Once they all got used to moving among the high branches, always being very cautious to make sure—after they had seen what happened to one who hadn’t—that they had the next branch gripped firmly before they let go of the previous one, it wasn’t so bad. It was even kind of fun in a way, if you could relax and forget that if you fell, a yard-long stake was going to go right through your face. Stone was far in the lead now, but those who followed behind could see the way by the broken branches he made as he moved along. And without admitting it to himself, he made the breaks a little bigger than necessary to make sure they could find them. They moved like this for hours, losing track of time in the sun-splattered streaks and beams that twisted down through the maze of branches.
At last, just as the sun was making its final ascent over far mountains, Stone came to a clearing and slid down the outermost tree. He waited a few seconds, staring back. The others were spread out in a long line behind, edging along. He didn’t wait. Ahead was another trail that ran through a much thinner forest, little grooves of trees set among thigh-high brush. Stone moved ahead cautiously, his senses on full alert. God knew what they were planning for them next. As if in answer to his question, five men jumped out from the shadows of a copse of pines and came at him swinging staffs like the ones they had trained with the day before. Stone didn’t falter an inch but headed right for the closest one. As the man came in with a circular overhead strike, Stone grabbed the end of the pole, pulled backwards with his whole body and fell down onto the ground. Digging the end he held into the dirt, he pulled the other end and the masked attacker right up into the air and overhead where he flew past, soaring about twelve feet before he crashed face first into the dirt. Continuing his backwards roll Stone came up with the staff in his hand just in time to block a slashing blow from another attacker. Stone didn’t even pull his stick up but just pushed the end in his hands forward, aiming the other end for the groin. The stick poked the attacker’s personal property and he went down as if hit by a rhino, writhing in pain on the ground.
Holding the staff in front of him, Stone ran through the ranks of attackers. Another came charging from the right and Stone caught the descending blow on the end of his stick and spun it back up with a flick of the wrist. The style he used in stick fighting was actually not what the NAA taught, but his father’s personal style adapted from Japanese sword-fighting techniques—Iaido—that he had learned in the Pacific during World War II. But the effect was to turn the arm and striking implement of the opponent and then counter-strike with the speed and focus of a boxer. Stone snapped the pole back into the side of the attacker’s head, almost dead on the temple, and the man fell like a rag doll and lay still in the dust. Stone hoped he hadn’t killed him. He knew these were all part of the scenery. The next two backed off as he came at them with fire in his eyes, pole pulled back to the side, ready to strike. They darted back into the shadows and Stone let them go. Tucking the pole under his arm, he ran forward as fast as he could down a low hill.
From the yells and wood-slapping-flesh sounds behind him, Stone knew the others were being attacked, but that was their problem. His were what looked like quicksand pits ahead of him. The pathway narrowed into a sort of funnel, and the only way forward was through several hundred yards of thick mucky sand that looked like it could suck down a cow in seconds. Stone suddenly saw a series of rocks poking just out of the sand along both sides of the quicksand highway and he started carefully along them. The going was immediately tough, since his boots kept slipping off and stepping into the slime. Stone stopped on two fairly good-sized rocks, and getting a good balance on one leg took off first one, then the other of his boots and the socks as well. He tentatively stepped forward with his bare feet. It was much better. The bare surface of his foot acted almost like a suction cup when it landed on the surface of each rock and became coated with the scummy surface layer. If anything, his feet became like suckers and were hard to pull off, releasing only with a loud sucking, almost sexual sound. But it made the quicksand crossing easy as he just set firmly down on one rock and then suctioned his foot to the next.
After about a half hour of this Stone emerged at the other end of the death trap and put his boots back on, then started forward, following the next red arrow pointing ahead. The direction led him down a long slowly sloping hill about a mile to a shoreline. But he had only come about a quarter mile when the image of some poor bastard going under the sand forever made him stop in his tracks. He turned and jogged back to the end of the pits. Sure enough, two men had fallen in about halfway along, one of them his foxhole sharer, Bo. The recruits behind them were frozen in place, unsure what to do.
Stone screamed across to them. “Take off your fucking shoes and socks, you bimbos. You can get traction with your feet.” They tried it—and liked it. They quickly pulled out the two stranded ones and the entire group started across the shifting sands. Stone turned and headed back down the slope to the shore. After ten minutes he reached a sandy beach, the shore of a wide lake whose opposite side he could only dimly see far off. An arrow stood right by the lake, pointing into the water. Stone tried it with his foot, shivered and then started taking off his things. If he was going to have to swim through it he wanted to be as light as possible. He tied all his clothes into a ball, except for his pants. Stone tied the feet of these together, then lifted the thick cotton camouflage pants over his head, filling them with air. He quickly closed the waist end, sealing it tightly shut with his belt and then waded into the frigid waters holding the instant buoy, sealed with air so both of its cotton legs were filled out like balloons.
“Christ, it’s cold,” Stone screamed to the misting water surface. “I sure hope there’s lifeboats and all that shit waiting for me out there, ’cause I already feel frozen like a fucking popsicle.” He put the homemade preserver into the fairly flat surface of the lake and then settled down on top of it. It eased down into the black liquid but held his weight fine. Stone, his teeth chattering, praying the sun would rise soon and warm his half iced-over back, started paddling into the darkness. It wasn’t that the journey itself was so difficult, but how cold it was that, he quickly realized, was going to be the problem. Stone swirled around slightly as he was caught in a light current and saw the first of the others coming onto the shore about a hundred yards off. They spotted his makeshift flotation device and pointed to him, yelling and laughing amongst themselves. Once again Stone had given them the way out of an apparently impossible situation.
Only thing was, Stone’s arms and legs felt like they were tightening up by the second as he paddled across the ink-black lake. Below his feet he could feel little swirls of water from time to time and hoped it was nothing bigger than a bread-box that might take a bite out of him. But he knew he had to get across fast. His chest felt it was turning to cement, hardly able to breathe in the frigid air so tight were all the muscles in his body. When he discovered that he couldn’t move his arms at all Stone just kept kicking forward, letting the hands steer in the water like a forward rudder.
It took forever but just as the sun rose like a lantern into the dark tree line on the shore, Stone made land, and gasping like a beached whale pulled himself up onto the sandy shore. And there, with a smile as big as a pumpkin’s on Halloween, and a dark laugh to go with it, was Sergeant Zynishinski, staring at Stone like he was an insect from another galaxy.
CHAPTER
Fourteen
“RISE AND shine, Stone, the general wants to see you,” a voice with the decibel level of an elephant in coitus interruptus bellowed into Stone’s ear as he lay sprawled out on the cot of the recruit bunk-house back inside the fortress walls. Stone tried to pull his head back under the covers, knowing it wasn’t going to work.
“Come on, come on, Stone. You’ve slept eight hours, for Christ’s sake. It’s an honor for General Patton to want to see any raw recruit. He must have his eye on you. Now get that ass out of bed before I kick it out.” Stone pulled the covers back and slowly peer
ed out from between two half closed eyes.
“Why is that you are always waking me from what would be a perfect sleep if I could just get two hours more of it?”
“Mr. Stone, if sleep is what you crave,” Sergeant Zynishinski said, releasing yet another immense gob of black and brown spit and chewing tobacco, “then you’d best desert fast and take your chances with the hound dogs. ’Cause you’ll never get it here. Now get up. I’ll be at the door. If you ain’t there in two-and-a-half minutes, I’m breaking your head.” He turned and stomped out, his size twelve EEE boots cracking down on the wooden barrack floor so that every half unconscious man twisted in his sleep. Stone rose and looked quickly around the place, counting—fifteen. So two more who had started the obstacle course hadn’t made it through. He wondered who the poor bastards were and just what had happened to them. He dressed in the darkness and quickly headed toward the door, where he almost crashed straight on into the sergeant, who was coming back inside to get him.
“What happened to the other two?” Stone asked the D.I. as they walked quickly down the lane to the main thoroughfare.
“Quinn and Hartgast.” The sergeant shook his head angrily. “Quinn took a strike to the throat during the staff attack. He may or may not make it. Hartgast never came out the other side of the lake. We keep an eye on everything. You can’t see us but we were watching you all the whole way. If we can help it, no one dies. But the son-of-a-bitch seemed to be okay, then went under for a second… and never came up. This group was better than usual, actually,” he commented. “We’re lucky if we get ten or twelve make it all the way through. Seventeen this time. But a lot of that had to do with you, Stone. Like I say, I had my eye on you.”
The sergeant led Stone toward a section of the fort he hadn’t been in before, until they came to a three-story warehouse without a single window in the place. The whole thing was surrounded by a sandbagged and barbed-wired fence about ten feet high—almost creating a mini-fortress within the fort. A number of elite guards with the golden eagle clutching a skull on all their uniforms stood around, watching everything intently. Sergeant Zynishinski saluted and the two troopers by the door, these with Ingram submachine guns around their necks, let them through. Inside, Stone sucked in his breath—it was beautiful, filled with huge oil paintings on the walls, and plush persian carpets on the floor. Expensive antique furniture sat everywhere, dark wooden chairs and desks that looked as if they had all come from a museum.
“Yes,” a lieutenant asked, looking up from a wide cherry desk just inside the outer door.
“General Patton specifically requested I bring this trooper to him first thing this morning.” Sergeant Zynishinski said with a look of obvious distaste at the wimpy secretary. As far as the D.I. was concerned there was just two kinds of soldier—the fighting kind and all others. And he had a hard time relating to the “others.” So he snorted hard and looked around for a place to spit out a black piece of slime-coated tobacco chew.
“Ah yes,” the secretary said, taking a file card from a box in front of him. “Yes, the general was very anxious to see… Mr. Stone, is it?”
Stone nodded and smiled sweetly. He had done more smiling around this place than he had for the last five years. But then since he and his family—mom, dad and sister, megatypical American family—had spent most of the time fighting and yelling at one another, he hadn’t had a lot of use for said expression. There was something about being trapped together inside a cave for five years—even a luxurious cave stocked with food and every amenity—that had brought out the nastiest parts of their personalities. The appointment secretary picked up a phone and pressed a button.
“Yes—Stone, sir. Send him right in? Thank you, sir.” He hung the phone up gently, as if afraid to put it down too hard, and waved Stone through. Sergeant Zynishinski started along after him, but the secretary stopped him with an icy “Not you, Sergeant. Just Private Stone. You may leave. The general thanks you for your quick attention to his orders.” The D.I. stared down at the shoulder-padded worm of a man with a look of tangible contempt. He had the strongest urge to take his head and slam it down on the perfect wax finish on the cherry desk beneath him. But he had been in the army too long to lose it all with such a violent impulsive motion. The sergeant had learned to push down his own emotions like one would kick an enemy in the face. Though it would be fun. He filled his barrel chest, stood up stiffly and turned on a dime toward the door.
“Couldn’t have stayed anyway,” the sergeant intoned clearly as he walked off. “Must attend to my men.”
Stone gingerly pushed against two handcarved oak doors and they virtually flew open. And again his breath caught in his chest—it was… awesome. Huge oil paintings of Greek gods fighting among themselves in the heavens took up one wall; a picture of Napoleon, cracked and faded, clearly a masterpiece, took up another. Angels flying down from the sky on a third wall—hundreds of them with arched ivory wings, and the eyes of God himself staring from behind a cloud. Here and there around the large room suits of armor stood upright, as if guarding the art on the walls. And on the fourth wall, swords, ancient firearms, daggers hung everywhere, beautiful in their primitive lines and exaggerated antique features. Stone started slowly forward, hardly able to digest so much luxury, splendor—the gold candelabra in the ceiling, the black velvet couches on the sides of the rooms, the library of gilded books that rose floor to ceiling in the corner, the Greek vases and Chinese porcelains…
“Ah, Private Stone,” a voice said from his side. Stone turned to see a powerful-looking man seated in a leather armchair. It was Patton—unmistakable. Stone had seen his picture enough on the walls of the main buildings. Next to the NAA flag it was the most repeated image. But in person, the general looked much more vibrant, alive, with piercing crystal-blue eyes that seemed as if they could burn right through you. Stone almost instinctively saluted, instantly feeling angry at himself for playing soldier boy so well. But Patton looked pleased and motioned for him to sit.
“Please, please, take a seat. Have a cup of coffee.” He pointed toward a steaming electric brewer on a small table to the side. “It’s my own mixture, made from a number of different beans we have in the warehouse.” Stone leaned over and poured a cup, then sat in the chair. It seemed to fit his body perfectly and Stone wondered for a second if the arms were going to spring up and grab him. He quickly lifted the cup to his lips and took a sip. It was delicious, the best coffee he’d had since going into the bunker, where it had been all frozen and instant and almost undrinkable after the first year.
“Excellent,” Stone said, his mouth still glued to the edge of the cup. He took another gulp. The high caffeine content flowed instantly into his veins and Stone felt his eyes open wide and his mind suddenly snap into second gear.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” the general asked as he swept his hand around the room.
“It’s incredible, General,” Stone said, letting his eyes make a more careful sweep this time. Still, there was too much to even begin to comprehend, just a blur of art and military objects that belonged more in a king’s castle or a Rockefeller’s Hudson River mansion than in a windowless, rust-tinged warehouse in the middle of nowhere. “I’ve never seen so much,” he struggled for the words, “expensive-looking furnishing anywhere… and in my time I’ve seen some high level places.”
“Yes, I love beautiful things,” the general said, rising from his chair and starting to pace around the room. He reached out and stroked the art objects as if they were alive, running his hands across the surfaces of Rembrandts and Michelangelos, along the spine of a statue of a horse. Stone studied the general carefully. He was a big broad-shouldered man with a military bearing much like his father’s; around his hips sat two ivory-handled .45’s, which, if Stone remembered, the World War II Patton had adorned himself with too. A McArthur-style jutting jaw and weather-burned skin, lines around the eyes, the cheeks grooved. The face of someone who had been out in the world all his life instead
of hiding from it. But it was those eyes—those laser eyes that looked as if they saw through everything—like the major’s. So many things about General Patton reminded Stone of his father that it unnerved him; it threatened to bring up unresolved conflicts with the old man that he hardly needed to pyschotheraphize right now.
“Beauty is what makes it all worth fighting for, Stone,” General Patton went on, walking around the room, stroking his prize possessions.
“Indeed.” Stone coughed, unsure what to say about such a statement. He hadn’t seen too much beauty lately.
“I need men who appreciate beauty—and who want it, Stone,” Genreal Patton said, suddenly turning and glueing Stone to the chair with those ice pick eyes. Stone just dug his face a little deeper into the coffee, having no idea what the general was getting at.
“You did well on your training, Stone. Excellently in fact. From what Sergeant Zynishinski has relayed to me, you displayed not just ingenuity in getting through the obstacle course, but went out of your way to provide leadership to the rest of the recruits. In fact, I was informed that several more lives might have been lost but for your intervention. Excellent, excellent, Stone. I need men who can think on their feet. Men who can dare to rise above the herd. I have many recruits, more and more every day now. But you see what most of them are like—half of them dumb cows from the caves, the rest morons from the mountains. And most of those who make it through are useless as anything more than cannon fodder. I need men who can be leaders, Stone. Men like you.”
The Rabid Brigadier Page 11
