Quicker

by Laurence Dahners

  She slipped out of bed and quietly over to the gym. At two in the morning the gym stood as empty as she’d hoped. Despite all the times she’d been warned to never do gymnastics alone for fear of being hurt without anyone standing by to spot and help, she lined up at the vault runway. She considered and decided to try a Yurchenko with two and a half end over end rotations or saltos instead of one and a half as well as the usual two and a half twists. She dropped deep into the zone as she flew down the runway and went into her round off. Springboard, hit the table much harder than usual to get altitude while starting to flip and twist hard! Hah! She could feel she was actually going to flip end over a little more than two and a half rotations. Ell stretched her legs and arms as long as possible to slow her rotation and hit a “stuck landing.” She did it one more time to work off the rough edges and the second one was perfect. Good! That was one “secret weapon” she could pull out if they seemed to be thinking about not taking her to the Olympics. She couldn’t stay in the zone long enough to try anything else that night, but over the next few nights she snuck over to the gym and worked out other, never before performed moves, for beam, bars and floor.

  The next day Coach Benson intercepted Ell on her way into practice. “I want you to alternate vaults with Anna. You’d be our best vaulter except you blow your landing so often. After each of your vaults, wait by the landing zone to watch Anna’s landings. Anna’s are consistently good and I want you to try to ‘imprint’ what she does.

  Ell simply said, “Yes ma’am.” She headed for the vaulting runway. Bobbling the landing had been Ell’s habit to that point in the training in order to deflect attention from how perfect her vaults could be and to try to make friends with Anna. Bobbling the take off could be dangerous so she never bobbled there. Ell dutifully watched Anna stick her landings. Then she went to perform her own vault and did her best to slightly under replicate whatever “small” bobble that Anna had just made.

  Coach Benson was standing by the landing area “spotting” for both of them and as Ell stood across from her the coach spoke steadily to Ell about how to improve her landings. As Ell improved her landings and “stuck” them better than Anna did, the Coach became more and more enthusiastic about how well her idea was working. This made Ell nervous because the Coach didn’t seem to be very prepared to spot Anna for a bad landing. She was too focused on “coaching” Ell. Admittedly, Anna seldom made a bad landing.

  As Anna made each sprint for her vaults, Ell tried to get Coach’s attention focused back on spotting Anna. After all Ell was supposed to be watching Anna’s landings, so she would turn to concentrate her own attention during each of Anna’s sprints despite the coach’s continued lecturing.

  Anna’s hand stuck the springboard with an odd sound! Ell’s panic reaction flooded through her as Anna flipped and then her hand skidded on the vaulting table. Anna began tumbling through the air out of control! Ell’s zone crashed over her and her world slowed to a crawl. Ell saw Coach Benson stop talking and began reacting. She saw Anna’s eyes had opened wide with panic and she had gone rigidly into extension, slowing her rotation. Ell carefully considered Anna’s trajectory and rotation - she was going to land head first and hard! Ell had already crouched, now she thrust up into a leap, arm tackling Anna’s upper body in order to slow Anna’s rotation even further. Ell absorbed a lot of Anna’s rotation and began to tumble herself. So Ell let go and swung her arms violently in a couple of windmills, though the windmilling motions seemed slow to her, deep in the zone. The windmilling stopped Ell’s rotation and she grabbed Anna by the arm again to correct a tilt in Anna’s orientation. Ell and Anna slammed hard together into the mat. But, they landed feet first. Anna clung to Ell for a moment, gasped and shuddered once, then stiffened and said quietly but emphatically, “I don’t need your help, Ell.”

  Coach Benson gaped for a moment, and then said, “That’s not the standard and approved ‘spotting’ method Ell… But it worked well enough I guess.”

  That night at dinner Ell sat down across from Anna in a vain hope that she might have softened her dislike. Anna stared at her for a moment then got up to move to the other end of the table. Ell sighed, it seemed she’d just as well stop trying to make friends and just do what she had to do in order to beat the others out for a spot on the official Olympic team. Hopefully, without using any of the secret elements she had developed.

  The next day Ell decided to start doing as well as she could without going into the zone and let that take her to whatever level on the team it took her to. The first apparatus she’d been assigned to by the coaches that day happened to be vault again. Of course Anna was working on vault too, being the vault specialist. The entire team had participated in some warm-ups then started to their individual assignments. Ell had arrived at the beginning of the vault runway just a little bit ahead of Anna but Anna stepped in front of Ell with a glare, “I’m going first!” Ell opened her hand toward the lane indicating she should go ahead. Anna stepped up to her mark and looked down the lane with focused concentration. Ell expected her to go, but instead she turned to Ell and said, “Watch how this is done, ol’ lady.” Then she took a deep breath and started her sprint.

  Ell, at a loss to understand why Anna despised her so, did watch Anna’s vault, a very difficult double front half-out. Anna did it very well with only a small step on her landing. Ell realized that Anna had probably chosen that vault because Ell had never done it and Anna probably thought it was beyond Ell’s capabilities. Ell hesitated a moment then broke her resolution and let herself slip a little bit into the zone. With the world a little slowed, she thought through exactly what Anna had just done and started down the sprint lane herself, letting herself go just a little faster than she usually did. She launched a little harder off the vaulting table than usual and did a double front, half-out herself, sticking the landing as well as she could for her first time doing a vault and only being slightly in the zone. This turned out to be very well indeed and in fact she stuck a perfect landing several feet farther down the lane than Anna had. Coach Baiul had been spotting for them and exclaimed, “Ell! I didn’t know you could do that vault! That was perfect! Can you do it routinely?”

  “I think so Ma’am.” Ell saw Anna glaring at her. Anna did another vault while the coach was still talking to Ell so she and Anna walked back to the vault runway together. Although Anna was ignoring Ell, Ell said quietly, “I’m not sure exactly why you hate me Anna, but if you want to teach me vaults, I guess I’ll just have to learn them as well as I can.” Anna stared stonily ahead and didn’t respond. Ell immediately regretted the dig. That wasn’t the way she wanted to live her life. She resolved to be more mature and simply ignore Anna’s vitriol from now on.

  ***

  Jamal ran from his tent to the firing line and brought the venerable AK-47 to his shoulder. He squeezed off three round bursts until it clicked on empty. Then after all the other trainees had finished firing he slogged through the sand to retrieve his target. Hamid, his instructor, rubbed his crooked nose and clucked over the paper on which the outline of a head had been perforated in four locations. “Four hits out of an entire clip.” Hamid shook his head, “You should hope that your life never depends on your shooting.” Jamal wiped the sweat from his brow but kept his eyes downcast. Hamid was a hardass. Jamal had been badly beaten on several occasions at the training camp. Once for insubordination but three more times for poor performance in a skill he had been assigned to learn. Most of the trainees were better athletes than Jamal, though they seemed intellectually dull. “Go!” Hamid said, “You will shoot more tomorrow.”

  As Jamal trudged back to one of the awnings he looked up at the burning sky. He was pretty sure the camp must be somewhere in Northern Sudan but Jamal had been blindfolded for part of the ride out in the back of a truck. If he fled he would have a difficult time escaping the country. He had no money and they had his passport. Thoughts of breaking with the organization when he got back to America were crossing his min
d more and more frequently.

  Many of the other young men in the organization were religious fanatics, readily eager to sacrifice their own lives in “Jihad.” Though Jamal had felt the same ten years ago, he realized his commitment had waned. When he brought the deaths of his family to mind, his rage would return, but his rage had been markedly tempered by the fact that he had now committed almost exactly the same atrocity against a family himself. The other young men here would not feel that it was the same, because the family he had destroyed had been Christian. However, Jamal had seen happy pictures of them as a family in the news. Christian or no, it had been a terrible thing.

  “Jamal Assad?”

  Jamal looked up into the cold eyes of a man he had not seen before. Eyes so cold he felt a chill down his spine despite the burning hot day. “Yes.”

  “There are some here who doubt your commitment.”

  “No, no, I am committed!” Jamal heard a tremor in his voice. Had he read Jamal’s mind? This man, he felt certain, would kill him without a second thought if Jamal’s commitment was in doubt.

  The man pulled a large knife out of a sheath. Jamal felt his heart pounding in his chest. The man gripped it by the blade – and tossed it, hilt first, to Jamal.

  Jamal’s ears were ringing and his head so swimming in relief that he almost didn’t hear the man’s next words. “Give me your toe.”

  “Wha… what.”

  “The small toe will do. As a token of your commitment.”

  For a moment Jamal thought he might throw up. Prickles ran down his spine and a faint ringing came in his ears, but then he knelt to take off his shoe and it passed. He slowly unlaced his boot, then pulled off his sock. Grasping the knife firmly, he placed it over the joint of his small toe and with a violent motion threw his whole body forward, forcing the knife blade to crunch through his own toe. The pain was lancing and excruciating, but he was grateful to find that the knife was sharp.

  To his amazement, Jamal found himself one of the leaders of the team sent to create terror at the Olympics. Hamid of the crooked nose, who had terrorized Jamal at the training camp, was the actual leader. Jamal served more as a guide to America, but the fact that they consulted him before every move made him feel like a leader. Before returning to Tucson he was questioned endlessly as they deliberated over possible targets. They considered and discarded a plan to bomb the Olympic stadium. “Bomb sniffing” had become quite the art in America and even if they did set one off, the audience would have many foreign nationals. It would likely kill some Muslims as well and, although the dead would go to Allah as martyrs, it would create dissension amongst those who were weak of faith.

  Setting off a bomb elsewhere in Dallas would be easier and they could arrange it to be in an area where only infidels would be found. A Christian church seemed a good choice. This plan foundered on the desire to devastate America in front of the world audience for Olympic contests. No, they decided, they must kill Olympic athletes, preferably some from the American team alone. Jamal searched on the internet and determined that the teams were to stay in housing dormitories away from the actual sports complex and would be bussed to the complex on a daily basis.

  Jamal returned to Tucson but then caught his flight to Dallas the next day. He arrived before any of the others and using a false identity rented a Suburban SUV and rooms in a disreputable apartment building. He picked up two more “martyrs” at the airport and dropped them off at the apartments. Hamid and the other five members of the team were unable to get visas to enter the country legally. Hamid had emailed Jamal GPS coordinates and Jamal let the truck’s AI take him to a road near the specified location. Then he dutifully drove the SUV according to his AI’s directions, first on a dirt road and then off even that road into the desert near the border with Mexico. He parked when he reached the specified coordinates, rolled down the windows and turned off the lights. At first he sat alertly, staring into the night but eventually boredom set in. He reclined the seat back and dozed off.

  Something cold bumped his ear and he woke to the realization that it was a gun muzzle! “Bala'a il a'air.” Hamid growled in garlicky Arabic. “I could have killed you! Wake up!”

  “Sorry.” Jamal said, rubbing his eyes and sitting up. The doors of the SUV opened and it rapidly filled with the six men. Several heavy boxes went into the back. Jamal’s nose was assaulted by the smell of sweaty unwashed men. He started the vehicle and turned it around for the long drive back to Dallas.

  Hamid sat in the passenger seat. “You have a place for us to stay?”

  “Yes, in a slum, all the nice locations are full because of the Olympics.”

  “We don’t need ‘nice.’” Hamid growled. ”Do you have American style clothing for us?”

  “Some, but only one set each. We will need more, especially for that little guy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, I didn’t know how big you all are.”

  “No, why do we need more than one set?”

  “Because, in America you must be clean and your clothes must not stink. Smelling the way you do, they will watch every move you make and you will be arrested just for existing, much less for committing any crimes.”

  Hamid grunted skeptically, but in the morning he showered and made the rest of the men do so as well. Then he helped Jamal shepherd them all down to a nearby thrift shop to pick out more clothes. Hamid and one other spoke English well. Two more spoke broken English but could get by. The remaining four spoke only a few words.

  They spent the day driving around Dallas and evaluating the lay of the land. A land of concrete and buildings and new sports stadiums. They saw where the athletes would be housed and where they would strive to win medals. Arguments broke out over the likely routes to be taken from the dormitories to the arenas. They separated into small teams with an English speaker in each then rode in the city buses and took taxis so that each would understand how the city functioned.

  It took considerable effort just to determine that the buses the teams would ride in to and from the games were to be rented from companies that provided drivers. It would not be possible to know which bus would transport the American teams ahead of time.

  Hamid massaged his deformed nose and said, “We will just have to board the bus after the Americans are already on it.”

  Jamal felt his brow rising, “Board the bus? I thought we were going to put a bomb under it?”

  “How will we do that when we don’t even know which bus they will be on? No, we will kidnap them first and hold the city in terror with the threat of their deaths. We will wait to actually kill them until the eyes of the entire world are upon us!”

  “But, with the eyes of the world upon us, escape will be impossible!”

  Hamid’s eyes glittered, “Of course. We are martyrs! We will do this deed in the face of death and they will speak of us for all time!” He clapped Jamal on the shoulder, “Our time in this world is short my friend.”

  Jamal swallowed and looked around. The other men’s eyes were fervent and if any of them were dismayed he didn’t see it on their faces. Jamal’s eyes shifted to the floor and he hoped they didn’t hear his heart pounding in his chest. Distantly he wondered when he had become afraid to die. For years he’d told himself that he stood ready to die for his vengeance. Surprise washed over him to realize how little vengeance still pumped in his veins now. He had been seduced by the Great Satan.

  With time and a great deal of argument a plan slowly gelled. They would wear athletic suits in the American Olympic team colors and would then wait along the route to the arenas. When they saw a bus full of Americans they would stop that bus and board it pretending to be American athletes who had mistaken the boarding location. Then they would hijack the bus to a location where they could broadcast the killing of the athletes, preferably one by one, to the world.

  A visit to a Wal-Mart equipped them each with athletic garments resembling the sweat suits of the American Olympic team. They then began examining
possible routes that busses might take between the dormitories and the stadiums. Jamal and Hamid, with one or two others at a time, drove the possible routes and up and down side streets, looking for a site where they could hold the athletes after they captured them. They had no idea what might work and had argued constantly over various possibilities. A large parking garage stood just off the main street to the arenas and Jamal turned into it. Hamid said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “This parking deck would be easy to drive a bus into. I thought we should check it out.” Jamal drove up a wide ramp that circled, taking the Suburban higher and higher in the deck.

  “But it is open to the outside! We’d have no protection from snipers!”

  “At least let’s drive to the top and look out at the city from up there. Who knows what we’ll see.”

  Hamid crossed his arms and sat back into his seat, obviously unhappy. When they got to the top they got out and the four of them wandered around looking off the top deck to see the city. Jamal had to admit he didn’t see anything useful and Hamid soon said, “This was a complete waste of time.”

  As they drove back down Jamal said, “Maybe one of these lower levels, we could park the bus near the perimeter of the deck…”

  Hamid interrupted, “No! That’s stupid. We need a completely enclosed space.”