The Rabid Brigadier (14 page)

“Tie some belts together and pull him out. Someone strong… like you, Bull,” Stone screamed the fifty feet
through the thicket where he could dimly see the scene unfolding. Bull at first glared at Stone but then thought better about
it and saw an opportunity for himself to be a hero. He ripped his belt out from his pants, took three more from the other
men perched in his tree and attached them all together, then lowered the homemade vine down to the bellowing wounded man below.

“Take it, asshole,” Bull screamed down, which even Stone agreed was about the appropriate word for the situation. The screaming
man calmed himself enough to grab hold of the belt ladder and wrapped both of his arms firmly around it. Bull leaned back
against the base of the tree and set both his legs up on branches ahead of him for leverage. “Now hold on to this as strong
as a scumbag around a hardon,” he yelled and started pulling. Luckily for both of them the recruit who had fallen, one Doug
“Badluck” Evans, all the way from Montana, was light—with clothes on, around one-fifty—whereas Bull weighed in at over two-fifty
and had the biceps to show it, not to mention the eyes of the rest of the team focused on him, glowing, half-hidden in the
rolling darkness of this neo-jungle world.

Straining and cursing with every heave, Bull pulled the man up one mighty take at a time. The veins in his neck looked like
they were going to explode and his cheeks grew red as lobsters just thrown into the boiling pot, but he kept pulling, hauling
the man right up and off the stake, and up into the tree. Arms reached out from nearby branches and they jockeyed the wounded
recruit onto the base of a thick branch. But there was no way he could go forward—or back. You could see into the bone through
the puncture in his leg. He’d have to stay. But that was his problem. They tied him to the branch so he couldn’t fall out
if he lost
consciousness and then moved on ahead. They had their own problems.

Once they all got used to moving among the high branches, always being very cautious to make sure—after they had seen what
happened to one who hadn’t—that they had the next branch gripped firmly before they let go of the previous one, it wasn’t
so bad. It was even kind of fun in a way, if you could relax and forget that if you fell, a yard-long stake was going to go
right through your face. Stone was far in the lead now, but those who followed behind could see the way by the broken branches
he made as he moved along. And without admitting it to himself, he made the breaks a little bigger than necessary to make
sure they could find them. They moved like this for hours, losing track of time in the sun-splattered streaks and beams that
twisted down through the maze of branches.

At last, just as the sun was making its final ascent over far mountains, Stone came to a clearing and slid down the outermost
tree. He waited a few seconds, staring back. The others were spread out in a long line behind, edging along. He didn’t wait.
Ahead was another trail that ran through a much thinner forest, little grooves of trees set among thigh-high brush. Stone
moved ahead cautiously, his senses on full alert. God knew what they were planning for them next. As if in answer to his question,
five men jumped out from the shadows of a copse of pines and came at him swinging staffs like the ones they had trained with
the day before. Stone didn’t falter an inch but headed right for the closest one. As the man came in with a circular overhead
strike, Stone grabbed the end of the pole, pulled backwards with his whole body and fell down onto the ground. Digging the
end he held into the dirt, he pulled the other end and the masked attacker right up into the air and overhead where he flew
past, soaring about twelve feet before he crashed face first into the dirt. Continuing his backwards roll Stone came up with
the staff in his hand just in time to block a slashing blow from another attacker. Stone didn’t even pull his stick up but
just pushed the end in his hands forward, aiming the other end for the groin. The stick poked the attacker’s personal property
and he went down as if hit by a rhino, writhing in pain on the ground.

Holding the staff in front of him, Stone ran through the ranks of attackers. Another came charging from the right and Stone
caught the descending blow on the end of his stick and spun it back up with a flick of the wrist. The style he used in stick
fighting was actually not what the NAA taught, but his father’s personal style adapted from Japanese sword-fighting techniques—Iaido—that
he had learned in the Pacific during World War II. But the effect was to turn the arm and striking implement of the opponent
and then counter-strike with the speed and focus of a boxer. Stone snapped the pole back into the side of the attacker’s head,
almost dead on the temple, and the man fell like a rag doll and lay still in the dust. Stone hoped he hadn’t killed him. He
knew these were all part of the scenery. The next two backed off as he came at them with fire in his eyes, pole pulled back
to the side, ready to strike. They darted back into the shadows and Stone let them go. Tucking the pole under his arm, he
ran forward as fast as he could down a low hill.

From the yells and wood-slapping-flesh sounds behind him, Stone knew the others were being attacked, but that was their problem.
His were what looked like quicksand pits ahead of him. The pathway narrowed into a sort of funnel, and the only way forward
was through several hundred yards of thick mucky sand that looked like it could suck down a cow in seconds. Stone suddenly
saw a series of rocks poking
just out of the sand along both sides of the quicksand highway and he started carefully along them. The going was immediately
tough, since his boots kept slipping off and stepping into the slime. Stone stopped on two fairly good-sized rocks, and getting
a good balance on one leg took off first one, then the other of his boots and the socks as well. He tentatively stepped forward
with his bare feet. It was much better. The bare surface of his foot acted almost like a suction cup when it landed on the
surface of each rock and became coated with the scummy surface layer. If anything, his feet became like suckers and were hard
to pull off, releasing only with a loud sucking, almost sexual sound. But it made the quicksand crossing easy as he just set
firmly down on one rock and then suctioned his foot to the next.

After about a half hour of this Stone emerged at the other end of the death trap and put his boots back on, then started forward,
following the next red arrow pointing ahead. The direction led him down a long slowly sloping hill about a mile to a shoreline.
But he had only come about a quarter mile when the image of some poor bastard going under the sand forever made him stop in
his tracks. He turned and jogged back to the end of the pits. Sure enough, two men had fallen in about halfway along, one
of them his foxhole sharer, Bo. The recruits behind them were frozen in place, unsure what to do.

Stone screamed across to them. “Take off your fucking shoes and socks, you bimbos. You can get traction with your feet.” They
tried it—and liked it. They quickly pulled out the two stranded ones and the entire group started across the shifting sands.
Stone turned and headed back down the slope to the shore. After ten minutes he reached a sandy beach, the shore of a wide
lake whose opposite side he could only dimly see far off. An arrow stood right by the lake, pointing
into the water. Stone tried it with his foot, shivered and then started taking off his things. If he was going to have to
swim through it he wanted to be as light as possible. He tied all his clothes into a ball, except for his pants. Stone tied
the feet of these together, then lifted the thick cotton camouflage pants over his head, filling them with air. He quickly
closed the waist end, sealing it tightly shut with his belt and then waded into the frigid waters holding the instant buoy,
sealed with air so both of its cotton legs were filled out like balloons.

“Christ, it’s cold,” Stone screamed to the misting water surface. “I sure hope there’s lifeboats and all that shit waiting
for me out there, ’cause I already feel frozen like a fucking popsicle.” He put the homemade preserver into the fairly flat
surface of the lake and then settled down on top of it. It eased down into the black liquid but held his weight fine. Stone,
his teeth chattering, praying the sun would rise soon and warm his half iced-over back, started paddling into the darkness.
It wasn’t that the journey itself was so difficult, but how cold it was that, he quickly realized, was going to be the problem.
Stone swirled around slightly as he was caught in a light current and saw the first of the others coming onto the shore about
a hundred yards off. They spotted his makeshift flotation device and pointed to him, yelling and laughing amongst themselves.
Once again Stone had given them the way out of an apparently impossible situation.

Only thing was, Stone’s arms and legs felt like they were tightening up by the second as he paddled across the ink-black lake.
Below his feet he could feel little swirls of water from time to time and hoped it was nothing bigger than a bread-box that
might take a bite out of him. But he knew he had to get across fast. His chest felt it was turning to cement,
hardly able to breathe in the frigid air so tight were all the muscles in his body. When he discovered that he couldn’t move
his arms at all Stone just kept kicking forward, letting the hands steer in the water like a forward rudder.

It took forever but just as the sun rose like a lantern into the dark tree line on the shore, Stone made land, and gasping
like a beached whale pulled himself up onto the sandy shore. And there, with a smile as big as a pumpkin’s on Halloween, and
a dark laugh to go with it, was Sergeant Zynishinski, staring at Stone like he was an insect from another galaxy.

CHAPTER
Fourteen

“R
ISE AND shine, Stone, the general wants to see you,” a voice with the decibel level of an elephant in coitus interruptus bellowed
into Stone’s ear as he lay sprawled out on the cot of the recruit bunk-house back inside the fortress walls. Stone tried to
pull his head back under the covers, knowing it wasn’t going to work.

“Come on, come on, Stone. You’ve slept eight hours, for Christ’s sake. It’s an honor for General Patton to want to see any
raw recruit. He must have his eye on you. Now get that ass out of bed before I kick it out.” Stone pulled the covers back
and slowly peered out from between two half closed eyes.

“Why is that you are always waking me from what would be a perfect sleep if I could just get two hours more of it?”

“Mr. Stone, if sleep is what you crave,” Sergeant Zynishinski said, releasing yet another immense gob of black and
brown spit and chewing tobacco, “then you’d best desert fast and take your chances with the hound dogs. ’Cause you’ll never
get it here. Now get up. I’ll be at the door. If you ain’t there in two-and-a-half minutes, I’m breaking your head.” He turned
and stomped out, his size twelve EEE boots cracking down on the wooden barrack floor so that every half unconscious man twisted
in his sleep. Stone rose and looked quickly around the place, counting—fifteen. So two more who had started the obstacle course
hadn’t made it through. He wondered who the poor bastards were and just what had happened to them. He dressed in the darkness
and quickly headed toward the door, where he almost crashed straight on into the sergeant, who was coming back inside to get
him.

“What happened to the other two?” Stone asked the D.I. as they walked quickly down the lane to the main thoroughfare.

“Quinn and Hartgast.” The sergeant shook his head angrily. “Quinn took a strike to the throat during the staff attack. He
may or may not make it. Hartgast never came out the other side of the lake. We keep an eye on everything. You can’t see us
but we were watching you all the whole way. If we can help it, no one dies. But the son-of-a-bitch seemed to be okay, then
went under for a second… and never came up. This group was better than usual, actually,” he commented. “We’re lucky if we
get ten or twelve make it all the way through. Seventeen this time. But a lot of that had to do with you, Stone. Like I say,
I had my eye on you.”

The sergeant led Stone toward a section of the fort he hadn’t been in before, until they came to a three-story warehouse without
a single window in the place. The whole thing was surrounded by a sandbagged and barbed-wired fence about ten feet high—almost
creating a mini-fortress within
the fort. A number of elite guards with the golden eagle clutching a skull on all their uniforms stood around, watching everything
intently. Sergeant Zynishinski saluted and the two troopers by the door, these with Ingram submachine guns around their necks,
let them through. Inside, Stone sucked in his breath—it was beautiful, filled with huge oil paintings on the walls, and plush
persian carpets on the floor. Expensive antique furniture sat everywhere, dark wooden chairs and desks that looked as if they
had all come from a museum.

“Yes,” a lieutenant asked, looking up from a wide cherry desk just inside the outer door.

“General Patton specifically requested I bring this trooper to him first thing this morning.” Sergeant Zynishinski said with
a look of obvious distaste at the wimpy secretary. As far as the D.I. was concerned there was just two kinds of soldier—the
fighting kind and all others. And he had a hard time relating to the “others.” So he snorted hard and looked around for a
place to spit out a black piece of slime-coated tobacco chew.

“Ah yes,” the secretary said, taking a file card from a box in front of him. “Yes, the general was very anxious to see… Mr.
Stone, is it?”

Stone nodded and smiled sweetly. He had done more smiling around this place than he had for the last five years. But then
since he and his family—mom, dad and sister, megatypical American family—had spent most of the time fighting and yelling at
one another, he hadn’t had a lot of use for said expression. There was something about being trapped together inside a cave
for five years—even a luxurious cave stocked with food and every amenity—that had brought out the nastiest parts of their
personalities. The appointment secretary picked up a phone and pressed a button.