Now who was the asshole?
My face began to turn red again, but this time my anger was directed at myself. What the hell had I been thinking?
One minute can decide the outcome of the battle, one hour the outcome of the campaign, and one day the fate of the country.
Russian Field Marshal Prince Aleksandr Vasilyevich Suvorov
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“L
ISTEN UP, BOYS
and girls. I’m going to show you how to kill someone eighteen different ways, using only your hands.”
“And a bottle opener,” someone added, from behind me.
Everyone who heard laughed. The muscle-bound behemoth standing in front of us looked like he drank a gallon of steroids for breakfast. He stood about five foot five and seemed to have shoulders as wide as he was tall. His arms were as large as my thighs. Even so, he was so fastidiously serious with himself that we could hardly stand it.
“Who said that?” he said, squeezing his hands into fists that could crush pool balls.
I’d seen his type before. An expert at fitness who parlayed his good health into the idea that he knew how to fight. Not fight on a mat in a studio, but fight during the piss and shit of war. These pretenders were all cut from the same cloth. The first time he was forced to run from one point to another with full battle rattle, a rifle and a helmet, he’d pull up with a strained muscle, screaming like it was the end of the world and never get to the point where he’d get to use any of his eighteen ways to kill someone, much less call 1-800-GETMEOUTTAHERE.
When no one spoke up, he continued. “You all might be experts at one or two things, but I’m certified in seventeen forms of martial combat, including...”
As the Giant Pretender rattled off a list of martial arts like he was a walking Wikipedia, I let my mind wander. This was the fourth expert to come into our facility to give us
instruction
. Now that we were in Phase II, they’d taken away our tablets. I never realized how much I’d come to appreciate that thing. I wished I had it now. My tablet was a lot less stupid than this shit, but then every military in the world had its own form of professional development where good-intentioned leaders brought in experts who ended up being ill-prepared for the reality of a roomful of soldiers.
Mr. Pink and several of the senior facilitators, now dressed in black slacks, shoes and Polo shirts with the red, stylized TF OMBRA logo on their left breasts, had been interacting with each of the groups. They’d been stressing the need for team building, which was ironic, since my team pretty much hated me. I’d beaten down Olivares three weeks ago and hadn’t been able to get much traction since. We’d fought every day. As it turned out, the first day was to test our control. It looked like I failed. The next day they issued padded kicks, gloves and helmets.
“You,” I heard from somewhere far away.
I unglazed my eyes and realized that the steroid monster was looking at me.
Pretending like I wasn’t sure, I put on a patented
who me
look and pointed at my own chest.
He nodded. “Yes. You. Why don’t you come up here and let me demonstrate?”
I glanced at my team beside me, but their eyes were everywhere but on me. No one wanted to help. Why should they? Every group had an asshole, and it looked as if I was that guy. I stared for a moment at Olivares, hoping he’d give me one of his snide smirks, but he was playing his part perfectly.
I shook my head.
“You want me to come up there, sir?”
“Yes, Sleeping Beauty. I want you to come up here so I can give you a kiss and wake you up.”
I blinked as everyone laughed. I could feel my face turning red. “Seriously?”
Steroid Monster rocked his head back and laughed; it was surprisingly high pitched. “Of course not, genius. I need you to help me demonstrate moves. I need you to attack me.” At this, he turned to the audience and grinned, all teeth and confidence.
My blood had begun to rise and I fought to keep it down. I excused myself to leave my row, then walked to the front of the room. I was dressed in the same urban cammies as before, but now, like everyone else, I wore white running shoes. The number 19 over my left breast showed which team I was on.
At the front of the room, I glanced back at the thousand-odd people staring back at me and turned to Steroid Monster. Although he was several inches shorter, he was as wide as a minivan.
“What’s your name, son?”
I hated being called
son
. “Mason.”
“Well, Mason, where are you from?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Do much fighting there?”
“Some.”
He smiled again. Teeth and confidence. “Good. I didn’t want to get an ‘expert,’” he said, his fingers making air quotes around his last word.
I sighed on the inside. Why was the world filled with so many asshats? I was so busy rolling my eyes on the inside that I missed what he said next.
“What?”
“I said, attack me.”
“Any particular way?” I asked, wondering what he was up to.
“Surprise me.” He flashed the crowd a smile again, and the first few rows laughed.
“Aren’t you going to get into a stance?” I asked. He was just standing there, his right leg in front of him as he put his weight on his left leg, his hands resting imperiously on his hips.
“I’m good. Ready whenever you are.”
He gave me a look that said
you can’t do nothing to me, you sniveling little excuse for a man
. I’d never been one to be intimidated. I glanced once at the crowd, scanning the rows until I found the rest of Nineteen. They were all watching except for Olivares and Aquinas, who were deep in conversation. I saw a smile on her face, then a smile on his.
“Come on, son. We haven’t got all day.”
I shouted a loud
Keeya,
turned and in one swift move brought my right elbow down on his left thigh, just above his knee. I felt the point of my elbow dig through muscle until it tapped his femur. Then I stood and stepped back.
He crumpled to the ground, screaming.
I looked at the shocked crowd and gave them a smile. All teeth and confidence. Then I shrugged, and walked back to my seat. My team, as I suspected, didn’t give me the time of day, which was fine. I didn’t need them. After all, I was the designated asshole.
Mr. Pink and three others went to the front of the room. He directed that they help the man writhing on the floor, while he turned to the crowd.
“Looks like our ‘expert’”—he aped the man’s air quotes—“wasn’t prepared for your expertise.” He shook his head and shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked at home in front of a big crowd.
He pointed to me. “Sorry to do this to you again, Mason, but would you come up here?”
A low murmur went through the crowd, the collective sound of people who thought I was in big trouble. I felt the same way. I got up, excused myself yet again, and walked to the front, thinking of the dozen walks to the principal’s office I made when I was a kid.
“It’s okay. Mason isn’t in trouble,” Mr. Pink said. “On the contrary. He’s demonstrated two very important things to you. Can anyone tell me what they are?”
I found myself looking at the ground. Being talked about in third person always made me uncomfortable.
“That he’s a jerk?” someone offered.
It seemed as if everyone was laughing.
I stared at a space a thousand feet past my toes, nodding and smiling, as if I was part of the joke.
“No, no. I was talking about what he did up here,” Mr. Pink said.
“We were, too,” someone else said, to another round of titters.
Mr. Pink glanced at me. I caught his gaze. I could tell he wasn’t happy. Then he turned his gaze on the audience. They soon shut up.
“What we’ve learned here is not to be reckless. Underestimating your enemy is reckless. You saw what happened to your instructor, right? He expected Mason to throw a punch or a kick; that Mason would demonstrate a move the instructor had practiced defending against a thousand times.” He began to pace, but kept his head towards the audience. “You’ll note, however, that I said
practice
. Which means he probably has never used it in real life.”
“You been in combat, Mason?” he asked me.
“You could say that,” I murmured.
“What? Speak up so the rest can hear you.”
“You can say that. Yes, sir.”
“You do any of those moves in combat?”
I envisioned the Hajji inside the second floor door of a house we were clearing in Baghdad who’d lost his knee the same way, right before the guy behind me double-tapped him in the head. “Yes, sir.”
“Practical experience beats practiced experience every day of the week. Mason has used what he knows in combat. He’s used it to survive. Laugh all you want. Call him a jerk all you want. But Mason is a survivor.
“Another thing we have to learn from this is expectations. It’s a cliché and you’ve heard it a million times, but you must expect the unexpected.”
He turned and pointed at me.
“Your instructor expected Mason to know one of the popular martial arts that deal with kicks, punches and joint locks. This is not what he knows. What did you train in, Mason?”
“Kapu Kuai Lua, sir.”
“Kapa Kuai Lua, or Lua, is a Hawaiian martial art pre-dating King Kamehameha. It involves bone breaking, muscle bruising and pressure point manipulation. There are no high kicks. While they learn elements of joint locking, it’s more to defeat the locks than to apply them. Is this right, son?”
I glanced at Mr. Pink, who was smiling.
“Yes, sir.”
“And I can guarantee that your instructor had never experienced Lua before. I mean, who else but Mason in this room would have thought to dig an elbow into his thigh and bruise his femur?”
Not a single hand raised.
Mr. Pink nodded.
“I said I had two things. There are actually three. One of the reasons none of you would have thought of bruising the man’s bone, aside from not knowing how, is that he’s a fellow human.” Mr. Pink rounded on me with a full-on glare. “Maybe when we recruited you all to this endeavor, you didn’t understand what we said.” He put his hands to his mouth and shouted. “We are about to be attacked by aliens, and the human race is under threat of extinction.”
He paced to the other end of the front.
“Did everyone hear that?”
The crowd gave a resounding
yes
.
He turned to me. “Did you hear that, Private Mason?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why do you keep hurting your fellow human beings instead of protecting them?”
I stared at him, at a loss for words.
“I asked you a question, son.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. Why’d you do it?”
I shook my head again, then said, “Because he pissed me off.” I didn’t have to repeat myself. You could have heard a pin drop in the great room.
“You hurt a fellow human because he pissed you off.” Mr. Pink moved straight at me. I backed up a few feet, but he only put his hand on my shoulder. “Listen, and listen close, everyone. This shit is real. The aliens are coming. They’re going to invade and kill most everyone on the planet. There’s literally nothing we can do right now. We’re struggling to figure out a way to defeat them, but the amount of information we know about the enemy is pathetic. We can’t fight ourselves before they even attack. We surely can’t fight each other once they attack. We have to stick together. This isn’t a matter of black, white, brown, red; this is about being human. We have this club, you see, and you are all members. To be a member, you have to be human. To be a member, you have to fight to save the human race. Nowhere in the club’s charter is there room to fight each other and to hurt each other.”
He let go of my shoulder, but I could still feel the weight of his hand.
“So fucking
stop
it. Get over it. This is not the world you knew. This is a new world, where the loss of even one of you could mean all of our doom. Do we understand each other?”
The crowd and I gave a resounding
YES, SIR
!
“Good. Then get this room changed around. We have more training to conduct. We need to be strong. We need to be ready. We need to be able save the planet, even if that means every one of us, me included, will die doing it. Because believe it or not, me and those like me were recruited for the same reasons you were recruited. To give us a second chance to make a difference.”
Then he walked out.
I stood there, mind reeling. Until this very moment, I hadn’t known what I’d felt for these people. They weren’t part of my unit. My unit was back in Afghanistan. They weren’t my friends. My friends were littered on the bomb-laden road of my past, scattered like ashes across all the good and bad things I’d ever done. They’d really been nobody to me. They’d meant nothing. I’d grown fond of Michelle only because she seemed worse than myself. In my hubris, I’d believed I had the power to save her, even when I couldn’t save myself.
Each and every man and woman sitting in their chairs believed a variation on this theme. It wasn’t something we’d done intentionally. But it was the result of committing oneself so entirely to undoing one’s very being. We’d tried to not only kill ourselves, but the ideas of ourselves we’d created by becoming warriors. Somewhere along the way each one of us had made a decision, took a turn, or done something which we felt was incontestably the worst thing anyone has ever done. And to punish ourselves, we’d tried to pay the ultimate price.
But were we really that horrible?
Had we become so irredeemable that we had no way to overcome the events that had brought us to this point?
Could we not save ourselves, and in doing so, save everyone else as well?
I realized that this was what Mr. Pink had been trying to say all along. It was the unifying force that tied each of us together. We no longer had our original units to return to. We’d denied ourselves any affiliation to them when we’d taken our own hands and tried to invoke destiny. Now we were part of a different unit. We were Task Force OMBRA. The unit had no regional or national identity. It was beyond red, white and blue. Instead, we had an idea—an idea which encompassed everyone in the great room beneath this broad Wyoming plain and imbued us with a sovereign responsibility, to be the absolute force to come together and fight for the survival of our species.