those who had created the Washington State pack. Worse, she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that the genesis for this latest hybrid process wasn’t Stutmeir’s work at all. It was the DCO’s.
Harry and the other doctors, as well as everyone else who’d worked there, had been hired to come to Costa Rica and work on what they thought was a top secret Department of Defense genetics program designed to enhance soldier performance through the use of cutting-edge DNA manipulation techniques. It wasn’t until they were given the boxes and boxes of background research that they realized the cutting-edge techniques involved the use of animal DNA. And the way Harry described the research information made it sound exactly like the technical reports the DCO had put together after the raid in Washington State. Even the color-coding on the edge of each report matched the way the DCO tracked intel sources. Even though the doctors and scientists had been shocked at the direction they were expected to take their research, none of them had complained, until things started getting too real.
“So when did everything go wrong?” she asked, still pondering exactly who in the DCO had betrayed them. The thought that Zarina had a spy on her team who was selling hybrid information was almost as scary as the hybrids themselves.
“About four weeks ago,” Harry said. “When we were ordered to transition to human trials.”
“No one ever said there would be any human trials,” Lester interjected. The way he said it made Kendra think he felt the need to defend himself to her. “We were told that our work was completely developmental. It wasn’t ever supposed to be used on humans.”
Harry nodded in agreement. “Everyone thought that. Then we realized they weren’t kidding, and that they weren’t going to give us a say in the matter. The head of our research team, Dr. Mahsood, dismissed all of our concerns and ordered us to start administering our first batch of serum before it had even cooled. I have no idea why they suddenly started pushing so hard.”
Had the DCO team’s scheduled arrival for the training exercise accelerated their timetable to get the hybrids out of the lab and into the field?
“And that’s where the camp’s security force came into it, right?” she prompted.
This was the part of the story they’d gotten to when Harry had started pressing her about why she was asking so many question.
“They asked for volunteers and started with the guards. But it wasn’t long before they were testing on the rest of the support staff,” Albert explained. “It wasn’t like we had a lot of options.”
Kendra didn’t bother to mention Stutmeir’s preferred method of finding candidates to turn into hybrids—kidnapping homeless veterans.
“Marcus was the first in line,” Harry added. “I have to hand it to him. I thought he was a bully and a thug from the moment I met him, but he wasn’t going to expose his men to a risk he wasn’t willing to face himself.”
Or he simply decided that if anyone was going to get turned into a super soldier, he was going to be the first in line. A big alpha male like Marcus probably thought he couldn’t be in charge if he wasn’t the biggest dog on the block. But Kendra didn’t point that out.
Kendra hated to keep asking questions, but she needed information if she ever hoped to get out of this place. She had no idea why she’d been thrown into this room, but sooner or later, someone would come looking for answers from her. She had to have a plan by then.
“It went well in the beginning,” Harry said suddenly. “Marcus and the other four volunteers went into…well I guess you would call it their hybrid state within an hour of the first treatment. The increase in strength, speed, and endurance was immediate and obvious. Improvements in vision both day and night, as well as the complete loss of pain receptivity, came later.”
“Mahsood, and whoever he was communicating with back in the States, were ecstatic, and asked for additional volunteers,” Lester added. “We wanted them to wait until we did some baseline testing and looked for long-term issues, but they wouldn’t listen. That’s when they started injecting the rest of the support staff. Mechanics, lab techs, medics…anyone they didn’t think were essential to the test trials.”
“Then someone started pushing for a field test to evaluate what we’d accomplished, and that’s when we lost complete control of