Destroyer 91: Cold Warrior
By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
Prologue
When his mind awoke, his eyes beheld only darkness. But his mind was awake. His brain, long the realm of inchoate nightmares from which there had been no awakening, no refuge, and no surcease, processed conscious thoughts.
When he tried to open his eyes, they refused him. He could feel his lids strain and tug, attempting to separate.
He made a frightened noise deep in his throat, and tasted something plastic along one edge of his thick, dry tongue. His throat felt raw.
Then he sensed presences. Something popped out of his right ear and he heard sounds again. Beeping. A steady hum. An oscilloscope. To his mind leaped the image of an oscilloscope.
"Steady, sir," a youngish voice said.
He grunted inarticulately.
Something came out of his left ear, and the sounds were all around him. There were two of them. They were hovering on either side of the bed on which he lay.
At least, he hoped it was a bed. He could not tell. It felt more like a plush-lined coffin.
Fingers took his chin and separated his jaw. The hinge muscles shot fire into his logy brain and he cried out in agony. But the thing that had obstructed his mouth, the plastic-tasting thing, was no longer there.
"Don't try to speak yet, sir. We're still in the middle of bringing you back."
His mind shot into first gear. Back!
He forced his mouth to make sounds. They sounded horrible, corpsey.
"How . . . long?" he croaked.
"Please, sir. Not yet. Let us finish the procedure."
"Grrrr . . ."
They began unwinding the bandages that sheathed his eyes.
The darkness shaded to gray, then lightened to a pinkish haze in which faint greenish sparks hung, dancing-his optic nerves reacting to the first stimuli in . . . dammit, how long had it been?
"Hmmm," an older voice was saying. "Eyelids are encrusted. Seem welded together."
"I don't see anything in the manual about a procedure covering this," the youngish voice muttered.
"May be a natural phenomenon. We'll leave them. Let the retina get used to stimulation again."
He swallowed. The effort was like ingesting a rough-textured concrete golf ball.
"How . . . long . . . damn . . . it!"
"The briefing officer is on his way, sir. We're physicians."
"Status?"
"Well, your new heart is functioning normally. The animation unit did a good job. Twenty-six beats a minute, like a Swiss clock."
"It was a heart attack, then?"
"You don't remember?"
"No."
"We've had to perform certain other . . . procedures. There was some tissue damage, with resulting loss of function."
"I feel nothing."
"Technically the nerves are still frozen. Feeling will come back. There may be some discomfort."
He said nothing to that.
Then a door clicked open, and he sensed the attending physicians had turned.
"Oh, there you are. He's conscious and responding to our voices, Captain."
"As you were." The new voice was more mature, a strong voice. One he felt he could trust. Not like those wet-behind-the-ears, over-solicitous doctors. Who the hell had hired them, anyway?
"Director, I am Captain Maus."
"Maus. What kind of a name is that?"
"German, sir."
"Go ahead. Report. How long was I . . . inanimate?"
"Let's start with the good news, sir. We currently have thriving bases in California, Florida, Japan, and France. Except for some cultural problems with the French base, expansion is continuing apace."
He absorbed that with a tight smile. The empire flourished! The captain went on.
"In the last few years the Berlin Wall has fallen, the two Germanies have reunited, the Soviet Union has broken up into a chaotic collection of autonomous states with the economic prospects of a landlocked Fiji Islands, and Eastern Europe is free."
He groaned. "That long?"
"It has been a while, Director."
He frowned. "Revenue?"
"Down in the last several quarters. The global economy has been rocky. But we're solidly in the black. There has been no downsizing-"