Chapter 24

Thursday, as soon as Paul comes into the office, I pull him aside and say, “You and I need to go for a ride, alone.”

He is smart enough to know not to ask what it is about. There are times when we need secrecy for national security issues and times when I have done things that were not entirely legal but needed to be done, like taking care of Couture.

Paul also realizes that he is to drop what he is doing when I say something like that. It is only a couple minutes later, we are in an SUV leaving the compound. Paul asks, “Is there anywhere in particular that you want to go?”

“No, just drive. We need to talk without anybody potentially hearing any of this.”

“What is it, Boss.”

“Have you heard about Grace, my girlfriend from when I was in Fort Grand?”

“Just bits and pieces. I try to keep my nose out of things when you aren’t talking about work, and I don’t think I need to know for security reasons.”

“I appreciate that. Grace disappeared while I was sent to my Uncle’s in Deer Lake. I think it was done as a message to me. There was no body found, and I have reason to believe that she is still alive. My problem is, I have no way to look for her. You know what the laws are like here. If I hired a PI, whoever has her would either kill her or send her someplace where I would never find her.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“I was hoping you would know somebody that would help if the pay was right. I know that not everybody you worked with in the special forces is as upstanding as you. My hope is that you either know somebody or can talk to the others in our little spec ops group and see if they know somebody. I need this done discretely. The point is to get her back, not to scare somebody into killing her.”

“Why now? You have been here for almost a year.”

“When I came here, I didn’t have the money. Once I got the money, I didn’t know who to trust. When I figured out whom I could talk to, we were knee-deep in helping the girls at school. I know the trail is fairly cold, but I have some ideas of where to start looking.”

“Don’t expect miracles. With the amount of time that has passed, it will be a while before she is found.”

“One of the reasons I have been setting my companies up so others can take care of them in my absence is, I intend to head up there this summer and do some digging of my own. I may even use myself as bait.”

“A 15-year-old kid shouldn’t be going on a road trip alone, and he definitely shouldn’t be using himself as bait to trap a slaver.”

“By summer, I will be legal to drive, and there is nothing anybody can do to stop me. If you insist, I will take Gun and Jane, but I don’t like it. If I scare the assholes, it is one thing. I can hate myself, but if it were one of them that did it, I couldn’t forgive them either.”

We talk about Grace as we drive around. After about an hour, the conversation winds down, and Paul asks, “Is that all? Should we head back?”

“Head back, but there is one more thing we need to talk about.”

“What is it?”

“I have a medical problem that only Dr. Nowak, my family and girlfriends know about. It’s nothing to be worried about, quite the opposite. The good doctor put me through a preliminary stress test, and the data indicates that my burst strength and burst speed are well above what they should be. And, what he describes he saw in the microscope has me speculating that my healing rate has increased significantly. None of it is to the degree of a comic book superhero or anything, but I need to test myself and see what I am capable of. You are the one I trust the most, and this can’t get out.”

“I have no clue how to test you.”

“Then it is a good thing I do. I rented a shop, one block up and in from the old rental shop. I’m having a bunch of gym equipment and shock mats delivered over the next week. I’m also having duplicates of all the equipment from our cardio lab at the university delivered. I will teach you how to operate the equipment. It is all easy to run. The difficulty is in understanding what the readouts mean.”

“Do you think this is why you were able to dispatch the six boys armed with knives without serious injury and get up after being run over?”

“The getting up after being run over I have done before. It isn’t normal how every fight I have been in over the last year has gone exactly as I planned.”

At the gym, you will hear many fools claim that if you need to think in a fight, you have lost. Most people who fight without thinking are mediocre and tend to impress by only fighting those that don’t know how to fight. Occasionally, you will get one with good instincts, and he can make it to the world stage, but it is extremely rare for them to be any good at that level.

Typically there are two ways top end fighters approach a fight, and I have done it both ways. The first is to visualize the fight beforehand. You plan out your moves and your enemy’s reactions before the first punch is thrown. Usually, the first move or two happens as you envisioned, but the opponent almost always throws a wrench into your plans, and things go off on a tangent.

The other is to think your way through a fight. Only the best of fighters can do this, and, for the most part, the only martial arts that are any good at teaching this are grappling styles. In my first life, I tried demonstrating this to a friend, but I failed miserably because she didn’t understand what was going on in the fighters’ minds.

I was studying fencing, and another student was a collegiate wrestler from Turkey. We got to talking about the difference in the thought patterns between a fencer and a wrestler. A fencer relies heavily on their medulla oblongata. The short of it is a fencer relies on what they call instinct. In reality, they train, doing their attacks and counters repeatedly, ingraining them to the point where they become instinct. It is possible because there are only a limited amount of attacks, and each attack has a limited amount of defences. It requires no real thought, and you can rely on your fight or flight response to make decisions for you. The problem with this way of thinking in real life is if something unorthodox happens and you need to think, it takes time for your medulla to realize that it needs to give up control and allow the frontal cortex to make the decisions.

It is like an ordinary soldier only needs to know so much. He can survive on his fight or flight mechanisms to make the decisions for him. Then there are the special forces. They do things that most regular soldiers would never attempt. Their training is much more involved, and they need to learn how to think when their fight or flight mechanism wants to keep control.

Both grapplers and spec ops soldiers spend a large portion of their training learning to fight with the medulla oblongata turned off, so that all decisions are made from the frontal cortex. If a normal person does this, their reaction time slows drastically. If a typical soldier fought with his medulla turned of, in the time it took him to kill one person, a spec ops soldier could kill six or seven.

It was the Turk who wanted to show the thought process, so he had two fencers stand up. One attacked, and the other parried. In their minds, the medulla reacted immediately. Without even thinking about what he was going to do, the attacker lunged. Just as the attacker had minimal thought, so too did the defender. The medulla didn’t allow for complex thought. Given the location the foil was headed, there was only one reasonable defence, so the medulla instantly had the defender parry and counter for his point. The entire process took less than a second.

Then the Turk and I stood up. It was his idea, so I let him attack. He did so with a head and arm throw, typical of Judo. I made a slight adjustment, and so did he, then I hit the mat. It all happened just as quickly as the fencing demonstration. The difference is what happened in our minds. It wasn’t a simple yes-no thought like the medulla handles.

The Turk had to pick one out of hundreds of different attacks and their variations. Seeing how I was standing a bit taller than I should, he chose to throw me. The instant he lunged forward, I had a long series of thoughts. Do I use the Judo, wrestling or Combat Jujitsu defence, all of which are completely different? I chose the wrestling defence and pivoted my hip to drop my knee. In that instant, he saw which defence I was doing and went to counter it; knowing it was unlikely he could counter, he flinched. This was when I decided it was his demonstration, so I didn’t want to embarrass him and stood back up for him to continue the throw.

Other thought processes were going on in our minds. Since we were both seasoned grapplers, we were planning moves in advance. Collegiate wrestling is known as the chess of fighting for a reason. The point is in the heat of the moment when the action is happening, a grappler or spec ops soldier makes five or six decisions in the time it takes a regular soldier, fencer or boxer to make one or two decisions. The speed of thought is insane, and mistakes are made. It is why you never hear about a collegiate wrestler going undefeated for more than a couple tournaments. Eventually, they make a mistake.

The thing is, I have had many physical altercations since I came to this timeline. The closest I came to making a mistake fighting is when I donkey kicked one of the kids attacking me with a knife as I killed his buddy. I made a calculated decision to risk getting my lower leg slashed, and it didn’t pan out. Even that wasn’t a mistake. It was a calculated risk that I lost. One on one, I should be able to do it, but I have been fighting multiple people simultaneously. MPs spend little time doing any real work. They spend an inordinate amount of time working out and sparring. I shouldn’t have been able to take out the MP with the ease I did, especially since I am in a 15-year-old body.

Paul states, “I admit I am impressed with some of the things you have been able to do. Heck, I may be a little jealous.”

“There is some risk with the testing. In the stress test, I didn’t notice when my heart rate increased at an extreme rate. It is normal for bursting, but it was a little higher than I would like. We will keep an EKG machine hooked up and a heart rate monitor so there shouldn’t be much risk, but just in case you should brush up on your CPR.”

“You best be honest with me when it comes to telling me what readings are normal. If your heart fails, I’m going to kill you.”

I am pleased that he never asked what happened to give me this strange medical condition. He has always been good about compartmentalizing what he needs to know vs what he would like to.

Thursday after school, I go to unlock the bikes so I can ride to work with the girls as usual. Paul is waiting for me, saying, “You will want to come with me instead of riding with the girls. While waiting for the girls to collect their bikes, I put mine on the SUV’s bike rack. We quickly say goodby to the girls and are off.