Operation Chaos Read Online Free PDF

clear that the other guys weren’t happy that he was taking so long. They were belligerent, demeaning, calling him robo-soldier. From what she’d seen of him, she didn’t recommend getting into a conflict with this guy.
    In her life, she’d never known the physicality of a male as thoroughly as she knew this guy, from stem to stern.
    The operations on him were as intense as any she’d ever encountered. He had surgeons trying to save his lower extremities while she was inside his skull.
    He was the hospital’s great save.
    Then the argument in the next room reached a nasty level and she came back to her reality, her predicament, and decided, much as she wanted to know what was behind all of this, she needed to get out of there. The relationship between JC and those men wasn’t a good one. Nothing about the situation boded well.
    She inched toward the backpack. He had a medical kit, which meant scissors or a cutting tool of some kind.
     

8
     
     
    Two surgeons fought her about Johnny Cash. “He’s too far gone. There’s no saving him. We can’t use resources and time and doctors when we have more and more coming in.”
    “He can be saved,” she insisted. ”I’ve evaluated his wounds, and his ability to fight. I brought him in because he’s strong—he’ll make it.”
    She was so insistent and determined that she knew she was putting herself on the line. And she was willing to use whatever powers she could, including the head surgeon at the Naval Hospital during that time. He happened to be her father.
    She got her way and she had to win. And she did.
    She thought back to Bagram, that moment of celebration when they were finally about able to send Johnny Cash off to the more advanced Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
    They only saved four of the nine men involved in that terrible incident. Even now, she could remember the smell of burned flesh and the incredible scene of one of his fellow soldiers using his helmet to protect the open patch of skull that Johnny Cash had, a soldier who bled to death even as he gave aid.
    The heroism and horror of that experience came flooding back to her now with full force. A weapon she had to use. She had to get to this guy.
    The difference between high-order explosives and the low-order explosives and their pressurized waves was one of the most critical elements of saving lives and something she’d specialized in.
    By the time she got to him, having worked with so many after two years at the most intense stage of that war, with both Afghan children and soldiers, she’d learned how to quickly assess multisystem life-threatening injuries.
    Rainee later wrote an acclaimed article on blast-wave varieties. How to assess abnormalities in the middle cerebellar peduncles, in cingulum bundles, and in the right orbitofrontal white matter, just by understanding the type of blast wave.
    A good portion of her life, she’d slept and woke with the science of the brain on her mind. But then, later in her career, she began to deal with the therapy so necessary to the brain injured, joining an expanding group of neuroscientists who believed the mechanics of the brain—understanding how it worked from an electronic, synapse, cellular-communication standpoint—weren’t enough. They didn’t deal with the living, feeling, thinking mind.
    The signature wounds of the longest lasting of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left scars that were as deep in their way as the scars of Vietnam on those vets. And it wasn’t enough to deal with them on only one level or another. They had to be dealt with in totality. Brain and mind.
    And now one of those enhanced had kidnapped her, and that was her leverage.
    She thought about the physical level with this man. The delicate removal of those metal fragments, his labored breathing, the tubes in his mouth, his nose, the background medical chatter. Bright, fierce lights. A face distorted by having been ripped up. A once