Gallo’s eyes were open, and his head twisted from side to side in the helmet as they carried him. His lips moved, but made no recognizable words. He was probably completely out of it on whatever painkillers the suit had injected into him.
They hauled him up the ramp. Four medics stood inside, wearing air masks. Logan and the others lowered Gallo to the floor. The medics swarmed around him, attaching sensors to his skin, and cutting through the suit.
“How is he?” Logan said.
“Prepare for dustoff,” said a voice from the speakers inside the hold. The motors began to rev up.
“We’ll fix him up and get him back to you,” the medic said. “Get clear, we have to go.”
Logan, Bairamov, and Heinrichs jogged down the ramp as the transport's thrusters fired up again, blowing away what little loose dirt still remained in the square.
Logan backed up to the nearest wall with Bairamov close behind him, then moved further away around the corner of the building as the rising dirt blasted into his visor, and the external temperature display on his HUD rose every higher in the heat from the thruster exhaust.
The transport rose slowly above the buildings, then swung around ninety degrees, and raced off toward the hills around the valley as fast as it had arrived. Even if any insurgents had managed to set up a SAM ready to launch since the transport flew in, it was heading back on a different course.
Volkov was still arguing with the mayor, but Logan couldn’t hear what they were saying, and didn’t really want to. It wouldn’t be anything good.
What would he do, if he was in charge of a place like this? If he opposed the insurgents, they’d kill him. If he opposed the Legion, they’d shout at him, maybe torture him, and then kill him. What good choices did the mayor have?
Finally, Volkov turned away. The mayor bowed, then strode back into the village hall, probably just glad to be safely in a place where Volkov couldn’t rip his head off with two power-assisted metal fists. Volkov stormed away to the middle of the square, with Poulin trailing behind him. Then he finally spoke over the net.
“Charlie team, pack up. We’re moving out. Rendezvous at the rally point.”
CHAPTER 10
Pyrenees, France
Logan grunted and hunched over as the fist hammered into his stomach. He raised his head and stared into Chief Corporal Beauchene’s lean, slightly wrinkled, scarlet face. The Chief leaned closer, his hand still balled into the fist that had just punched Logan again.
Logan could smell the cloud of cheap, hoppy beer stench that oozed from Beauchene’s mouth whenever he came too close. The instructor seemed to start drinking the cheap Legion beer before breakfast, and continue on and off until he climbed into bed late at night.
But, somehow, he never seemed to grow drunk, just vicious and angry.
Centuries ago, so they said, Legion officers had been known to beat misbehaving recruits to death, to encourage the others. Rumours among the other recruits in Logan’s section said that Beauchene had been a serial killer in his civilian life, before he was sent to the Legion to atone for his crimes, and the man was frustrated that he was only allowed to beat the recruits these days. Not kill them.
But they were probably making that up.
Probably.
“What worthless waste of breath has Rousseau sent me this time?” Beauchene yelled, with his lips so close to Logan’s ears that the shout almost deafened him.
Beauchene pointed along the line of recruits who were standing to attention in the parade ground beside Logan, past the weather-beaten white walls of the centuries-old barracks building, and down the steep hill toward the three-metre wall that surrounded the camp.
“Run to the wall, and we’ll see if you can remember to salute properly when you get back.”
Then he nodded toward the smaller, dark-skinned man standing at Logan’s side. “You too, Desoto. You should be keeping your team-mate in line. If he fucks up in combat, you’ll be dead with him.”
Logan saluted, and turned toward the fence.
He jogged toward it, then accelerated to a run. He was used to this now. The run down to the wall was easy, he could just let gravity pull him toward itl, and try to stay upright on the loose dirt. But his legs would be jelly by the time he reached the parade ground again on the way up.
“I hate all you foreign bastards,” Beauchene yelled at the other recruits. “You aren’t worthy to scrub a Frenchman’s ass.”
Logan could hear Desoto’s gasping breath behind him, and mutterings that he was sure must be Spanish swearwords.
The first words Beauchene had said to the new recruits as they lined up on the parade ground on their first day were “Si vous parlez Français, asseyez-vous.”
Logan had learned enough French to get by during his three years in the ZUS. He followed the order, and sat. Most of the other recruits just stood there, looking at him. It was an easy way to determine who really understood some French, and who didn’t.
So the instructors had teamed him up with this smiling, non-French-speaking Spaniard who’d somehow found his way across the border wall to France, then volunteered for a life of adventure in the Legion.
And found more than he’d bargained for.
Desoto had explained that he'd learned English by listening illegally to the radio broadcasts that reached Spain from the BBC propaganda stations extolling the virtues of England, and encouraging the people of Europe to rise up and join them; one of the ways the politicos got around the lack of communication channels between England and France.
The people never did rise up, of course, and most likely never would, but Desoto had learned enough of the language that way that he could try to understand Logan’s translations from the French. But Logan often wondered how much the Spaniard really understood of what the instructors told them.
Logan dug the heels of his boots down into the grass as he approached the wall, then slid to a stop. He slapped the wall with his hand, then turned around, and began to run back up the hill just as Desoto reached the wall. His leg muscles strained with the effort of pushing his body uphill, and his breathing grew deeper and faster.
Logan’s first week as a Legion recruit wasn’t going as well as he might have hoped. But it was still less painful, and a little better fed, than the time he’d spent in prison.
And, at least for now, he still had his head. Even if his lip was cracked from Sergeant Dubois punching him when he was a little too late translating orders from French into something Desoto could understand.
“You’ve got what it takes to be a success in the Legion,” Rousseau had said, just before the cops led Logan out of the prison room, to load him into the back of a van to be delivered to the Legion. “But, flunk out, and you’ll be back here the next day. Don’t make me regret this decision.”
But did Logan really have it?
He’d thought he was fit in the ZUS, but the Legion was showing him how little he knew. He might not even live to see the end of the course at this rate. Still, anything had to be better than just sitting in that cell, waiting to be executed.
He’d heard that the English government would sometimes take criminals who’d committed serious crimes, and offer them a place in the Marines instead of a long jail term or a noose.
Dad had told him the Americans got most of their Marines that way, but he’d been complaining for years about ‘the bloody yanks’, so who knew what was true, and what he just made up so he would have something to complain about?
Either way, the French must have had the same idea. As Rousseau had said, killing him was a waste if he could be made to do something useful for France instead.
And what better place than prison to find men who were used to lives of violence, and had few qualms about using it to achieve their ends? He’d met plenty of such men in the ZUS, where power and wealth was all that mattered, and no-one would have had any qualms about hurting him for their benefit, or entertainment. Or the girls he was protecting.
T
o the rich and powerful, they were just disposable toys.
He was gasping for breath by the time his boots stomped up the last few metres of the hill, past the side of the barracks, and onto the parade ground. He leaned against the flag pole and bent forward, holding his aching belly, and sucking in air as fast as he could.
He wiped the swear from his brow, and felt his face cooling in the mountain air now he was no longer running. Then stumbled on, back to rejoin the line of recruits.
“Garde à vous!” Beauchene yelled.
Logan moved smartly to attention this time. He’d learned what that meant, and he didn’t need to be punched again this morning. Even Desoto knew that much French after his first few hours of training, and stood at attention beside him as he returned, chest still heaving as his body recovered from the run.
The Legion called it The Farm. But it didn’t much look like one. Just a couple of low concrete buildings set on the side of a shallow valley, surrounded by a three-metre-tall wall with guards at the gates and drones in the sky, in case any of recruits decided they’d like to desert before they even finished training.
They might more accurately have called it The Prison, but, despite the hard beds and freezing river water in the shower block, it was more comfortable than the prisons Logan had been incarcerated in so far.
“The Legion is now your homeland,” Beauchene told them. “Wherever pile of shit you maggots may have crawled out of, you are here now to die for the glory of France, so women will weep at your heroic deaths, and men will write rousing songs to remember you by. And I expect every one of you bastards to send ten of the other bastards to Hell first, or I will personally fight my way down there to kick your bloody face in.”
And the Legion might as well be their homeland, because none of them were going home any time soon. Except for the few who had volunteered to join as free men, who could still ‘go civil’ and walk out the gates.
But that walk, admitting that you just weren't tough enough, and didn't have what it took to become a Legionnaire, might take more courage than staying the course.
Farm or not, the instructors certainly behaved like animals, though few were as vicious as Beauchene. But the rapid and rough punishment quickly separated out those who couldn’t handle the tough, brutal life of a Legionnaire, and sent them home without wasting time.
They’d told Logan when he arrived that only one in four made it through training to be awarded the famous white cap of a Legionnaire. And he wasn’t the only man in The Farm whose future might depend on winning that hat. It seemed Rousseau had made a hobby of scouring the prisons of France, looking for ‘the right men’ for his Legion.
Adamski had told a similar tale late at night in the barracks, as the recruits whispered their life stories to each other in the darkness. He’d broken into some aristo’s house in Marseilles, trying to find something to sell to buy food and drink while he lived rough on the streets after jumping ship from the Russian Navy, then swimming to the shores of France. He was clearing out the jewels piled in the safe and thinking of how many fancy meals they would buy, when the cops grabbed him.
The aristo turned out to be Rousseau’s nephew, and Rousseau informed Adamski that he could spend twenty years in jail, or five in the Legion. And assured him that the Legion had much better food.
Either the General had an enormous family with relatives all over France, or he wasn’t being entirely honest with the truth.
Regardless, Rousseau had managed to talk both of them into signing away the next five years of their lives to the Legion. Volunteering to join the toughest sons of bitches in the French military, always the first to be sent in to the worst battles in French space, and the last brought home. Often, in bags.
And it was too late to change their minds now.
With the muscles and stamina he’d built up in Section 19, Logan would have flown through the physical training. But the flics had starved and beaten that out of him in prison.
Now he was rebuilding his body all over again. He’d stuffed himself with as much food as he could since leaving his cell, as he worked his way through the Legion recruitment system, and had expected he'd be able to continue at The Farm. But he was lucky if he had more than five minutes to wolf down whatever mass of goop the cooks slapped on his plate each day, no matter how unappetizing it might be. Breakfast was the best meal of the day, and that was just a slice of bread and a cup of coffee.
He thought many times about breaking into the kitchen at night, and making a proper meal for himself. He dreamed of the delights he’d cook from the contents of the Legion freezers. Meat, vegetables, cakes, meals like the ones the toffs ate back home. He studied the cheap locks on the doors and windows every day he passed by. After his years in the ZUS, they wouldn’t provide the slightest protection against his skills.
But then Johnson broke into the Officer’s Mess one night, and Dubois caught him slumped in a corner beside the garbage disposal with a fat belly, and chocolate and croissant crumbs smeared across his face around a wide smile.
The instructors called all the recruits to the parade ground, and forced Johnson to eat every croissant they could find in the Mess, until he threw up. No-one seemed quite sure whether it was a punishment or a reward, but Johnson still had a smirk on his face at the end. At least until the instructors gave him a good beating afterwards.
That didn’t look much like fun.
Logan had asked Adamski one time about his experience in the Russian Navy, as he seemed to be one of the few who’d taken to the Legion life with a smile on his face. Even Chief Beauchene didn’t seem to phase him, though, with Adamski’s prior experience of military life, he rarely screwed up, and rarely got hit.
“Russian Navy was worse,” Adamski had said, in his tortured French. “There are no whips here. No-one gets thrown into sea for screwing up. This is like holiday in comparison.” Then he smirked, and nudged Logan ‘s side. “Except less vodka.”
Perhaps it was.
If your idea of a holiday consisted of non-stop cleaning, running, climbing, press-ups, and sit-ups. Logan had expected the Legion to teach him to fight like a soldier, to use military weapons, and military tactics. They issued him a rifle soon after he arrived, but an old one, an ancient gunpowder weapon with no ammunition, that had probably last been fired a century ago.
The rifle was just another weight for him to have to haul around everywhere he went, and something else to keep a close eye on to ensure no-one walked off with it. At best, that would have left him doing press-ups non-stop until someone found it. At worst… a sore and bloody neck.
For the first few weeks, the instructors mostly seemed to spend their time trying to beat him down and wear him out, with constant chores and kilometre after kilometre of runs on little sleep and little food. The few days when the recruits were allowed to get to bed early, expecting to collapse into eight hours of deep sleep, were just another form of punishment.
They’d be woken by instructors yelling and banging clubs on garbage-can lids for a midnight run, or for another surprise inspection at two in the morning, where the instructors would find an excuse for every man to fail and spent the rest of the night cleaning and reorganizing his bed and kit.
By the third week, all Logan dreamed about in the few hours of rest he managed to claim each night were eating a good meal and getting a proper night’s sleep.
But he never did.
And the slightest mistake due to that lack of sleep would be rewarded with a sharp punch to the chest or a club across his back, and another fifty press-ups, or a run to the wall and back. Every night he went to sleep convinced he would finally drop out the next morning, but, every morning, he remembered that would mean a return to his cell, for just long enough for them to prepare to chop off his head. Every time he imagined his head lying in the metal bucket, his dying eyes staring up at the stump of his neck as it spurted blood, he was more determined to see The Farm through to the end.
After a month,
when half the recruits had already dropped out and taken the long walk through the gates back to prison or civilian life, the survivors began to study something that almost resembled the kind of training he’d expected, beginning with knife fighting and unarmed combat.
That day in the gym, Beauchene asked who knew how to fight. Logan should have known better than to put up his hand, but his street fights in Paris had taught him how to punch and dodge. And he’d killed a man with his bare hands.
Besides, he’d appreciate a chance to punch Beauchene for a change. Even if he got punched a few times in return.
Beauchene motioned for Logan to attack him.
The instructor didn’t even put up his fists, but just stood in the middle of the gym with his hands at his sides, and a smile on his face.
That was when Logan began to wonder whether he’d made a mistake. Beauchene wouldn’t do that if he expected to get hit. But there was no backing out now. Logan feigned a punch with his right hand, then dodged left and swung a punch from that side. If he was just fast enough...
Beauchene dodged the blow, punched him in the face, and kicked his legs out from under him.
Logan slammed down on the floor, with his mouth full of the coppery taste of his own blood. Before he could get up, Beauchene was kicking him in the stomach. Logan grabbed Beauchene’s foot, and tried to pull it aside, to knock the man off balance so he’d fall.
Beauchene twisted his foot against Logan’s thumb, pulled it free, and swung the boot down on Logan’s hand. Logan grabbed for the hand as it pounded with thudding pain beneath Beauchene’s weight, and lay there, grimacing, as Beauchene lectured the other recruits.
“Some of you think you’re hard men. Some of you think you’re tough because you killed someone. Well, I can tell you now, what worked on some aristo with his dick hanging out in Paris won’t work on me, or on the battlefield. You pull that street crap here, and I will kick the shit out of your worthless ass, you understand? A Legionnaire trains as he fights, and he fights as he trains. What you learn about losing here, you won’t have to learn the hard way, in combat.”
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