Los Lobos Negros Training Camp — Edonia | October 14–28, 2011
Fourteen days.
Alpha team had eight members. They were not friendly — not in the way that groups performing for a camera were friendly, and not even in the way that groups who had decided to accept a newcomer were friendly. They were indifferent with a specific quality that Alen recognized as professional: they would work with him if he proved worth working with, and they would tell him when he had not, and they would not manage his feelings about either outcome.
This was fine. He had not come for friendship.
* * *
Day 3
The CQC session happened in an open yard with sawdust on the ground and no mat. Diego picked the sparring partners without explaining his reasoning, which was its own explanation — he was testing responses to disadvantageous conditions.
The man called Gregor was built like someone who had been designed for the specific purpose of being difficult to move. He swung a haymaker with the confidence of someone who had won this way before, which meant he had won this way before, which meant he had a preference for it, which meant he had a gap in what he did when it didn't work.
Alen slipped the punch — not dramatically, just sufficiently — and swept the leg at the point where Gregor's weight was fully committed to the swing. The radial nerve strike to the forearm was the follow-through: precise, targeted to the cluster just below the elbow, not a punch but a landing, with enough force to interrupt the motor signal temporarily. Gregor went down. His right arm didn't work for about thirty seconds.
The yard was quiet.
Gregor sat up from the sawdust and looked at his arm and then at Alen with an expression that wasn't embarrassment. It was interest.
"Show me that again," Gregor said.
Alen showed him. Slowly, with the anatomy explained. This was either the right move or it wasn't, and by the way Diego was watching from the far side of the yard, it was the right move.
* * *
Day 7
The extraction simulation ran through the ruins of an old factory at the edge of the valley, which had probably been a factory at some point and was now the kind of specific ruin that mercenary training camps found useful. Eight targets. Two of Kane's team simulating casualties requiring carry-out. Time limit.
Alen took point. He moved at a pace that was faster than Alpha team's default and slower than his maximum, because moving at his maximum would produce questions he wasn't ready to answer. He cleared each position before the team reached it, not because he was showing off but because that was the correct tactical choice — the point man who waited for confirmation was the point man who absorbed the first hit.
He anticipated three of the eight targets before they presented, based on the factory's geometry and the sound the targets made on the concrete floor. He did not explain this to anyone. He just moved and let the results be the explanation.
At the debrief, Alpha team's de facto leader — a woman called Marta who had been in the guild for nine years and was the best tactical reader in the group — looked at him across the table and said: "You were listening for them."
"Yes," he said.
"How far out?"
"Twelve meters. Maybe fifteen in a quieter building."
Marta looked at him the way people looked at something they were filing under a new category. She didn't say anything else. She marked his assessment sheet.
* * *
Day 14
The final test was twenty miles in a blizzard with eighty pounds of gear, followed immediately by a tactical breach of a defended structure using live non-lethal munitions.
Alen finished first by eleven minutes. He stood at the finish line in the snow and watched the rest of Alpha team arrive. The last man, a young Edonians recruit named Pavel who had been falling behind since mile fourteen, was struggling with the grade at mile nineteen.
Alen went back.
He took about a third of Pavel's pack weight without asking — just reached over and lifted the heaviest component and kept walking alongside him. Pavel looked at him.
"You don't have to—" Pavel started.
"I know," Alen said. "Keep moving."
They finished together.
Diego was on the ridge, smoking. He had been there for most of the day. Alen had noted this without commenting on it, because Diego's presence on the ridge was not something that needed commenting on.
* * *
That night in the mess hall, Diego came to the table where Alen was eating and set a bottle of vodka down in front of him. The room went quiet in the way rooms went quiet when Diego moved through them with intention.
"Mateo is a sentimental fool," Diego said, to the room generally. "But he knows men."
He pulled a heated iron rod from the kit at his belt. The tip glowed the color of a coal face. The mark on it was a wolf's head, simplified, the guild's identification.
He looked at Alen.
"You fight correctly," Diego said. "Not impressively. Correctly. There's a difference and most people don't know it." He held up the rod. "You want to carry this?"
Alen stood. He unzipped the top of his tactical shirt and moved the collar aside, exposing the left shoulder.
Diego pressed the brand against the skin.
Alen looked at him. He did not look at the rod or his shoulder or anything else. He held eye contact with Diego and breathed, and the smell of burning was specific and unpleasant, and he did not move.
Diego pulled the iron away. The mark was clean.
The room exhaled.
"Lobo Solitario," Diego said. Lone Wolf. He said it quietly, which was how Diego said things that mattered. He picked up the vodka and poured two glasses. "Welcome to the pack."
He set a thick dossier on the table beside the glass.
"Five years with the guild," Diego said. "Urban warfare. Counter-insurgency. Three biohazard containment operations in the Eastern Slav region — Blue Umbrella's recruiters know that geography well right now. The documentation is clean." He picked up his glass. "Blue Umbrella is recruiting in Bucharest next week. Show them this and show them the mark."
Alen picked up the dossier. He felt the burn on his shoulder settling into the specific deep ache of a wound in its first hour. He would be healed by morning, which meant the mark would scar rather than remain raw, which actually served the cover better — it needed to look like it had been there for years.
"Thank you, Diego," he said.
"Don't thank me," Diego said. "Just make sure that when you're inside that corporation, you remember what you are."
Alen raised the glass.
He thought about what he was.
He was the grandson of James Marcus, who had built the original virus in a hidden laboratory in the Arklay Mountains and had believed he was doing something good and had been wrong. He was the son of Jessica Richard, who had spent thirty years protecting people she loved by keeping them at arm's length and had died of that loneliness in a Cambridge hospital. He was the product of a biological sequence that had been waiting for the right host for sixty years.
And he was John Michael Kane, Lone Wolf, who had a documented record and a wolf's head scar on his left shoulder and a Blue Umbrella recruitment appointment in Bucharest next week.
"Always," he said, and drank.
END OF CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Chapter Fifty-Two to follow — Blue Umbrella