Blades of Winter

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by G T Almasi

CHAPTER 16

  TEN YEARS AGO CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA, USA

  When I was a kid, one of the things I loved about hanging out with my dad was that he treated me like a grown-up. He’d drink, tell stories, and swear about politicians—especially Nixon. He showed me how to fix stuff and how he maintained his Mods. I even got to help with certain things, like his knees. I’d squirt lubricant into his uncapped knee joints while he held his leg in place. He’d swing his lower leg back and forth to work the grease into the machinery inside. It sounded like two steaks rubbing together and smelled like pizza that’s been cooked on a car engine.

  Daddy also used to take me to Extreme Operations’ firing range. Technically, guests weren’t allowed, but he was ExOps’ rock star, so they’d look the other way when the two of us walked in. It helped that he held the range’s record with a score of 298 out of 300. My initial results were barely over 100, but they zoomed up to 200 after my father taught me how to adjust for wind, elevation, and distance. Then he showed me how to time my breathing, to take a deep breath and hold it while I aimed and fired. Once I’d mastered this, I was up to 250 and qualified as a sharpshooter. As I got better, Dad began challenging me to friendly competitions. If I was shooting well that day, he’d let me win. He always got extra hugs from his Hot Shot when we went to the range.

  All this transferred to my attitude at the local public school, which is to say I had a huge one. I knew my daddy could whomp all the other daddies’ asses, so I’d pick the biggest kid on the playground and pounce on him: punch, bite, kick. They never expected it because of my size. I barely weighed eighty pounds when I left public school to enter Extreme Operations’ youth training facility, AGOGE, commonly known as Camp A-Go-Go.

  ExOps recruited me right after my father’s memorial service. Some people came to the house to gather his classified materials and equipment. They weren’t sure if he’d brought his ExOps-issued LB-505 with him on his last mission. When they asked me about it, I blasted them with enough swear words to make the Devil blush. My father had just died, and here were these clipboard-toting assholes bugging me about the only part of him I had left. They left that part of the form blank.

  When Dad was away on his Jobs, I’d putter around in his workshop. He always left his shop a mess, so I’d tidy up for him. I liked to be around all his work things. Meanwhile, my mom would go to her job in ExOps’ Administration Department. We’d have our uptight little life together until he got home.

  One time, I grumbled to my dad about what a pain Mom had been while he was away. He stopped what he was doing and sat down across from me on the workbench. I could see him collect his thoughts for a minute.

  “Alix, honey, I know things are tense around here when I’m gone. You’re a big girl now, and I need to ask you for a favor.”

  My big girl mind raced. What could it be? “Yes?” I squeaked.

  “You know how your mom and I fight sometimes when I’m home?”

  Jesus, did I. So did the neighbors, the cops, and the local newspapers. “Yeah, kind of.”

  “First off, it’s not your fault, okay? It has nothing to do with you. We both love you very much.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Your mother and I fight so much when I come home because she and I are both terribly wound up. She’s upset because she doesn’t know what happens to me on my trips, and I’m upset because I do know. I’d like you to be really good for Mom while I’m away by helping around the house and doing what she asks. Maybe she won’t be quite so tense, and I’ll try to unwind without making her mad. We’ll all have a nicer time while I’m home.”

  Children helping parents? I’d never heard of this. Kids are supposed to get-get-get, aren’t they? Still, that part at the end sounded good. I was always glad when my father came home, but I was also glad the fights stopped when he went away. “Okay, Daddy,” I said, “but I want an extra-nice treat.”

  He chuckled and said, “You got it, sweetheart.”

  As a typically patient child, I immediately asked, “What will it be?”

  “What will what be?”

  “My extra-nice treat!” I had my Daddy-slaying charm turned up to eleven. I figured if I played my cards right, I might score a life-size chocolate pony.

  He laughed, stood up, and reached down to sweep me into his arms. I held on to his shoulder, right at eye level with him. He said, “Tell you what, Hot Shot. The next time I’m home, I’ll teach you to work on Li’l Bertha.” I kissed him on the cheek and wrapped my arms around his neck. It wasn’t what I’d expected, but my father knew me too well. I’d coveted that gorgeous gun since I’d first laid eyes on it. Some kids get into tennis or chess, but not me. I took to guns the way a senator takes to interns.

  Dad had been home for an unusually long time, almost a month. He hadn’t had any drinks in a few days, so I could tell he was getting ready to travel again. That night, I lay in bed reading one of my dad’s gun magazines from the stash I kept in my closet. I stored my clothes in two-foot-tall heaps all over my room because my closet had become a warehouse of the stuff I scrounged from around the house: piles of magazines, a collection of old tools and electronics, and a few empty liquor bottles with fancy labels.

  Most of it was stuff my dad would leave around after he passed out late at night. My mom or I would find him in the morning, asleep in his shop. Sometimes he’d have written things on his bandages. It was usually gibberish, but some things you could make out. Mom would take a big black marker and scribble over it. She didn’t want him in trouble for walking around with classified information written all over him.

  My parents’ room was right next to mine. Government-issue houses have notoriously thin walls, so I could always hear what they said. For once, what I heard wasn’t shouts. I didn’t hear any crashes, either, since my father had already trashed most of the bedroom furniture. But the fact that they weren’t shouting didn’t mean they weren’t arguing.

  “For God’s sake,” my mother exclaimed, “she’s only ten years old.”

  “Cleo, I know how old our daughter is. She’s very mature for her age.”

  “I don’t care! Jesus, Philip. She asks the most awful questions when you’re away.”

  “If she asks, that means she’s ready to hear it.”

  “No, it doesn’t! Fourth-grade girls should not ask their mothers about machine guns and strangulation. I can’t even look at the drawings she brings home from school!”

  “Cleo, I don’t talk to Alix about—”

  “Well, she sure as hell doesn’t hear it from me!” my mom said, her voice rising. “I’m worried she’ll turn into a person like, like …”

  “Who, me? What’s wrong with that?” barked my dad. My mother didn’t answer. I heard the mattress creak as one of them sat on the bed. My dad inhaled slowly, exhaled all at once, then continued. “Honey, I know my work bothers you, but it’s not all as bad as it sounds. Besides, how many of your friends have a Level 19 Liberator at home?” This is how I learned to handle my mother. She’s a real sucker for this kind of charm.

  “Philip, stop it.”

  “Baby, enough for now. We’ll talk in the morning before I go to work. Why don’t you come here?” The bed creaked again. My dad had successfully lured my mother into bed. They talked for another minute or so, and then it got quiet. After a while I could hear them having sex, moaning and stuff. Maybe my mother wouldn’t divorce my father, after all. Once in a while, she would talk about it on the phone to her friends when she thought I couldn’t hear her.

  I fell asleep and dreamed about being an Extreme Operations agent like my daddy. I’d travel and shoot guns and beat people up, but when I came home I wouldn’t drink, and I wouldn’t smash up the house.

  DATE: February 21, 1968

  TO: Office of the Executive Intelligence Chairman

  FROM: Office of the Director of Extreme Operations

  Division

  SUBJECT: Project AGOGE

  Dear Sir,

  Please
find attached a detailed proposal for the founding of a special school for the recruitment and training of Extreme Operations field agents. Put simply, this institution will intensify our competitive capacity in the clandestine warspace. This will be achieved by authorizing Extreme Operations to evaluate and indoctrinate potential agents when they are as young as twelve years old. If fully exploited, these young persons’ quick reflexes, adaptability to upgrades, and emotional suggestibility will grant our case officers an insurmountable advantage in the field over our competitor’s older agents.

  We will continue to recruit and train older agents, but my opinion is that the graduates of this school will be so overpowering in the field that older agents will primarily be used as handlers or teachers.

  Clearly, employing young people for such dangerous work is a controversial concept. Our public relations people have already generated a series of preapproved talking points and press releases in the event of a public-facing exposure.

  Sincerely,

  William Colby

  Director, ExOps

  CHAPTER 17

  EIGHT YEARS AGO AGOGE, HIGHLAND BEACH, OUTSIDE OF ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND, USA

  Considering Camp A-Go-Go’s intensity, the first day was pretty soft. It was eight years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. My class of recruits was introduced to the rest of the school at the first day ceremony. Some of the instructors and advanced students gave short speeches, and then we plowed through a ton of pizza, hot dogs, and sodas. It was like a birthday party for seventy-five kids all at once.

  Camp is actually a well-known secret government training program. Its real name is Authentically Gifted Operatives General Education. Since it’s a government institution, it was abbreviated to the annoying-to-pronounce acronym AGOGE. None of us could agree how to say AGOGE, so we called the place Camp A-Go-Go or simply Camp.

  There are actually quite a few Camps. The government operates a bunch of these schools to maintain an optimal number of students at each facility and to let the kids live near their families.

  Speaking of families, before a recruit is accepted into the AGOGE, all of his or her relatives are dragged through a bureaucratic jungle of prodding, poking, and background checks. The process is so labyrinthine that by the end people are just glad they aren’t going to prison for something.

  The families are sworn to a secrecy the government knows most of them won’t keep, but it establishes a behavior pattern for the family. You see, everybody knows that Camp is where secret agents and other government spooks are trained. But those are the regular secret agents and spooks. Those guys stop at Standard Training. Nobody is told about Advanced Training. Nobody is told about the Levels.

  If your family members demonstrate that they know how to keep their traps shut, your file is moved to a different filing cabinet with much higher ass-kicking potential. I knew all about Levels already because I’d been raised as a spy brat.

  Even so, when I got to Camp, Advanced Training seemed very distant. All of us punks started as Unranked Recruits pending rank testing for physical coordination, interpersonal skills, and reflexes. Most of the other entering students were thirteen or fourteen years old. I was only twelve, but what was painfully obvious was how much smaller I was than the rest of my class.

  Fortunately for me, size didn’t matter for rank testing. I did well on the coordination sequences where they had us run across beams, climb ropes, quick crawl through a long pipe, and jump from a high board into a swimming pool. I bombed the interpersonal skills section because I hadn’t realized you’d ever talk your way through anything here. My dad’s stories never mentioned talking to his targets.

  Then came the reflexes sequence. It was designed to test how quickly you made decisions and acted on them. The instructor called me into an office and guided me to the guest chair in front of a big desk. He walked behind the desk and sat down. He stared at me for a couple of minutes. By this point, I had figured out to sit still and stare back. Fidgeting was sure to lower your scores. The instructor opened a drawer, pulled out a black revolver, and placed it on the desk in front of him. He closed the drawer and said, “I want you to tell me how you would get this weapon from—”

  I lunged forward and spit in his face. He squinted his eyes shut and jerked his hand up to wipe my spit away. I nabbed the gun, dropped back into my seat, and pointed the pistol at him. His hand hung in front of his face while he looked at me through his fingers.

  After several seconds of silence, he asked, “What if it isn’t loaded?”

  I cocked the hammer back. Click. “Then my grade isn’t as high.”

  They promoted me to the highest rank, Recruit Rank 9, passed me out of Recruit Initiation, and accepted me into Initial Training. Who needs talking? By being the first recruit ever promoted to Initial Training before her thirteenth birthday, I left the rest of my entering class in the dust. I was half the height and weight of the senior student in Initial Training, who had started at Camp A-Go-Go almost three years earlier.

  Mornings in Initial Training were like a regular school. We took required classes in history, English, foreign languages, math, and science. I liked history and foreign languages, the others not so much. After lunch was when the difference between Camp and a normal school became obvious. Our afternoons were entirely devoted to physical education classes. We practiced martial arts, competed in team and individual sports, ran for endurance, and trained in gymnastics. I was eager to begin firearms classes, but those are only for recruits in Standard Training and up.

  Most of the trainees, including me, liked the martial arts classes best. I’d imagine that I was my dad and fight the bad guys with head kicks and sucker punches in the gut. We would practice our moves as a group, then form up in sparring lines to practice at half speed with minimal contact to avoid injury.

  One day our instructor rolled in a cart full of padded gloves, boots, vests, and helmets. He laid them out by size—small, medium, and large—and told us to suit up. When we were all decked out in our fighting apparel, he formed us in sparring lines as usual. This time, however, we were to fight at full speed and full contact until he whistled the fight was over.

  We fought hard. Our bodies spun and leaped, glad to fight flat-out and not worry about hurting one another. All that padding made us feel invulnerable. I wound up across from a much bigger girl (naturally) with a few years of martial arts training under her belt. Her name was Janice. She knocked me around, but I put up a lot more resistance than she expected. Our fight seemed to last longer than the others. By the time the whistle sounded, we were both drenched in sweat and breathing like furnaces. Janice won on points, but given the size difference, she should have blown me right out of the room.

  Our instructor had us square off against the same people again and told us we would fight a second round that would count toward our rankings as Initial Trainees. He told us to imagine that we would be kicked out of AGOGE if we lost. This time I fought Janice to a standstill. She had me on technique and hit me with an array of maneuvers and combinations I’d never seen before, but I was faster and blocked everything she threw at me.

  I knew I couldn’t stay on the defensive forever, though, so I watched her carefully, looking for an opening. Just as I caught a tendency of hers, she faked me out with a great move. I blocked for a kick, but she got me with a punch right in my solar plexus. The whistle blew, and Janice had won again, but by even fewer points than in our first round together.

  I was pissed, and I wanted another shot at redemption because I’d figured out her weakness. Once Janice was in her spin, she was too fast and unpredictable for me to go on offense, but I’d seen my chance. To set herself up for that move, she would plant both feet and counterwind her body a bit to spring into the spin. During that counterwind, Janice was wide open.

  The rest of the class finished their second-round fights, and the scores were tallied for our rankings. The instructor set us up for a third round. This time we were told to imagi
ne that if we lost, we would be killed. This was a shock to us first-year kids. I don’t think it occurred to any of us that we wouldn’t live forever. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, so instead I imagined that I was my father on his last mission and that I would fight for my life so I could go back home to see me and Mom again.

  I set up opposite Janice. We were both still gassed from our last round, so we faked and feinted for a minute, catching our breath while we looked for an opportunity. Then she planted both of her feet. As she wound herself up, I leaped forward and kicked through the front of her knee. Her leg bent backward and snapped like a celery stick. Janice screamed and tumbled to the floor, both hands on her knee and her eyes squeezed shut. I crouched down and then launched myself over my opponent. I aimed my feet so they’d come down on Janice’s neck. Time seemed to slow down. The room fell silent except for the wind whistling past my ears. Suddenly I realized that the sound in my ears wasn’t from the wind; it was from my instructor frantically blowing his whistle to signal us to stop fighting. My toes brushed Janice’s chin as I spread my feet apart to avoid breaking her neck. Janice’s eyes popped open as my foot landed barely an inch from her face.

  Time came back to normal speed as the instructor pulled me out of the way and gently picked Janice up. Everyone in the class followed him out of the gym as he carried her to the infirmary. Everyone except me. I stood there, looking down at my feet.

  Jesus, was I really about to do that?

  After a minute, I joined my classmates at the infirmary to see if Janice was okay. We all hung around outside for a while, but the nurses wouldn’t let us in. Eventually, we went back to our rooms, me last of all.

  I opened my closet and pulled my clothes out to pack since I was sure I’d be expelled. Half an hour later, there was a knock at my door. It was the same tall woman who’d come to my house the year before. She walked me out of the dorm, but she didn’t take me back home.

 

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