It was Ian's cue to hand over the phone and wander off to the living room with his coffee. Rob came to find him about fifteen minutes later, looking pleased in the way he always did when he'd spoken with Tom.
He patted Ian on the shoulder. "I take it you're feeling confident now."
"Yeah. I can maintain this."
"Well, that opens a lot more doors."
Ian wanted to show Rob what he could do, but it didn't seem like the right moment. "Where's Mike and Livvie?"
"Gone out to buy some airsoft kit."
"Couldn't he order it and get it delivered?"
"Come on, you know Mike. He sees every delivery he doesn't need to have as some potential security breach. And he needs to do
everything
himself. Y'know, he'd have been really unhappy if he'd ended up in the Army full-time. He'd be a colonel by now. All meetings and memos."
"But he hands stuff over to lawyers and accountants. He's got people for everything."
"Even his people have got people, mate. But there's some things he just won't delegate. Especially manual labour."
Rob wasn't joking. Mike treated making things like a religion. They walked out to the stables to check the progress of the kill house. Stacks of cut wood – planks, batten, sheets of plywood – stood in the covered yard awaiting construction. Inside, Mike had marked the floor and walls with lines of spray paint and stacked straw bales.
Ian walked up and down the flagstone passage that separated two facing rows of stalls, working out how the place would look when the wood was in position. It seemed a shame to spoil such nice stables, but Mike never had to worry about what someone else would think or if it would affect the value of the house. Ian sometimes caught glimpses of what Mike's wealth really meant, and they were never in the places he expected to see them.
"Are we going to build this?" Ian had helped build the log frames on the makeshift assault course in one of the paddocks. Mike was a competent workman. "What is it, partition walls with windows and swing doors?"
Rob studied something on his phone. "Yeah, Mike's trying to make the space a bit more complex. Otherwise it'd be like clearing a hall in a block of flats, although that's pretty bloody hairy too."
"Any tips?" Ian asked.
"Yeah, don't stand in front of a door to open it. That's where the buggers aim first. Having said that, I've kicked down doors a few times, so what do I know? But to be on the safe side, fire through interior walls before you get to the door. Or toss in a grenade. Preferably both." Rob paced out a line, imagining something. "Provided you're not worried about the paperwork or a court martial, that is. We'd all be speaking German now if we'd had bloody lawyers breathing down our necks in World War Two."
"Wouldn't they have shot all the lawyers, though?"
Rob winked at him. "You always look on the bright side, mate. I admire that."
Mike and Livvie returned with boxes of equipment – authentic-looking carbines, magazines, goggles, all kinds of kit – and laid it out in the stables. Ian sorted through the boxes, slightly baffled. It seemed to take more equipment to pretend to fight a battle than to engage in a real one. Mike picked up a carbine and demonstrated it to Ian.
"You can't exactly shoot locks out with this, but it feels the same weight and you can use proper optics," he said. "Everything fits on your webbing the same way, too, and it'll give you a sense of what it's like when someone shoots back. If it suits you and you want to progress, I'll get you some training at a proper shoot house."
Ian looked at the price tags. "Damn, Mike, some of this stuff costs as much as the real thing."
"You want to try it out, then?"
"Sure."
Rob started walking back towards the house with Livvie. "Call me if you need a target. I'm going to track down some of my old oppos and see where they're working now."
Mike loaded a pistol and squeezed off a few rounds at a bale of straw with a rapid
putt-putt-putt-putt-putt
. Ian decided to risk an opinion.
"Rob's still kind of lost, isn't he?"
"Yeah, he needs goals. But he's running out of them." Mike loaded a carbine and demonstrated the mechanism to Ian without saying a word to explain it. "He always wants to be pushed beyond his limits."
"How about an expedition somewhere remote?"
"No, he'd see that as self-inflicted. You know what he'd love? A post-apocalyptic wasteland. A zombie invasion. Anything where he's got no choice but to make the best of it."
"I thought you both liked challenges."
"Ah, but I can always deploy my rich guy's parachute if things go wrong, even if I don't plan to, so by definition I'm playing at it. I think it's
not
having a choice that hits the spot for Rob." Mike handed Ian the unloaded rifle and a magazine. "Come on. We're freezing our asses off here. Let's armour up and go shoot each other."
They dressed in the indoor range. There was a mirror in the small locker room, and it didn't bother Ian until he caught his reflection. He'd never worn full combat rig with helmet and goggles before. With the rifle, he looked like a real solider, and it was too much for him. He was an imposter. He was no better than those guys he saw on the Internet trying to come across as badasses when they were just paintballing, guys who'd never faced what Mike and Rob had.
Or Great-Granddad
. He turned away from the mirror, appalled at himself.
"I swear this isn't as dumb as it looks," Mike said. He'd picked up on Ian's reaction and seemed to think it was because they weren't using live rounds. "It's not so different to the simulated ammo we use in training, except that stuff fits regular weapons. The rounds still hurt like hell."
"Don't worry, I understand." Ian adjusted his helmet, trying to avoid the mirror. "Really."
Mike caught his arm and pulled him back in front of the mirror. "Gap," he said, tugging at Ian's body armour. He treated everything as if it was live fire anyway. "You need that tightened up. You'd be amazed where rounds can sneak in."
Ian couldn't avoid his reflection now. It was a whole different kind of recognition, nothing like seeing the core of himself in a changed face. This was a glimpse of a different state of being. He was confronting a fantasy. He hadn't felt this uncomfortable in a long time.
"Am I playing at it, Mike?"
"No more than anyone else in training. And I'm taking you seriously."
Ian didn't have to explain, then. Mike understood.
They stalked each other in the woods, sprinting from trunk to trunk so Ian could get a feel for snap shooting. But in a matter of minutes, it didn't feel like simulation at all. It became real. Mike stepped out of cover to fire and Ian froze mid-aim. His brain said he couldn't possibly shoot Mike. A round caught him in his left shoulder, but he still couldn't return fire.
Mike took a few more shots from the cover of the tree and Ian fired back seconds later, but that was way too slow. He couldn't steel himself to target Mike until the guy broke cover and closed the gap, firing as he moved. Ian forced himself as Mike came in close to fire at very close range. Yes, those rounds damn well hurt when they hit unprotected flesh.
"You okay?" Mike pushed his goggles up to the top of his helmet. "Problem?"
"It was really hard to shoot you."
"Psychologically, you mean."
"Yeah. I don't mean aim."
Mike gave him a slap on the back. "That's normal. Once you get hit and hurt enough times, you'll start shooting back for sure. Like when you were sparring with Rob. Want to try again?"
Ian indicated an empty magazine. "I'm out. Look, can I ask you some personal stuff? "
"Anything you like." Mike started walking back to the range. It was getting dark. "Are you wondering if you'd be capable of killing someone?"
"Yes. Emotionally capable, I mean. Not skill."
"I think most people can kill. It's just depends on what presses their button and how hard it needs to be pressed. Coming under fire for the first time did the job just fine for me."
Ian knew the worst thing to ask a guy like Mike was how it felt to kill and how many times he'd done it. It even sounded creepy coming from an interviewer in a serious documentary. But Mike was the most patient guy Ian could imagine, and he wanted to understand how a capacity for violence could be part of that.
"Ever wished you
hadn't
killed someone?" he asked.
"Not yet. I know some people do when they get older."
"Ever get nightmares?"
"Not many, and not about taking a life."
"Am I prying?"
"No. Not at all. They're sensible questions. You're right to ask them."
They changed out of their kit and cleaned up. Ian sat on the bench next to Mike and polished his boots in silence.
"My sister doesn't understand how confusing combat is and what you don't notice or recall," Mike said suddenly, as if there'd been some argument about it in the past. "You know you're being shot at, so you open fire. No problem. Us or them. But you often can't tell if you fired the shot that killed someone. There's usually too much going on. I killed a guy trying to bundle me into a vehicle, and I still don't know if I remember it accurately. Has Rob told you the story?"
"Depends," Ian said. "I don't know if he thinks he remembers the same parts that
you
think you remember."
Mike nodded. "That sums it up."
"You would have ended up dead. Sooner or later."
"Probably. I didn't think that at the time, because American hostages are worth money. But the guy could have sold me to someone who would have beheaded me for the cameras. So I decided I'd rather die trying to escape than go missing for years or have Livvie see a video of me getting my head hacked off. I couldn't bear thinking what my family would go through. I know it sounds crazy, but if I fought back and got shot, at least they'd have closure and they'd know it was quick."
Ian realised courage wasn't the obvious thing he'd thought it was. It was having bigger fears than saving your own ass. Mike was more afraid for the people he loved.
"Yeah, I get it," Ian said.
"I know you like movies, buddy, but the way they depict combat usually makes it look like you can see everything and take decisions the way you do in an office. But it's not like that. There's so much you can't see or hear. And you can't tell what's reasonable force, whatever the hell that means. Even if you're used to it, the adrenaline's pumping. You don't have a conscious second to rationalize. Your training kicks in and you just react." Mike paused, still working shoe polish into the leather. Ian couldn't tell if he was picking his words or trying to recall detail. "Anyway, I took this guy's knife and stabbed him, then I grabbed his rifle and shot him. I don't even recall his face."
Ian remembered Rob's account of the firefight. They'd been right in the middle of it. They could both have died. Killing an asshole trying to drag you away to an uncertain fate seemed perfectly reasonable, exactly what Ian expected a guy to do.
"Do you feel bad about that, Mike? Because you shouldn't."
"No, I don't. But in my head, I didn't think he was going to kill me right then. And I wasn't thinking about killing him. I was just determined to escape or die, and that was the only way I could do it."
"Self-defence, if you ask me."
"What's clear to regular people is something else when a lawyer decides to argue a case years later. But I'm just telling you why I ended up killing a man, and why I know I'd do it again."
Mike stopped rubbing the brush back and forth across the toecap of his boot. He looked frozen for a moment. Ian didn't know if he'd finished.
"Well, I hope I'd have the balls to fight back," Ian said.
Mike shook his head. "I never told my sister or Mom all the details. If Charlotte started with her legal bullshit about rules of engagement, or her husband gave me his armchair opinion on how he'd have handled it, I'd never be able to speak to her again. And that would be awful for Mom and Dad."
Ian had yet to meet Charlotte. Rob said she was nice enough but a bit of a know-it-all. "Would she really question it?"
"Well, I think she might. So I never want to know for sure. She's got no idea what it's like to spend every minute among people trying to kill you. And I've got zero patience with someone who can't see how that changes everything."
Everyone lied or hid something, then, even the most honest guys like Mike, and often for the best of reasons. But Ian decided he didn't want to keep anything from him. Mike had trusted him with really painful, personal stuff. It made for powerful bonds.
"Would you rather I didn't tell you about my morphing?" Ian asked.
Mike picked up his other boot and began polishing again. "Would you be happier telling me?"
Ian's pants were a similar DPM pattern to his old jacket. He put his hand flat on his thigh and visualized the skin mottling and darkening to match the camouflage. He almost didn't need to shut his eyes to concentrate now.
"That's a sitrep," he said.