Running the Maze s-5

by Jack Coughlin

  Stacks of tires and other retardants were still used to soak up the spent rounds, but instead of just plywood, the interior walls were green screens on which different worlds were projected. Automobiles and taxis and buses moved, smoke hindered vision, people were shopping in stores, and sounds and motion were constant. Or the setting might be the interior of a quiet suburban American home, or the cars of a train, or the bowels of a ship or an oil platform or a nuclear power plant. Foam cutouts were used to represent furniture and obstacles, also colored by the computers. The jackpot was the unknown opposition force, which was no longer merely stiff pop-ups but full-sized, three-dimensional holograms that responded to the moves of the trainees. Their weapons would blink to fire simulated bursts, and the updated MILES gear worn by the attacking good guys would shriek if the computers scored a hit. The holograms did not necessarily die with the first hit, unless the computer judged it as a kill shot. The controllers guided the fight from racks of computers in a safe blockhouse outside of the hangar.

  “Then let’s start by using that Mayberry R.F.D. innocent street scene. There’s no information on it about who the tangos might be. I want Powell concentrating on having to make careful decisions so that he doesn’t shoot Floyd the Barber by mistake because he steps outside the shop carrying a razor.”

  “Everybody hates the Mayberry set,” Rockhead said with a laugh that sounded more like a growl. “That old TV show has a built-in wild card with Deputy Barney Fife running around with an unloaded gun. What about weapons tomorrow? Normally, they armor up and use MP-5s for these scenarios.”

  “No. In my line of work, there is seldom a submachine gun around when you need one. I want this guy stripped down to get him out of the protective bubble and make him feel more vulnerable, almost naked, from the start. Jeans and T-shirts and sneakers. One pistol of his choice, no silencers. The story line is that we are on a fishing trip near Mayberry and the closest responders when Sheriff Andy calls for help because his police station is under attack. Terrorist on Main Street and lots of women and kids.”

  “What about comms?”

  “Standard headsets, but I want the controllers to jam the frequency just after we go in to help throw him off balance. And send word to him tonight not to wear a jockstrap.”

  “Why? We don’t wear jocks anyway.”

  “Part of the mind game. I just want him thinking about his groin. Vulnerability.”

  “Put him under some real stress, Kyle.”

  “All right.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Rockhead finished off his beer and wiped a plash on the table.

  “Scare the shit out of him.”

  “How?’

  “I have all night to plan it.”

  * * *

  BOATSWAIN’S MATE FIRST CLASS Ryan Powell readied his weapon and growled at the man who would be going with him into the Ghost House. “Don’t get in my way, old man. We’re using live ammo today.” Powell was somewhat pissed at being paired with this over-the-hill Marine. Dude had to be way into his thirties, about ten years older than Powell, which meant he was going to be slow. Some kind of hotshot sniper, back in the day.

  Swanson said nothing as he studied the rangy SEAL: less than six feet tall, shaggy brown hair, wide shoulders, and corded muscles that flexed through the strong forearms like ropes. Even in jeans, he had the stiff look of a Transformer robot, as if he were about to turn into a pickup truck. Swanson looked beyond the taut, healthy body. The weight was evenly distributed but back on his heels, and the eyes were black dots, twitchy. The fingers drummed lightly on the Heckler & Koch SOCOM pistol in the belt holster. Anxious, or just normal jitters in facing the unknown?

  “The fuck you staring at, Pops!” Powell barked. He was confident that he would master the Ghost House again and put the old Marine to shame while doing so. Then he would ride the jarhead mercilessly, and try to pick a fight just to have the pleasure of whipping his butt. Youth, strength, ability, determination, and pride were all on his side. It still bothered Powell that he had not been part of the bin Laden hit. The Marine had nothing. Powell gave Swanson a mean grin, like a pit bull eyeing a kitten. “I’m gonna kick your jarhead ass.”

  “Ready on the range?” called the range safety officer.

  Swanson racked a round into the chamber of his reliable Marine Corps .45 ACP pistol and clicked off the safety. “Ready,” he said.

  “Ready,” echoed Powell, bringing out his pistol and getting into his stance.

  “Stand by,” ordered the range safety officer. A double door swung apart to let the shooters enter the target zone and closed behind them. “The range is hot.”

  Swanson and Powell were alone on Main Street, guns up. Aunt Bee was looking at them from a window, her eyes wide with fear. The bodies of two children lay dead in the street, and people were running into houses for safety, away from the rattle of automatic weapons down the street at the sheriff’s office. Smoke poured from the windows. Powell stepped forward, pistol grasped in two hands while his eyes probed the surroundings and the shadows. Swanson was five feet away on his right, matching his advance. There was a crackle in their earbuds; then the radios went silent.

  “Control?” said Powell, and heard no reply. He pushed the microphone closer to his mouth. “Control?” He glanced at Swanson and tapped his ear. Something was wrong. The Marine ignored him and took another step forward, ducking into cover behind a foam block that looked like a Dumpster. Powell got his eyes back on the street scene. Part of the scenario assumed that the area behind them was already cleared. A little girl in a doorway stared at them as if they were interplanetary aliens, and a dirty pickup truck suddenly sped out of an alley and dashed across the street into the grocery store parking lot, where the driver bailed out and ran inside. Civilian. A misty smoke snaked along the ground.

  Powell was tense, beginning to sweat. First the radio glitch, and now he had almost pulled the trigger on the dude in the pickup. He slowed down to ease his breathing. Where was the damned tango?

  Then came a thunderclap of two fast shots almost in his right ear as Swanson fired twice right over Powell’s head, missing him by no more than six inches. Powell flinched, took a knee, and yelled, “Cease fire! Cease fire! What the fuck are you doing?” He safed his weapon and put it away, but nothing changed. The rules were that anybody on a range could stop an exercise if he saw something going wrong. The Marine bounded across a sidewalk and into a doorway, heading for the sheriff’s office. A flicker of computerized tracers shot out of the target zone, slashing past Powell, who hit the deck hard, prone and with his hands over his head. “WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING? CONTROL! CEASE FIRE! STOP IT!” The Marine fired three times at a hologram that appeared in the street with a gun, putting two in the chest and one in the head. The pictured man crumbled to the ground.

  A loud horn honked inside the Ghost House, and the images dissolved and the doors opened, letting in the sunlight as the smoke poured out. Ryan Powell jumped to his feet as the Marine ambled back toward him, his weapon on safe and hanging loosely from his hand. Powell was furious. “You almost killed me,” he yelled, balling up a big fist. “This was a live-fire training drill, and you deliberately shot right over my head. I’m going to have them write you up, then I’m going to kick your scrawny ass.”

  Swanson looked calmly at the warrior and saw worry painted on the young face. Death had come near. “I was part of the test today, Bos’n Powell. It was negative training to snatch you out of your comfort zone and not let your muscle memory and practice kick in. You froze at the critical moment. As soon as things started south, you shut down. Your job was to finish the mission, not pussy out.” Kyle returned his own pistol to the holster in the back of his belt and lowered his voice. “You can’t call cease fire in real combat, Powell. You just can’t. There are no second chances out there, buddy, and my opinion is that you don’t want to be here, not really. Something has taken the heart out of you and has left only your natural talent. It’s time for
you to get on with your life.”

  “You are full of shit. Who the fuck do you think you are?” The raging Powell felt the touch of Rockhead on his elbow. “Who is this asshole, Senior Chief?”

  “Somebody you would not want to meet in a dark alley, Powell. Let’s you and me go have a talk, son.”

  * * *

  ROCKHEAD SHERIDAN MET SWANSON back at the same watering hole that evening. This time they sat inside, at the bar. A news report was on the TV about the upcoming launch of the first mission that would eventually lead to a Mars landing. A cut of cool ocean air had moved in to drop the temperature, and rain was blowing onto the patio. Neither man was in a good mood.

  “Had to be done,” Rockhead said. “Powell has already departed for a thirty-day leave to try to get his act together. Turns out he had some serious home problems and a set of new twins, both of them real sick, so he was at a personal crossroads. I told him to go home and do what was really important, take care of his family.”

  “So he’s done with Team Six?” Kyle folded a wet napkin, just to be doing something. He had not enjoyed taking part in the collapse of Ryan Powell.

  “Yep. If he wants to stay as a SEAL, we’ll rotate him into being an instructor in the BUD/S training. He’d be close to home and probably be pretty good at the job.” Rockhead shrugged. “Life sucks sometimes.”

  They went silent for a little while. Then Kyle asked, “You gonna let me have another run at the Ghost House tomorrow? By myself?”

  “That was the deal, Gunny Swanson. You should get two, three more chances to shoot some holograms before you go back to the Puzzle Palace in Washington.”

  Their attention was drawn to a breaking news banner flashing on the television set that hung from the ceiling, a fragmented report about the slaughter of an international medical team in the northern part of Pakistan. Nine dead and no survivors.

  “Tough,” observed Rockhead, signaling the bartender for another beer. “Bunch of tree-hugging do-gooders out hiking where they don’t belong.”

  Kyle agreed. “Plenty of places in this screwy world where they could be helping, and they chose Pakistan. Not that the refugees don’t need all the help they can get. That flooding is a mess.”

  “My only real beef is if those doctors and nurses start crossing over and give training in first aid and medical treatment to the terrorists. Maybe even treat their soldiers. Helping keep the enemy alive, no matter how noble, is bad karma. We want to kill them and some liberal medics want to patch them up? No way.”

  Kyle thought for a moment as individual photographs of some of the medical team passed on the screen. He agreed with Rockhead. “Well, at least that one is over and done with. Doesn’t involve us.”

  3

  A PAKISTANI ARMY PATROL had found the bodies but knew little more than that most of the victims were foreigners. Wallets and identification cards had been stolen, but the corpses had been scattered around a truck that wore the blue symbol of the United Nations painted on its doors.

  The bare details were quickly passed along to a Doctors Without Borders outpost that the medical team had visited the night before it set out on its final journey. The unofficial grapevine that binds the various relief organizations soon got the news back to UN Refugee Camp Five, allowing Dr. Lin Yao, the director and chief administrator, to place a direct call to the UN Headquarters in New York and pass along the tragic news. A general press announcement was dispatched, but the identities of the murdered doctors and nurses were withheld pending the notification of family members, no small task since the victims had been an international group.

  Dr. Yao, a small and precise man, needed an entire day to confirm who had volunteered to make the trek north. His eyes misted, and he had to remove his glasses to wipe them as he determined the names of the nine dedicated medical personnel who had been senselessly murdered. Their loss was going to be a significant blow to ongoing operations at Camp Five.

  There had been only one American, the team leader, Dr. Joseph Ledford, the gentle and dedicated physician who had trained at the Mayo Clinic. Two Canadians, two Chinese, and one more each from Venezuela, Fiji, South Africa, and Jordan. Yao realized his mistakes: The group did not include enough Muslims to go out into the countryside on their own, and the Fijian nurse openly read her Christian Bible every day and protested the subservient position of women in this rigid society. My fault, thought Yao, blaming himself for a tragedy that could not have been predicted. I should have paid more attention before giving permission. There was just so much work.

  Once his list was complete, Yao found their personnel folders and sent the names to New York, where workers set about contacting proper authorities around the world to carry the worst news possible to the affected families. The U.S. delegate to the United Nations was given the name of Dr. Joseph Ledford, whose home address was in the state of Iowa, and the State Department sped the information along to the office of the governor of Iowa in Des Moines, which steered it over to the state police, which passed it along to the Kossuth County Sheriff’s Office in Algona.

  Towns and villages dot the farmland in the middle of Iowa, and many miles separate them. As a result of a shrinking tax base, road patrol units covering the 974 square miles of the largest county in the state are spread thin. The dispatch officer checked his computer, saw that the nearest deputy was about thirty miles east of the Ledford Dairy Products spread, and assigned him to personally go to the farm. The call was made on a cell phone to keep it off the police scanner frequencies that were monitored by the media.

  Margaret Ledford was sweating in the August heat as she helped a hired hand fit a repaired chain to the screw of a broken conveyor belt, and she stepped away from the job when the sheriff’s car pulled in behind a tractor parked near the barn. She lifted the broad brim of her straw hat and wiped her forehead, recognizing Deputy Bill Turner, who had once attended the combined junior-senior high school with both of her kids, Joey and Beth. Everybody knew everybody out here. He seemed slow to get out of the car as a dust cloud settled about it, giving Margaret a moment to wonder what in the world he was doing out here in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. She waved.

  Turner gave a nod and reluctantly stepped onto the dirt, looking like a cop, not an old friend. Mrs. Ledford was not someone with whom he could postpone getting to the point. Best to get it done professionally but kindly. Turner had great respect for her. Her husband, Stephen, had died of a heart attack three years ago, their son, Joey, had left long before that to become a doctor, and their daughter, Beth, was overseas somewhere with the Coast Guard. Margaret refused to move and had continued to run the big farm with hired help, losing her grief in the grind of pulling a living out of the rich Iowa dirt. Against the odds, and with a pair of full-time hands, she successfully ran about four hundred acres of corn, wheat, and soybeans, and at least a hundred and fifty head of cattle and a dozen horses. The fog of working from dawn to dark every day had slowly eased the burden of her husband’s passing; she would never forget him but had accepted things as they were. The kids came back to visit now and then, and that’s just the way life was. Her hair was going gray, but Deputy Turner knew that Maggie Ledford was one tough lady, and that she would need that strength now.

  “Hey, Bill,” she called, walking over to him. “You wearing sunscreen today?”

  “Yeah, Maggie.” He did not engage her in the banter, and his face was serious. “Can I get a glass of water?”

  “You tell me what you’re doing here. Then you can have water, milk, or a beer of your choice.” She put the hat back on but stripped off the heavy gloves and crossed her arms, looking up at the tall deputy.

  He hooked his thumbs in his belt and bit his lip, then sighed. “No way to make this easy, Maggie, so I’ll just say it: Joey’s dead. He was killed with his entire medical team by the Taliban over there in Pakistan.” The deputy looked straight up, unwilling to make eye contact, and when he glanced back down, he saw that the color had drained from Maggie Led
ford’s face and she was collapsing. He caught her. “God damn them,” Bill Turner whispered to himself, taking the weight of the woman before she fell. “Damn ’em all straight to hell.”

  Inside the cool house, once Mrs. Ledford recovered from the initial shock, she asked Deputy Turner if her daughter had been notified. He didn’t know. Maggie went to her little desk in the kitchen, pulled open a drawer, and found a special telephone number that she was to call in case of a personal emergency; the American Red Cross would contact Beth, who was on classified duty somewhere overseas.

  * * *

  “PREPARE TO TAKE THE shot, Gunner.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Think you can hold this flying machine steady for a moment? You’re bouncing around so much I might not be able to even hit the dang ocean.” The voice in his headset was totally calm.

  “I have my own problems, Gunner,” Lieutenant Commander Arvis Taylor replied. “You thinking maybe you can pilot this extremely complex MH-68H helicopter better than me?”

  “You think you can shoot better than me?”

  “No, Gunner. I do not. So stand by to slam a round into that boat, if you please. He didn’t get the message from your warning shots. I’m steadying up now. If you see anybody with an RPG, take ’em down without waiting for my order.” Taylor studied his instruments closely as he worked to bring the bright white Coast Guard helo with the bold orange stripe to a midair standstill.

  “Ab-so-lute-ly, sir.” At the open side door behind Taylor, the sniper also was running through mental geometry to sight in on the engine compartment of the speedboat below—relative speed, angle of attack, bullet drop over distance, the effect of the powerful downdraft on the shot. Adjustments were made. These pirates had met their match but didn’t understand that yet. The sniper had ripped a few warning bursts from the M-240 machine gun around their boat with no effect. Now that weapon was pushed aside, and a thirty-seven-pound M-82 Barrett .50 caliber rifle was in position instead, dummy-corded with a D-ring to the harness. The powerful scope brought the engine compartment at the rear of the target boat into a tight, clear view.