Chapter 139. No More Babysitters

Washington greeted me with a damp predawn fog that blanketed the runways at Dulles Airport. The clocks in the terminal showed it was just after five in the morning. I did not take a taxi. It was an unnecessary expense. Instead, I waited for a regular bus headed toward the Virginia suburbs.

Everything I owned at the moment fit into a worn nylon Under Armour gym bag sitting on the seat beside me. The contents were Spartan and familiar: a clean T-shirt, a pair of fresh boxers, a toothbrush, and a phone charger. It was almost exactly what I had carried to the Corps training camp a couple of months earlier. The only difference was that this time, the security restrictions allowed me to bring an ordinary smartphone. No heavy paper books adding weight to my backpack and leaving my shoulders raw. My entire electronic library now fit on a single memory card.

Outside the bus windows, the gray office districts of the capital slowly gave way to dense, empty stretches of woodland. We were getting close to the restricted P-SWAT base. The real test started now, and I had come prepared.

I had spent the last week before departure gathering information. My sources were Megan and Danny. Their information was limited. They both served in other divisions and did not have the full picture, but out of everyone I knew, they were still the most reliable. At least, unlike Selina, they did not respond to every phone call with a barrage of sarcasm or try to make me look like an idiot just for fun. Danny, my handler, who was a good ten years younger than me, and Megan, my childhood friend who had successfully ignored my existence for the past twenty years, had somehow become my only support system. They were not exactly people I would want to grab a beer with on a Friday night, but they gave me straight answers. That was enough for me. Personal feelings were a lousy foundation for getting the job done.

The data painted a clear picture: P-SWAT and Intelligence were the two toughest, most heavily militarized organizations in the Corps. For everyone else, service looked more like a normal corporate job: show up in civilian clothes, put in nine hours, and go home. Unfortunately, not everyone got that luxury. Intelligence had an unspoken code of its own, something resembling the elite culture of Army Rangers. The assault units, on the other hand, were straight out of every painfully predictable B-movie about infantry. They lived at the very bottom of the military food chain. That meant barracks packed with fifty sweaty, pissed-off guys, a power-hungry sergeant screaming at everyone around the clock, and toilets scrubbed until they gleamed. At training camp, they treated us like porcelain dolls because the fragile minds of teenage recruits were considered a precious resource. But once you made it through initiation and completed your first combat deployment through a Portal, those rose-colored glasses shattered. The Corps stopped smiling. The babysitters disappeared. In their place came angry sergeants and a hard dose of reality.

I had to be honest with myself: I did not like where I was headed. I was not a person who went looking for trouble. Yes, I knew how to break bones, but that was a skill, not a hobby. I got no pleasure from violence. And as for listening to my superiors scream at me, I had already had my fill of that crap during my internships after college. Trying to break my personality and turn me into a mindless component of an assault rifle was a bad plan. I was not some patriotic TV commercial volunteer, and I had never signed up to put up with this just for a nice line on my résumé. I had been dragged into the military against my will. But the system did not leave room for compromise. Nobody was going to let me walk away, and challenging orders was even less of an option. My only rational move was to minimize the damage and prepare for the worst.

I had only a week to prepare. For an ordinary person, that would have been nothing. For me, it was plenty, especially since I had done ninety percent of the groundwork long before this day.

To survive in an organization like P-SWAT, you needed to meet three criteria.

First, physical superiority. Serious muscle and a solid punch. You needed the size to withstand the daily grind of training without falling apart. Sure, you could show up as a pale office clerk, and the military would eventually strip away the fat and build you up anyway, but the price of that transformation was measured in gallons of sweat and an endless stream of screaming instructors. The ability to hit hard also mattered to the barracks ecosystem. The people there would be a particular breed, and some only started taking arguments seriously after hearing their own ribs crack. Fortunately, I had this one covered. I was already physically stronger than the average person by a wide margin, and my jiu-jitsu and Krav Maga training would let me put down a couple of platoons' worth of professional MMA fighters if necessary.

Second, procedural integration. Military drill, insignia, chain of command, command codes. Most recruits had all that bureaucracy beaten into them through punishment, but I preferred to eliminate the human factor whenever possible. I had memorized every patch, rank, and regulation before I had ever set foot in the training camp.

Third, local reconnaissance. If you wanted to minimize friction in a new system, you had to learn the specifics of your particular unit ahead of time. Which subjects made the local commander twitch, which duties gave you a chance to catch your breath, and which assignments were best avoided at all costs. Those little pieces of inside information could turn the hell of your first month into something resembling a tolerable routine.

Unfortunately, that was where my carefully calculated plan fell apart. I did not have a single contact inside P-SWAT. I was walking into an information vacuum. That meant I would have to gather operational intelligence as I went, inevitably taking a few knocks and improvising along the way. It was the worst possible scenario for a rookie, but an acceptable one for a future operative. After all, I still had a career in espionage ahead of me.

The bus gave a muffled hiss of compressed air and rolled to a stop. I grabbed my bag. This was my stop.

As I made my way down the aisle, a murmur swept through the bus. Dozens of eyes, mostly civilians and teenagers, turned toward me with open awe. Two boys in the back even straightened up and awkwardly raised their hands in salute. The reason for all the attention fit me perfectly: my Corps dress uniform. Regulations did not require me to arrive in uniform, but they did not prohibit it, either. One of the military psychology manuals I had read offered a simple rule: On your first day at a new base, impress your superiors with the weight of your accomplishments. It immediately keeps you from being lumped in with faceless cannon fodder and establishes the right precedent.

I stepped onto the roadside shoulder. A gray, deserted field stretched around me, split in two by a narrow strip of asphalt. The checkpoint was still a good half mile away. Keeping up a brisk, steady pace, I made a mental note: if I had to travel this road every day, buying a decent motorcycle would be my first priority. Wasting precious hours of my life waiting for public transportation was an unacceptable luxury.

A couple hundred yards ahead, a familiar figure came into view. A teenager in a baggy biker jacket and bright orange bandanna was walking along, kicking roadside stones and loudly humming to himself, completely lost in the music blasting through his oversized headphones. An old acquaintance. My temporary charge from training camp.

"Hey, Ted," I said as I caught up with him, giving him a brief wave.

The kid jumped as if he had been electrocuted. My deep, even voice had caught him completely off guard. He yanked out his headphones, stared at me with wide, astonished eyes, and then broke into a huge, ear-to-ear grin.

"Tom?! Holy crap, where'd you come from?!" Ted waved his arms so frantically that he looked like he was trying to take flight. Then it hit him. "Wait, did they... you know... send you to the assault units too?! No way!"

"As you can see," I replied without breaking stride.

"But what the hell, Tom?! You're awesome! You were supposed to become some super-duper elite trainer or something! Why'd they stick you in this dump with us regular guys?! That's not fair!"

"The Corps allocates resources where they can generate the highest marginal return." I glanced at my watch. "We have fourteen minutes to check in at the checkpoint. I suggest we pick up the pace. Starting our service with a time-management violation would be a strategic error."

Ted immediately sped up, almost breaking into a run to keep up with my long military strides. I watched his frantic efforts in silence. Funny how fate worked. We had not only ended up in the same division, but had been assigned on the same day. My orders, however, had been processed later than everyone else's. Logic suggested that the Corps' assignment algorithm had detected our previous connection and deliberately placed us in the same unit to reduce stress on a minor combatant. Very humane of the artificial intelligence. Too bad nobody had thought to give me the same psychological support.

"Hey, Tom..." Ted suddenly stopped and looked me up and down, pure, undisguised panic creeping into his voice. "Why are you dressed like you're going to a presidential parade?! Crap, crap, crap! Was I supposed to wear a uniform too?! I don't have anything except this jacket! They're gonna turn me away, aren't they?! They're gonna say I'm a loser!"

"Stand down. No need to panic." I held up a hand, cutting his hysteria off at the source. A calm, even tone was the basic rule when dealing with teenagers. "Civilian clothes are perfectly acceptable when reporting for duty. They'll issue you a standard gear set once we're on base."

"Phew..." The kid let out a loud breath and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then narrowed his eyes mischievously. "Then why'd you dress up like a Thanksgiving turkey? Entering a cooking contest?"

The corner of my mouth twitched almost imperceptibly. A bold comparison, but entirely in character for him.

"An investment in the future, Ted. I want the local brass to see a combat officer the second they lay eyes on me, not some green recruit."

"Yeah, like me..." Ted immediately deflated, staring down at his worn sneakers. "Easy for you to say. You're an adult, you're already a second lieutenant, and, you know..."

Suddenly, his eyes locked onto my chest. They widened with such wild excitement that he looked as if he had just come face-to-face with Captain America himself.

"Holy crap! Is that... a Bronze Star with a V device?! No way! You actually did something heroic?! When did you become a hero, Tom?! Tell me, come on, tell me!"

"In the Portal. Right in front of you, actually." I gave him the bare facts of the airborne operation as concisely as possible, without any unnecessary heroics. "Command considered my actions effective. What interests me more is how you know so much about the military awards system."

"I saw it in a textbook at training camp!" he shot back, leaning forward with excitement. His face twisted into a comical expression, a mixture of burning envy and wild, almost predatory ambition. "Damn, Tom... I want one too now! No, I'll get something even better! I'll become the strongest assault trooper in the history of this base, just you wait! I'll wipe the floor with all of them! I'll fight to the death!"

"You're sixteen, Ted. You're half my age." I gave him a pat on the shoulder, steering that fountain of teenage energy in a more useful direction. "By the time you reach my age, you won't have a patch of empty space left on your uniform. Assuming, of course, you start making friends with discipline."

The kid's face lit up with pride. The gloom vanished, and his posture straightened. Excellent result. His morale had stabilized just before we entered the tiger's cage. And that was damn good timing, because we had finally reached the gray concrete gates of the main P-SWAT checkpoint.