HE APPEARS IN A DREAM THAT DOES NOT FEEL LIKE A DREAM.
My real father.
I am twelve years old, the time before The Program changed my life forever. My father is next to me, his arm warm around my shoulders.
When I am awake, I don’t think about my father’s death. My feelings about it are buried far away where they cannot distract me. But when I am asleep, the memories return, along with the incredible pain of losing him.
In the dream, my father has something important to tell me. It’s something he needs me to understand, something critical to my survival.
I lean toward him. He opens his mouth to speak—
But instead of his voice, I hear a popping noise, something like the sound a can of soda makes when you pull the top.
The noise is familiar to me. It is the pop of a gas grenade, and in my mind’s eye, I see the familiar oblong metal encasement, a top with a pull ring. Yank and throw, and the grenade hits the floor and rolls as it has been designed to do.
If this was a real noise, it will be followed by something else.
The hissing sound of escaping gas. That is what I hear now.
Move. Quickly.
By the time I know the gas is real, my body is already in motion. I roll out of my bunk and hit the floor.
I stay low because gas rises. It’s a warm summer’s night, but I know from my training that the gas will be warmer than the air at initial release. It will rise until it hits the roof, then collapse on itself and fall toward the floor. I have time. Seconds. Perhaps as much as half a minute.
No more.
I know all this without thinking. I know it instinctually, and that is enough, because I have been trained to act on instinct. Not to weigh the options, do a pros-and-cons list, strategize. There is a time to do all of those things, and then there is a different time.
A time to survive.
I am on my belly in the dark now, moving past the sleeping campers around me, crawling toward the bathroom area in the rear of the cabin.
I listen to the gas releasing. A single canister.
It’s a twelve-person cabin. I consider the size of the room, calculate the expansion and absorption rate. I consider the purpose of a gas grenade. There are three primary uses of gas attack:
Cloak.
Disable.
Kill.
Whatever the purpose of the attack, I suspect I am the target.
After my last assignment, I was told to wait somewhere for further instructions. A certain hotel in a certain city. That is standard operating procedure for my employers, The Program. I carry out a mission, and then I wait for The Program to send me instructions.
But sitting in an empty hotel room in a strange city, there was nothing but time to think about the things I had done. When the thinking got too loud, I went for a walk. The walk led me to a bus. The bus brought me to Vermont, where an ad posted on a local diner’s wall led me to the camp and a CIT position.
I wanted to get away from the mission, the thoughts of the girl, and the dream of my father that comes when I wait.
But the dreams followed me. Evidently so did someone else.
I have an idea who it might be, but I can’t be sure. With a gas grenade releasing in the cabin, I have no recourse but to protect myself.
Defend myself first, ask questions later.
I consider all of this in the fifteen seconds it takes to inch on my belly toward the bathroom area in the back of the cabin, feel my way up the drainpipe under the sink, and reach across cool porcelain to find someone’s hand towel.
I wet the towel and wrap it around my face to make a temporary mask. It should buy me a few extra seconds.
There is a rear exit to the cabin, but I’m sure it will be guarded.
I pause on the floor of the bathroom and I listen.
No footsteps. That means they are waiting for the gas to do its job.
That’s how I would undertake an operation like this. Seal the cabin, slide the gas canister through the front door, and wait. Then I would complete my assignment.
What is their assignment right now? I don’t intend to be here to find out.
With the wet towel on my face, I make my way not toward the front or rear door, but to a removable wooden square in the bathroom floor. My guess is that their recon has not uncovered its existence, because ours is the only cabin that has it. A secret Color Wars project from years past. That’s the story I was told, and it’s that story that caused me to choose this cabin. I pop open the trapdoor and drop into the cool dirt below.
I do not know what’s waiting for me in the darkness outside.
So I must be ready for anything.
CHAPTER THREE
THERE ARE SOLDIERS HERE.
I make out a handful of them in the dark, an advance team, tactical, aiming lasers playing across the wood of the cabin above me.
I roll along the ground, exposed for a few precarious seconds until the motion carries me under the frame of a neighboring cabin.
Peter’s cabin.
I do not owe him anything. I’ve only been here for three days. I have stayed nearly invisible, my personality softened, everything about me fuzzed down like a dimmer switch turned to its lowest setting. Only Peter knows me, or at least the me I want him to know.
Maybe he knows more. I’ve talked more than usual. I’ve needed to talk.
Still, I should not care about him. Instead I should roll from beneath this cabin to another, hopscotching from cover to cover until I am on the edge of the camp and I can disappear into the woods.
But I cannot let Peter suffer for befriending me. I have to warn him.
So I pull myself from under his cabin, run my fingers up the wooden slats, and find a ledge beneath the window. There is only one soldier nearby, his laser aiming back toward my cabin, so I dead-lift myself up by my fingertips, tilt up the window covering, and peer through the screen.
There is a gas canister here, too, releasing its contents in the center of the floor.
I gasp a lungful of clean air and thrust myself through the window screen. I stay low and move through the darkness, just under the layer of gas.
I quickly locate Peter lying in his bunk.
“Wake up!” I shake him.
He’s nonrespondent. I lean down and listen to his chest. His heart’s still beating, slow but steady. His breathing is shallow but regular.
The boy next to him is the same way. And the one next to him.
Knockout gas. That’s what is in these grenades.
I know now that Peter will survive, so I fling myself back through the window to the outside.
The gas is everywhere now.
It rolls from the cabin doors and floats across the ground like fog in the moonlight.
I cannot help Peter. It’s too late for that. So I will help myself.
I run.
I fling myself against the side of a cabin, keeping my body close to the wall for cover. I wait for a moment then I dart out again, making my way cabin by cabin toward the safety of the forest that surrounds the camp.
I make it to the furthermost cabin, but before I can make a break for the woods I see a mass of soldiers coming toward me, rising out of the darkness of the forest. There are at least two dozen of them, professional soldiers in tight formation following on the heels of the advance team. They are in Tychem Coveralls with breathers and night-vision goggles. Their guns are up and at the ready, lasers crisscrossing the area as they search for me.
The soldiers are well trained and highly equipped. Could they be working for The Program? The Program doesn’t have military assets in the formal sense, but their reach is enormous, their resources nearly unlimited.
And if it’s not The Program, who else could it be? I think about the many other groups I’ve brushed up against in previous missions. Rogue elements of the Mossad, Ministry of State Security agents from China, SZRU operatives from the Ukraine. None of them are likely to be able to track me, much less to the woods of Vermont, but now is not the time to take chances.