Boned2 (Mandarin Connection Book 5) Read online

  “Is this how Bone was able to survive the storm? This OCTAVIUS… stuff?” I ask.

  I’d almost said ‘shit,’ but decided at the last minute that the Old Man was deserving of some respect.

  “Bone is a very good swimmer,” he chuckles, “but nobody is that good!” he smiles.

  “No, all Bone had to do was fall off, and then dive down to about one-hundred feet, and wait for about six minutes while the other divers found him and brought him aboard the “USS Betsy Ross.”

  “What’s that?” I say.

  “It’s a nuclear attack submarine, captained by an old school-chum of mine. Captain Michael “Buck” Rodgers. He owed me a couple of favors,” he says.

  “Now, I probably owe him one, again,” he mutters.

  “I thought ships were named after men,” I say.

  “Traditionally they are, or after states,” the Admiral says.

  “Times change. New ideas brought about by new blood in the armed services,” he says.

  “Old traditions sometimes die hard, but they do die,” he says, wistfully.

  “Never thought I’d live to see the day, to be honest,” he adds.

  He sits there for a moment, lost in his thoughts.

  “Why did you do this to me?” I finally say.

  “Hmm? Oh, this was definitely because of Bone,” he says.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  I am afraid of this answer, because I know it complicates my next steps, if the Admiral confirms my suspicions.

  “Rachel, you must realize how Bone, how all the Jaeger men, feel about you?” he says, a bit delicately.

  “Yes,” I say, hesitantly.

  I wonder if they shared their impressions, and feelings about me as easily as they seemed to share their sense of adventure.

  “Bone, especially,” he says.

  “He practically mowed over Travis to get to you and Randy, and refused to leave your side until you were out of the woods, with regards to the procedure,” he says.

  “Drake Jaeger loves you to death, Rachel,” he says, quietly.

  “They all do, but Bone is mated to you,” says the Admiral.

  “I envy him,” he says.

  “I envy all of them, and their women,” he says, with feeling.

  “You all represent the best we can achieve, and the fate of our style of living, of our way of life, depends on you and those like you that we are grooming. This is generations of work, finally culminating in results that are incredible,” he says.

  “I want you to know how important it was for us that Bone allowed us to graft some of his stem cells into your spinal cord,” he says.

  This is getting too creepy for me.

  “Why doesn’t Bone, or Karl, or even Stephan, for that matter worry about their women finding out?” I ask.

  “They all know, now,” he says.

  “And, they are okay with it?” I ask, incredulous.

  “No. Not at first. But, when we showed them the threat the Mandarin Connection organization presented..” he starts to say.

  “Fuck the Mandarin Connection!” I suddenly cry out.

  The Admiral is taken aback.

  “I don’t care about drug dealers, and arms trade, and all this international shit!” I say.

  “Why does my man, my father, my brothers – everyone I love is involved in some conspiracy, and I get dragged into it after they all decide to ‘let me in’?”

  Now, I am crying.

  Hurt and bewildered, I try hard to concentrate on his words, but my heart is just breaking.

  All these lies!

  “Rachel, I can’t speak for them, but let me tell you why I do this,” says the Old Man.

  I sniff, and nod.

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  —————

  He tells me his story.

  —————

  The Old Man, Admiral Reginald Decker, gathers himself.

  He is impressive, even at his age.

  He must have been quite the looker early on in his career.

  You can tell he was chiseled, and ripped, and even now he takes care of himself.

  “About twenty-five years ago, I was an officer on a cruiser during the First Gulf conflict. Our mission was to attack the Baghdad forces of Saddam Hussein with cruise missiles. We did our job, and were exiting the area, when a gunboat appeared from nowhere, and fired on us,” he says.

  “This is all highly classified, but you are cleared to receive it,” he says, absent-mindedly.

  Cleared?

  I’ve got a clearance?

  I listen intently.

  He’s looking out the window, almost as if he’s reliving the event.

  “We were sinking, on fire, and one of the forward magazines exploded. I went sailing into the ocean, and it was only by the grace of God that I survived. There had been no warning, you see,” he continues.

  “I floated on some pieces of debris, and then time lost all meaning. I think I was adrift for about three days. On that third day, a miracle happened, or so I had thought,” he says.

  “A US submarine managed to locate me, and surfaced. A man came over to me, and helped me onto the vessel, and then I was out for about a week,” he says.

  “That man was Buck Rodgers, who is now the captain of the Betsy Ross. But, there was a bigger surprise coming for me,” he says.

  I watch him fighting strong emotions, as he struggles to get his story out.

  “Your stepfather, Om, was on the submarine, too,” he recalls.

  “He was returning from a mission deep into Iraq. He had captured a Chinese diplomat, and had learned of their involvement in the situation,” he says.

  “The facts are that the Mandarin Connection has a very long history,” says the Admiral.

  “As far as we can tell, it goes back almost five thousand years,” he says.

  I gasp.

  Is he joking?

  “The tentacles of this organization reach across the globe, and throughout modern history,” he says.

  “The main problem is the depth and strength of the organization. Every major corporation, military and government has been infiltrated. It is often difficult for us to obtain intelligence about their activities because their operatives are very good, and insanely loyal. The Chinese diplomat that Om captured killed himself within hours, despite being under guard. Somehow, he managed to launch himself out of the sub from a torpedo tube,” he says, with a smirk.

  “That’s not possible, is it?” I ask.

  “Not by any manner I can fathom. And, believe me, once I was back on duty, I was interrogated. During the many inquests about our destroyed cruiser, and the subsequent investigations, I was exposed to and informed about many things that seem incredible and fantastic, even now,” he says.

  The Admiral pauses again, and I know he is thinking and weighing carefully the information he is providing to me.

  “Rachel, what I am going to tell you seems impossible, but it’s true,” he tells me.

  “We were attacked by an invisible ship,” he says.

  “And, the man responsible for the technology was Jonathon Reighland. He was running a shell company that was fronted by another one known as DORCAN. They were bilking the military out of millions of dollars a month, for years. Two decades later, Brett Ghent and his father became involved, and the Ocaba Bien incident occurred. Ted Ghent had developed a construction software program that uncovered the illicit activities of DORCAN, and Reighland sought to take them out of the situation by providing seed capital for Brett’s startup, Pecker.”

  I listen with rapt attention.

  “When Martin Frieberg found out, he was almost killed. Ted and his wife, Sarah, and Brett and Kady, went to Ocaba Bien, where a lot of the technology behind the ship attacking us was being used in a different fashion. It was used to surveil and then predict and model outcomes of certain guests, and provide a unbelievably intense experience for those guests.”

  The Old Man star
es out the window, again.

  “Reighland had been manipulating many important people for years, using his grasp of psychology and the good name of his twin brother, Walter, to further his empire.”

  He shifts position on his chair, and grunts.

  “But, Black Dog put an end to all of that when Brett brought them in to rescue Kady. Jonathon Reighland was shot and fell into the sea. His body hasn’t been recovered,” says the Admiral.

  “What’s all that got to do with you and Om, and this OCTAVIUS thing?” I ask.

  “Om was the first of many OCTAVIUS experiments. In our search for perfect super-soldiers, humanity has done some very reprehensible things. But, the OCTAVIUS program, and its components, were born out of a need to combat similar programs being developed by our enemies. Specifically, there is one aspect of the Mandarin Connection operations that seems to be devoted to the same ends. We found out about it from the little information gleaned from the documents and statements of the Chinese diplomat. Om and another team of men went on subsequent missions to uncover more details, and that brought us to our need to have his sons – amplified,” he says.

  “Was I ‘amplified’? Is that why I am alive?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says the Admiral.

  I am terrified.

  What has been done to me?

  —————

  “Rachel, I want to assure you, there really was no other way,” says the Admiral.

  “Randy died, and was beyond our capability to recover him. But, you were just barely viable. And, Bone convinced us that it had to be done,” he says.

  “It saved your life!” he suddenly exclaims.

  “But, why didn’t anyone tell me about Bone? He was alive! You all led me to believe he’d drowned!” I cry.

  The tears fall from my cheeks like rain.

  “Bone insisted you not be told, to spare your feelings. Frankly, the reason I agreed was because I didn’t think he was going to come back from his mission, and there’d be plausible deniability in that case,” he tells me.

  My eyes go wide, with the realization that the Old Man was willing to sacrifice Bone, or anyone else, to crush the Mandarin Connection operation.

  “You’re as big a bastard as they are!” I yell at him.

  He looks at me, for just a moment, then laughs.

  “My dear girl,” he sputters, “I am the biggest bastard alive!”

  He laughs, and then is sober.

  “I have to be. It comes with this job. Leaders must make hard decisions, that cost good men their lives. And, the danger outweighs the personal likes and attachments we make. I’ve lost countless friends over my career. Some died for very stupid reasons. Some were heroes. But, they are all gone, casualties of a war that almost nobody knows even exists,” he says.

  “But, now, you know,” he adds.

  I nod, slowly.

  It’s a lot to take in.

  “The invisibility technology, and other tech that Reighland had developed and marketed, was being used to avoid our drug interdiction forces. That’s where Derek and the Alpha Team came in. They were making inroads into that when Megan Greene was kidnapped by Robert King and George Tanner. Megan’s stepmother, who was Robert King’s wife, was killed as well. We found out that Blaise White was working with Reighland, and another man. We didn’t know who he was. But, when Brian and Kim spotted the two thugs at the banquet, another piece fell into place. These two men had kidnapped them from Indian Wells, and killed Kevin’s brother, Randall. Now, we’re confident that the man behind a lot of the Mandarin Connection, at least here in the states, is Harlon Calloway,” he declares.

  My head is throbbing with all of this news. I need some time to digest it.

  “What do you want me to do, Admiral?” I say.

  “I’m just some silly girl, in love with a bunch of men who happen to be my stepbrothers. I thought that was fucked up enough. Now, you’re telling me I’m involved in a super-secret society, the fate of the world is on me, and I’ve been operated on and given some kinds of…what exactly?” I ask, suddenly fearful in an entirely new way.

  “Let’s go outside and I will show you something,” he says.

  —————

  Outside of the hospital is a farm.

  A big one, with cows and horses and chickens, and growing food.

  It looks like a movie set version of one, really.

  “Welcome to the Facility!” he says, with enthusiasm.

  It was something I didn’t really feel, myself.

  A man on a tractor drives by, waving.

  I can just barely make out the wire behind his ears, but I am beginning to get the hang of being more observant.

  He has an earpiece, and is undoubtedly some kind of secret agent, like all the people in my life apparently are.

  Shit!

  How did I suddenly become Jane Bond?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Karl and Bone come to me at night…

  “Rachel, we need to speak with you about something. It’s about all of us, and we need to clear it up,” begins Karl.

  My heart is racing!

  The men whom I had grown closest to in my life are tearing me apart!

  I love Karl, his rough, rugged ways and his bold love making.

  But, Bone is my soul-mate!

  I had almost died when he went overboard, and it was only Karl’s strength that had helped me make it through that dark time.

  Yet, he knew that Bone had not died!

  How can they have both tricked me like that?

  What were they thinking?

  That I would be okay with fucking the one if the other one was just ‘indisposed’?

  What kind of assholes are these men?

  “Karl and I had a long talk, before I went ‘missing,’ Rache. The two of us didn’t think it would be fair to you to have to be kept in the dark like that without – compensations,” says Bone.

  “What? You think I’m an idiot who can’t handle the truth? Why didn’t you just tell me?” I cry, knowing his answer.

  “We considered all of that, but the Alpha Team and the others nixed it. Too much risk to operational security,” says Karl. “I know how that sounds…”

  “I know that, you asshole!” I yell.

  “But you both deliberately treated me like a piece of meat!”

  Both men, look down, and then at each other, and I know they are ashamed.

  Bone is near tears, and Karl struggles manfully against his feelings.

  “Rachel, the truth, the REAL truth, is that we all love you,” says Bone.

  “Yes, it’s true, even Stephan,” says Karl.

  “Oh, yes, especially Stephan!” I spit back.

  I am furious!

  “You all play god with other people and their lives, not even considering how it will affect them!” I say.

  I am shaking now, tears streaming down my cheeks.

  I can see both of their faces, blurred through my tears, and they are each dealing with their own strong emotions.

  “Rachel, you know I love you more than anything!” says Bone.

  “It was my idea that Karl would… be there… for you. I know how important it is for you to love someone. The need to connect physically, the passion you have inside you.”

  I hate him.

  He thinks I am just a weak little girl, his stepsister, who needs a man to protect her.

  “So, what? I am just a whore you can give to your brothers at your whim? You don’t own me, Bone. No one does!” I seeth.

  “Look, I don’t think you understand…” he begins, but I cut him off again.

  “I understand it perfectly,” I say, viciously.

  “You presumed to want to spare poor old Rachel’s feelings, because I’m too stupid or not reliable enough to play your war games with your Alpha buddies, right?”

  Then the crying really gets started.

  I weep silently for a few minutes, not wanting either man to touch me.

  Kar
l and Bone look at each other, obviously at a loss for words.

  “Rachel,” says Karl, quietly.

  He tries to put a hand on my shoulder, but I shrug it off, hissing, through my pain.

  “Don’t touch me!” I say.

  “You bastards!” I hiss.

  “Baby Doll,” he tries again.

  I sniff and glare at him.

  “What?” I say.

  “Om and your mother… they are still alive,” he says.

  —————

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I yell.

  Holy shit!

  Not only Bone, but now Moms?

  Where does the trail of lies end?

  “It’s not what you think, Rachel!” says Bone.

  “This is not a game,” says Karl.

  “We only just found out about this from Kevin, right before the ambush. Kevin’s brother, Randall, was the attorney for The People, a tribe whose burial lands were being confiscated, illegally, by Harlon Calloway’s company. The Governor also had helped by accepting money to pass a bill that condemned the State lands. There are uranium and lithium deposits under the hills there. Calloway wanted to take over the lands to launder money from the Mandarin Connection cartels, and sell the minerals to Iran and Iraq, for their nuclear weapons programs,” explains Karl.

  I listen, but didn’t get the importance of what he was telling me.

  Moms was alive?

  “Rachel! Om and your mother were flying back with important evidence to help Alpha Team and the DEA unravel another thread of the Mandarin Connection operations when their plane crashed,” says Karl.

  “We know they survived, because Kevin was able to intercept and decipher communications between King and Calloway,” he continues.

  “We aren’t sure where they are being held, but we know Calloway and one other man is behind it. We originally thought it was Blaise White, Megan’s half-brother. But, when he ended up dead at the maximum-security facility ADX Florence…” he says.

  But, I can’t hear him anymore.

  His voice trails off as I grasp at the most important bits.

  My mind is spinning!

  Om and Moms are alive, but being held captive?

  They’d been kidnapped?