“I’m starving.”
The man handed back a bag, along with the drinks. Ruhi found one of his favorite lunches, Asiago cheese bagels with turkey and lettuce. He almost asked how they knew, but then didn’t bother. The coffee, as he could have predicted at this point, was also as he preferred it — strong, with a splash of cream.
He offered Candace one of the sandwiches. She declined.
“You eat. When we get to the Farm, we’re going to start with small-arms training. Sounds easy, but it’s not. You’ll need your energy.”
“Handguns?”
“Right,” she said.
“Doesn’t sound too arduous.”
But about ninety minutes later he found that it was nerve-wracking. Ruhi was “shot” in the head five times in the first two minutes of training at the facility, which looked much like a real farm with broad pastures, split-rail fencing, dirt two-tracks lined with shade trees, and a huge pond. What it did not look like was a hardcore training ground for a citizen now taking a crash course in becoming a spy.
He was supposed to enter a room with an air gun drawn, ready to shoot. The weapon was an exact replica of a Glock 17. That much he could handle. The challenge came when human figures popped up that he was ordered to “take out.” They were taking him out until the instructor said it was time for the “step-by-step.”
He meant that literally, as it turned out. With Candace sitting up above the unroofed area, the short man showed Ruhi precisely how to scope out the threats upon entry and move his feet efficiently, “So you don’t trip.”
“I’m not even sure how to shoot or hold this thing,” he said, eyeing the air gun.
“Understood, Mancur,” the instructor replied, “and we’ll have you on the range soon enough, but given our extremely tight schedule, we want you to know the basics of self-defense and combat in close quarters with natural light. The fact that it’s getting dark is perfect, but it does make it more difficult to see the ‘enemy.’”
Ruhi accepted the reasoning, followed the man’s brusque instructions, and burst through a door into another room, this time firing at a figure to his right before pivoting quickly to his left to “kill” another one. The instructor nodded approvingly.
I’m enjoying this. Ruhi recognized that a primitive desire to prevail in combat was stirring the juices of his reptilian brain for the first time.
With each entry that followed, the instructor worked on the “choreography” until he said he was reasonably confident that Ruhi would not shoot his partner in actual combat.
“You have pretty decent hand-eye coordination, from what I can see,” the man told him. “Bodes well for the gun range.”
That was where they headed as night fell in earnest. Candace was by his side as they piled back into the large SUV.
“So what did you think?” he asked her, with a glance back at the unroofed rooms he’d just “cleared.”
“Pretty good. There’s hope for you yet,” she joked.
The same security team drove them to the gun range. Ruhi figured the men were tasked with keeping them safe and on schedule.
The indoor range was well lit. Life-size paper targets of a man’s upper body hung from clips along the entire width of the room.
A new instructor, a woman about Candace’s age, with a blond ponytail and clear safety glasses, told him that he was going to get “stripped-down training” on everything from gun safety to shooting to kill.
“First, I want you to point to the target.”
“Don’t I need a gun?” Ruhi asked. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Candace cringe.
“Not yet. Point to it,” the instructor said in a noticeably less restrained voice.
Ruhi pointed.
“Okay, mission accomplished. Now hold your arm right there.” It started to feel heavy immediately. Ruhi realized that he was exhausted. “You see the slight bend in your elbow? How it’s not locked out?”
Ruhi nodded.
“Helps if you answer verbally, Mancur. Then I don’t have to look away from the subject at hand.”
“Yes. Got it.”
“Okay, now point with your left.”
He repeated the exercise, wondering if there was something wrong with his execution, some bad habit that he would have to break.
“Again, you have the same bend in your elbow, correct?”
“Yes, is that—”
“That’s good. When I hand you a pistol, which I will do momentarily, I want you to point, keeping your elbows bent in about the same position. That natural bend is important.”
She handed him a real Glock 17. He realized why he had drilled with a replica; right away, the actual weapon felt less foreign. Its thumb rest and grip accommodated his fingers so readily that it was as if he’d been born with it in his hand.
“That gun is not loaded. But always check. Always know what you’re handling.”
She demonstrated how to pop the clip to check the “load,” and then slide it back in.
“What’s this?” she asked rhetorically as she racked the slide that rode above the barrel. “That’s how you get this semiautomatic ready to rock.”
Then she showed him how to hold the gun with his right hand and support it with his left. She tapped both elbows. “See?”
Indeed, he did. Those bent elbows looked like the arms’ own shock absorbers.
“About seventy percent of your strength in holding your handgun comes from your dominant hand, which in your case is your right. About thirty percent with your left. It’s in the support role. You create isometric pressure to steady your aim.”
She went on to explain that he should not hunch over to shoot, “unless you’re ducking bullets. Otherwise, stay upright, and raise the weapon before your eyes. You don’t want your body and arms all moving at once, no matter what garbage you’ve seen on TV or in the movies.”
She took the weapon back from him. “I’m sliding in a full clip. Seventeen rounds. I’m going to hand it over to you like this.” She showed him proper handgun handover. “Now I want you to aim at the center of the figure and shoot until you empty the clip. Take whatever time you feel you need between shots. This is the fastest training program — and you can put quotes around ‘training program’—that I’ve ever been part of, but that doesn’t mean you have to fire fast. Just do your best and pay strict attention.”
Ruhi turned to the target, trying to remember everything she’d told him.
The sketch of the man’s upper body suddenly looked about a mile away. But what really shocked Ruhi was that fourteen of his first seventeen shots hit the target. Only six were definite “kill” shots. The rest just winged the figure. But he figured that hitting an arm or leg with a 9-millimeter round would ruin just about anybody’s day.
“That’s good shooting for someone who says he’s never shot before.”
“I haven’t, really.”
“I didn’t mean to imply differently,” she said.
Sure you did. You probably think it was at some terrorist training camp.
He shot five full clips. Out of eighty-five rounds, he missed the target entirely only nineteen times. He felt certain that he would have done better if fatigue hadn’t made him so shaky. He mentioned that to the instructor.
“Don’t console yourself with that excuse, because in real combat you’ll be shaky with adrenaline, and that uses up so much of your energy so fast that we’d like you to be able to do this half asleep. That’s clearly not on the agenda in your case. But then again, I’m surprised that you can hit the target at all. What sports did you play in high school and college?”
“I’ll bet you already know,” he said, smiling.