On Distant Shores (Exiles Triology Book 1) (15 page)

“What are you doing, leaning against that car?  Somebody owns that car.” Jamison pointed at the car as if it was the Holy Grail, and Tom had defiled it.

“Ah, Mr. Jamison, . . . “

“That’s Director Jamison!”

Tom nodded, “Yes sir, Director Jamison, this is a rental car.”

Jamison stopped, stunned.  “Who gave you a rental car?”

“It’s in our orders.  We’re authorized two rental cars.”

Jamison didn’t like that at all.  “The hell you are! Who the hell authorized you two rental cars?”

Tom knew that whatever he said, it wasn’t going to placate the director, “Well, anywhere we go, we usually have rental cars on our orders.”

Jamison got into his face, his finger pointed at Tom’s nose, “By God that money better not be coming out of our account.  We didn’t have you sent up here to go sightseeing around the town.  I’m going to find out where that money came from, and I’m going to have those orders modified.” Jamison turned around and walked to the building. 

Tom stared, perplexed.  “That is one sad, strange little man,” he murmured to himself.

He pulled out the phone and called Barbara back, told her what happened, told her he loved her, and hung up.  Then he walked back to find Mike and tell him what had just happened.

About thirty minutes later, Mike came out of the building to go to the rental car and get his cell phone.  He called Major Salk to give him a situation report.

Friday afternoon, they were coming out of the facility when 1
st
Lieutenant Jondreau met them outside the gate.  Lieutenant Jondreau was the officer in charge of security at the facility.  He was military police, and all of the security personnel, to include the SSO was part of his purview.

“Chief Duggins, I have a message for you from Director Jamison.”

Mike walked over to the young man.  He took the piece of paper from the lieutenant, and thanked him.  He walked back to the team, reading as he walked.  The lieutenant turned and went back inside the building.

“Damn it.”

Everett looked at Mike, wondering what was going on.

Mike just shook his head, and motioned that they should go to the cars.  Mike, Everett, and Rob were in the same car.  Mike turned to Everett and told him, “Well, I don’t think we’ll be able to go to Yellowstone this weekend.  We have to be here to work tomorrow.”

Everett looked at him, “Really?  I didn’t know the engineers worked weekends.”

Mike looked out at the countryside, “I guess they want to get as much time with us as possible.”

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They showed up at Area 19 the next morning.  They parked their cars, and something was odd.  There were very few cars in the parking lot.  When they got to security, a Staff Sergeant Patrick Murphy, who was definitely not Irish, approached them.  He was as big as D’Inazio, but his skin was dark as mahogany.  Other than that, they were bookends, down to the shaved scalp.

“Hey, Ebony and Ivory, you guys should sing the song,” Rob quipped.

The Staff Sergeant looked at him with disdain, “Forgive me if I don’t participate.”

Rob looked back at him, “That’s not too social.”

“I’m not a social kind of guy.”

Mike stepped up before things could get out of hand.  He would hate for the Staff Sergeant to get hurt.

“Can I help you Staff Sergeant Murphy?”
              “Yeah, your work detail starts in about ten minutes.  We have a truck that’s going to be pulling up.  Do any of you know how to use a forklift?”

Mike was confused.  He thought that they were here to work with the engineers, and mentioned this to the Staff Sergeant.

Murphy looked at him like he was crazy, “Man, those people are officers and civilians.  None of them work on the weekend.  The only people out here is the security detail.  Word was passed down that you would be doing a work detail this weekend, so they scheduled a truck with supplies to come in.”

Mike turned to Everett.  Everett spoke, “It’s not his fault.  It has to be Jamison and Mitchem.”

“That’s Director Jamison and Lieutenant Colonel Mitchem,” Murphy informed them.

D’Inazio placed his hand on Mike’s shoulder, and said, loud enough for Murphy to hear.

“Mike, don’t hurt him, he has his entire career, hell, his entire life ahead of him.  He’s a young man.”

D’Inazio looked at the Staff Sergeant, “Staff Sergeant, you may want to move back behind your gate.”

Murphy looked incredulous.  He couldn’t believe they were talking to him.  He outweighed Chief Duggins by a good fifty pounds.  He didn’t think that skinny guy could do anything to him.

Everett cleared his throat, “Staff Sergeant, Mike has, what, 34 confirmed kills on this team, three with his bare hands, five with a knife.  As you can see by the color red he’s turning, discretion might be the better part of valor.”

Murphy looked at Mike, and looking at the rest of the team, he decided that his health may be improved on the other side of the security gate.

Mike stormed out to the rental car, grabbed his phone, and called Major Salk at home.  Major Salk called Lieutenant Colonel Bretscif, who called back to Fort Bragg.  It went from there to Tampa at SOCOM.  A three star Army general called a two star Air Force general who worked at SOCOM.  That two star started calling people.  Then it rolled down hill, picking up speed, until it landed on Lieutenant Colonel Mitchem’s desk.

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LTC Mitchem was livid.  He was unaware that Jamison called the Army team in to work on a detail unloading a truck.  The more he thought about the situation, the more he wondered what he ever did to deserve the idiot.  When he heard about this project at his previous position in DARPA, he lobbied hard and pulled strings to get the assignment.  Now he was wondering if he would have a career when he was finished here.

That damn warrant officer.  Who knew he had connections like that.  When Mitchem arrived Monday morning, he received a message from his assistant that he was to call a Major General Watkins as soon as possible, which of course meant immediately.  He spent the next thirty minutes being informed that it was a privilege for his facility to be hosting CW3 Duggins and his team, that they should be treated like guests, and that he better get Director Jamison on board, or they would both be out of a job.  The team would be pulled from the duty at Area 19 to be sent back to their unit.

There was a knock at the door of his office.  “Come in,” he said in a voice just high enough to carry through the door.

The door opened and Dr. Randall was framed in the door way.  LTC Mitchem’s blood pressure was already high, and he felt his blood quicken as she stepped through the door.  She closed the door, and walked over to stand close enough for her lab coat to brush against him.  He could smell the perfume that she was wearing.  She leaned close enough to press her thigh against his arm, and put a folder on his desk.  She leaned forward, the curves of her body pressing against the shirt and skirt that she wore.

He knew that she was doing that on purpose, to give him a thrill.  Jessica would flirt with him using subtle, erotic movements designed to stoke his desire for her.  She was a master at pushing his buttons.  He didn’t know that everybody in the research facility was aware of their infidelities.  Rumors were pretty fierce about the two.  One of the Airmen on the security staff saw them entering a hotel together.  He was sitting in a restaurant across the street, and he drew the natural conclusion.  Gossip flew through the research facility. 

Dr. Randall stood next to him and looked down into his eyes.

“Do you know what I have here?” she asked.

“I hope those are the results of the tests we’ve been conducting with the Army team,” he replied.

She heard the tension in his voice.  She placed her hand on his shoulder, “What’s wrong?”

He inhaled, then exhaled, releasing tension, “Jamison has a hard on for the Spec Ops guys, and shit just went up the hill, and then back down, landing on my back.”

Randall looked confused.

He waved his hand to forestall the next questions, “Please just tell me that I can get rid of these damn Army guys soon.”

Dr. Randall’s mouth curved down slightly.  She knew Mitchem’s personality.  It was so easy to seduce him.  His ego led him to the bedroom.  She could respect a healthy ego.  After all, she was one of the most respected scientists in the United States.  With the neuro mechanical interface, plus other projects she was working on, she was going to be able to write her own ticket in the future.  She became the lead on this project by twisting men to her agenda.  Some she slept with, and others she merely flirted with.  She knew power, and how to bend power to her needs.  While she enjoyed their exploits in bed, there was no way she was going to let his puffed up ego ruin her chances of riding this to a professorship and tenure at UCLA.  This research facility, while on the cutting edge of science, was missing some very crucial social facilities.  She would kill for fresh sushi again.  And nobody in Great Falls knew how to make a good martini.

Mitchem and Jamison were a pain, but they would make a very good reference for her future endeavors.  She was only happy that Mitchem was here.  She would have been very disappointed to have to sleep with Jamison to get what she wanted.  That man was a worm.

“Yes, they’re the test results, and the ‘Army guys’ have helped us make great strides in understanding how the neuro-net and the artificial intelligence are interfacing with a human test subject,” she explained.

Mitchem saw the look in her eyes and didn’t like what he was seeing.He ventured a simple question, “And?”

Dr. Randall knew she had him at that moment.  When LTC Mitchem saw the slight smile on her mouth, he knew he wasn’t going to like what she was going to tell him.

“And,” she offered, “We need to keep them with us for a few more weeks to fully integrate the neural net and artificial intelligence to them.”

He started shaking his head, “No, no, I’m not going to keep those clowns here any longer than necessary.”

Dr. Randall stopped his protests with a simple look.  He had seen that look before, and knew that she was digging her feet in on this one.

“But, it is very necessary to keep them for a few weeks longer.  They’re the best athletes we’ve ever had here.  Their neuro-muscular development is something we only see on elite athletes.  It is not like we can get elite athletes with the proper security clearances to work with us.  These are the only soldiers that we could get with the proper clearances to bring in on this project.  Besides, they understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.  Most of the ‘Army team’have science degrees in some academic fields that parallel the engineering team’s own expertise.  The Department of Defense, if they did a study of all the people in the DoD, couldn’t have sent us better test subjects.”

Mitchem continued to protest, even though, deep inside, he knew that he wouldn’t win this argument.  “I just had a Major General ream my ass because of them.  And I have Jamison on the horn complaining about these yahoos!  I just want to get rid of them.  I won’t have these cowboys in this research any longer.  They have no respect for what your team is trying to accomplish.  They don’t treat your team with the respect it deserves.  They don’t even use proper titles for the people on your team.  Hell, they call Dr. Nachman, Dr. Ed,” he replied.

“Yes, but they call me Dr. Randall
,” she thought to herself.

“Dr. Nachman doesn’t mind.  He even has a bit of hero worship going for them,” she said. “Hell, most of the team is awed by these guys.”  Dr. Randall continued, “Part of it is the fact that they’re an elite team of commandos, and part of it is that they know geek speak.  They feel like part of the research team.  Two of them went over to Luis’ house to play video games with some of the younger guys on the research team.  The research team loves these guys.And, you can’t argue with the results we’re getting from the interface,” she finished.

She opened the folder on his desk to the relevant pages.  She knew he wouldn’t be able to understand most of the results on the page, but he was able to grasp the charts that were trending up past the ninetieth towards the ninety-fifth percentiles.

He looked at the graphs before him, “How much longer will you need to keep them for this data to be complete?”

“I need them for at least four more weeks so that I can continue to monitor their integration into the mech neural net,” she replied.  “The neural nets are learning from them as well.”

“And you can’t do this with in a shorter time frame?” he asked.

“Not if we want the necessary data to do this with other soldiers.  I need this baseline to compare other soldiers’ rate of absorption into the neural net interface.  With this data, we’ll be able to do a comparative study and see which soldiers will be able to interface, and which soldiers won’t be able to interface.  We will save money by eliminating inferior soldiers that will never be able to interface with the suits.  This will allow us to discriminate between the superior and inferior trainees.  Plus, it will bring up the success rate for those that are interfacing correctly with the mech armor,” she answered.