by Tom Clancy
As well she should. When the bird finished its lazy trip and came down, the black girl had a two-minuteand-forty-eight-second flight to her credit. That wasn’t going to be an easy time to beat.
They watched eight more throwers, none of whom came within thirty seconds of the third girl, then Tyrone had to go and warm up for his own throw. His mouth was a desert, his bowels churned, and he was breathing too fast. This ought not to be scary, it was something he did every day the weather was good, throw his boomerang, dozens of times. But there weren’t several hundred people watching him practice, and today he only got one throw that counted.
Just let me break two minutes, he thought, as he approached the throwing circle. Two minutes won’t win, but I won’t be last, and I won’t feel like a fool. Two minutes, okay?
He pulled a little commercial pixie dust from his pocket and rubbed it between his left thumb and first two fingers, letting it fall to check the wind direction. The glittery dust sparkled as it fell and showed him that the wind had shifted a hair toward the north but still was mostly northeast. He dropped the rest of the dust, pulled his stopwatch and held it in his left hand, and took a good grip on the Möller with his right. He took three deep breaths, exhaling slowly, then nodded at the judge next to the ring. If he stepped out, he’d be disqualified. The judge nodded back, raised his own stopwatch.
Go, Tyrone.
He took another deep breath, one step, leaned, snapped his wrist, and put as much shoulder into it as he thought the bird could stand. He was careful to make sure it didn’t lay over to the right, and he put it as close to forty-five degrees as he could.
He clicked the stopwatch.
Two minutes and forty-one seconds later, his bird gave it up. He caught it safe, double-handed clap, and that was that.
Tyrone grinned. There were still a dozen more throwers to go, but he had beaten his own personal record by more than thirty seconds, and he was in second place. No matter what happened, he was happy with that throw.
As Tyrone started back toward where Jimmy Joe waited, the black girl who was in first came over. She was athletic looking, muscular in a T-shirt and bike shorts and soccer shoes, a little plain. Not in the dropdead-beautiful class that Bella had been in. And still was in.
“Nice throw,” she said. “You‘da leaned a little more to your left, you’da gotten another ten, twelve seconds out of the flight and beat me.”
“You think?”
“Sure. The Möller’ll do six minutes, so they say. I’ve thrown a three minute fifty-one second in practice. Hi, I’m Nadine Harris.”
“Tyrone Howard.”
“Where you from, Ty?”
“Here. Washington.”
“Hey, really? Me, too. Just moved here from Boston. I go to Eisenhower Middle. Or I will go next week.”
Tyrone stared at her. “No feek?”
“Nope. You heard of it?”
“I go there.”
“Wow! What are the chances of that? Hey, maybe we can throw together sometime! Last school I was at, nobody else was a player.”
“I hear that. Exemplary. Let me give you my e-mail address.”
When Tyrone got back to where Jimmy Joe stood, his friend was looking around on the ground. “Lose something, white boy?”
“Oh, I was just looking for a big stick.”
“A big stick?”
“Yeah, slip, for you. To help keep the women away.” He waved in the direction of the departing black girl, pretending to be hitting at her with an imaginary stick.
“Ah, shut it down, dip, she’s just a player is all!”
“I can see that.”
“You spend too much time in the pervo rooms, JJ. Get a life.”
“Why should I? Yours is so much more fun.”
Tyrone swatted at him, but his friend danced away. He moved pretty fast for such a little creep.
Later, when the juniors were done, Tyrone watched the portable computer sign they’d set up to flash the results. Unofficially, he already knew he was third. Some guy from Puerto Rico had slipped in between him and Nadine with a time three lousy seconds longer than Tyrone’s. Even so, third out of thirty-four at a national competition, and with a new PR, that wasn’t bad. He’d made the U.S. team.
The sign started to blink, then it went blank. A second later, an image of some kind of flag appeared, waving in a VR breeze.
Tyrone glanced at his friend. “Hacker got ’em. Why don’t you go and offer to fix it?”
Jimmy Joe’s eyes lit up. “You think?”
Tyrone laughed.
Saturday, April 2nd
Las Vegas, Nevada
“Got a problem, Colonel,” Fernandez said.
They were at the staging area, getting the trucks loaded for the drive into the desert. A dozen troops, men and women, hauled gear and made ready to begin the run.
“We haven’t even made first contact with the enemy yet, Sergeant. Not the local police, is it?”
Sometimes they called the locals in, sometimes not, depending on the situation. This time, there weren’t any cops close enough to the target’s location to worry about, and the Clark County Sheriff’s Department didn’t need to know because it was out of their jurisdiction by a long way.
Fernandez shrugged. “It’s the computer. Take a look.”
Howard drifted over to the tac-comp, where a tech named Jeter sat and cursed under his breath.
“It appears to be the Union Jack,” Howard observed.
“Yes, sir,” Jeter said. “It is. It’s supposed to be the sitrep feed from Big Squint, with a three-dee layout of the target’s location.” Jeter thumped the monitor with one hand. “This is what happens when you buy your electronics wholesale from the damned New Zealanders, begging your pardon, sir.”
Howard grinned. “I trust you to clear it up before we depart.”
“Yes, sir.”
Howard looked away, took a deep breath and let it out. He looked at his watch. He wondered how Tyrone had done at the boomerang competition. He was tempted to call, but he knew better. Shielded com or not, it was unwise to give away your position in a tactical situation and not a good habit to get into. He’d call his son when they got this target acquired and neutralized. He was a good kid, Tyrone, but he was also a teenager. Life was getting complicated for the boy, and it wasn’t going to get any easier. How could a father protect his son from that? He couldn’t, and that was painful. The days when Daddy was all-knowing and all-wise were gone. He’d never given it much thought, but now it was staring him in the face: His son was growing up, changing, and if he wanted to maintain contact with him, he was going to have to change, too. That was a strange feeling.
“Got it,” Jeter said. “We’re back on track.”
Worry about child rearing later, John. Keep your mind on the business at hand.
“Good. Carry on.”
5
Saturday, April 2nd
London, England
Toni Fiorella climbed the narrow, creaky stairs toward the second floor of the four-story walk-up. The place she wanted was on that floor, over a small appliance shop in an area called Clapham, between a brick-red Indian tandoori restaurant and a charity shop with boarded-up plywood windows. The buildings and the area in general were run-down. Not as bad as the worst of the Bronx, maybe, but not a place you’d want to take your old granny for a stroll after dark. Unless your granny was maybe a dope dealer and armed.
As she neared the top, Toni caught the odor of sweat, stale and fresh.
The heavy wooden door was unlocked.
Inside were fifteen or sixteen men and five women, all dressed in dark sweatpants, athletic shoes, and white T-shirts. The T-shirts had a black and white logo on the back, with a smaller matching version over the left breast: A Javanese wavy-bladed dagger—a kris—set at about a thirty-degree horizontal angle, bounded on the top and bottom by the words Pentjak Silat.
The twenty-odd people were doing djurus.
Toni grinned. The
forms weren’t the same as hers, since this version of the Indonesian martial art was not Serak but a variation of Tjikalong, which was a western Javanese style, but it looked similar enough to hers that there was no mistaking the djurus—the forms—for karate kata.
The school itself was hardly impressive, nothing as nice as the FBI gyms at home. The ceiling was high, maybe fifteen feet. The floor was dark wood, old and worn but clean. Folded in one corner of the large room were fraying blue hardfoam mats that also showed much wear, plus a couple of heavy punching bags wrapped in layers of duct tape. A brown wooden door had upon it a sign that indicated it led to a bathroom—a loo, it was called over here. Exposed pipes, for water or heat or whatever, ran across the wall in back about ten feet up, and the metal had been painted alternating colors, red, white, and blue. A large roof support in the middle of the floor wore what looked like an old mattress wrapped around it and held tight with half a dozen red and blue bungee cords. A double row of fluorescent lights graced the ceiling. An exhaust fan whirred in one of the windows, blowing the odor of sweat into the evening.
It was your basic large workout room, no frills.
A tall man dressed the same as the students walked around, observing their form, correcting stances, and offering praise when it was merited. He was not quite muscular enough to be a bodybuilder, but he was broadshouldered and narrow-hipped. He had short gray hair with some brown left in it. He wore aviator-style glasses. A first look might say mid-thirties, but Toni guessed he was in his early fifties, based on his hands and the smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
“Hello,” he said in a clipped British tone. “May I help you?”
“Hello. I’m Toni Fiorella. I called earlier?”
“Ah, yes, the American visitor. Welcome! I’m Carl Stewart, and these are my students.” He waved at the assembly. “We’re just about to finish with djurus.”
“Don’t let me get in the way. I’ll just stand and watch, if that’s all right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thank you, Guru.” Toni moved to stand next to the stack of mats.
“All right, then,” Stewart said to the class. “Any questions about the djurus?”
A few hands went up. Stewart answered the queries about various moves from the forms. He was patient, not condescending, and he would demonstrate the correct move to show how it was done.
He was smooth, balanced, tight. In silat, the ability to perform a djuru precisely wasn’t always an indication of fighting ability, but you could tell a lot about a person by watching them move.
Carl Stewart moved as well as anybody Toni had ever seen. And she had seen more than a few fighters over the years.
Interesting.
For the next half hour or so, Stewart worked on self-defense applications from the forms, showing how they would apply against an attacker, then putting the students into pairs to practice. There weren’t any belts to denote rank, same as in most silat styles, but it was obvious after a few minutes who were the advanced students and who were the beginners.
This was her weakness, Toni knew. She’d had plenty of advanced training from her guru—as the Indonesians called their teachers—but she hadn’t spent much time in group situations, either as a student or an instructor. Guru had always told her she needed to teach to get the full benefit of silat. She had only just begun that.
After about thirty minutes, Stewart put the advanced students into a series of controlled semi-free style matchups. One student would be the attacker, the other the defender. He allowed the attackers to throw full power punches and kicks, but only to the chest or thigh, where a missed block would merely be painful instead of seriously damaging.
She watched as the current pair of students faced each other. The defender was a thin man with long black hair, the attacker a short and squat red-haired fellow. The thin man turned so his right side was toward the attacker, his feet wide in a deep, open stance; his left hand was high, by his face, the other hand low, to cover his groin.
Red tapped his right fist, to show that would be his attacking weapon. They stood about six feet apart, and they circled each other slowly.
Red lunged, shot a fist at the center of Thin’s chest. Thin pivoted slightly, did a scoop block and a backfist with his right hand, then followed up with a grab and sapu, a sweep, that upended Red and put him on the floor.
Not bad.
Red came up, gave Thin a fist-in-the-palm salute, and they reversed roles.
Thin punched. Red ducked under the punch, put his right shoulder into Thin’s belly, stepped through and biset, a heel-drag, and took Thin to the floor.
Not bad at all. These would be the two senior students, Toni guessed.
Stewart waved the students off. Then he looked at Toni. “We have an American silat practitioner with us today, class. Perhaps she’d like to demonstrate how her style works?”
Toni smiled. She’d half expected this. Since she was in jeans and running shoes and a short-sleeved cotton pullover, she was dressed to move. “Sure,” she said.
“Joseph, if you would?” Stewart nodded at Red. “Joseph is my senior student.”
Toni nodded and gave Stewart, then Red, the fist-inpalm bow. Relaxed, hands low.
Red circled to her left. She did a back cross-step, turned to follow him.
Red lunged, bracing his right punch with his left hand, set up for the wipe if she blocked.
Toni dropped to the floor, caught Red in the belly with a short left-thrust kick, hooked her right foot behind his right knee, and thrust with her left again.
Red went over backward as Toni rolled up and did a heel scoop—a hackey-sack kick over his head, slapping it with her left hand to show the connection.
Red waited to see if she was done and, when she stepped back to show she was, came up with a big grin. “Nice move!”
Stewart also wore a smile. Her move had been flashy, but it had worked against his senior student, so he ought to be impressed.
“Very good, Ms. Fiorella.”
“Toni, please, Guru.”
“Mightn’t I ask if you would feel up to performing kembangan?”
Toni nodded. Of course. Kembangan was the “flower dance” and, unlike forms or kata in most martial arts, was a spontaneous expression of a silat player’s art, nothing prearranged. An expert never did the same form twice. Unlike buah, the full-speed and full-power dance, kembangan softened the moves, using the open hands more than fists, and turned the motions into a dance suitable for demonstrations, weddings, and social gatherings.
If you really wanted to see how good a silat player was, you watched them do kembangan. In the old days, when a fight was imminent but the contestants didn’t want to maim or kill each other, they would sometimes offer each other kembangan instead of actual combat. Experts could recognize who would have won the fight by the skill they displayed during the dance, and there would be no need to come to blows. If you were defeated in kembangan, you apologized or made right whatever the problem was, and that was that. It would be dishonorable to continue against an opponent of much lesser skill, and foolish to challenge one who was obviously much better. Of course, the best dancers would sometimes deliberately put small errors into their routines to lull an opponent into thinking they were less skillful than they actually were. In kembangan competitions, only if the players considered each other to be of like abilities did the game progress to sweeps or strikes.
Toni took a deep breath, allowed it to escape softly. She made a full, formal bow to the guru, did another cleansing breath, then a third, and began.
There were days when you were off and days when you were on. Today, her flow was good, she felt the energy coursing through her, and she knew she could do a clean dance without major mistakes. Halfway through, she deliberately misstepped a hair, allowed her balance to drift slightly off before she recovered.
One did not wish to embarrass the guru in charge of a school one visited by being perfect. It might make him look
bad in front of his students, and that was impolite.
A minute was enough. She finished the dance, bowed again. It was a great one, she knew, one of her best. Her guru would be proud.
The class broke into spontaneous applause.
Toni flushed, embarrassed.
Stewart smiled at her. “Beautiful. An outstanding kembangan. Thank you . . . Guru.”
Toni gave him a short nod. He acknowledged her skill by calling her “teacher.” And now she was curious. It was a bit forward, but she said, “I would be pleased to enjoy your kembangan, Guru.”
The students went quiet. It wasn’t a direct challenge, but there was a broad hint: I showed you mine, now show me yours.
He smiled wider. “Of course.”
He offered her a formal bow, different than hers but similar in intent, cleared his wind and mind, and began. Stewart’s best days would be behind him. At fifty, she knew he would be past his physical peak, on the downhill slide. That was the nature of human physiology. His knowledge might be greater, but his body would be half a step behind, and steadily, if slowly, losing ground. Her own guru had been amazing, but she’d been an old woman when Toni started, and there were places she could no longer go. Stewart was still in good shape to look at, and certainly better shape than most men his age, but he would have lost a couple of steps by now. She should have made a couple more mistakes in her dance, she thought.
With Stewart’s first series of moves, Toni realized she was wrong.
If you play decent guitar and you see a tape of Segovia practicing, it makes you want to cry because you know you’ll never be that good.
Stewart was the martial artist equivalent of Segovia.
Toni watched, mesmerized. The man moved as if he had no bones, as if he was a drop of hot oil rolling down a clean glass window—smooth, effortless, and utterly amazing. She had never seen anybody perform kembangan as well.