Guns were fine but noisy.
Knives adequate but not always reliable.
Hands were always there, quick and silent.
Bane preferred hands.
He learned to kill a hundred different ways with them. Closed fist or opened hand, it mattered not at all. He could snap a neck in a second, crush a throat in under two. The exercises and drills went on and on, offering him new challenges all the time.
One made him take out three men in sight of each other in less than a minute under cover of darkness, then had him repeat the same exercise in daylight.
Another left him weaponless in a forest with a half dozen heavily armed men in pursuit, his task being to neutralize them all in under an hour. Timing was everything. Success counted on it.
A third forced him to live in the wilds for two weeks with no food, no water, no weapons, not even any clothes.
The training continued for six months. Joshua Bane was taught to be a machine whose conceptions of right and wrong never extended beyond his orders. There was work to be done that would take a machine to accomplish. The slightest hesitation would mean failure. Thus, all traces of conscience and morality vanished as the machine’s parts were tightened and honed. The weeks passed … dragged. The games grew tiresome. Bane craved reality. He felt like a spreading pool of gasoline thirsting for a tossed match.
One night his six instructors were playing cards when the lights went out in their cabin. The sounds of a struggle followed briefly before the lights snapped back on to reveal a grinning Bane hovering over the bound, gagged, and defeated frames of his instructors.
He had passed his final test. A machine was never allowed into the field until he was more than ready. He must, first, have reached a point where he could live only in that frame of mind, where that kind of life was the only viable option. And to prove his ascension to that level, he had to go beyond the play book and create his own rules. On the night Bane had raided his instructors’ cabin, he’d proved he was all this and more. The student had become the master. He was ready for the field.
Bane spent a good portion of the next five years behind enemy lines. The subject of his missions changed almost daily but the intent never varied: to disrupt the enemy, break down his chain of command and channels of communication through sabotage, espionage or elimination. Mostly elimination.
The machine that had once been Joshua Bane did not require information, just input; not explanations, just orders. He killed as instructed neatly, precisely, and coldly.
Cold as ice.
They called him the Winter Man.
Buried deep within the machine, though, lay something that still thought, reasoned, even felt. While en route to meet the Swan’s chopper after a typically successful assignment, the Winter Man came across a burning school house in a Vietnamese village. Four times he ventured into the flames to emerge with the last of the trapped children, never hesitating or bothering to consider the risk.
A photographer for one of the wire services snapped a whole series of pictures in the midst of the action, some of them close-ups displaying the strangely calm look on Bane’s face as he ran to and from the burning building. This, the reporter noted in a tag line, was the work of a true hero. These might have been among the most dramatic pictures of the war, if they had been allowed to run. Army Intelligence and the Pentagon could not have the face of their personal killing machine plastered over the front pages of every daily paper in the U.S. Conveniently, the film proved faulty, the pictures developed into formless blurs. The photographer could do nothing but shrug. The processor smiled and set about recounting the wad of bills his unusual assignment had gained him.
The Winter Man remained in the shadows.
And now Joshua Bane drove past a faded, peeling sign resting over an equally faded building: King Cong’s Gym. He swung off 140th Street in search of a space. They were difficult to come by at this time of night in Harlem but Bane knew a place where there were always a few to be found. Cars belonging to the King’s patrons were never vandalized, and Bane had been watched often and long enough by hidden eyes to know that included his.
He pulled his stylish and functional Cressida up in front of a boarded storefront two blocks from the gym. The thought of walking through a not-so-friendly section of Harlem in total darkness caused him not the slightest hesitation or concern. He was out of his car and walking before the open hostility of the area struck him.
Fifteen yards and one burned-out building later, he realized he was being followed. Bane didn’t pick up his pace here but slowed it, feeling the hackles on the back of his neck rise stiffly. Always the unexpected, that was the key, anything to throw the opposition’s timing off. More. Slowing down increased his options while lowering those of his pursuer.
More time passed before he stepped over each dirty sidewalk crack, but Bane felt his tail holding ground, maintaining the gap between them at forty-five feet, maybe forty. Bane swung quickly, in a crouch, found no one behind him, and turned back to the front. His pursuer was good, very good. The advantage belonged to him now. Bane had given himself away, forfeited his element of surprise, and worse, lost track of his pursuer’s position. His ears scanned the perimeter about him. He didn’t trust eyes. By the time you saw something, it was usually too late to do much about it.
Bane slowed his pace to a crawl.
This was no amateur tailing him, no Harlem hotdog or mugger. Bane would have made one of those in an instant and sent him scurrying home to mama. No, this was the real thing, someone in the Game and a damn good player at that. For the first time, Bane regretted he wasn’t carrying a weapon. His confidence in his hands was absolute but there were times when one of the Bat’s throwing knives or a cool Browning would feel very good indeed.
His pursuer was almost on top of him now. Bane sensed him all right but had no idea of the man’s position. Bane’s fingers coiled, ready to spring. He passed into the shadows cast by a streetlight, saw Conglon’s battered gym sign just up ahead, and let himself relax briefly.
Too long.
The huge shape rose before him out of the darkness and air, stayed there just long enough for Bane to realize it was gone. Then a massive arm snaked toward his throat, stopped only when Bane got his forearm up in time to act as a wedge. He sidestepped and ducked but his opponent was equal to the task, more than equal, flowing with the move and pummeling Bane’s kidney with something that felt like steel.
Suddenly two massive arms joined over his solar plexus, and with great surprise Bane felt his 210 pounds being hoisted effortlessly into the air, just enough pressure being applied to squeeze his breath away and keep it from him as his ribs began to give.
Bane had gone into a counter move he doubted very much would work when a raspy voice slipped into his ear and everything made sense.
“Gotcha,” said the King.
Chapter Three
King Cong’s 300 pounds might once have been more solid but his six-foot-eight-inch frame had never been more menacing. If anything, the white patches which decorated his thick black afro made him seem even more chilling and monstrous. He slapped Bane on the back, came up barely short of hugging him, and they walked across the street to the giant’s gym.
“Been a long time since we played a round of the old game, Josh boy.”
“A year at least. You must have been practicing.”
King Cong shook his head, stretched his massive arms. “Uh-uh. I’m too old for that sorta shit. Turned fifty last week, you know.”
“But you didn’t have a party.”
“Don’t want to go pushin’ my luck any now, do I? All those little fuckers runnin’ around the street who’d like nothin’ better than to do in the King just might take a poke at me if they knew I hit half a century.”