Kevin Lee Swaim
The Chimera Strain
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my beta readers. Your feedback was invaluable.
Special thanks to all the active and retired military members who helped with this endeavor. Any mistakes contained herein are entirely mine.
DEDICATION
To my family, for bearing with me while I spent so many days and nights working on this novel.
CHAPTER ONE
John Frist hurtled to the ground near the Iraqi border at over one hundred miles per hour, his head protected by his Visual Improvement System for Optical Recognition. The VISOR’s electronics quieted the rush of air to a barely audible whistle while his HUD displayed the quickly decrementing altimeter. The C130J Hercules he had jumped from was a quickly moving red dot in the HUD as it disappeared into the night.
Below, his VISOR showed a ghostly overlay of information. The roads were highlighted in yellow, the vehicles in blue, and his main objective, the series of low stone buildings, blazed in red.
He grimaced. In two years, he had gone from soldier to terrorist to guinea pig. The Office of Threat Management had recruited him, experimented on him, and turned him into a technologically enhanced killing machine. He was stronger and faster than before, and his Battlesuit and VISOR were just the beginning. The Implant in his abdomen provided a steady stream of drugs to enhance his musculature, his brain, even painkillers to numb the dull throb from the prosthetic where his left foot had been blown off in an explosion by the terrorist, Abdullah the Bomber.
It took six months after the mission in New York City, six long months of surgeries and physical therapy, to heal his wounds. It had taken him that long just to relearn how to walk, to run, to fight with his prosthetic.
Damn thing still hurts.
A voice broke the whisper of air. “Mission is a go. Prepare for deployment.”
The voice belonged to Eric Wise, the leader of Project StrikeForce and Assistant Director to the OTM. Eric was a former Delta Operator, one of the hardest and toughest men John had ever met.
Eric also knew John’s terrible secret.
John had blamed the Red Cross for misplacing his emergency leave paperwork, causing him to miss his parents’ funeral. After his discharge, he moved to Washington, then bombed the Red Cross building in Fairfax, Virginia. Five hundred and twelve people died in the blast.
The OTM identified and kidnapped him from the street in front of his apartment. He was renditioned to Guantanamo Bay and interrogated for months by the CIA in the secret part of the base, Camp 7. When there was nothing further to glean, they transported him to Area 51 where the scientists working for the OTM wiped parts of his memory, replacing others with false ones, before experimenting on him.
They injected him with nanobots and wove his bones in carbon graphene. They removed his gallbladder and replaced it with the Implant. They pumped him full of drugs and worked him over, all the while under the impression that he had no memory of what he had done.
Only Eric knew the truth.
John remembered everything. He remembered the bombing. He remembered the bag over his head when taken from the street while opening the door of his pickup truck. He remembered waking as nanobots crawled through his body, weaving graphene, an excruciating pain worse than the torture he endured at Guantanamo Bay.
The same drugs used to heal his body had also healed his mind, reconnecting neurons, giving him back his memories.
If John slipped for a moment — if anyone found out — he was a dead man. The OTM couldn’t allow him to live. He was too great a risk, too great a threat.
He had plenty of time to think during his rest and rehabilitation after the events in New York City. There was only one conclusion — the only reason the OTM would bother mind-wiping a terrorist was because the process wasn’t safe. He had no family, no friends. No one would miss him. If Project StrikeForce failed, if the tech proved unsafe, they could safely dispose of his body and no one would be the wiser.
The OTM hadn’t counted on the drugs. The drugs repaired the damage done to his brain when his Humvee was hit by an IED in Iraq. They repaired the damage and his mind was finally clear, his misplaced anger and obsession with the Red Cross gone. He was horrified at what he had done. He wanted to atone for his crimes, but was forced to fight for the OTM.
He had grown weary of it.
None of it mattered. He was just a machine, preparing for battle. The ground quickly approached and he steeled himself for the jerk of the parachute.
When it came, the Battlesuit slammed against the cords as his body decelerated. He felt the whine of the servos as the VISOR’s computer manipulated the lines to steer him to his destination, three thousand feet below.
“Chute deployed,” he said.
“You’ll be landing hot.”
Half a world away, Eric watched the VISOR’s telemetry and video from the drones flying overhead. Below, all was quiet as the people inside the houses went about their business, plotting terror attacks against the United States.
They weren’t innocent. Eric had walked him through the mission profile. The men and women below were plotting something big. The first step in halting that plan was to eliminate the terrorists and gather intel.
Eric was right, he was coming in hot.
He concentrated and the VISOR’s night vision blinked on. He saw the ground rapidly approach, and when he hit, the shock ran up his legs and jarred him hard enough to make his vision swim. He collapsed to the ground, a stabbing pain in his leg where the prosthetic bolted to the tibia, then turned and grabbed the cords and pulled hard, wrapping them in his arms until the black parachute fabric was bunched up tight.
“I’m down.”
He placed the parachute material on the ground and weighted it down with several rocks. He glanced around and found the nearest guard a hundred yards away. He watched the VISOR’s split screen as the guard to the south strolled past a stone hut and around a corner.
He removed the oxygen bottle from his belt harness and disconnected the hose from the VISOR, setting it under the edge of the parachute. There was a soft beep as the VISOR began filtering the night air, then he removed his HK MP5SD. The VISOR blazed to life, showing his estimated current ammo count. “Ready to proceed.”
“Copy that. Activating the Implant.”
He felt a surge as the drugs entered his system. The Implant dumped the highly-experimental drugs into his bloodstream, and he gasped for breath, his heart trip wiring in his chest. Concern over the mission faded until all that was left was the urge to act. “Implant activated. I’m going in.”
He raced across the loose rock, footsteps sure and light, prosthetic springing wildly as he covered the twenty yards to the first house. It was no bigger than his small apartment he lived in after his discharge. He came around the corner and spun into the thin wooden door, tearing it from its hinges. Thermal vision from the drones showed eight occupants in the house, six men in the front, and two women in the back.
He barely had time to register their surprised looks as his suppressed HK cracked. He spun it ruthlessly and efficiently, catching the first man in the chest, then on to the second. They fell where they sat, but the third man was grabbing for his AK, his long gray beard whipping madly, then John’s bullets tore through the man’s side.
He moved on to the next three as they scrambled across the room for a table loaded with rifles against the far wall. They never made it. John mowed them down, their bodies shuddering under the hail of gunfire, collapsing to the floor as bullets ripped through them.