So what is going on here?
I calculate the angles, the danger to myself and Father, the bullet trajectories.
I look for an escape.
I might make it to one rifle, use it to take out the one opposite. But these men are not stupid and they have staggered their positions so as not to be directly in each other’s lines of fire. Still, I might achieve something. I might take out one or two. Maybe even four. But two dozen men?
Perhaps if I got to Father first, the soldiers would not shoot—
No. Everyone is expendable. That’s what I’ve been taught.
Father. Mother. All of these soldiers.
And, of course, me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Father says.
“Do you?”
“Naturally. I taught you how to think.”
“What am I thinking?”
“You’re wondering the purpose of these soldiers and why they have not lowered their weapons. And you’re calculating angles.”
“How do you know?” I say.
“That’s what I would do in your situation.”
“Have you ever been in my situation?”
He doesn’t answer, only smiles at me. A sly smile.
That’s when I see it. The way out.
I’ve been thinking about it wrong. I don’t need to use Father as a deterrent.
I need him as a shield.
Get to the first soldier, use his rifle to take out the two across, then grab Father and use his body to protect me against the inevitable fusillade of bullets.
If I sacrifice Father, I will live. I play it out in my head, and I know my chances are good.
My facial expression does not change, not in any way a normal person could detect, but Father is not a normal person.
He grins. “You see it, don’t you?” he says.
“I do.”
The calculus of bodies and angles in space. A human puzzle devised by Father as a test.
It’s always a test, that’s what I’ve come to understand.
“It’s you or me,” he says. “But not both.”
I nod.
“You’ve been trained to protect The Program and survive at all costs,” Father says. “That’s your mission imperative.”
I look from Father to the soldiers. I take a long, slow breath, preparing myself to leap at him.
“Would you sacrifice me to complete your mission?” Father says.
“I’d have to determine which of us was more valuable to The Program.”
“And then?”
“And then I’d do what I had to do,” I say. “I’m loyal to the mission. Not to you.”
That’s all it takes.
Father raises his hand, signaling to the soldiers. I brace myself for the pain of multiple bullets.
It doesn’t come.
Instead fingers are removed from triggers. Guns are lowered. The circle disperses.
“I came to check on you,” Father says. “But I see now that you are well.”
I was right. It was a test.
And I passed.
The soldiers walk back into the forest. Father comes toward me now, a wide smile on his face.
“Well done,” he says.
“You needed all these troops to make your point?” I say.
His face turns serious.
“There are some things you don’t know,” he says.
“What kinds of things?”
He looks around the camp. “Not here,” he says. He turns toward the forest. “I think we need some father-son time.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“A driving lesson.”
“I already know how to drive.”
“A different kind of driving lesson,” he says, and he heads into the woods.
I have no choice but to follow him into the darkness.
CHAPTER FOUR
WE WALK FOR ABOUT A CLICK BEFORE WE COME TO A CLEARING.
Military trucks are parked in a convoy. This is the staging area for the operation in camp.
“Are you ready for your lesson?” Father says.
He reaches into his pocket, removes a key chain, and tosses it to me.
“I know how to drive a Humvee,” I say.
“I don’t mean the trucks,” he says with a smile.
He points to a clearing beyond the staging area. I note the blades of a helicopter rotor camouflaged in the forest.
“I’m not rated for a helicopter,” I say.
“Not yet,” he says.
CHAPTER FIVE
DAWN IS BREAKING OVER THE VALLEY BELOW US.
I’m piloting the helicopter with Father next to me, watching the ground whip by beneath. Apple orchards, farmland, stretches of forest. The beauty of the Northeast spreads out for miles in all directions.
“How do you like her?” Father says over the roar of the wind.
“She’s a beautiful machine,” I say.
Helicopters are complex to fly, even more so than small planes. I did seven and a half hours in a trainer as part of my initial studies in The Program, but I didn’t get my rating. It was deemed unnecessary. I received enough training to understand the flight dynamics along with the basic controls and electronics should I need to talk about helicopters in conversation, or more likely, if I intercepted information about them and had to interpret what I was seeing.
But now I’m actually flying a military helicopter under Father’s tutelage.
“Pull the cyclic toward you,” Father says. “Gently. That’s it. Now give it some throttle.”
I do as he says, and the craft adjusts, the angle steepening as we aggressively power forward.
“This is great!” I say.
“She’s a beast,” Father says. “This is a domestic variation, but you should see the real thing in combat.”
“I’d like to,” I say. A blur of speed, a flash of dark blue as a lake goes by, all of it accompanied by the whoop of rotors churning above us.
I can’t help but smile. How many sixteen-year-olds get to fly a helicopter?
A small mountain looms several miles ahead, high enough that we won’t clear it. I bank east, anticipating it with plenty of time to spare.
“You didn’t think you could handle her, did you?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“But you can,” Father says. “You can do anything. You just have to remember your lessons.”
Father is being kind, guiding and teaching me. This is how it was when I came to The Program. I lived and trained for two years at the house. I passed from normal life into this new life, a life most people only experience for a few hours when they’re watching a great movie.
“I brought you up here so we could talk man-to-man,” Father says.
I glance over to find him looking at me. I don’t like what I see. I grip the cyclic too hard, and the helicopter tilts left.
Father notes it with an eyebrow raise.
He reaches across my seat, puts his hand on top of mine, and adjusts the flight path. His touch surprises me, the sudden intimacy of his hand on mine in this small space. But his adjustment does the trick. The helicopter stabilizes.
“Are you off the reservation?” Father says, his voice serious.
“Why would you think that?”
“You went away.”
“I took a break,” I say.
The mountain has somehow returned to the center of my windscreen in the last adjustment. I bleed off power and angle the rotors to take us out of its path. But before I can complete the maneuver, Father reaches over and puts his hand on top of mine, clamping down and preventing a change of direction.
That puts the mountain in front of us on a collision course.
“I said a man-to-man talk. That means we tell each other the truth,” Father says.