Dinner passed without incident. The wine was every bit as excellent as he’d expected, but the meat was overdone and the vegetables disappointing. Washington, he thought, was overrated as a city of restaurants. On his way out he simply picked up his companion’s briefcase and walked to his car. The drive back to his hotel took twenty leisurely minutes. After that, he spent several hours going over the documents. The man was reliable, Cortez reflected, and earned his appreciation. Each of the four was a solid prospect.
His recruiting effort would begin tomorrow.
7. Knowns and Unknowns
IT HAD TAKEN a week to get accustomed to the altitude, as Julio had promised. Chavez eased out of the suspenders pack. It wasn’t a fully loaded one yet, only twenty-five pounds, but they were taking their time, almost easing people into the conditioning program instead of using a more violent approach. That suited the sergeant, still breathing a little hard after the eight-mile run. His shoulders hurt some, and his legs ached in the usual way, but around him there was no sound of retching, and there hadn’t been any dropouts this time around. Just the usual grumbles and curses.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Julio said without gasping. “But I still say that getting laid is the best workout there is.”
“You got that one right,” Chavez agreed with a laugh. “All those unused muscle groups, as the free-weight guys say.”
The best thing about the training camp was the food. For lunch in the field they had to eat MRE packs – “Meal Ready to Eat,” which was three lies for the price of one – but breakfast and supper selections were always well prepared in the camp’s oversized kitchen. Chavez invariably selected as large a bowl of fresh fruits as he could get away with, heavily laced with white sugar for energy, along with the usual Army coffee whose caffeine content always seemed augmented to give you that extra wake-up punch. He laid into his bowl of diced grapefruit, oranges, and damned near everything else with gusto while his tablemates attacked their greasy eggs and bacon. Chavez went back to the line for some hash-browns. He’d heard that carbohydrates were also good for energy, and now that he was almost accustomed to the altitude, the thought of grease for breakfast didn’t bother him that much.
Things were going well. Work here was hard, but there was nothing in the way of Mickey Mouse bullshit. Everyone here was an experienced pro, and they were being treated as such. No energy was being wasted on bed-making; the sergeants all knew how, and if a blanket corner wasn’t quite tucked in, peer pressure set things right without the need for shouting from a superior officer. They were all young men, as serious about their work as they knew how to be, but there was a spirit of fun and adventure. They still didn’t know exactly what they were training for. There was the inevitable speculation, whispering between bunks that gradually transformed to a symphony of snoring at night after agreement on some wildly speculative idea.
Though an uneducated man, Chavez was not a stupid one. Somehow he knew that all of the theories were wrong. Afghanistan was all over; they couldn’t be going there. Besides, everyone here spoke fluent Spanish. He mulled over it again while chewing a mouthful of kiwi fruit – a treat he hadn’t known to exist a week before. High altitude – they weren’t training them here for the fun of it. That eliminated Cuba and Panama. Nicaragua, perhaps. How high were the mountains there? Mexico and the other Central American nations had mountains, too. Everyone here was a sergeant. Everyone here had led a squad, and had done training at one level or other. Everyone here was a light infantryman. Probably they’d be dispatched on some special training mission, therefore, training other light-fighters. That made it counterinsurgency. Of course, every country south of the Rio Grande had one sort of guerrilla problem or other. They resulted from the inequities of the individual governments and economies, but to Chavez the explanation was simpler and to the point – those countries were all fucked up. He’d seen enough of that in his trips with his battalion to Honduras and Panama. The local towns were dirty – they’d made his home barrio seem paradise on earth. The police – well, he’d never thought that he would come to admire the LAPD. But it was the local armies that had earned his especial contempt. Bunch of lazy, incompetent bullies. Not much different from street gangs, as a matter of fact, except that they all carried the same sort of guns (the L.A. gangs tended toward individualism). Weapons skills were about the same. It didn’t require very much for a soldier to butt-stroke some poor bastard with his rifle. The officers – well, he hadn’t seen anyone to compare with Lieutenant Jackson, who loved to run with his men and didn’t mind getting all dirty and smelly like a real soldier. But inevitably it was the sergeants down there who earned his fullest contempt. It had been that paddy Sergeant McDevitt in Korea who’d shown Ding Chavez the light – skill and professionalism equaled pride. And, when you got down to it, pride truly earned was all there was to a man. Pride was what kept you going, what kept you from caving in on those goddamned mountainside runs. You couldn’t let down your friends. You couldn’t let your friends see you for something less than you wanted to be. That was the short version of everything he had learned in the Army, and he knew that the same could be said of all the men in this room. What they were preparing for, therefore, was to train others to do the same. So their mission was a fairly conventional Army mission. For some reason or other – probably political, but Chavez didn’t worry about political stuff; never made much sense anyway – it was a secret mission. He was smart enough to know that this kind of hush-hush preparation meant CIA. He was correct on that judgment. It was the mission he was wrong on.
Breakfast ended at the normal time. The men rose from their tables, taking their trays and dishes to the stacking table before proceeding outside. Most made pit stops and many, including Chavez, changed into clean, dry T-shirts. The sergeant wasn’t overly fastidious, but he did prefer the crisp, clean smell of a newly washed shirt. There was an honest-to-God laundry service here. Chavez decided that he’d miss the camp, altitude and all. The air, if thin, was clean and dry. Each day they’d hear the lonely wail of diesel horns from the trains that entered the Moffat Tunnel, whose entrance they’d see on their twice-daily runs. Often in the evening they’d catch the distant sight of the double-deck cars of an Amtrak train heading east to Denver. He wondered what hunting was like here. What did they hunt? Deer, maybe? They’d seen a bunch of them, big mule deer, but also the curious white shapes of mountain goats racing up sheer rock walls as the soldiers approached. Now, those fuckers were really in shape, Julio had noted the previous day. But Chavez dismissed the thought after a moment. The animals he hunted had only two legs. And shot back if you weren’t careful.
The four squads formed up on time. Captain Ramirez called them to attention and marched them off to their separate area, about half a mile east of the main camp at the far end of the flat bottom of the high valley. Waiting for them was a black man dressed in T-shirt and dark shorts, both of which struggled to contain bulging muscles.
“Good morning, people,” the man said. “I am Mr. Johnson. Today we will begin some real mission-oriented training. All of you have had training in hand-to-hand combat. My job is to see how good you are, and to teach you some new tricks that your earlier training may have left out. Killing somebody silently isn’t all that hard. The tricky part is getting close enough to do it. We all know that.” Johnson’s hands slipped behind his back as he talked on for a moment. “This is another way to kill silently.”
His hands came into view holding a pistol with a large, canlike device affixed to the front. Before Chavez had told himself that it was a silencer, Johnson brought it around in both hands and fired it three times. It was a very good silencer, Ding noted immediately. You could barely hear the metallic clack of the automatic’s slide-quieter, in fact, than the tinkle of glass from the three bottles that disintegrated twenty feet away – and you couldn’t hear the sound of the shot at all. Impressive.
Johnson gave them all a mischievous grin. “You don’t get your hands all bruised, either. Like I said, you all know hand-to-hand, and we’re going to work on that. But I’ve been around the block a few times, just like you people, and let’s not dick around the issue. Armed combat beats unarmed any day of the week. So today we’re going to learn a whole new kind of fighting: silent armed combat.” He bent down and flipped the blanket off a submachine gun. It, too, appeared to have a silencer on the muzzle. Chavez reproached himself for his earlier speculation. Whatever the mission was, it wasn’t about training.