Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

There were four people in the room. Two wore blue surgical scrubs, complete with caps and face masks that hid all clues to their identity. The other two were laid out on gurneys. One of the latter was barely visible; just pale white arms and legs protruding from a tent of blue fabric, transfixed in the glare of the lights; he was the focus of the surgeons’ attention.

The last person in the room was male, a dark-skinned Burmese man in his early twenties or perhaps younger. He lay naked on a stretcher, which had been pushed to one side of the room. He was unmoving, as if unconscious, but it was plainly evident that he wasn’t simply sleeping. His upper torso had been opened like the petals of a rose. King caught only a momentary glimpse into the man’s chest cavity, but it was enough to see that there was a dark bloody void where his heart and lungs ought to have been.

King had seen terrible things in his life—children blown apart by IEDs and American serviceman horribly burned in fuel explosions—but those raw savage experiences were nothing alongside the sanitized, precise and utterly inhuman evil he now beheld.

He brought his gaze back to the surgeon who stood above the patient—the recipient of the organs that had been taken from the body of the unwilling donor. The doctor’s eyes were fixed on King’s gun, but after a moment they flickered up to meet his gaze. He raised his hands in a supplicating gesture, his latex gloves painted with blood.

“I don’t know what you want,” the man said in a voice that was unnaturally calm. “But you have to leave, now.”

“Or what?” The question came from Tremblay, but it had none of his customary humor. He was as shocked as King.

“Or my patient will die,” was the haughty answer.

King took a menacing step forward, close enough to see inside the chest cavity of the patient; the stolen body parts lay flaccid and seemingly lifeless within. Only now was King aware of the complex web of tubes that sprouted from the supine form, connecting the man to IV drips and bypass machines—devices that were keeping the man’s blood oxygenated and flowing while the surgeons methodically spliced in the hijacked organs.

The patient’s face was hidden beneath a shroud of blue cloth, but King didn’t need to make a positive identification to know what sort of person lay on the operating table: a true human predator, someone who bought the organs of another living human to sustain his own miserable life, as casually as someone might order a cheeseburger.

“And why the fuck should I care about him?” King asked.

Parker’s voice abruptly sounded in King’s ear. “Movement on the roof. They’re going for the helo… It’s Sasha! I have eyes on Sasha.”

There seemed to be an unasked question there, but it took King a moment to disengage from the horror unfolding right in front of him. Roof? Helo? Then the picture came into focus; Rainer was about to slip through his fingers again.

For the briefest instant, he considered telling Parker to take out the helicopter. A burst of some 7.62 millimeter rounds into its turbine engines would probably disable it and leave their foe trapped on the roof.

Trapped… Backed into a corner… There was no telling what Rainer might do if that happened.

King keyed his mic. “Deep Blue, this is King. Will you be able to track that helicopter?”

There was a brief delay before the mystery figure answered, with no small measure of urgency: “Affirmative, King. You’ve done all you can there. Abort the mission and exfil immediately.”

Done all you can… Abort… King felt his earlier self-directed rage rising again, but he fought it back. “Roger. Irish, hold your fire. Let them go.”

On the other side of the operating table, the surgeon relaxed visibly, as if sensing that King’s radio transmission signaled the end of the incursion. “What we’re doing has nothing to do with whatever it is you want. Please, just go, so I can get back to saving this man.”

King adjusted his aim ever so slightly, and squeezed off a single shot. The only noise from the suppressed MP5 was a faint metallic click as the internal mechanism ejected the spent brass casing and ratcheted another round into the firing chamber. The sound of the surgeon, screaming in pain and disbelief, as the nine-millimeter bullet punched through the palm of his right hand, was much more satisfying.

King threw a mock salute with the smoking muzzle of the weapon. “Good luck with that.”





TWENTY-SIX


Ever since leaving his Ranger unit behind to join with King’s Delta team, Erik Somers had felt like the odd man out.