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bodies out and then selecting survival potential. Those decisions were the worst. She knew those not chosen were going to die, as would some of those they took out, and they appropriately called them Sophie’s Choice decisions.
    I’ve been inside this soldier’s brain, she thought. He’s one of mine.
    There were many levels of intimacy between humans, but none quite so delicately intimate as pulling fragments from a brain, halting bleeds, reconstructing pathways. Operating hour after hour. Then again. And again. Replacing skull with metal caps.
    So many she’d treated, both in war zones and in the States, yet this one was special. Johnny Cash was one of the exceptional saves. Every surgeon at Afghanistan’s Bagram had drifted in at one time or another to assist or just watch.
    It’s got to be him, she thought. And if it was him, if she was right, that might give her some angle to work to get more out of him, find out who this former patient was that they wanted her to bring in. And “in” to what?
    And would this finally answer the question of what had happened to so many of her patients who suddenly disappeared? The soldier they wanted her to see was one of them, so maybe the mystery would finally be solved.
     

7
     
     
    Her soldier returned, an angry expression on his face.
    From his backpack he removed a small medical kit, opened it, and brought out a syringe and a small bottle.
    “You don’t need that,” she said. “I told you I’ll answer whatever questions you have. I have nothing to hide from you, whoever you are. Whatever you want.”
    “Standard procedure,” he said.
    “Hey, standard procedure isn’t what any of this is about. I don’t need to be drugged. I’m not going to fight you, dammit. I just need to understand what it is you, or whoever you’re working for, wants. Let me understand my role.”
    “What does it matter?”
    “It matters because, for starters, I know you,” she said.
    He paused, the bottle suspended in one hand, the syringe in the other. So old fashioned, she thought. Like some movie of the last decade. But she knew what it probably was and wanted no part of it.
    “Yes, I know you,” Rainee said. “Maybe I know you better than I know many people on this earth. You’re the patient at Bagram we called Johnny Cash. JC.”
    He stared at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “We know each other from the war,” she said. “I was one of your doctors.”
    He studied her intently for a moment, like he was trying to understand what she was talking about.
    But then he was distracted by the argument in the other room. “No, you don’t know me and I don’t know you.”
    But he didn’t inject her. He had other problems to deal with. He put the syringe and bottle in the case and then started to go into the next room, but something stopped him. He looked back at her, disturbed by her as much as by the men in the other room.
    Got you, you enhanced bastard, Rainee thought. But she needed to get into his brain, trigger something, bring up old buried memories if they were still there. And she knew the key. It would work, or not. But it was the best she had.
    “Lima Nine Four,” she said. Nobody on the face of the earth would react to that unless they were, in fact, Lima Nine Four.
    It was like she’d slapped him.
    But then, unexpectedly, he reacted to something else. He reached into his cargo pants and came out with some kind of device.
    He touched it a couple times, and for the moment she lost him. He was dealing with something beyond her.
    Then, as if nothing had transpired between them, he went into the next room, shutting the door behind him.
    She heard the man she thought was JC yell in his deep growl with that reconstructed larynx of his. It was a very scary sound when he was angry.
    Absolutely, that’s him. That’s JC, she thought. But what worried her was the intensity of the argument in the next room. She couldn’t make out everything, but it was