He made a final equipment check and moved out.
GUNNY HALL CHECKED HIS wristwatch. Half an hour left in the exercise. If Swanson didn’t make it to the finish zone by then, he would fail. That would be good. “Anything? Anybody?”
“Negative.”
“No.”
“Not me.”
Hall decided to cheat. Swanson had to be caught this time. He broke the rules and ordered the walkers to report the trainee’s position.
In less than a minute, there was a soft crackle of a radio in his earpiece. “I got him,” said a walker. “Northwest corner of the zone. Only about fifty yards from you.”
The spotters put their glasses on the area and still saw nothing.
“Go stand on him!” Hall ordered.
The walker solemnly strolled over and put a foot on the immobile back of Kyle Swanson. “Bang,” he said. “You’re dead.”
“Nope,” Swanson answered, “but everybody else is.”
SWANSON SHED THE BULKY ghillie suit and had some water, then was trucked back to the camp. Anger had turned his face red, and his muscles were as tight as banjo strings. Thirty minutes had passed and Kyle was still seething when he was called to see Gunny Hall in the operations tent.
“Stand at ease, Lance Corporal,” Hall barked. “I failed you today. Four points. You have one chance to remediate. One chance to pass or fail. Screw up again and you’re out.”
“Gunny, permission to speak freely?” Swanson asked.
“Permission denied,” Hall said with a steely curtness. “I know everything you have to say-that we didn’t play fair today, that you’ve already accumulated enough points to pass the course, that you’re better than everybody else out there. Right?”
“Yes, Gunny Hall.” Kyle’s muscles tightened even more. He wasn’t allowed to lay out his side of the story, and there was too much of a rank difference for a fight.
“Now I will tell you where you are fucking up big-time, Marine. I’ve seen a hundred guys just like you: the loners, the special cases, the ‘I don’t need anybody else’ types. This school ain’t about you, Lance Corporal. Stalking is not an individual event.”
“It should be,” Kyle said before he considered the impact his words would have.
“Nobody said you could speak, asshole. So typical of you, Swanson. Always with an answer even before the question is ever asked. You’re willing to do everything we want… but you refuse to listen! Now you get my little lecture, and you will by God pay attention.” Hall was on his feet, pacing back and forth like a drill sergeant, his hands clasped behind his back and his face contorted with emotion. “Now stand at ease, even sit down if you want to, but for Christ’s sake, listen to me. Okay?”
Swanson exhaled deeply but remained standing at a rigid parade rest. Hall shook his head at the feeble silent protest.
“Lance Corporal, we lost a good man out there today, that SEAL kid. Why?”
“He fucked up.”
“Yes, he did, and because he did, he is gone, out of here, and that is not the friggin’ point.”
“What is the point then, Gunny? He screwed up and I didn’t. Why are you so pissed off at me?”
“Because war is not an individual sport.” Hall stopped beside his desk and opened Kyle’s personnel folder. “I’ve wasted some time looking into your background, Swanson, and talked to a couple of shrinks about your kind of personality. It’s all there. You’re about as special as a cheap Tijuana whore. All the symptoms of a classic loner: Alone as a kid in an orphanage. Alone in school. Even when you played baseball in high school, you were a pitcher, the one individual that everybody else on the team supports. But this is not a place where a loner can excel.”
“I seem to be doing okay on my own, Gunny Hall.”
“You think so?” Hall sat down in his chair, leaned back, and folded his hands. “Not in this game. The name of the friggin’ course is Scout Sniper, you moron. Consider this as a combat situation: A minimum of two men go out together, and if one of them dies, chances are damned good the other one will, too. Scout. Sniper. Personal excellence is mandatory, but it is not enough. Right now I would not want you as a partner.”
Kyle blinked, caught by surprise. “Why?”
“Because I could not trust you. You might go off and try to accomplish the mission on your own, leaving your spotter alone. I could not rely on you for help if I was trying for a shot, or trying to escape and evade.”
“So I should give myself up to make somebody else look good?” Kyle did not understand this logic.
“No, Swanson. Look, we both know that you cheat and that you succeed. That is good. You are a natural leader, and you really are better than the rest of them, so I expect more from you. Help these other guys, son. Share your skills and your ideas and your methods. Show them how to do what you do. I want you to prove to me and the other instructors that you can be trusted when the crap hits the fan. It’s all about trust, Lance Corporal Swanson.”
“I can do that.”
Hall was finished with the lecture and just grunted and waved the kid away, with no idea if Swanson had listened to a word he had said.
8
OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
MONDAY NIGHT
JIM HALL WAS SPREAD out comfortably aboard a Citation Bravo executive jet, the modified Cessna 550 model, sliding through the night sky at four hundred knots and thirty-five thousand feet. He had dropped the facing seat to make a bed, changed into an old Adidas tracksuit for comfort, popped five milligrams of Ambien, lowered a silk mask over his eyes, and stuck the buds of an iPod into his ears. Classical music and the drug would ease him into sleep while they crossed the pond.
The private plane was one of the ghost fleet, special aircraft owned by an Agency front company and used primarily for unique missions such as renditions and paramilitary support. The small, quick plane, with its pair of Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines mounted aft and high, had been to a lot of places, always off the record. It was still bouncing through some air pockets from a storm front that was closing across the East Coast but would rise through the clouds soon. Lauren Carson was across the aisle, wide-awake, to answer the phone if he needed to know anything.
This was style, exactly the way Hall wanted to run the final assignment of his career with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Word had spread that he was about to retire, and even before he left Langley to board the plane at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, he had detected the tattered threads of disrespect tangling around his ankles. Invisible shackles. After this, he would be nobody; another old man gone. Somebody else would become the special assistant to the deputy director of operations, and there would be a string of promotions on down the ladder. The CIA was a gigantic bureaucracy. No desk stayed empty very long.
He changed position in the seat and increased the volume of the music to mask the whine of the engines. Like many workers with a lot of years in any industry or business, Hall had become disillusioned with his profession.
The first major puncture in the balloon of faith came with the hard lesson that the shield of anonymity provided to CIA agents was neither impenetrable nor absolute. That idea was knocked for a loop when a political scandal ripped the name and face of one agent out of the shadows. The president of the United States himself had declassified the identity and thrown her to the political and media wolves. The affair actually had made Jim Hall feel a little better, because it proved that he was not the only person running a game in the dangerous jungle known as Washington, D.C. In fact, he figured that he was one of the littler fish. After he assessed how the impact of an agent being outed had spread like a virus through Langley and ruptured so much trust, he decided that it was only prudent for him to prepare for the unexpected; in other words, cover his ass.