I carried my issue gear back to T-6. The sneakers felt right with two pairs of the socks. I found the right hole for the belt, filled the canteen, and positioned it at a better place on the belt. Chuck had told me I would be carrying twenty pounds of rock in the backpack, so I made careful adjustment of the straps, bringing die padding to the exact place where the straps hit the tops of my shoulders. Then
I inspected the Uziunder the light. It hadn’t been built for pretty. It was an ugly, simple, straighfforward little weapon. The empty clip snapped into place easily. It had a good balance, and a simple three-way control for safety, single fire, and full automatic. It looked designed for quantity production. I couldn’t give it full approval until I had a chance, if ever, to ilre it. Then I would learn the cycle of fire and whether it would ride up at fun automatic, or whether the gases were diverted just right to make it easy to hold on target. It hung well over the shoulder on its fat little sling and came off the shoulder fast, with your hands faring into the right position. I had heard that since I had been around this kind of hardware they had upped the cycle of iIre, upped the muzzle velocity to practically double, and reduced the weight of the projectile. A man could carry a lot more rounds into a firelight, do just as much damage with each hit, and hit oftener.
I was up early and observed the usual routine of the others that wherever I strolled, somebody was keeping an eye on me. Brother Thomas was an unknown quantity.
When I had been wakeful in the night, I had realized that my assumption that they would mail the tapes had to be wrong. This outfit preferred to take no chances at ale It had to be a hand-delivery sys
The Green Ripper tem, and so it would do no good at all to try to find a return address.
When I went back to sleep I dreamed of Sister Elena Marie, smiling at me, talking to me. It was very important that I understand what she was saying, but I could only catch a word or phrase here and there, and they were in a foreign language I could not even identify. She was telling me how to get around behind the screen, back to where she was, and she was becoming angry because I couldn’t understand what she was telling me. If I could get on the same side of the screen as Sister Elena Marie, then Gretel would be spared. When I yelled at her in rage, it woke me up agam.
I ate little because I had a good idea of what they were going to try to do to me. I guessed they could probably run me into the ground. But out of pride I wanted to make them have to stretch to do it.
They had six hundred and forty very rugged acres. It was a bright chilly day, at first. Chuck ran the group with whistle signals. I had to be briefed on those. Most of it was standard operating procedure for patrols. Infiltration, cover and concealment, giving covering fire, without ammo. It involved a lot of running. I had a fifteen-year disad- vantage with most of them, and I was carrying eighty more pounds uphill than were the two girls. But they wasted energy in random movements. I husbanded every ounce, made no unnecessary step.
I was sweating heavily by late morning, and they all looked dry. They were conditioned.
There were special little moments of humiliation. Once when we had crossed a swollen creek and were going up an abrupt rocky slope on the other side, I got so winded near the top that I was grabbing sman trees to yank myself along. As I was doing that, Stella went by me, running uphill on tiptoe, deft as a goat, and turned to give me a smile and a quick wink before leaving me behind, looking uphill at the bounding flex of those hips under the tough denim.