There is no easy way to do this. MD2 and 3DS work in completely different ways, and the data needed to construct a good 3DS animation is lost in the export process to create an MD2. 3DS and similar formats are made up of component entities which are then transformed (in a way similar or identical to B3D's entity+movement system) between various times in the animation. By contrast, MD2 files simply describe the model as a single mesh, with its vertices rearranged at every frame of the animation instead. You can easily convert any animation to an MD2 by recording the global positions of the vertices of the component objects post-transformation, for each frame, but for the reverse, there's essentially no way to know what transform was used to put a given vertex of an MD2 wherever it currently is. You don't even have a "base" position to work from (frame 0 is not special in MD2s, it's just the first frame of the loop).
Converting an MD2 to 3DS is also complicated by the fact that 3DS doesn't support bones or vertex deformation, while MD2 is literally nothing but vertex deformation: MD2s rarely break their model up into visibly-separate submeshes, because the purpose of the format was to avoid having to do so. 3DS requires separated submeshes, and thus there's almost no chance the animation of a good MD2 can even be represented as a 3DS at all. It would have to be a very poor MD2 that was never intended for export to that format in the first place for this to work.
It is possible to convert an MD2 to the B3D format by using the brute-force approach of simply creating a bone for every vertex, but this will be inferior in every way to just using the original MD2 (much, much slower to draw; worthless for importing into a modeller); don't do this unless you actually can't use the MD2 for some reason.
Your 100% best bet is to contact the original artist and ask them for the development files. People rarely work directly in the MD2 format (even in the days of Quake, the models were mostly developed using bones and then exported) - whatever they worked in will almost certainly be more amenable to export in a modern format that allows you to keep those construction features.
Also, there's no reason at all to use 3DS these days. Use B3D, it's superior in every way and is literally designed as a drop-in replacement - not only do you get bones, you also get much better control over surfaces and lighting and the resulting meshes both look much nicer, and are far more efficient to draw. (For working on a model in the art pipeline, use neither - game formats are always inferior to the native format of a modelling program; they all lose some data.)
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