his arm, and John had narrowly missed losing his leg.
The concussion, though…
The doctors had been evaluating his concussion when the news of his parents’ death had arrived. His request for emergency leave had been denied.
Everything was horribly scrambled in my head.
He’d railed at the nurses and doctors. They were unsure if he had suffered permanent brain damage or was only concussed.
Then came the honorable discharge. Civilian life offered him no structure. He had no family. No friends. He drifted aimlessly, avoiding the VA doctor’s suggestions, until he found himself living in an apartment outside of Washington, D.C., obsessed with the Red Cross’s failure to file his emergency leave paperwork.
How did I get so… twisted?
He had bombed the Red Cross, and a CIA team had captured him and transferred him to Guantánamo Bay for months of interrogations.
He was angry and helpless, and then Eric Wise had shown up and hauled him away to Area 51 for experimentation.
The OTM’s mission was simple. They watched the world, preventing threats before they became unmanageable. And, for that, they needed a new type of soldier.
The OTM wove carbon graphene around his skeleton and pumped him full of experimental drugs. They removed his gallbladder and replaced it with the Implant, a machine directly connected to his aorta, capable of delivering a range of synthetic and naturally created drugs. The drugs could sharpen his reflexes or deliver a powerful painkiller.
They had also given him the Battlesuit, high-tech armor that could protect him from knives or small-arms fire. A clamshell helmet called the VISOR protected his brain, and the VISOR’s Heads Up Display showed him the world in vibrant detail. He had access to radio, cell phones, and overhead drone feeds.
The OTM had made him more than human — they’d made him the ultimate soldier.
The ultimate soldier with a head full of false memories.
The OTM had also wiped his memories and implanted false ones, forcing him to forget how he had bombed the Red Cross and making him think he had volunteered for Project StrikeForce.