Hell's bells! He'd warned the lads to take care, but they were young and too full of themselves to even consider that one old man was a threat of any kind. Didn't expect they'd be up against John bloody Steed and his samurai umbrella, now had they?
Well. They'd know better next time. Embarrassing and painful lessons were the kind that etched themselves into one's memory.
Christ.
Jay Gridley stood there, machete in one hand, his revolver in the other. He hadn't even moved yet, and already he was dripping with sweat. The jungle lay in front of him, leaves and vines woven into a thick wall of tangles, too verdant and altogether too alive. His heart pounded, and he was breathing hard. It took everything he had just to hold the jungle image, and even so, it wavered at the edges, threatening to collapse at any second.
It wasn't just the problem with concentration. Yeah, Saji's exercises had helped, the breath and meditation and all. And his grandfather had been a Buddhist, and he knew a bunch of them, so it wasn't that weird.
The big thing was, Jay was afraid. No, not just afraid, he was terrified. This was the jungle where the tiger had been, where it had leaped from cover and clawed him, ripped at his brain so he couldn't think. Maybe killing his ability to walk the web forever, and, if so, killing him, too.
He didn't have to be here. Nobody was making him go back into the jungle. But if he couldn't play computers, he might as well be dead.
He took another breath. The little handgun wouldn't even slow the tiger down, he knew, but he couldn't work the machete and hold the big double rifle ready. If it came at him again, he would get hurt again, maybe worse than before.
He could get help. Saji was willing to come with him. He wouldn't carry a gun, because he wouldn't shoot even a VR creature, but he could offer moral support. And there were other ops, some in Net Force, some not, who could link with Jay and share the scenario, some of whom would cheerfully tow a howitzer and who'd blast anything that moved. But that wasn't the way. Jay couldn't spend the rest of his life asking for help. If he couldn't walk in the valley of the shadow alone, he couldn't do his job, and if he couldn't do the thing he loved most in the world, what was the point?
He took yet another breath and let it out slowly. He was going in. If it got him, then it got him, but he was going to go down swinging the big knife and pulling the Webley's trigger if he went, and to hell with it.
He raised the machete. The VR wall of vegetation rippled and wavered. The image started to fade. Crap!
He came back into himself in front of his home workstation, soaked with sour-smelling sweat, heart still thumping madly away.
He'd been ready. He had. He was willing to do it.
Just not ready and willing enough to hold the scenario.
He blew out a sigh. Okay. He'd go back, try it again.
In a little while. When he'd had a chance to get his breath back, to rest a little. Really, he would go back. Really.
Chapter 19
Mikhayl Ruzhyo, now looking like just another tourist, walked toward the Imperial War Museum. The building, with its centered dome and pillared front, could have almost been an Italian church, had not the approach been guarded by a pair of fifteen-inch guns, taken, according to the sign nearby, from HMS Resolution and HMS Ramillies.
Churches had been violent places through the centuries, but he had never heard of one protected by naval guns outside the front entrance.
To one side of the walkway, a tall concrete slab stood, a section of the Berlin Wall taken from near the Brandenburg Gate. He had been a teenager in 1989, when they had started taking the wall down, and the significance of it had been lost on him. What an American president had once called "the evil empire" had been much closer to home. He had known very little about the world outside his homeland in those days. He had learned too much about the world since.
The piece of the Berlin Wall had been painted to look like a giant cartoon face, done in blues and blacks, with its mouth stretched wide open. Against a dark red background in the mouth were the words "Change Your Life."
Easy for you to say.
Ruzhyo had been to London several times, usually on his way elsewhere, once on assignment to erase a wayward colleague, and he had seen a few of the tourist sights: Buckingham Palace, the Wellington Monument, Abbey Road. He and Anna had almost come to England on a holiday once, before she got sick, but something or other had prevented it. Since Anna had died, he hadn't done much tourist activity. Anna would not have enjoyed this place, but these days, war museums suited his tastes.
Inside, the main gallery was full of old tanks and artillery pieces, with various airplanes hung from the ceiling. He strolled past a Mark V tank, a 9.2-inch howitzer, a Jeep. Gray greens were the dominant colors.
The most impressive display was of a giant V2 rocket, the side cut away to show the engine, such as it was. The missile was huge, painted a dark green. It looked to him like a cartoon rocket ship, a pointed cigar with fins on the tail.
Ruzhyo stared at the V2. How frightening it must have been to civilians to see this monster dropping from the skies during the Blitz. According to the placard, more than 6,500 of the V2s and smaller V1s fell on London and South East in hard and explosive hailstorms, killing a total of 8,938 people.
How, he wondered, had they been able to come up with the exact number killed? 8,938?
If the Germans had been able to manage a decent guidance system for these beasts, they would have killed a lot more. But while they had been fearsome devices, shooting them off had been rather like launching pop bottle rockets. That they were able to hit London at all had been more due to luck than skill. Many, if not most, of the V1s and V2s had fallen harmlessly into the sea or onto the countryside. And in a war, 9,000 civilians mean little in the overall casualty count. A few drops in an ocean of blood.
What men did best was to kill other men. Especially when given leave to do so in a war.
Ruzhyo strolled past a searchlight, another item painted a flaky military green; he looked at a shellacked and unpainted wooden fishing boat used during the evacuation at Dunkirk; he examined Monty's tank, one in which he'd ridden during the North Africa campaign against Rommel, when Montgomery was still a lowly general and not yet the famous field marshal.
The monuments of killing.
There were also side rooms with cryptography equipment the museum-goers could play with, and on the lower ground floor, a World War One experience, designed to look like the trenches. This floor also had a Blitz display, and a Second World War area, as well as a more modern conflict display: Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Falklands, Bosnia, the Middle East. Ruzhyo quickly passed through the more contemporary presentations; they held little interest for him. He knew about those kinds of wars. Chetsnya and the invading Russians lived in his memory as real as if it had taken place yesterday and not almost twenty years past.
Even though it had been a sea of mud then, it was a much cleaner business in the trenches in France in 1915 than it was when Ruzhyo had been Spetsnaz. Cleaner in the sense that you knew who your enemies were, you knew where they were, and you had things laid out for you in black and white. Attack here, shoot there, live or die along the way. There was little skulking about and shooting people while they sat at a desk or lay in bed with a wife or mistress. Those had been his stock in trade. He knew about that kind of war.
It wasn't particularly satisfying, these monuments to war, but it seemed appropriate. He would book his flight out and leave today, if possible. Perhaps by way of Spain, using another identity. Madrid would be warm by now, and the smells of Spain were more pleasing than those of England.