by Allen Zadoff
Defend myself first, ask questions later.
I consider all of this in the fifteen seconds it takes to inch on my belly toward the bathroom area in the back of the cabin, feel my way up the drainpipe under the sink, and reach across cool porcelain to find someone’s hand towel.
I wet the towel and wrap it around my face to make a temporary mask. It should buy me a few extra seconds.
There is a rear exit to the cabin, but I’m sure it will be guarded.
I pause on the floor of the bathroom and I listen.
No footsteps. That means they are waiting for the gas to do its job.
That’s how I would undertake an operation like this. Seal the cabin, slide the gas canister through the front door, and wait. Then I would complete my assignment.
What is their assignment right now? I don’t intend to be here to find out.
With the wet towel on my face, I make my way not toward the front or rear door, but to a removable wooden square in the bathroom floor. My guess is that their recon has not uncovered its existence, because ours is the only cabin that has it. A secret Color Wars project from years past. That’s the story I was told, and it’s that story that caused me to choose this cabin. I pop open the trapdoor and drop into the cool dirt below.
I do not know what’s waiting for me in the darkness outside.
So I must be ready for anything.
THERE ARE SOLDIERS HERE.
I make out a handful of them in the dark, an advance team, tactical, aiming lasers playing across the wood of the cabin above me.
I roll along the ground, exposed for a few precarious seconds until the motion carries me under the frame of a neighboring cabin.
Peter’s cabin.
I do not owe him anything. I’ve only been here for three days. I have stayed nearly invisible, my personality softened, everything about me fuzzed down like a dimmer switch turned to its lowest setting. Only Peter knows me, or at least the me I want him to know.
Maybe he knows more. I’ve talked more than usual. I’ve needed to talk.
Still, I should not care about him. Instead I should roll from beneath this cabin to another, hopscotching from cover to cover until I am on the edge of the camp and I can disappear into the woods.
But I cannot let Peter suffer for befriending me. I have to warn him.
So I pull myself from under his cabin, run my fingers up the wooden slats, and find a ledge beneath the window. There is only one soldier nearby, his laser aiming back toward my cabin, so I dead-lift myself up by my fingertips, tilt up the window covering, and peer through the screen.
There is a gas canister here, too, releasing its contents in the center of the floor.
I gasp a lungful of clean air and thrust myself through the window screen. I stay low and move through the darkness, just under the layer of gas.
I quickly locate Peter lying in his bunk.
“Wake up!” I shake him.
He’s nonrespondent. I lean down and listen to his chest. His heart’s still beating, slow but steady. His breathing is shallow but regular.
The boy next to him is the same way. And the one next to him.
Knockout gas. That’s what is in these grenades.
I know now that Peter will survive, so I fling myself back through the window to the outside.
The gas is everywhere now.
It rolls from the cabin doors and floats across the ground like fog in the moonlight.
I cannot help Peter. It’s too late for that. So I will help myself.
I run.
I fling myself against the side of a cabin, keeping my body close to the wall for cover. I wait for a moment then I dart out again, making my way cabin by cabin toward the safety of the forest that surrounds the camp.
I make it to the furthermost cabin, but before I can make a break for the woods I see a mass of soldiers coming toward me, rising out of the darkness of the forest. There are at least two dozen of them, professional soldiers in tight formation following on the heels of the advance team. They are in Tychem Coveralls with breathers and night-vision goggles. Their guns are up and at the ready, lasers crisscrossing the area as they search for me.
The soldiers are well trained and highly equipped. Could they be working for The Program? The Program doesn’t have military assets in the formal sense, but their reach is enormous, their resources nearly unlimited.
And if it’s not The Program, who else could it be? I think about the many other groups I’ve brushed up against in previous missions. Rogue elements of the Mossad, Ministry of State Security agents from China, SZRU operatives from the Ukraine. None of them are likely to be able to track me, much less to the woods of Vermont, but now is not the time to take chances.
I must try to escape.
If I step away from the cover of the cabin wall, my heat signature will give me away. My only hope is to stay where the gas is heaviest. It may disrupt their enhanced vision long enough for me to get away.
I dive for the nearest cloud of gas, but the soldiers are on me before I can do anything, a closing maneuver that overwhelms with sheer force.
I freeze, caught in the open.
The laser sights of their weapons play over my body. They surround me, circling, two dozen men with guns, with technological advantage, with overwhelming power.
I rapid-scan the area, looking for angles, routes of escape, any way to reduce their firing solutions, but I do not find any.
I am caught.
I note the feet of the soldiers around me shuffling back and forth. Nerves. Overwhelming numbers and power, yet they are nervous.
Which means they know who I am.
How is that possible?
Suddenly the circle parts, two of the soldiers stepping back to make space. A man comes out of the shadows and strides purposefully into the circle. He wears no protective suit, carries no weapons. Even before I see his face, I know who he is. I know from the certainty with which he moves. I have not seen him in more than two years, but we have spoken on the phone dozens of times as he guides me through my assignments.
This is the man who trained me.
The man I call Father.
He is not my real father. He is something else. My commander.
Now I know who has come for me. It is The Program. But why have they come like this, with dozens of soldiers?
I watch Father’s face. It is impassive, unreadable.
Something contracts in my chest, my breathing suddenly shallow.
I give the feeling a name:
Fear.
But it fades almost as quickly as it arises.
That’s how it’s always been. Things that would make other people afraid don’t seem to affect me.
I look at Father coming toward me.
Instead of being afraid, I recalculate the angles and odds. With a circle of fire aiming inward, Father’s presence has reduced the firing solutions by as much as twenty percent. They cannot shoot through him, so he has unwittingly tilted the odds. Not yet in my favor. But better.
He comes closer until he is no more than eight steps away. Far enough to be out of range of a physical strike, close enough to be heard.
“They do not know your name, so I will not use it,” he says quietly.
I look at the soldiers.
“These are not our people,” he says. “They think they’re backing a Homeland Security operation.”
The Program is not Homeland Security. We are something else. Something that does not officially exist.
“Why do you need them?” I say.
“A precaution,” he says. “We didn’t know your status.”
I scan the area, judging the size of the operation.
“It’s a lot of people for a status check,” I say.
I note the tension in Father’s jaw. There’s something he’s not telling me.
“What do the soldiers know?” I say.
“They know you are deadly. They know you are potentially an enemy to the United State
s.”
An enemy?
But I am the opposite of an enemy. I am a soldier for The Program, which means I am a patriot defending the United States. This is the basis of my training, the entire reason for The Program’s existence.
Why would they think differently?
Father does not provide me any clues. He crosses his arms and examines me from a distance.
“It’s been a long time since I put eyes on you,” he says.
“True,” I say.
I haven’t seen Father since graduation day. I had fought dozens of people by that time, and I had an inch-deep knife wound in my shoulder. The knife belonged to Mike, my so-called brother in The Program. My brother who was ordered to kill me as a test.
I survived my first fight with Mike. So I completed my training.
“Graduation day,” Father says. “That was the last time.”
He remembers, the same as I do.
“That was two years ago,” I say.
“Two years and a lifetime. You’ve done so many amazing things since then, grown in ways we could only dream of. Mother is very proud of you.”
Mother. The woman who controls The Program.
“So am I,” Father says. “Which is why I’m surprised to find us in this predicament.”
He gestures to the soldiers around us.
Predicament. Now I understand why this is happening. At least a little of it.
“I’ve been off the grid for seventy-two hours,” I say.
“Seventy-two hours or seventy-two minutes. You don’t go off grid. It’s not a part of what you do.”
My protocol is to complete the assignment then wait for the next one. This is the perpetual cycle of my life. Work and wait. Work again.
Simple.
“Why would you come to a place like this?” Father says, looking around disdainfully.
“I needed to get away,” I say.
“Away from what?”
My memories. But I don’t tell him that.
“Just away,” I say.
“You are a soldier,” Father says, as if he understands the problem without my telling him. “You do work that has to be done. Sometimes it can be unpleasant, but that’s not news to you.”
“No.”
“Then what happened?”
The truth is that I don’t know. The old me would never be here at a camp, disobeying orders, even in the smallest way. The old me did not go off the grid. It wouldn’t even enter my consciousness.
That was before my last mission.
Before the girl.
“Are you going to hurt an entire summer camp to punish me?” I say.
“Hurt? No. They’re sleeping. About six hours, and they’ll wake up with terrible headaches and diarrhea. They won’t remember anything. Worst-case scenario, they’ll examine last night’s dinner in the trash. It will be filled with salmonella. We’ll lace it before we go.”
“That will explain their symptoms.”
“An entire camp feels bad the morning after Fish Thursday. Life is cruel like that.”
But maybe I am the cruel one. I came here after all. And what did I think would happen to these boys? To Peter?
Father takes another step toward me. His voice softens.
“I know why you did what you did,” he says.
The statement surprises me. I watch Father more closely.
“The thing with the mayor’s daughter shook you up,” he says.
His voice is uncharacteristically sympathetic, like he’s talking to someone he cares about and wants to help. I feel my body relax the tiniest bit.
“You understand?” I say.
“You needed some time,” he says. “You could have asked us for it. You could have made the call.”
My special iPhone. Destroyed at the end of each mission. That’s standard operating procedure. But I didn’t pick up another one. That’s where things got strange.
“It was wrong of me to cut off communication,” I say.
I look at the two dozen soldiers around me standing at full readiness, fingers inside trigger guards.
These men are prepared to fire.
That’s the first lesson of weapons training. Do not touch the trigger unless you’re prepared to fire.
Father said the soldiers were here as a precaution, but they have not lowered their weapons. Which means Father does not trust me.
It’s true that I went off grid, but this reaction seems out of proportion. Father could have sent a car to pick me up or passed a message through channels. He could have made up some excuse and knocked on the door of my cabin. There are a thousand ways he could contact me if he wanted to do so, none of which involve weapons.
So what is going on here?
I calculate the angles, the danger to myself and Father, the bullet trajectories.
I look for an escape.
I might make it to one rifle, use it to take out the one opposite. But these men are not stupid and they have staggered their positions so as not to be directly in each other’s lines of fire. Still, I might achieve something. I might take out one or two. Maybe even four. But two dozen men?
Perhaps if I got to Father first, the soldiers would not shoot—
No. Everyone is expendable. That’s what I’ve been taught.
Father. Mother. All of these soldiers.
And, of course, me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Father says.
“Do you?”
“Naturally. I taught you how to think.”
“What am I thinking?”
“You’re wondering the purpose of these soldiers and why they have not lowered their weapons. And you’re calculating angles.”
“How do you know?” I say.
“That’s what I would do in your situation.”
“Have you ever been in my situation?”
He doesn’t answer, only smiles at me. A sly smile.
That’s when I see it. The way out.
I’ve been thinking about it wrong. I don’t need to use Father as a deterrent.
I need him as a shield.
Get to the first soldier, use his rifle to take out the two across, then grab Father and use his body to protect me against the inevitable fusillade of bullets.
If I sacrifice Father, I will live. I play it out in my head, and I know my chances are good.
My facial expression does not change, not in any way a normal person could detect, but Father is not a normal person.
He grins. “You see it, don’t you?” he says.
“I do.”
The calculus of bodies and angles in space. A human puzzle devised by Father as a test.
It’s always a test, that’s what I’ve come to understand.
“It’s you or me,” he says. “But not both.”
I nod.
“You’ve been trained to protect The Program and survive at all costs,” Father says. “That’s your mission imperative.”
I look from Father to the soldiers. I take a long, slow breath, preparing myself to leap at him.
“Would you sacrifice me to complete your mission?” Father says.
“I’d have to determine which of us was more valuable to The Program.”
“And then?”
“And then I’d do what I had to do,” I say. “I’m loyal to the mission. Not to you.”
That’s all it takes.
Father raises his hand, signaling to the soldiers. I brace myself for the pain of multiple bullets.
It doesn’t come.
Instead fingers are removed from triggers. Guns are lowered. The circle disperses.
“I came to check on you,” Father says. “But I see now that you are well.”
I was right. It was a test.
And I passed.
The soldiers walk back into the forest. Father comes toward me now, a wide smile on his face.
“Well done,” he says.
“You needed all these troops to make your point?” I say.
&
nbsp; His face turns serious.
“There are some things you don’t know,” he says.
“What kinds of things?”
He looks around the camp. “Not here,” he says. He turns toward the forest. “I think we need some father-son time.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“A driving lesson.”
“I already know how to drive.”
“A different kind of driving lesson,” he says, and he heads into the woods.
I have no choice but to follow him into the darkness.
WE WALK FOR ABOUT A CLICK BEFORE WE COME TO A CLEARING.
Military trucks are parked in a convoy. This is the staging area for the operation in camp.
“Are you ready for your lesson?” Father says.
He reaches into his pocket, removes a key chain, and tosses it to me.
“I know how to drive a Humvee,” I say.
“I don’t mean the trucks,” he says with a smile.
He points to a clearing beyond the staging area. I note the blades of a helicopter rotor camouflaged in the forest.
“I’m not rated for a helicopter,” I say.
“Not yet,” he says.
DAWN IS BREAKING OVER THE VALLEY BELOW US.
I’m piloting the helicopter with Father next to me, watching the ground whip by beneath. Apple orchards, farmland, stretches of forest. The beauty of the Northeast spreads out for miles in all directions.
“How do you like her?” Father says over the roar of the wind.
“She’s a beautiful machine,” I say.
Helicopters are complex to fly, even more so than small planes. I did seven and a half hours in a trainer as part of my initial studies in The Program, but I didn’t get my rating. It was deemed unnecessary. I received enough training to understand the flight dynamics along with the basic controls and electronics should I need to talk about helicopters in conversation, or more likely, if I intercepted information about them and had to interpret what I was seeing.
But now I’m actually flying a military helicopter under Father’s tutelage.
“Pull the cyclic toward you,” Father says. “Gently. That’s it. Now give it some throttle.”
I do as he says, and the craft adjusts, the angle steepening as we aggressively power forward.
