The Englishman watched the man cross the compound with his typical nonchalant amble. Tall and well toned, with shortcropped hair and a small nose that made him look boyish. He had become ruthless as required, but his soft eyes contradicted his stature.
I am lost, I am found—Carl was trapped between the two without the slightest clue as to how lost and found he would truly be before it was all over. Lost to himself, found to the darkness that waited below hell.
Englishman wanted to grin and spit at the same time. It was all growing a bit tedious, but he’d known from the moment he walked into this terrible camp that he would grow bored before the fun began.
Soon. Maybe he could change his name from Englishman to Soon. Soon rhymed with noon, as in Daniel Boone.
There was no way he could adequately describe the depths of his hatred for the man who was stealing the show with all of his move-this- move-that emotional control nonsense. Englishman could and would drop Daniel Boone the moment he felt good and ready.
Which would be soon.
He took a deep breath and shifted his eyes toward the pretty girl. Kelly. She was playing her part well enough, but he wasn’t sure she could toe the line. Her emotions could get in the way, despite all her training. Did she know the true stakes? He wasn’t sure. Either way, he wouldn’t trust her. He’d come here to make sure Carl did what was expected of him, or kill him if he didn’t, and Englishman was hoping it would be the latter, because he hated Carl more than he thought humanly possible.
If they only knew why he was here, what lay in store for them, how he would do it all . . . My, my.
Hallelujah, amen, you are dismissed.
NEARLY FIVE hours had passed since Kelly liberated Carl from his pit. She’d hooked him up to an IV and pumped enough glucose and electrolytes into his system to wake the dead. He’d been in his pit for two days, she told him. A meaningless bit of trivia.
He ate a light, balanced meal, then showered, shaved, and dressed in his usual training clothes per her instructions. A short run brought him fully back to the present, the physical world outside the tunnel.
Kelly had asked him to meet her and the others at the southern shooting range precisely at three for a drill. He wandered the compound for half an hour, then made his way south, past the hospital, which doubled as the administration building; past the barracks; past a small mess hall that they rarely used and a weight room that they frequently used.
He supposed that he spent an average of three days every week in the pit, but he rarely recalled anything about them. In the beginning his training was filled with the pain required to break him. Needles and electricity and drugs. They still used electricity, but once he’d learned to control his body, his training had turned more to his mind.
The mental training sessions, like the kind he endured in the pit, were now hardly more than a good, hard run. So long as he successfully blocked the pain. But today was different. At some point, he’d tried to split his focus and succeeded. Then he tried to break through the wall in his tunnel and, to his surprise, again succeeded. In fact, if he wasn’t mistaken, he had pushed back the heat crowding his safe place.
He wondered if Agotha had noticed anything in her detailed charts. Kelly hadn’t said a word of it, but if he wasn’t mistaken, the light in her eyes was brighter. Regardless of what caused this, he was glad for her. She was pleased with him, which made him happy.
Where do I come from?
The stray thought surprised him. He briefly wondered who his father was, then put the question away. There was no answer to it, he remembered.
They were waiting by the sandbags when Carl made his way down the slope to the shooting range. The vegetation had been cleared four thousand yards to the south—he could see the trees bordering the encroaching forest but no detail from this distance.
There was something ominous about those trees, he remembered now. Oh yes. The compound didn’t need a fence to keep them in, because if any of them stepped beyond the trees, their implants would send a debilitating electrical charge into their brains. He’d tried it on two occasions with disastrous effects, but he couldn’t remember anything beyond that.
At least a dozen assorted personnel drifted in and out of contact with him in any given week, guards and scientists and the like. He knew a few by name, but most existed like ghosts in his mind, beyond the scope of his immediate concern, which was survival and success.
Two of these personnel stood fifty yards to each side of the sand-bags now. Carl focused on the three people who were in the scope of his immediate concern. Kelly, Englishman, and Jenine.
The recruits were not allowed to talk to one another except as required by their training. As far as he remembered, he’d never spoken to either Englishman or Jenine without Kelly present.
Jenine. The sight of her standing in black slacks and brown pullover, facing the south with her arms crossed, evoked nothing but curiosity in him. Did she have a pit? Jenine looked at him without expression. Her hair was black, shoulder-length, framing a face with fine features browned by the sun. The Ukrainian, as they called her, was always quiet and hard to read. She could smile softly and slit your throat before you realized that her smile had left her face.
Carl wasn’t sure if he liked her or not.
Englishman. From twenty yards he looked angry, but this was nothing new. The man often looked angry, as if he resented being in Carl’s company. This wasn’t a weakness necessarily. He compensated for his lack of emotional control in other ways. There was something profoundly unusual about the sandy-haired man who stared at him over crossed arms, wasn’t there? Whereas Carl could shut out distractions and focus on his intentions, Englishman seemed to join the distraction and use it to his advantage. He didn’t strike Carl as a man who needed to be taught anything by either Kalman or Agotha. Kelly said that the exercises kept Englishman’s skills sharp. One day, when Carl was truly skilled, maybe he would learn to do what Englishman did.
“Hello, Carl.” Kelly smiled. “You look refreshed.”
“Thank you. I feel good.”
Not a word from the other two. Though often pitted against one another, they rarely trained together with a common objective. By the looks of the three sandbags set thirty yards apart, the X Group was going to be shooting downrange. That will change before the end of the training exercise, Carl thought. Beside each shooting post lay a crate. He had no idea what these were for.
Kelly faced all three of them. “The reactive targets are set at twelve hundred yards. You will each use the M40A3 with a 150-grain boat tail bullet today. All three rifles have been sighted in at four hundred yards.”
She walked to the left, eyeing Jenine. “You will expend ten rounds on the reactive targets. Consider it a warm-up. Beyond the yellow reactive targets are the static targets. Do not shoot these targets. Dale, take the far left; Jenine, center; Carl, on the right. Take your places, find the targets, and fire at will.”
Carl turned to his right and walked to his sandbag. He’d shot more rounds on this field than he could count, much less remember. What he could remember with surprising detail were the technical specifications of the rifles, handguns, and cartridges that he’d spent so many hours with.
The rifle leaned against a small fiberglass rack by the sandbags. It wasn’t just any M40A3, he saw. It was his. He’d sighted it in at four hundred yards himself; he could remember that clearly now.
Warmth spread through his chest. He wanted to run for the weapon, to pick it up gingerly and examine it to be sure they hadn’t scratched it or hurt it in any way. His heart began to pound, and he stopped, surprised by his strong emotional reaction to the weapon.
A hand touched his elbow. “It’s okay,” Kelly said softly. “Pick it up.” She looked at him sheepishly, as if she’d given him the very gift he’d been waiting for so long. And she had, he realized.
Kelly winked. “Go on, it’s yours.”
Carl walked to the rifle, hesitated only a moment, then picked it up and turned it in his hands. So familiar. Yet so new. The sniper rifle fired a .308 round through its free-floating twenty-four-inch barrel. Internal five-round magazine, six including the one chambered.
He ran his hand over the well-worn fiberglass stock and noticed that his fingers were trembling. He had to seize control, but these feelings were so comforting that he allowed them to linger.
Did he always feel this way when he picked up his rifle? Did the others feel this way?
He lifted his eyes and saw that Kelly was watching him with interest. Maybe some understanding.
He knew that the rifle he held was nothing more than a tool formed with precision, but then, so was a woman’s hand. Or an eye. It was what he could do with this rifle that fascinated him.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome. Shoot well today.”
“I will.”
She walked back toward the others.
Carl picked up a box of .308 rounds and set his emotions aside. Shooting well, as she put it, was like the beating of his own heart. Both could be controlled, both gave him life, both could be performed without much conscious thought.
He dropped to one knee and set the box of cartridges on top of the sandbag. A quick examination satisfied him that the mechanisms of the rifle were in perfect working order. He pressed five rounds into the magazine, disengaged the bolt, slid a cartridge into the barrel, seated the bolt, and took a deep breath.
He was eager—too eager. After the jumble/void of the last day/week, he felt fully alive, kneeling here, staring downrange. A slight, steady breeze, five miles per hour, he estimated, from the east. Temperature, seventy Fahrenheit. Low humidity.
It was a perfect day for killing.
Carl unfolded the bipod and lay down behind the rifle. Scope cover off. The thin thread that hung from the barrel to indicate wind barely moved. He drew the weapon back into his shoulder and glassed the field.
Three rubber cubes—yellow, blue, and red, each five inches square—sat on the ground. The yellow was his. When hit, the cube would bounce, thus its identification as a reactive target.
Carl snugged the weapon and swung the Leopold’s familiar cross-hairs over the target. He knew the charts for dozens of rounds intimately. The 150-grain boat tail bullet had a muzzle velocity of twenty-nine hundred feet per second. It would take the projectile just under half a second to reach twelve hundred feet. In that time the bullet would fall 22.7 inches and slow to nineteen hundred feet per second.
But his target was thirty-six hundred feet away. Twelve football fields. In that time the bullet would slow below one thousand feet per second and fall more than five feet.
If he placed the crosshairs directly on a target that was four hundred yards out, he would hit it precisely as aimed. But at this distance, he had to place the crosshairs more than five feet above the target.
He steadied his aim, lowered his heart rate, released the air in his lungs, and focused on a spot roughly five feet above and slightly to the left of the yellow cube.
A round went off to his left. Englishman. The red target leaped. All of this was peripheral to Carl. He slowly increased the tension in his trigger finger.
His rifle jerked in his arms. It took the bullet almost two seconds to reach the yellow cube. When it did, the cube bounced high, rolled to the left, and came to a rest.
Carl ejected the spent shell and chambered a second cartridge.
A breeze cooled his neck. A musty odor from the dust under his chin and the gun oil mixed with the sharp smells of burned gunpowder. His body hugged the earth. He was a killer. His preferred instrument was the rifle, and his weapon was his mind.
Carl shot the second round, waited for the target to bounce, reloaded quickly, and reacquired the yellow cube.
He was a man who loved and hated only if and when it facilitated his objective to kill. To kill he had to survive. Survive and kill, this was his purpose.
He sent a third round speeding down the range.
“Do you know what happened today?” Kelly asked behind him and to his right.
He held the scope over the target until it settled for a fourth shot. “No,” he said.
“In the pit, do you know what you did?”
Carl considered the question, trusting his instincts on the fourth shot. She was talking about the heat. Rifle cracks filled the air in rapid succession. Three cubes bounced downrange, like three puppets on strings.
“No.”
“Did you try to lower the temperature in your pit?”
“Yes.”
She lay down beside him, glassing the field with binoculars. “You succeeded, Carl.”
So. His mind was connected to his immediate environment through this quantum field that Agotha had told him about.
He shot the target for the fifth time. Successfully. Chambered his last round.
“Do you see the white target on the right farther down range?”
He moved his scope. “Yes.”
“It’s over three thousand feet. Can you hit this target for me?”
She knew he could—he’d done so many times in a row. Carl answered anyway. “Yes.”
“But by the time the bullet reaches that distance, its parabolic rotation will be nearly ten inches in diameter. You can’t control the bullet’s wobbling to place it where you want in that teninch circle.”
“Correct.”
“But if you can lower the heat in your pit, can you affect the flight path of a bullet?”
Carl eased off the scope and looked at her. Was she serious?
“I want you to shoot your next five shots at the static target. Shoot for the center.”
“I was in a different place when I lowered the heat.”
“Go there now.”
“I was in the pit for three days. My mind was focused. And I don’t know what I did. I created a second tunnel, but beyond that I don’t really know what happened.”
“You can’t create a second tunnel now?”
He didn’t know. Even if he could, he had no idea how to affect the flight path of a bullet leaving the end of his barrel at twenty-nine hun-dred feet per second.
“Please, they insist.”
He would try, of course. He would do whatever they wanted. He would do it for Kelly, but he was quite sure he would fail.
And what were the consequences of failing this time?
“They don’t care if you succeed or fail; they only want you to try.” Carl nodded.
The 150-grain bullet would fall much farther over two thousand feet. And the target looked much smaller, barely more than a white speck in the distance.
He spent a full minute bringing his focus into alignment and entering his tunnel. The light at the end was the target. It was here, on the range, that he’d first thought of consciousness as a tunnel.
The air had become still; there were no shots from the others. There was a path between where he lay and the white target. He walked that path, feeling the wind, the humidity, and the trajectory that the bullet would take, arching over the field to fall precisely into the porous white electronic board.
He lowered his heart rate so that he would have enough time to shoot between beats. Made his muscles like rubber so there would be no movement conducted through his bones into his shoulder, or fore-arms, or trigger finger.
It was time to send the bullet. He knew that he would hit the target if he shot now.
But they wanted more.
Carl tried to form a second tunnel as he had in the pit. But no matter how he focused his mind, it refused to form. Why?
Maybe he didn’t need a second tunnel. Maybe he could just focus on the bullet and force it to fly straight.
He brought all of his mind to the bullet. For a moment everything around him simply stopped. His breathing, his heart, the air itself seemed to pause.
Carl sent the bullet.
He couldn’t see the impact on a static target at this distance, but through her scope, Kelly could.
“Again,” she said.
“Did I hit it?”
“Again,” she repeated.
Carl reloaded and repeated the same shot five times to her urging. “Did I hit it?”
She lowered her binoculars. “You did fine, Carl. I’m very proud of you.”
Kelly handed him the binoculars and walked toward the others, who were watching patiently.
“We’re going to play a game,” she said loudly enough for all of them to hear. Carl lifted the binoculars and quickly studied the target.
He’d hit it, he saw, but in a scattered pattern, with no more accuracy than any other time. The marks winked out as the target electronically cleared itself. He lowered the binoculars. Kelly had reset the target with the remote in her hand. She offered him a small smile and continued.
“Each of you will lie down in a crate with your weapon. The crates have been treated with a chemical that agitates hornets. You have a six-inch opening in the front panel through which to shoot at the reactive twelve-hundred-yard targets. Once you are ready, three dozen black hornets will be funneled into each of your crates. Their stings will adversely affect your muscles. The first to place five rounds into the target will win this contest. Do you understand?”
None of them responded.
“Good. The winner will be freed and given a knife. The next one to succeed will be armed with a handgun and will hunt the winner until one of you is either killed or incapacitated. The third will be left in the crate for an additional five minutes and then taken to the infirmary.”
Carl dropped the binoculars on a sandbag and picked up his rifle.