Chapter 2

It was called, informally, the Colonel’s Club. I doubt it had a real name.

I’d been there before, but only during the early-morning hours before the sun came up. This time the nightmare woke me early, and the club was only a few hundred meters away. I had no place else to go, and I needed to get out of my CHU.

There was an opened bottle of good single-malt scotch on the table in back. I put money in the kitty, dropped a couple of ice cubes in a glass, poured, then sat down at an empty table near the back.

A few officers were sitting near the door. Others might come into the Club while I was there, but they wouldn’t sit at my table. For that matter, the others might change tables, move away from mine. The patrons were almost always field-grade officers, and none were interested in chatting with a lowly warrant.

I was an outcast, even here. But I was used to it. I’d been a disappointment at the School, too; they wanted communicators, they got me.

I completed the course, after a fashion; I had a small amount of the Talent they wanted, telepathy, but it never got past the rudimentary stage. I had a different ability, psychokinetics, PK. That got their interest, at least until they realized I would never get very strong. Superman I’m not.

The administrators also kept hoping my TP would get stronger, but it never happened. They finally gave up. They dismissed me from the course as a ‘graduate’, then tried to find someplace I could be useful. “What to do with him; all that money, wasted. He’s not a total failure. He surely must be good for something, mustn’t he?”

The School’s administrators sent me to the Army; they thought my PK might be useful in combat. If I worked out, the School could start a branch to develop PK’s, and even if I failed the data would be useful. The Army, or at least an officer of that service who was senior enough to decide, agreed to accept me as a tactical-intelligence technician. The new buildup in Afghanistan had begun less than a year before, courtesy of the new president, and the Army hadn’t recovered from the Sequester yet. They needed people.

Even me. “PKs can’t lift much and they don’t have good control; it’s really only a minor talent, not very useful, but maybe you can help real soldiers. The Army wants you, my boy. Make us proud; go be all that you can be.” So I went.

The School had final instructions, and I was still naive. I had no reason not to go along with them. Hadn’t they developed this marvelous Talent? “Keep your abilities secret,” my adviser told me as I packed. “It’s critical that other nations not find out what we’re doing.” That was understandable, and it probably wouldn’t be all that difficult considering the limited strength of my Talent.

A TP, telepath, can hide his abilities, but a PK will sooner or later be noticed. And as soon as the secret gets out, rival nations will begin working on the problem, maybe even come up with an improved teaching method. Meanwhile, the technique the School used was new and who could tell what might eventually come of it? Secrecy buys time, so I readily agreed to what they asked.

My first stop found me enrolled in the Infantry School for a concentrated course in infantry operations such as patrolling and intelligence gathering; that was all the preparation I was expected to need. “It’s as much as we give new recruits to the Agency, right? It should be enough.” Or so their thinking went.

I was a class of one. I wore no insignia and no name tag, just nondescript BDU’s. Meanwhile, the Agency kept refining my role. “After he completes the course? Let’s make him a chief warrant officer, senior enough to be left alone, junior enough not to be noticed.” Such was the agency’s thinking. I’m sure someone thought it was funny, combat wizardry officer, the code name the agency assigned me, or chief warrant officer, CWO.

“Report to the personnel office after finishing the course, Chief. You’ll need to swear the oath and sign the appointment forms, then just pin the bars on and catch the first available plane to Afghanistan. One of the forms is a non-disclosure agreement. You know about those, right?” I agreed that I knew about them.

So I became an almost-instant CWO. The Army routinely makes instant warrants, commissioned officers too, so I was just one more, anonymous among the rest. But it would take time for the records to be completed, waivers to be granted where necessary (there are rules regarding who can be appointed, and to what duties), and a personnel file created. A slot on a transport plane would also need to be found.

The Army finds work for idle hands, so someone suggested I attend jump school while I was waiting for the paperwork to catch up and the necessary movement orders cut. That caused a few headaches.

Airborne School normally takes three weeks, but I would need to leave on PCS, permanent change of station, before I could complete the course. Perhaps, if I formed another class of one, the Airborne School could accelerate my training as the Infantry School had done? They thought they could. After all, the first men to jump from airplanes hadn’t had any training at all.

Accepting the assignment turned out lucky; I discovered the most useful Talent of all during the night jump, the ‘bubble’, my name for my personal protective field. It’s a side effect of my PK, and it’s stronger because it’s always short-range. As to how I found out I could do it...

Sheer fucking terror makes you do things you never knew you could.

Three days of lectures, endless conditioning drills to develop my upper body strength; they had almost no effect on me because of my PK, which works reasonably well at close range, but I was already in good physical shape by virtue of the life I’d lived before arriving at the school.

Jump from a mockup of an airplane fuselage and land in a sand pit? Easy. Selected classes followed, and the following afternoon I dropped from the 250-foot free tower. My parachute landing fall was sloppy, but then no one expected me to be a parachutist. The landing was considered acceptable, barely, though the cadreman frowned. I’m sure he would have recycled me or booted from the course if he’d had a choice, but he didn’t.

The Airborne School knew I was a spook, just not exactly what kind. Still, they’d seen all sorts come through and I was nothing special in their eyes. “That’s good enough, Chief,” he sighed. “You probably won’t kill yourself. You’ll jump from a C-130 tomorrow morning, that’s a cargo plane, then a Chinook helicopter in the afternoon. You’ll have another C-130 jump Friday morning, a fourth jump Friday afternoon, and a night jump Friday. Jumping’s fun, man, you’re gonna love it! After that, just settle your personal affairs and catch the flight to be-yootiful scenic Afghanistan Monday.”

I joined a stick of regular parachutists as last-man-out for each jump. Nothing to it, really; I just hooked up the static line and shuffled out the door behind the others. Wait for the chute to open and ride the canopy to the ground. Do the best parachute landing fall I could, stuff the chute into the jump bag and turn it in for repacking. Nothing to it!

All very routine, and yes, I did like it ... until I looked up during the night jump.

No opening jolt. A cigarette roll, or maybe it was a streamer; it’s not what you want to see when you look for your canopy! I couldn’t decide which it was, because the skinny shape was silhouetted against an almost-dark sky. I only knew that I didn’t have a proper canopy and I was falling too fast. I could see a full canopy to my right, but it was above me and receding fast.

Time for emergency procedures. I knew about those, because there had been a class and I’d listened.

Try to shake the tangle loose, while bicycling frantically with my legs, but nothing worked.

Okay, try the reserve chute. Clutch the chute with my free hand, control the bag’s opening with the other, then throw the chute away as hard as possible.

That one tangled too; the two chutes were now spiraling around each other. Or maybe I was twisting in the air. I couldn’t tell. Just possibly, if I’d had more instruction during my abbreviated session regarding what to do if a chute malfunctions—but it was only a brief thought, all I had time for. Panic!

It was all I had time for. I looked up, then down to see if I could spot the dark ground below, and suddenly there was a red flash surrounding me. The harness straps snapped explosively and fluttered away somewhere, dragged by the failed chutes.

I was still a hundred meters in the air, legs churning frantically. I remembered that much from the lectures, bicycle with my legs, grab the control lines, and shake them. But I had no control lines, they’d gone with the chutes and harness, and I realized I was tumbling.

I hit the ground, back first...

And bounced. The first bounce caused me to bite my tongue, the second wasn’t as bad, and the bouncing soon stopped. I tumbled slowly across the landing zone, trying to figure out what had just happened. I was still alive, but I didn’t understand why. I giggled hysterically and remembered the words of Blood on the Risers. But not me, no blood on the risers, guys! No risers at all, see?

I was still in the bubble, although I didn’t know what it was yet, tumbling slowly across the dark drop zone. No one around; the rest of the stick had drifted with the faint breeze, meaning they had landed farther down the drop zone, which was just as well because it took several moments before I managed to collapse the bubble. After a few moments it disappeared as fast as it had formed and I fell on my face, leaving me with a bloody nose and bleeding from the mouth from where I’d bitten my tongue, and a long scratch on my arm from the bush I tripped over.