And, at least for now, he still had his head. Even if his lip was cracked from Sergeant Dubois punching him when he was a little too late translating orders from French into something Desoto could understand.
“You’ve got what it takes to be a success in the Legion,” Rousseau had said, just before the cops led Logan out of the prison room, to load him into the back of a van to be delivered to the Legion. “But, flunk out, and you’ll be back here the next day. Don’t make me regret this decision.”
But did Logan really have it?
He’d thought he was fit in the ZUS, but the Legion was showing him how little he knew. He might not even live to see the end of the course at this rate. Still, anything had to be better than just sitting in that cell, waiting to be executed.
He’d heard that the English government would sometimes take criminals who’d committed serious crimes, and offer them a place in the Marines instead of a long jail term or a noose.
Dad had told him the Americans got most of their Marines that way, but he’d been complaining for years about ‘the bloody yanks’, so who knew what was true, and what he just made up so he would have something to complain about?
Either way, the French must have had the same idea. As Rousseau had said, killing him was a waste if he could be made to do something useful for France instead.
And what better place than prison to find men who were used to lives of violence, and had few qualms about using it to achieve their ends? He’d met plenty of such men in the ZUS, where power and wealth was all that mattered, and no-one would have had any qualms about hurting him for their benefit, or entertainment. Or the girls he was protecting.
To the rich and powerful, they were just disposable toys.
He was gasping for breath by the time his boots stomped up the last few metres of the hill, past the side of the barracks, and onto the parade ground. He leaned against the flag pole and bent forward, holding his aching belly, and sucking in air as fast as he could.
He wiped the swear from his brow, and felt his face cooling in the mountain air now he was no longer running. Then stumbled on, back to rejoin the line of recruits.
“Garde à vous!” Beauchene yelled.
Logan moved smartly to attention this time. He’d learned what that meant, and he didn’t need to be punched again this morning. Even Desoto knew that much French after his first few hours of training, and stood at attention beside him as he returned, chest still heaving as his body recovered from the run.
The Legion called it The Farm. But it didn’t much look like one. Just a couple of low concrete buildings set on the side of a shallow valley, surrounded by a three-metre-tall wall with guards at the gates and drones in the sky, in case any of recruits decided they’d like to desert before they even finished training.
They might more accurately have called it The Prison, but, despite the hard beds and freezing river water in the shower block, it was more comfortable than the prisons Logan had been incarcerated in so far.
“The Legion is now your homeland,” Beauchene told them. “Wherever pile of shit you maggots may have crawled out of, you are here now to die for the glory of France, so women will weep at your heroic deaths, and men will write rousing songs to remember you by. And I expect every one of you bastards to send ten of the other bastards to Hell first, or I will personally fight my way down there to kick your bloody face in.”
And the Legion might as well be their homeland, because none of them were going home any time soon. Except for the few who had volunteered to join as free men, who could still ‘go civil’ and walk out the gates.
But that walk, admitting that you just weren’t tough enough, and didn’t have what it took to become a Legionnaire, might take more courage than staying the course.
Farm or not, the instructors certainly behaved like animals, though few were as vicious as Beauchene. But the rapid and rough punishment quickly separated out those who couldn’t handle the tough, brutal life of a Legionnaire, and sent them home without wasting time.
They’d told Logan when he arrived that only one in four made it through training to be awarded the famous white cap of a Legionnaire. And he wasn’t the only man in The Farm whose future might depend on winning that hat. It seemed Rousseau had made a hobby of scouring the prisons of France, looking for ‘the right men’ for his Legion.
Adamski had told a similar tale late at night in the barracks, as the recruits whispered their life stories to each other in the darkness. He’d broken into some aristo’s house in Marseilles, trying to find something to sell to buy food and drink while he lived rough on the streets after jumping ship from the Russian Navy, then swimming to the shores of France. He was clearing out the jewels piled in the safe and thinking of how many fancy meals they would buy, when the cops grabbed him.
The aristo turned out to be Rousseau’s nephew, and Rousseau informed Adamski that he could spend twenty years in jail, or five in the Legion. And assured him that the Legion had much better food.
Either the General had an enormous family with relatives all over France, or he wasn’t being entirely honest with the truth.
Regardless, Rousseau had managed to talk both of them into signing away the next five years of their lives to the Legion. Volunteering to join the toughest sons of bitches in the French military, always the first to be sent in to the worst battles in French space, and the last brought home. Often, in bags.
And it was too late to change their minds now.
With the muscles and stamina he’d built up in Section 19, Logan would have flown through the physical training. But the flics had starved and beaten that out of him in prison.
Now he was rebuilding his body all over again. He’d stuffed himself with as much food as he could since leaving his cell, as he worked his way through the Legion recruitment system, and had expected he’d be able to continue at The Farm. But he was lucky if he had more than five minutes to wolf down whatever mass of goop the cooks slapped on his plate each day, no matter how unappetizing it might be. Breakfast was the best meal of the day, and that was just a slice of bread and a cup of coffee.
He thought many times about breaking into the kitchen at night, and making a proper meal for himself. He dreamed of the delights he’d cook from the contents of the Legion freezers. Meat, vegetables, cakes, meals like the ones the toffs ate back home. He studied the cheap locks on the doors and windows every day he passed by. After his years in the ZUS, they wouldn’t provide the slightest protection against his skills.
But then Johnson broke into the Officer’s Mess one night, and Dubois caught him slumped in a corner beside the garbage disposal with a fat belly, and chocolate and croissant crumbs smeared across his face around a wide smile.
The instructors called all the recruits to the parade ground, and forced Johnson to eat every croissant they could find in the Mess, until he threw up. No-one seemed quite sure whether it was a punishment or a reward, but Johnson still had a smirk on his face at the end. At least until the instructors gave him a good beating afterwards.
That didn’t look much like fun.
Logan had asked Adamski one time about his experience in the Russian Navy, as he seemed to be one of the few who’d taken to the Legion life with a smile on his face. Even Chief Beauchene didn’t seem to phase him, though, with Adamski’s prior experience of military life, he rarely screwed up, and rarely got hit.
“Russian Navy was worse,” Adamski had said, in his tortured French. “There are no whips here. No-one gets thrown into sea for screwing up. This is like holiday in comparison.” Then he smirked, and nudged Logan ‘s side. “Except less vodka.”
Perhaps it was.