Killer Instincts v5 (20 page)

With these more sophisticated drills came equally sophisticated scenarios. I could see now why Richard had begun with checkers and moved on to
The Art of War
; he was conditioning me to see each confrontation as a series of moves and counter moves, and to understand that the way to survive the confrontation was to have my game plan in place before the first shot was even fired.

"The trick is to practice positive visualization, " Richard told me one day. "You have to not only see yourself progressing through your plan of action, but you have to see success at the end of every scenario. Victory often goes to the side who can see themselves winning before the battle has even been joined."

"Isn't that being over-confident?" I asked. “What about ‘plans never survive contact with the enemy’?”

"There's a big difference between being cocky and never believing in the no-win scenario. If you are confident that there is no situation so dire that you can't find a way out, you've taken the first step towards succeeding where others would give up and fail. You can read accounts of battles where time and again, the side who won was simply the side who refused to accept the odds stacked against them, and kept working to come out on top."

"It sounds like you've been there a few times yourself."

"You have no idea. But, I'm still here because I never quit when another dummy would have just stood up and ate some lead to get it over with. I've fought to the last bullet, and when my guns ran dry I've used my knife, and when that broke I've used my fists until my knuckles were bloody. But every time, I won through."

By the middle of my third week, we had a pretty solid routine. Up at dawn for exercises and our run, a light breakfast followed by setting up a combat scenario that I worked through in several different ways under Richard's tutelage. After lunch, while cleaning our weapons and making repairs to our target range, Richard and I would play out games of "What if".

"Have you ever tried a role-playing game?" Richard asked me one day over lunch.

"I don't know if that's any of your business, pervert."

Richard sneered. "Not sex, idiot. It's a kind of game."

"You mean like, what,
Dungeons and Dragons
? Wearing a cloak and pretending to cast magic spells with elves? No, I've never done that."

"I'm not talking about pretending to be a elf, dummy. Not every role-playing game is about dragons and gnomes. Some of them are about secret agents, or commandos, or anything else you can think of. A role-playing game is a natural evolution from cops and robbers or cowboys and indians into something much more structured and codified. The principle, however, is the same. A scenario creator posits a challenge, and the participants offer up ways in which they would overcome the challenge, with the creator acting as a referee, determining success or failure."

"If I checked under your bed, I wouldn't find a wizard's hat and a magic wand, would I?"

Richard flicked a cracker crumb at me. "It is a tool for training your mind to approach situations analytically, and quickly find a solution to the problem."

"Okay, you win, Bilbo Baggins. Give me a challenge."

And so, Richard and I played out what-if scenarios. Your target is in a sedan and you are trying to engage from a distance, how do you do it? Ground level or from a rooftop? Is it better to take the shot at night or during the day? Do you shoot through the sheet metal roof or the windshield? Do you go for the kill first, or do you try and immobilize the vehicle? Is it better to keep the target pinned down in the car, or get them to exit the vehicle? What if the target has a bodyguard? What if you want to take them alive?

Richard's ability to come up with a scenario that became increasingly more complex and convoluted was remarkable. Every time I found a solution to a problem, Richard would add another element or complication that forced me to step back, re-evaluate, and come up with a alternate plan. Our discussions became so complex that after a couple of days we drove into town one afternoon and bought ourselves some plastic soldiers, toy cars, and other visual aids. We built a "sandbox" that we could set up on the dining table in order to build out the imaginary terrain, erecting buildings made from cracker boxes, toy cars, soldiers representing both targets and innocents. These sandbox scenarios grew increasingly more involved, and the lessons I learned from playing checkers against Richard served me well. I would plan my "moves" while Richard adjusted the position of the enemies and the civilians, and I focused on making Richard react to me, and not the other way around.

"When we first tried this," I said to Richard, "I felt kind of silly. But now, I see how helpful it is to visualize all the players in the scenario and their spatial relationships."

"There's nothing silly about it. There is a reason they call chess 'The Game of Kings'. For thousands of years, generals have played out similar war games, sandbox battles pitting one enemy force against another in mock table-top warfare. Even professional sports teams use similar techniques; every football coach has a chalkboard with arrows showing sweeping flank maneuvers or headlong charges. Now that we've entered the computer age, programs have been written to pit opposing forces against each other on a virtual battlefield, calculating such minutiae as how weather, terrain, hunger and thirst affect the performance of the soldiers on the field, determining trajectories and percentages of rounds delivered on target."

"I've heard the Army encourages their soldiers to play computer games in order to develop their reflexes and understand the benefits of certain tactics."

Richard nodded. "There will come a day when much of a soldier's training will happen in virtual reality, although nothing will ever be able to fully replace the experience of live field exercises."

My last week in Texas was an unrelenting grind of training and study. Although Richard had said in the beginning we would focus on "guns, not Judo", he felt I had progressed far enough in my marksmanship that some basic unarmed fighting techniques made their way into our training schedule. First I was taught what Richard claimed was the most important skill: how to fall.

"If you're going to get into a fight, you're going to wind up on the ground at some point. The most important thing to know how to do is take that fall well, and recover from the impact."

Along with falls, Richard and I practiced throws. Against your average person with little unarmed combat training, the key was to lower your own center of gravity and widen your stance in order to keep yourself stable, while raising your opponent's center relative to your own and destabilizing them to provoke a fall. The ease with which Richard threw me around was astonishing; it seemed to take no effort on his part at all, he would just shift his body in relation to mine, and I'd find myself tumbling to the ground. Although Richard allowed me to throw him to see how the techniques worked, it was clear that in a real fight against the old man, I'd never have a chance.

Beyond throws and falls, Richard and I discussed and practiced simulated blows to the body's weak points. Strikes to the groin, the instep, the knee and the base of the skull were all good because there was little muscle mass to pad the impact. The fragility of the knee and elbow joints, the usefulness of dislodging and breaking an enemy's pinky or ring finger, and the ultra-sensitive bundle of nerves right under a person's nose were discussed in detail. Techniques such as kicks or punches to the juncture of the inner thigh to strike at the femoral artery, clapping blows to the ears to rupture an eardrum, or the best way to shove one's thumb into an opponent's eye socket were topics for our dinner conversations.

"What about knives?" I asked Richard one evening.

"Stay away from knives," he replied.

"What do you mean, stay away from them? Wouldn't it be easier to stab a guy then have to go through the trouble of ramming my thumb into his eyeball?"

"I don't have time to teach you anything about knives. They are messy, they can slip and twist in your hand and cut you as badly as they'd cut your enemy, they can be taken away by a lucky or trained opponent and used against you. They can even break, snap, or get stuck in the other guy and become useless. Better to not rely on a knife at all than be inexperienced and try anyhow."

"What if the other guy's got a knife?" I asked.

"Run away. The guy who pulls a knife on you is either real dumb, or real good, and you don't want to take that gamble."

Nevertheless, Richard showed me a few last-ditch techniques for catching a knife hand and gaining control of the weapon, but he stressed this was a do-or-die technique for me, and performing it incorrectly could get me into deep shit real fast.

"Go for that knife hand at the wrong angle, you're going to wind up with a blade sticking out of your palm or lodged in your wrist, and then your goose is cooked for sure."

THIRTEEN

My last day in Texas arrived with unexpected quickness. I simply woke up one morning, and it struck me that this was my last day of training. In twenty-four hours, I would be flying back to Boston and starting to take my revenge in earnest. Richard and I went through our morning workout and run, and over breakfast we discussed tomorrow's schedule.

"We'll skip the run and get some grub in you, then I'm going to drive you out to the airfield where I picked you up. Chuck is supposed to be there at seven tomorrow morning. From there you have an 11 AM flight out of San Antonio, so take a cab from one airport to the other, then slow down a little, get a meal in your belly, and get some sleep on the flight up north."

"What do I do when I get to Boston?" I asked.

"Your gardener will meet you at the airport and get you settled into your new apartment. He'll also provide you with any last-minute details."

"What does this guy look like, or is he just going to find me?"

"He'll find you, but just in case, he looks like you, more or less. Same height, same build, same hair color and eye color, same haircut."

"That's kind of creepy, actually."

"The gardeners bear a superficial resemblance to the operatives they cover for because it helps make the illusion more realistic for the neighbors. If your cover is ever investigated and the enemy learns from the neighbors that "you" appeared to be a five-foot tall Asian man, the cover wouldn't last too long."

"Makes sense."

"Trust me, if it didn't make sense, we wouldn't do it, because people would get killed."

The rest of the morning, Richard and I went through all the weapons I had trained with over the last few weeks to see if there was any change to Richard's original recommendations. I still liked the Uzi, the Glock, Beretta .32 auto, the Smith & Wesson .38 snub-nose, the DeLisle carbine, and the cut-down Remington 1100 shotgun.

Richard and I had focused the least amount of time on the Remington, not because a shotgun was easy to use; in fact, it was the most difficult and the most specialized of all the weapons I would have at my disposal. With limited ammunition, and a slow reload time, coupled with its tremendous recoil, blast, and the weapon's bulk, we both agreed that it was best suited for situations where I would be immediately emptying it into a room or a vehicle, then switching to another weapon for the rest of the engagement.

After spending a final few hours working my way through using these firearms under Richard’s mentorship for the last time, he agreed that I was as ready as I was going to be, given the time frame.

"I could say you needed to stay out here for another month, or six months, or heck, even a year. But the work I can do with you here can only take you so far. Right now, the biggest challenge for you is going to be finding the right time and place to strike, and I've got assets working on that as we speak."

"You do?"

"Along with your gardener, there's an intelligence operative in place right now, whose job is to keep an eye on the Paggianos and begin tracking patterns and familiar faces, strengths and weaknesses, hard points and vulnerabilities. Once you get into Boston, your operative will make contact with you."

"How will I know who it is?" I asked.

"Son, how many people in Boston are going to walk up to you and hand you an intelligence dossier?"

"Good point."

Richard offered to treat me to dinner on my last night in Texas. We drove into town and went to the same restaurant we visited three weeks ago. I got myself a ribeye steak and a beer, while Richard had pork chops and iced tea. Biscuits, greens, potatoes, and gravy were never in short supply.

"May I ask why you don't drink alcohol?"

"Alcohol makes it too easy to disguise something slipped into your drink."

"Do you think that's going to happen here?"

Richard gave me a look and a shrug. "It's an old habit, and if I have to ask myself every time if I think it's safe enough, I'll make a mistake when it counts. I have been in this business forever, and the list of people who'd like to see me dead is longer than you can imagine."

I considered my next words carefully.

"When I first heard about you from my uncle, he said he didn't know how you got into this line of work, only that you were already well-regarded when he met you after the war, and that he was certain you were never a military man."

"Well, he's right on both counts."

"So if it wasn't the military...?" I let the question hang in the air.

Richard shook his head. "You never paid to hear my life story. Let's just say that I was in deep with some bad hombres, and after cutting myself loose I settled back into doing the only thing I was ever good at, only I sold my skills to those I thought to be the good guys."

"I guess by that you mean, the U.S. Government."

Richard shrugged again. "Most of the time. During the height of the Cold War, who was a good guy and a bad guy changed with surprising frequency. Sometimes I worked for Uncle Sam, sometimes I worked for one of his friends, and sometimes I worked in the private sector for people who had government ties, people who could ask around and find out how to be put in touch with someone with my skills."