“The smartest?”
“Connolly. All those SAS guys are tops. Us Americans have to play a little catchup ball. But we will,” Vega assured him. “Don’t sweat it, Ding. You’ll keep up with us, after a week or so. Just like it was in Colorado.”
Chavez didn’t really want to be reminded of that job. Too many friends lost in the mountains of Colombia, doing a job that their country had never acknowledged. Watching his men finish off their training rounds told him much about them. If anyone had missed a single shot, he failed to notice it. Every man fired off exactly a hundred rounds, the standard daily regimen for men who fired five hundred per working week on routine training, as opposed to more carefully directed drill. That would start tomorrow.
“Okay,” John concluded. “we’ll have a staff meeting every morning at eight-fifteen for routine matters, and a more formal one every Friday afternoon. My door is always open-including the one at home. People, if you need me, there’s a phone next to my shower. Now, I want to get out and see the shooters. Anything else? Good. We stand adjourned.” Everyone stood and shuffled out the door. Stanley remained.
“That went well,” Alistair observed, pouring himself another cup of tea. “Especially for one not accustomed to bureaucratic life.”
“Shows, eh?” Clark asked with a grin.”One can learn anything, John.”
“I hope so.”
“When’s morning PT around here?”
“Oh-six-forty-five. You plan to run and sweat with the lads?”
“I plan to try,” Clark answered.
“You’re too old, John. Some of those chaps run marathons for recreation, and you’re closer to sixty than to fifty.”
“Al, I can’t command those people without trying, and you know that.”
“Quite,” Stanley admitted.
They awoke late, one at a time, over a period of about an hour. For the most part they just lay there in bed, some of them shuffling off to the bathroom, where they also found aspirin and Tylenol for the headaches they all had, along with showers, which half of them decided to take and the other half to forgo. In the adjoining room was a breakfast buffet that surprised them, with pans full of scrambled eggs, pancakes, sausage and bacon. Some of them even remembered how to use napkins, the people in the monitoring room saw.
They met their captor after they’d had a chance to eat breakfast. He offered all of them clean clothes, after they got cleaned rip.
“What is this place?” asked the one known to the staff only as #4. It sure as hell wasn’t any Bowery mission he was familiar with.
“My company is undertaking a study,” the host said from behind a tightly fitting mask. “You gentlemen will be part of that study. You will be staying with us for a while. During that time, you will have clean beds, clean clothes, good food, good medical care, and” – he pulled a wall panel back – “whatever you want to drink.” In a wall alcove which the guests remarkably had not yet discovered were three shelves of every manner of wine, beer, and spirit that could be purchased at the local liquor store, with glasses, water, mixes, and ice.
“You mean we can’t leave?” Number 7 asked.
“We would prefer that you stay,” the host said, somewhat evasively. He pointed to the liquor cabinet, his eyes smiling around the mask. “Anyone care for a morning eye-opener?”
It turned out that it wasn’t too early in the morning for any of them, and that the expensive bourbons and ryes were the first and hardest hit. The additional drug in the alcohol was quite tasteless, and the guests all headed back to their alcove beds. Next to each was a TV set. Two more decided to make use of the showers. Three even shaved, emerging from the bathroom looking quite human. For the time being.
In the monitoring room half a building away, Dr. Archer manipulated the various TV cameras to get close-ups on every “guest.”
“They’re all pretty much on profile,” she observed. “Their blood work ought to be a disaster.”
“Oh, yeah, Barb,” Dr. Killgore agreed. “Number Three looks especially unwell. You suppose we can get him slightly cleaned up before . . . ?”
“I think we should try,” Barbara Archer, M.D., thought. “We can’t monkey with the test criteria too much, can we?”
“Yeah, and it’d be bad for morale if we let one die too soon,” Killgore went on.
” `What a piece of work is man,’ ” Archer quoted, with a snort.
“Not all of us, Barb.” A chuckle. “Surprised they didn’t find a woman or two for the group.”
“I’m not,” replied the feminist Dr. Archer, to the amusement of the more cynical Killgore. But it wasn’t worth getting all worked up over. He looked away from the battery of TV screens, and picked up the memo from corporate headquarters. Their guests were to be treated as guests-fed, cleaned up, and offered all the drink they could put away consistent with the continuance of their bodily functions. It was slightly worrisome to the epidemiologist that all their guest-test-subjects were seriously impaired street alcoholics. The advantage of using them, of course, was that they wouldn’t be missed, even by what might have passed for friends. Few had any family members who would even know where to look for them. Fewer still would have any who would be surprised by the inability to locate them. And none, Killgore judged, had so much as one who would notify proper authorities on the inability to find them-and even if that happened, would the New York City Police care? Not likely.
No, all their “guests” were people written off by their society, less aggressively but just as finally as Hitler had written off his Jews, though with somewhat more justice, Archer and Killgore both thought. What a piece of work was man? These examples of the self-designated godlike species were of less use than the laboratory animals they were now replacing. And they were also far less appealing to Archer, who had feelings for rabbits and even rats. Killgore found that amusing. He didn’t much care about them either, at least not as individual animals. It was the species as a whole that mattered, wasn’t it? And as far as the “guests” were concerned, well, they weren’t even good examples of the substandard humans whom the species didn’t need. Killgore was. So was Archer, her goofy political-sexual views notwithstanding. With that decided. Killgore returned to making a few notes and doing his paperwork. Tomorrow they’d do the physical examinations. That would be fun. he was sure.
CHAPTER 2
SADDLING UP
The first two weeks started off pleasantly enough. Chavez was now running five miles without any discomfort, doing the requisite number of push-ups with his team, and shooting better, as well as about half of them, but not as well as Connolly and the American Hank Patterson, both of whom must have been born with pistols in their cribs or something, Ding decided after firing three hundred rounds per day to try to equal them. Maybe a gunsmith could play with his weapon. The SAS based here had a regimental armorer who might have trained with Sam Colt himself, or so he’d heard. A little lighter and smoother on the trigger, perhaps. But that was mere pride talking. Pistols were secondary weapons. With their H&K MP-10s, every man could put three quick aimed rounds in a head at fifty meters about as fast as his mind could form the thought. These people were awesome, the best soldiers he’d ever met-or heard about, Ding admitted to himself, sitting at his desk and doing some hated paperwork. He grunted. Was there anyone in the world who didn’t hate paperwork?
The team spent a surprising amount of time sitting at their desks and reading, mainly intelligence stuff-which terrorist was thought to be where, according to some intelligence agency or police department or money-grubbing informer. In fact the data they pored over was nearly useless, but since it was the best they had, they pored over it anyway as a way of breaking the routine. Included were photos of the world’s surviving terrorists. Carlos the Jackal, now in his fifties, and now settled into a French maximum security prison, was the one they’d all wanted. The photos of him were computer-manipulated to simulate his current-age appearance, which they then compared with real-life photos from the French. The team members spent time memorizing all of them, because some dark night in some unknown place, a flash of light might reveal one of these faces, and you’d have that long to decide whether or not to double-tap the head in question-and if you had the chance to bag another Carlos Il’ych Ramirez Sanchez, you wanted to take it, ‘cuz then, Ding’s mind went on, you’d never be able to buy a beer in a cop or special-ops bar again anywhere in the world, you’d be ,u famous. The real hell of it was, this pile of trash on his desk wasn’t really trash after all. If they ever bagged the next Carlos, it would be because some local cop, in Sao Paolo. Brazil, or Bumfuck, Bosnia, or wherever, heard something from some informant or other, then went to the proper house and took a look, and then had his brain go click from all the flyers that filled cophouses around the world, and then it would be up to the street savvy of that cop to see if he might arrest the bastard on the spot-or, if the situation looked a little too tense, to report back to his lieutenant, and just maybe a special team like Ding’s Team-2 would deploy quietly, and take the fucker down, the easy way or the hard way, in front of whatever spouse or kilo there might be, ignorant of daddy’s former career . . . and then it would make CNN with quite a splash ….