by Scott McEwen
Wyatt could hear Hallsy tempting him to give in, “Brother, just grab the board and you’re done. Make it easy on yourself.…”
But the kid wouldn’t.
The seriousness of the situation attracted even the attention of the Old Man, who came down from the porch of the Mess Hall and walked out on the beach to join the rest of Group-C.
“Okay. Listen up,” he said. “We have not yet assigned swim buddies, but that boy is having trouble. He’s already swum four miles, nearly, at his point. He’s passed his swim test. If you want this boy to continue in Group-C, I’m going to let you help him to shore.”
Wyatt scrambled up to his feet. A hand grabbed his arm, holding him back.
“Wait,” Hud said. “He can barely swim. He should be cut. He’s a liability to all of us. He’ll slow us down.”
Wyatt looked to the Old Man for help.
“Your Blue has a point,” the Old Man said. “You both need to figure out what it means if you help.”
Hud held firm to Wyatt’s arm. “It sucks, but let him wash out now. It’s the hard choice but the right choice.”
Wyatt glanced out. Out in the water, Samy thrashed like a fish on a line.
Wyatt nodded. “You’re right. He’ll slow us down.”
Hud released his grip.
Wyatt waited a beat. “But so will I at times.” He sprinted down the length of the dock and dove in, swimming as hard and fast as he could.
He reached Hallsy’s board but could not see Samy. Wyatt dove down and groped for Samy, who was hovering under the surface, gripping his cramped leg, trying to straighten it. He looped his arms under Samy’s chest and pulled him up. They breached the surface.
“Let go of me! I ain’t done.”
“He’s a camper,” Hallsy called down from his board. “He can help you. It’s okay.”
Samy seemed to process, nod, and sink again. Wyatt kicked and tugged, and dragged the big frozen boy, who was stiff and still cramping, back to the beach. Wyatt felt another body beside him in the water, helping to pull Samy in to shore. Dolly.
Others joined, including Hud. They carried Samy up the beach and plopped him in the sand. Mackenzie brought him a warming blanket and helped straighten his leg and stretch out the cramp. The boy’s body had turned blue, his lips a deep shade of purple.
“You have five minutes to rest,” Hallsy said as he walked down the length of the dock carrying the paddleboard.
The Group-C members congregated in the sand. Wyatt nodded at Dolly. “Thanks.”
“Hud was right. Next time you want to play hero, think of the group first.” Dolly’s reaction surprised Wyatt.
She scowled. “Failure like that on a mission will get us all killed. He needed to get himself there.”
“He just needed a little push at the end,” Wyatt said.
“This is day one. If he can’t do it now, you think he’ll be ready for day ninety, when things really get hard? You think you’re helping, but you just bought that kid more hurt. And us too.” Dolly turned and walked down the beach to where Hud was waiting. They shared a water bottle.
“Who cares?” Wyatt heard Hud say to Dolly, still glaring at him. “They’ll both be gone soon.”
* * *
“Your swim buddy is also your land buddy and your air buddy and your everything buddy. Your swim buddy is not just your friend, not just your family, your swim buddy is far more important to you,” the Old Man said. “Your swim buddy is you in another body. You are responsible for each other and you will look out for each other. If your swim buddy screws up, that means you screwed up. If they get lost, you get lost. You don’t have to like who you are paired with, you have to love them like your life depends on it. Because it does.”
Hud raised his hand. “What if your swim buddy quits?”
“No one likes to see that happen, but it does and will. If your swim buddy quits, one of the staff will pair you with someone else.”
The Old Man ended his speech by assigning everyone a buddy. And as he could have guessed, Wyatt was paired with Samy.
Hud was right about Samy slowing him down. After five minutes of rest, Samy was still shaking from the cold and unable to jog. So Wyatt had to help the big kid up to the top of the Caldera and back. They came in last and exhausted. The punishment this time was fifteen up-downs before lunch. Wyatt checked the clock as they filed into the Mess Hall. At the start of the morning, twenty-five Group-C candidates had splashed into the water. It wasn’t quite noon, and only eighteen were left.
Mum’s warm lunch was supposed to offer reprieve—fried fish, cornbread, soup, and salad. Some kids just stared at the plates, zombified. Faces in a hover, jaws moving, forks shoveling, mouths slurping and gobbling, but no one speaking … lunch at Valor.
Wyatt found himself at a table with Ebbie, Sanders, and Annika. Not that he was paying attention. He was facedown in his soup when he heard a chair pull up beside him. Samy plopped down across from Wyatt. His skin had returned from bluish to light brown. Samy didn’t say anything, just held up a fist for a bump. It hovered. A big-ass fist, brown and scaly.
Wyatt’s eyes shifted over to Dolly, who sat across the room with her sister, Cass, and Hud and Rory. Rory had been part of Group-B, but after the bomb fiasco was sent back to Group-C. She’d have to complete the summer with them if she wanted to progress. She’d, of course, known Dolly and Hud from the previous summer and glommed on to them. Wyatt could feel alliances forming that went beyond swim buddies. So be it, he thought, and reached out to tap Samy’s fist. Ebbie and Annika followed suit.
The big kid smiled. “Damn, boy,” he said. “These people should know camels can’t swim. But they can eat. Watch.” He picked up a fish fillet the size of the sole of a shoe. He held it up between his two huge fingers and dropped it into his mouth. The entire thing. He pounded his chest as he chewed. “That’s how a camel do,” he said in his strange ghetto patois. And then Samy laughed, clapping at the table, yelling, “Yeah, baby. This gonna be fun!”
* * *
Lunch was too short. A quick thirty minutes and they were back out in the water. Swimming and running. Calisthenics. Swimming and running. Calisthenics. And repeat.
The last exercise of the first day was an hour of treading water. Wyatt was sure Samy would not pass this test. But as they were now swim buddies, Wyatt’s fear was that Samy would take him down too.
As before, they stepped off the dock into the deep water. The big Arab kid said, “Don’t worry, boy, I gotchu.” Wyatt found himself cracking a smile.
In they went, Samy immediately struggling for the surface, kicking like he was running to stay afloat, frantically moving his hands, working very hard to keep his face above water.
“Relax,” Wyatt said. “You can’t swim when you’re tight. Don’t try to kick so hard. Slow your arms and legs down, less motion, go easy and you’ll do better.”
Samy tried this and at first he sank faster, but after practice and some more pointers modifying his movement, he caught the hang of it. Samy kept his lips above the surface, trying to control his dog-paddling. “Guess camels can learn to swim.”
The hour passed slowly. The challenge for everyone was not the swimming but the cold. Every camper was shivering violently when they climbed up onto the dock.
“Who wants a fire?” asked Cass.
Teeth chattering, everyone nodded.
“Okay, then, follow me.” Cass lead the wet campers into the woods to a giant spruce, half-fallen. It had died some years ago and been blown over in a storm but lay on its side, sun bleached and silver. Cass lopped the limbs and the campers dragged them back to the fire pit. She sawed the massive tree into billets, splitting the logs into firewood that lit easily with a little kindling and a match. Crackling flames licked up into the dried wood and roared to life.
Dinner was served by the fire, bread and a hearty stew. When all had eaten, the Old Man addressed the campers, “Congratulations to all of you for having endured day one of physical
training. I know that for many, this day comes as a shock and may be, by some measure, one of the hardest of your life. The days will only get more difficult. But you’ll get better at difficult.”
CHAPTER 13
October 2015
The Royal Panamanian Hotel and Casino, Monaco
At eighty, Pablo Gutierrez couldn’t just drink, he could drrrrriiinnnnnk. Head down, little shot glass to his purple old-man lips, and knock it back. Again and again. He’d sit at the bar mid-morning ’til pre-dawn the next day, slinging back poison with the kind of stamina that would make even young men and women wilt. They’d wind up facedown, lips hanging on to the bar, while Pablo swiveled on his barstool like a kid at a soda fountain. Not that this ability to drink should have surprised, or impressed, anyone. Pablo had spent enough time in Russia, with real Soviets, to learn how to drink like one.
Pablo had fled Honduras for Russia, then part of the Soviet Union, in the late ’80s. Like most Central American goons, Pablo was feeling the squeeze when the U.S. started cleaning house in the region. He got out just in time, a few months before his old buddy Manuel “Pineapple Face” Noriega was scooped up and brought to Miami to finish out his life taming cockroaches in a federal prison.
Man, that Ronald Reagan knew how to lay his whip down, Pablo thought and raised a glass in the Gipper’s honor. Then he raised another glass to honor Lady Luck, who had helped him escape so many tight spots. Salud.
Yes, Pablo had lived a charmed life. In the years after the Colonel’s disappearance—a mystery Pablo had spent a good amount of time and effort trying to solve—Pablo had been blessed with good times and even better fortune. He’d syphoned tens of millions of dollars from the pockets of impoverished peoples while carrying on the Colonel’s legacy of laying waste, an activity Pablo enjoyed almost as much as the Colonel himself. But Pablo never really had an interest in politics or regional power, and if he was honest, he never even really liked Central America. It was too humid, and the guys were too macho, too temperamental, like Latin dance-fighters all dressed up and looking for a salsa brawl. And the women were brunettes. Pablo liked blondes, and not bottle-blondes—though they’d do in a pinch; he preferred real, live blondes. Yes, truth be told, Pablo was destined to leave the region and go north.
So when things got hot and Ronnie Reagan came a-knockin’, Pablo skipped town and found work, protection, and happiness as a mercenary for elite members of the KGB. After the fall of the Soviet Union, those same guys would later form the core of Russia’s oligarch class. When that happened, Pablo traded his fatigues for a slick suit and became the guy you didn’t want to see if you ran afoul of a newly minted Russian billionaire. As his old KGB buddies grew preposterously wealthy and began collecting yachts, apartments in New York, and backyard zoos with zebras and gazelles, their attitude toward Pablo changed. He became their lackey, their errand boy. Plus, roughing guys up with fists and car batteries became less necessary when you could pummel them with bundles of rubles.
Pablo knew all this, but he didn’t care. He was making loads of money, got to assassinate hombres here and there, and was surrounded by blond women. Only problem was, most of the women were a foot taller than he was. Guess you can’t have it all.
By his early seventies, the former paramilitary thug was getting mildly arthritic and sick of craning his neck up at all the pretty young girls. So he looked for his next gig, and this time he decided to go legit … or something like legit. Pablo had socked away enough money and favors that he was able to leave Russia amicably and retire in style in Monaco, where he bought up a cozy little casino.
The Royal Panamanian Hotel and Casino catered almost exclusively to Russians and criminals, who were often one and the same. Pablo was in scumbag heaven. Rich and getting richer. Fat and getting fatter. Currently drunk and getting drunker. And, as a bonus, he even got to rough up a harmless tourist now and again. La buena vida, baby!
That night when Pablo peeked up from his shot glass, he saw the girl, a true blonde, and he felt like he was looking at a unicorn. He blinked to make sure the vision was accurate. Yes. It was. Across his bar, in the casino, at a poker table, sat the girl of his dreams. Dark eyes, olive skin, curvy build stuffed into a red dress that fit her like a rubber glove: so skin-tight it squeezed any extra flesh out the top of the dress. Height approximately five-six, meaning five-nine in stilettos, which meant Pablo would have to look up to her on the dance floor if he wasn’t wearing his lifts, but otherwise they’d be even. She was eighteen, maybe younger. And of course, her hair was natural blond. Even her highlights looked real.
Unfortunately, she sat next to one of Pablo’s most dangerous friends, Dimitrius Nabovuciomovich, or Dimmy, as he was known in the Russian underworld. Pablo assumed the girl was with Dimmy, which would have meant she was off-limits—the guy was a straight-up psychopath.
But studying her across the bar, Pablo realized the girl was plainly trying to escape the permanent cloud of cigarette smoke spewing from Dimmy’s brownish mouth and nostrils. And more than that, she was stealing from him. Pablo watched as she laid down hand after winning hand, Dimmy folding six times in a row. Dimmy doesn’t fold.
Who is this woman? Pablo thought as the girl grinned and extended her pink-nail-polished hands and slowly pulled the towers of candy-colored chips from the center of the table to her seat. This winged pony could play a mean hand of poker. Pablo had to make a move or he would regret it for the rest of his life.
Pablo sent her a bottle of 1942 Dom Perignon—there were only thirty-seven bottles in existence, soon to be thirty-six. The one Pablo owned cost the guy who’d actually paid for it a hundred grand. It had only cost Pablo the price of carrying it out of the guy’s house after electrocuting him for a few hours, but Pablo’s sentimental attachment to the bottle was great.
An elaborate ceremony was made as the casino’s sommelier walked the bottle over to the girl at the table. The high-stakes game stopped with a lurch. Wine geeks gawked. The sommelier drew a small sword and lopped off the neck of the bottle. Oohs and ahhhs and bubbles flowed. The girl smiled and waved to Pablo, then indicated to share the bottle with the table. A classy and expensive move, Pablo thought. He didn’t see that coming.
The players smiled and sniffed their glasses and then raised them to the girl at the table and to Pablo. Everyone at the table drank, and even Dimmy—who normally wouldn’t touch anything carbonated because it gave him gas—slugged his champagne back in one fierce gulp.
Everyone drank except the girl, who put her glass down on the table and, shooting Pablo eye daggers, reached back into the cloud of smoke beside her, plucked the cigarette from Dimmy’s lips, and dropped it into her bubbly. Pablo couldn’t hear the sizzle, but he felt it from across the casino. His heart seized. Not only was this girl beautiful beyond belief, classy in a sleazy way, and a natural blonde, she was also tough as hell. His Perfect Ten. Pablo swooned, madly in love. If Pablo lived to be eighty-one, he vowed he would marry the girl. Even if she was eighteen and she would likely look at him like a sagging grandfather. Fortunately, Pablo thought that in Monaco you didn’t need to be handsome, or young or smart, or even cool. Sure, those qualities helped. But money, well, money was magic.
The girl got up from the table, gathered her chips, flung a few at the dealer and sommelier, and headed to the cashier. Pablo staggered after her, finding his leg asleep from the many hours of perching on the stool. He frantically sent his casino security to slow her down and caught up to her in the line for the valet outside the casino.
“Why are you stopping me?” she demanded.
“Little girl, it’s not safe,” Pablo said, working off his dead-leg. “You have just won tens of thousands of euros. You can’t walk on the streets, not here. Criminals are everywhere. You cannot be too safe. Let me lend you my personal car. My driver will take you anywhere you want to go.”
Pablo snapped his fingers—yes, a tacky move, but it kind of fit the occasion. Tires chirped and a Maybach materialized a
t the curb, doors opened, a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket on the seat.
“Since I noticed you did not enjoy my last selection, I thought you might try another vintage. This one is even rarer.”
The girl glanced into the car, unimpressed but not quite offended. “The bottle you sent us at the table,” she said.
“Sent to you,” Pablo corrected.
“Was it expensive?”
“Very.”
“Well, I’m sorry you wasted it on me. I don’t drink, not alcohol.”
“Perhaps, then, would you be kind enough to let me enjoy some of the bottle and your company. I would be honored to accompany you on your drive. For your safety, of course.”
The girl pondered this for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “But would you mind bringing me a Sprite?”
Another snap of the fingers and Pablo’s bellhop raced back into the casino and returned with the beverage.
“Now, you must tell me,” Pablo said. “Someone so lovely, what does she call herself?”
The girl stabbed the cherry in her Sprite with a cocktail sword and smiled. “Raquel.”
* * *
Raquel told the driver to take her to the Hotel Hermitage, one of the fanciest hotels in all of Monaco. Pablo noted it quietly. This girl had to have some fortune of her own. As the car glided through the streets of Monaco, Pablo began to pry, asking where she was from and why she was in Monaco.