“Airborne rangers jump from planes,” Pierce called, and then the remainder of the team chorused;
“They ain’t got no goddamned brains!” The traditional chant made perfectly good sense to Chavez, who’d been through Ranger School at Fort Benning, but not Jump School. It made far better sense, he thought, to come to battle in a helicopter rather than as skeet for the bastards on the ground to shoot at, a perfect target, unable to shoot back. The very idea frightened him. But he was the only member of Team-2 who’d never jumped, and that made him a “fucking leg,” or straight legged infantryman, not one of the anointed people with the silver ice-cream cone badge. Strange that he’d never heard any of his people josh him about it, he thought, passing the first mile post on the track. Pierce was a gifted runner. and was setting a fast pace, maybe trying to get somebody to fall out. But no one would do that, and everyone knew it. At home, Ding thought, Patsy was getting herself ready for work in the hospital emergency room. She was leaning toward specialization in ER medicine at the moment, which meant getting a general surgery certification. Funny that she hadn’t selected her area of medical specialty yet. She certainly had the brains to do nearly anything, and her smallish hands would be perfect for surgery. She often practiced dexterity by playing with a deck of cards, and over the past few months she’d become expert at dealing seconds. She’d showed him what she was doing and how, but even then, watching closely, he couldn’t see her do it, which had amazed and annoyed her husband. Her motor-control nerves must be incredible, Domingo thought proudly, pounding into the third mile of the run. This was when you began to feel it, because in mile three your legs were thinking that they’d gone pretty far already, and maybe slowing down would be nice. At least that was true for Ding. Two members of the team ran marathons, and as far as he’d been able to tell, chose two, Loiselle and Weber, respectively the smallest and largest members of the team, never got tired. The German especially, graduate of the Bundeswehr mountain warfare school, and holder of the Bergermeister badge, was about the toughest son of a bitch he’d ever met-and Chavez thought of himself as a tough little son of a bitch. Loiselle was just like a little damned rabbit, moving along with grace and invisible power.
Ten more minutes, Chavez thought, his legs starting to complain to him, but not allowing any of it to show, his face set in a calm, determined mien, almost bored as his feet pounded on the cinders of the track.Team-1 was running, too, opposite them on the track, and fortunately neither team raced the other. They did record their times for the run, but direct competition would have forced all of the Rainbow troopers into a destructive regimen that would only produce injuries-and enough of those happened from routine training, though Team-2 was fully mission-capable at the moment, with all injuries healed.
“Detail… quick-time, march!” Pierce finally called, as they completed the morning jaunt. Another fifty meters and they halted.
“Well, people, good morning. I hope you all enjoyed waking up for another day of safeguarding the world from the bad guys,” Pierce told them, sweat on his smiling face. “Major Chavez,” he said next, walking back to his usual place in the ranks.
“Okay, gentlemen, that was a good workout. Thank you, Sergeant Pierce, for leading the run this morning. Showers and breakfast, troops. Fall out.” With that command the two ranks of five each disintegrated, the men heading off to their building to shower off the sweat. A few of them worked legs or arms a little for some exercise induced cricks. The endorphins had kicked in, the body’s own reward for exertion, creating the “runner’s high,” as some called it, which would mellow in a few minutes to the wonderful sense of well-being that they’d enjoy for the rest of the morning. Already they were chatting back and forth about various things, professional and not.
An English breakfast was much the same as an American one: bacon, eggs, toast, coffee-English breakfast tea for some-fuel for the coming day. Some of the troopers ate light, and some ate heavy, in accordance with their personal metabolic rates. By this time, all were in their day uniforms, ready to head off to their desks. Tim Noonan would be giving a lecture today on communications security. The new radios from E-Systems hardly needed the introduction, but Noonan wanted them to know everything about them, including how the encryption systems worked. Now the team members could talk back and forth, and anyone trying to listen in would hear only the hiss of static. The same had been true before, but the new portable radios, with their headsets and reed-thin microphones that hung out in front of their faces, were a great technical improvement, Noonan had told Chavez. Then Bill Tawney would brief them on any new developments in the intelligence and investigations on their three field deployments. After that came the before-lunch trip to the range for marksmanship practice, but today no live-fire/ live-target exercise. Instead they’d practice long-rope deployments from Malloy’s Helicopter.
It promised to be a full, if routine, day for Rainbow. Chavez almost added “boring” to the description, but he knew that John worked hard to vary the routine, and, besides, you practiced the fundamentals, because they were, well, fundamental to getting the job done, the things you held on to when the tactical situation went to shit and you didn’t have the time to think about what to do. By this time, every Team-2 member knew how every other member thought, and so, on exercises where the actual scenario was different from the tactical intelligence they’d been given going in, somehow the team members just adapted, sometimes without words, every trooper knowing what his partner and the others in the team would do, as if they’d communicated by telepathy. That was the reward for the intensive, intellectually boring training. Team-2, and Peter Covington’s Team-1, had evolved into living, thinking organisms whose parts just acted properly-and seemed to do so automatically. When Chavez thought about it, he found it remarkable, but on training exercises, it seemed as natural as breathing. Like Mike Pierce leaping over the desk in Worldpark. That hadn’t been part of the training regimen, but he’d done it, and done it perfectly, and the only thing wrong was that his first burst hadn’t taken his subject in the head, but instead had stitched down his back-causing wounds that would have been rapidly fatal – then followed it with a second burst that had blown the bastard’s head apart. Boom. Zap. Splatter. And the other team members had trusted Pierce to cover his sector, and then, after cleansing it of opposition, to assist with others. Like the fingers of his hand, Chavez thought, able to form into a deadly fist, but also able to do separate tasks, because each finger had a brain. And they were all his men. That was the best part of all.
Getting the weapons was the easiest part. It struck outsiders as comical-Irishmen with guns were like squirrels with nuts, always stashing them, and sometimes forgetting where the hell they’d been stashed. For a generation, people had shipped arms to the IRA, and the IRA had cached them, mainly burying theirs for the coming time when the entire Irish nation would rise up under Provo leadership and engage the English invaders, driving them forever from the sacred soil of Ireland . . . or something like that, Grady thought. He’d personally buried over three thousand weapons, most of them Russian-made AKMS assault rifles, like this stash in a farm field in County Tipperary. He’d buried this shipment forty meters west of a large oak tree, over the hill from the farmhouse. They were two meters-six feet-down, deep enough that the farmer’s tractor wouldn’t hurt or accidentally unearth them, and shallow enough that getting them took only an hour’s spadework. There were a hundred of them, delivered in 1984 by a helpful soul he’d first met in Lebanon, along with pre-loaded plastic magazines, twenty per rifle. It was all in a series of boxes, the weapons and the ammunition wrapped in greased paper, the way the Russians did it, to protect them against moisture. Most of the wrappings were still intact, Grady saw, as he selected carefully. He removed twenty weapons, tearing open each one’s paper to check for rust or corrosion, working the bolts back and forth, and in every case finding that the packing grease was intact, the same as when the weapons had left the factory at Kazan. The AKMS was the updated version of the AK-47, and these were the folding-stock version, which were much easier to conceal than the full-size military shoulder weapon. More to the point, this was the weapon his people had trained on in Lebanon. It was easy to use, reliable, and concealable. Those characteristics made it perfect for the purpose intended. The fifteen he took, along with three hundred thirty-round magazines, were loaded into the back of the truck, and then it was time to refill the hole. After three hours, the truck was on its way to yet another farm, this one on the seacoast of County Cork, where there lived a farmer with whom Sean Grady had an arrangement.