Chapter 3 - The Omega Protocol
The silence in Trauma Two was heavy, thick with the metallic reek of my own blood.
"Maya, stay with me," Claire begged. She was shaking. She grabbed a fresh bag of saline, spiking the port with trembling fingers. "I'm calling the hospital ethics board. I’m calling the chief of surgery. I don't care what your father signed. I won't let them let you die on this table."
"Claire..." I rasped.
"Don't talk, Maya. Save your energy. Keep your eyes on my badge. Look at my picture. Stay awake."
The heart monitor’s rhythm was changing. The crisp, sharp beeps were slowing down, spacing out into long, sluggish intervals that felt like the tolling of a church bell.
*BEEP............ BEEP............ BEEP............*
My peripheral vision was already gone. The room was shrinking into a pinhole of harsh white light surrounded by a creeping wall of greasy black frost. My fingers were completely numb, the cold creeping up my forearms toward my elbows.
*Hypovolemic arrest.*
I knew the clinical stages intimately. I had watched men die of it in ditches outside Fallujah, in mud huts outside Kunduz. First comes the tachycardia, then the profound drop in pressure, then the bradycardia as the sinoatrial node runs out of oxygenated hemoglobin. After that, the myocardium twitches, gives one final, uncoordinated spasm, and stops.
Three minutes. Maybe four.
The hospital system had abandoned me because my father had signed a piece of paper to preserve the deposit on his daughter's wedding orchestra.
*They think I'm Maya Vance.*
They thought I was the black sheep who ran away to join the Army, the stubborn girl who couldn't find a place in Greenwich country club society, the failure who hadn't married an investment banker.
They had no idea what I was.
"Jacket..." I whispered again, my breath barely fluttering the paper drape over my chest.
"Maya, don't worry about the jacket," Claire pleaded, her eyes shining with unshed tears as she pushed another milligram of epinephrine into the IV line. "I'm right here. I'm fighting for you."
"Jacket," I growled, drawing on the very last reserve of adrenaline left in my adrenal glands. The voice wasn't that of a frightened daughter anymore. It was the command voice of a Tier-One operator. "Give me... the jacket."
Claire hesitated, startled by the sudden, terrifying authority in my dying eyes. She reached to the plastic chair in the corner and lifted the heavy, blood-spattered tactical jacket, laying it across my chest.
My right hand, limp and gray, slid down into the familiar heavy fabric.
Civilian clothing doesn't have reinforced Kevlar inner linings. Civilian clothing doesn't have hidden compartments sealed with industrial tear-away velcro behind the left breast pocket.
My fingertips found the seam.
I didn't have the strength to tear it open with my bare hands, so I hooked my index finger around the covert nylon loop and used the weight of my own falling arm to rip the seam apart.
*Scrrrch.*
Inside the waterproof, lead-lined interior pocket rested a small, flat device. It was no larger than a key fob, made of matte-black carbon ceramic. It had no screen, no serial numbers, and no logo.
In the center was a single, recessed circular button protected by a brittle plastic safety seal.
*The Level-One Subcutaneous Exigent Distress Transponder.*
In the clandestine operations community, it had an informal name: *The Lazarus Switch.*
You were only given one if your identity was completely scrubbed from standard military databases, if your operational deployment was directly under the National Command Authority, and if capture, torture, or death was imminent in an environment where no diplomatic rescue could ever be mounted.
When you pressed it, you weren't calling 911. You weren't calling the local police.
You were transmitting an encrypted, ultra-high-frequency distress pulse directly to the Milstar satellite constellation, routed through the National Military Command Center in the basement of the Pentagon, straight to the Joint Special Operations Command Special Activities Center at Fort Belvoir.
It signaled only one thing: *Tier-One Classified Asset Compromised / Imminent Fatal Extraction.*
I felt my heart skip a beat.
*BEEP........................ BEEP....................................*
The darkness closed in entirely. Claire’s face vanished. The sound of her voice shouting for the crash cart became a distant, muffled echo, like someone yelling underwater.
I pressed my thumb against the black button.
I didn't just push it. I broke the seal with the last ounce of muscular force left in my dying body.
*Click.*
A tiny, microscopic blue LED pulsed once beneath the carbon casing.
The next second, the vital signs monitor beside my head let out a single, flat, continuous, high-pitched scream.
*BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—*
"Code Blue!" Claire's voice shrieked. "She's flatlining! Start compressions! Charge the paddles to two hundred!"
My hand fell away from the jacket, hitting the cold metal edge of the gurney.
I stopped breathing. The world went black.
May you like
And exactly four seconds later, the reinforced hurricane-glass double doors of the St. Jude Memorial Emergency Department were violently blown inward off their magnetic hinges.
***
