Chapter 2

The coast looked clear, but Turtle was suspicious of the easy advance. He was reminded of the old saying: "If the advance is easy, expect an ambush!" He signaled his squad to advance in leap-frog fashion, two men at a time. He was about to call up the third pair of troopers when the ambush was triggered. Thank the spirits that this was only a training exercise with everybody shooting blanks; otherwise men on both sides would have died.

The umpires ruled that one of Turtle's men had been killed and three wounded, but they ruled that the ambushing party had been wiped out! That left Turtle with four fully able troopers and one wounded, but able to fight. This meant that Turtle's squad had scored the highest rank of anybody who had been through the course. It also meant that the instructors were going to have to rework the ambush to make it even more difficult to defeat.

Turtle had, indeed, earned his name again, for having such a hard shell that seemingly nothing could get through his defenses. Turtle knew that a name was just a name and didn't let the praise of his companions or his superiors go to his head. There was only one problem with being so good at his job, he was a continual target for promotion, but Turtle liked being a squad leader and didn't want a higher command which would take him out of the action and insulate him from his men. Turtle had finally penetrated the thick skulls of the officers that he liked his current job, and they should leave him alone.

Nevertheless, word of Turtle's skill had worked its way up the line all the way to Gen. Six Eyes. Six Eyes was not one to waste resources, no matter what that particular resource preferred. On the other hand, Six Eyes was not about to piss off his best squad leader, so a compromise was in order. As it happened, Gen. Six Eyes had realized that it was time to develop a Special Operations Command, and Turtle was exactly the man to run it.

Special Ops was, by nature, a small size unit, but it took great skill to manage it properly so that an objective was reached with the minimum loss of friendly life. Gen. Six Eyes used all of his renowned persuasive skills to convince Turtle that Special Ops needed his guidance, but a promise was made that the unit would never grow so big that Turtle was moved out of direct contact with his men or with the action. Turtle accepted the rank of Master Sergeant, but he refused to become an officer. Gen. Six Eyes smiled and relished the victories he had won.

Turtle was given free reign to select the 12 men who would make up his unit, so he started out by picking two from his current squad, one of whom was the "dead" man from the last training exercise. Turtle spent nearly six weeks finding the men he wanted, all of whom were good soldiers, but not necessarily the ones that civilians would have pointed out as "hero" material.

When he was asked where he wanted his training area to be, Turtle listed 11 spots where he wanted his men to become experts in that particular terrain. He was then asked what sort of buildings he wanted constructed to house his men, and Turtle replied that buildings were unnecessary—they would live in tents or shelters they made for themselves. This caused some shock among the mid-level officer-types, but Gen. Six Eyes nodded in approval when he was told that Turtle refused to let the engineers even build him an armory. Turtle had said that every man was his own armory, he would carry his weapons and his normal ammunition issue with him at all times, even to shit, shower, and sleep.

As part of his training, each man was to try to steal anything he could from his companions. A successful theft was rewarded by the chagrin of the victim. Any thing stolen was returned before the next day's training began, and a big deal was made of the return. Before long, it was simply impossible for anybody to steal anything from a member of Special Ops. This didn't stop the guys from trying, but a thief who was caught was shamed just as much as his potential victim would have been, so there were no hard feelings from all this activity. The men realized that it was just part of the intensive training program that Turtle was running.

Every man was trained to be a qualified medic, radio operator, mechanic, and expert with all weapons. The training was never paused; except for feast days, Turtle's men were practicing something old or learning something new. They were never much for spit and polish, but they were hell on wheels as warriors!

Their first real operation came after they had been working together for nearly 10 months. Some fool had set himself up as a warlord in central China and had decided that hostage taking was the way to control the people. His mistake was in periodically sending body parts to the family of his victims. These had originally been fingers or toes, or maybe an ear in extreme cases, but now he has graduated to whole hands or feet, and even penises on two occasions. The Army was reluctant to go in for fear that he would murder his hostages if they did. The warlord had threatened to kill them by immersing them in boiling water until their skin sloughed off.

Turtle received a simple order: put this tyrant out of business! The obvious thing was simply to have a sniper shoot the warlord at long range, but that would do nothing to quell the demands for revenge. Something had to be done that would satisfy the victims that justice had been done. Therefore, Turtle decided to kidnap the warlord and let the local victims do the killing. Of course, this did not mean that a lot of minions might not be killed in the process of the capture.

The warlord had built himself a large stone castle on a hill difficult to reach except by a single, well guarded road. The hill was not high enough to be called a mountain, but it sure looked like one with its steep and rugged sides. Turtle saw that the designers of the castle's defenses had assumed that the only way to reach it was by the road and had not expended much effort on protecting anywhere else beyond a 14-foot-high wall surrounding the castle on all other sides. Therefore, Turtle planned to scale the hill at its steepest point and go over the wall there.

Turtle had already had all of his men learn the basics of mountain climbing, so he put them through a rigorous two-week training program to get them ready to climb to the castle. He knew that his men did not have enough time to learn to be experts at mountain climbing, but the hill, luckily, did not require that. Mostly, it was a case of being careful and having a strong body, both of which his men could handle admirably.

The night of the attack, Turtle's men went in by Zeppelin to a spot about a mile away from the castle. Turtle had picked a very cloudy night with no moon, so the Zeppelin was not spotted as it delivered the men. The Zeppelin was to wait there until Turtle returned with the captured warlord. The landing spot was in a small, out-of-the-way valley so the Zeppelin could wait for as long as necessary. Marines were along to guard the Zeppelin while it was on the ground, so nobody was worried about it.

Turtle had his men leave behind anything not really needed for the mission. They each had a set of night-vision goggles, so they were one-up on the warlord's men. They carried their climbing equipment, their rifles and ammunition, a garrote, and a knife. They were dressed in tight fitting black outfits with hoods, so they would be hard to see.

The men were in superb physical condition, so it only took them 30 minutes to reach the hill and start the climb. As soon as they started up, Turtle realized that there was stuff about mountain climbing that his men still had not mastered. Fortunately, the climb was not as difficult as advertised, so they made it up to the wall in about 90 minutes.

The only guards along here were occasional sentries who walked along a ledge set on the inside of the wall. The sentries were so rarely seen, that there was no problem in sneaking past them. Turtle's men used a rope and grappling hook to scale the wall, which also was easier than it looked from a distance. Turtle was beginning to think that the warlord had been sold a bill of goods about the impregnability of his castle.

They did not know the exact layout of the castle, so they were going to have to search for the warlord. But, before they went after the main villain, Turtle wanted to find the hostages. A secondary part of their mission was to destroy the castle, but they had to remove the hostages before they did that. Therefore, when they found a stairway, they went down instead of up. Turtle sent two scouts out to see what they could find. He admonished them to avoid contact with the people of the castle, since they needed to remain undetected for now.