Grayman Book One: Acts of War

by Michael Rizzo

5

  January 12th.

  Matt Burke:

  I’ve barely slept off the abuse the SEALs gave me, and Michael’s down here shooting. Despite the heavy sound-damping, I can hear the distinctive boom of that stupid gun of his way out in the corridor.

  Manning is watching him from Observation, cleaning his SIG on one of the benches like he’s just come off the range himself, but paying more attention to the show on the other side of the Plexiglas.

  “Check this doo, Major,” he says when he sees me come in with my bag. “Makes me wonder what they shot him up with in sim phase—I don’t think he’s all detoxed yet, but it’s good.”

  He’s walking. Just taking an idle stroll from one end of the firing line to the other, like he’s lost in deep thought, and then he just casually raises his shiny hand-cannon and pops the targets downrange without breaking stride. He does this in singles, doubles, triples—separated by more introspective pacing and regular magazine changes (the cannon doesn’t hold a lot of rounds—I count only eight between reloads).

  Downrange, holographic targets ghost up in the powder-smoke: stereotypically menacing ragheads and other assorted thugs, some exposed, some charging, some hiding behind assorted cover. They die with gamer-realism when he nails them. But he looks more like he’s running a pool table than combat shooting.

  “Okay, check this one out…” Manning hums.

  The target-generator’s given him a challenge: four leering Wabs holding what looks like a classroom full of children at gunpoint. This stops him. He stands there, head hung down, staring at the floor, gun hung limp behind his right thigh, dead still.

  Suddenly… Boom. Boom boom boom. He springs his body into a low, wide stance, and thrusts the gun out, wedged in both hands Weaver-style, and starts popping fast. His face loses the half-asleep cool and hardens into that half-snarl as he cuts all four of the hostiles down in less than two seconds.

  The big gun locks open and empty. He feeds it a new mag, snaps the action closed, and decocks it. Then he does a gunslinger spin with the heavy chunk of stainless before dropping it in his thigh holster. He goes still again for a moment or two, then turns and looks up at the glass, looks at me. He doesn’t look surprised to see me. I wave. He grins a little, looking almost embarrassed.

  So I leave Manning to finish packing his gear, and go down for a little target practice of my own.

  “You salvage that thing from home?” I just come out and ask, nodding at the big chunk-o-steel on his thigh.

  “No,” he says, kind of quiet and almost sad. “Had to leave everything. But they let me order a new one. So I went ahead and did a little upgrading…” He pulls a spare mag and shows me the rounds. “Eleven millimeter magnum. Uses a standard four-twenty-nine bullet—same as the .44 Magnum, but with twice the energy.”

  “Why not just use a rifle?” I try not to sound like I’m making fun, but he grins and gives a self-effacing chuckle as he snaps the mag back home.

  “Can’t hit the broad side of a bus with a rifle. Just can’t get the feel of it. Ears…”

  I realize what he means by “ears” in time to avoid perforated eardrums, getting my hearing protection on as he does a smooth draw, cocking the hammer as he pulls like it’s an old six-gun, and begins to empty his silly pistol downrange at a set of static targets. I feel the shockwave of each blast smack me in the face, hard enough to feel it up my sinuses. He does a decent job—not perfect, but he hits what he’s aiming at. But then I look at his eyes and realize he isn’t aiming. He’s just pointing—the gun isn’t even lined up with his eye. He actually turns his head and looks at me for the last few rounds and hits his targets anyway.

  “Show-off…” I grimace.

  “It’s just an upgrade of the whole Zen archery thing,” he says like it’s nothing. “But I can only do it if the weapon ‘points’ naturally for me. If it doesn’t, my aim is crap.”

  He trades the cannon for the old 1911 Colt from the small of his back. It has exotic wood grips with custom finger grooves. He unloads it and offers it to me. It feels disturbingly good in my hand.

  “I can’t do plastic guns—they feel like toys, don’t point for me, shitty recoil management,” he explains. “That, and I like guns with hammers, single-action triggers.”

  I open the slide. Everything is tight—no slop at all. “Nice…”

  “Match tuned,” he confirms. He hands me a full magazine and lets me try it out. It barely kicks. And it lets me make groups tighter than my SIG.

  “Sweet,” I appraise. “Why the .45?”

  “The hardball is slow and heavy. Excellent takedown without over-penetration. My teacher called it a ‘humane’ bullet: One shot stop, but no hydrostatic shock turning your organs into goo. It also won’t go through your target, six walls, and hit a child half-a-mile away. If I need to shoot through a truck, that’s what the other gun is for.”

  He offers me the cannon. It’s a foot-and-a-half long and weighs maybe five pounds. There’s a big muzzle brake on the end of a vent-ribbed barrel. Holding the two guns together—one in each hand—makes the “full-size” forty-five feel like a pocket pistol.

  “They sell these mostly for hunters,” he explains, “but this model is compensated for fast pin shooting. The new laser module lets Datascan watch my targeting, so I can get the heads-up imaging.”

  “I’m still surprised it lets you use this instead of the ICW,” I grouse. No one uses a magnum handgun in combat except in the movies: too hard to control, too heavy to carry, and shit capacity. But he doesn’t look like he’s combat shooting. I can’t even describe what it looks like. Tai Chi? A lazy round of golf?

  “I actually can’t track as fast with the ICW. I guess it knows that enough to trust me or something.”

  He drops the guns back in their holsters and goes quiet for a bit. I turn and look up at the Observation deck. No sign of Manning—he must have lost interest and packed it in for the night.

  “So what’s your story?” he comes out and asks. “You’ve got the advantage, Commissioner—care to share?”

  I try to shrug it off, but he wants something, anything.

  “Grew up in Baltimore. Dad went off to Iraq with his Guard unit when I was just getting into my fucked-up teenage years. Got stuck in the whole ‘stop-loss’ thing.”

  “He make it back?” he asks when I stop feeding for a moment, trying not to go back home in my head.

  “Um… Yeah, he did. The Dead Dad story—that was Manning: his father got blown up by a car bomb, along with a bunch of kids he was trying to do the hearts-and-minds thing with in Karballah, handing out candy. My dad had no such luck.”

  He actually doesn’t look at me like I’m nuts. Then I remember what his sister said about his own home life, so I elaborate:

  “The thing is, he dug the shit. Ate it up. He was gone four years, me and my mom left to freak every day that he was going to show up on the news, or there’d be that knock at the door. Me watching her lose it, bit at a time. Hating him. And him sending back mail that made me want to puke about how ‘important’ it was. More important than us. They split not long after he got back. I went with mom—I doubt either of us really knew the guy anymore. We got priced out of the East Coast in the Bush Era Housing Bubble and wound up in Wisconsin in time for the big crash. Mom had cancer by then. He never even tried to say goodbye or anything.”

  He’s a good listener, lets me do my wallowing. Hesitates on the obvious cut.

  “So… You joined the military?” He manages to keep the sarcasm pretty deadpan.

  I get in a laugh at my own expense. “Seemed appropriate at the time: Angry young man, broke, no good prospects. I scored high on the ASVAB in high school—my counselor insisted it would be good to take it, and I think I did just to prove I was smarter than the average jarhead. For my trouble, I got swamped by recruiters. When I fell out of college in my freshman year… well… I guess I was feeling just depressed and hopeless enough to give in, like maybe the old man was right a
nd it really was the best thing you could do with your life. But I think part of me wanted to prove I could get through it and not get reprogrammed into a Captain America clone. That, and I was pissed at the terrorists and feeling superior enough to push myself through Ranger School. Once I got in, I could stroke myself and feel all elite, feel like I was seeing the ‘real’ war, not the political media-face bullshit.”

  I load my own personal sidearm—a SIG Elite that should meet His Scariness’ requirements for a “real gun”—let the holo-targets reset and work my way through my first mag with about as much enthusiasm as I have doing sit-ups.

  “But?” he has to push me, just when I’ve got my life nice and rationalized.

  “But?” I throw back at him, reloading. “But the attitude’s stills there, gets me busted on a regular rotation. Sent off to even more fun places.”

  He just watches me run through the next mag. I know what he’s going to say the whole time. He lets it simmer until I’m done shooting.

  “Like Columbia?”

  “Nothing happened in Columbia,” I spit out the same old testimony. “The ‘unit’ I was supposed to be helping train got themselves dexed one night while we gringos were back in town getting shitfaced and laid—we found them all slaughtered after the weekend. Mission failed.”

  I make it a point of jerking my eyes up toward the sentry monitors in the corners of the range. He gives me a little lopsided nod to let me know he’s done pushing it.

  I really don’t feel like shooting anything. I blow through a box of ammo and start packing. I notice he’s nursing some nasty bruised cuts on his wrists from popping his zip-cuffs. They’re on top of the scars he got doing it in Germany.

  “You weren’t actually supposed to ‘escape’ that SERE scenario, you know that, right?” I take my run at him. He grins a bit at that.

  “I just wasn’t liking the company,” he says. “Besides, you remember what Doc said: I’m supposed to do shit like that when they poke me.”

  “No,” I correct him, “you’re supposed to get mad when they poke you. What you do—I don’t think they’ve figured that out yet. How the hell do you take out two SEALs like that? With a hood over your face, no less?”

  He drops into that self-effacing smile again. “Blindfold fighting is an old martial arts demo trick,” he excuses. “Once you’ve made contact with someone’s arm, you can find the rest of them. A little practice, and you can feel them move a lot better than you can see them.”

  “That easy, is it?”

  “Yes. Here. I’ll show you.”

  And he does: he has me raise my guard, and proceeds to humiliate me with a series of random feints faster than I can see. And he is fast—I can hear his arms cut the air like bad kung-fu sound effects, and he looks absolutely relaxed. Then he tells me to relax and press my wrist gently against his. When he does it again, I can feel him move, even with my eyes closed. Scarier, my body reacts naturally, moving to respond to each strike and kick he throws at me.

  “And that’s how you break SEALs?” I ask him, not willing to drop the attitude yet.

  “No,” he says easily, “but it helps me keep on top of them. The rest is a matter of a few basic rules of geometry, timing, momentum. Trapping, controlling, opening…”

  In a flash, his arms whip tap-tap and my guard gets jerked down and forward and I’m feeling like I’m in a car-wreck. The palm of his hand is right up under my nose before I know how it got there, and he’s got that grin going.

  “Holy…”

  He does the wrist-pressing thing again and asks me if I’m ready. I try to be, closing my guard up real strong and coiling my stance, but suddenly he’s everywhere, weaving around and through my guard, taking my every response and using it to suck me right into another no-contact punch or palm or chop. Almost no-contact, anyway: he’s using no real force, but when his palm barely smacks off my ribcage under my arm, it feels like he’s just played handball with my heart and lungs. If he’d hit me with any intent…

  “What the hell is that?”

  “A combination of things, but they all keep the same basics. The physics, the strategies, knowing how bodies and minds work.”

  “And you learned this… where?” I’m pushing again.

  He grins at me again.

  “You know Musashi?”

  “The samurai-guy? Famous old swordsman?” I try.

  “Undefeated in sixty-plus duels against the best fighters in his day, all with little or no real formal training,” he feeds me with that same reverent glazing he gave the manticore lecture with. “The point is, it took Musashi until he was fifty to figure out how he was doing it, and it all came down to some very simple, universal principles. But to him, they were natural. Like they were just wired in, from the first fight he had when he was only thirteen.”

  “And this is you?” I needle him. He shrugs.

  “It just makes sense to me, like I’ve always known it. Put a weapon in my hand, it feels like the most normal thing in the world. Maybe I’m just broken that way.”

  Then he gets that cool, faraway look that makes me worry that he’s going to demonstrate just how easily he can kick my ass again. “So… Is this something you can teach… well… me, for instance?”

  He grins, but at least he doesn’t laugh at me.

  “Probably.”

  But suddenly I’m very conscious of the sentries watching us from the corners—cold machine eyes wired into something with an agenda I’m only starting to wrap my head around.