With Lembick and Cawber at least, the Saint reflected, it would be a pleasure to exercise Gascott’s sarcastically contemptuous tongue. The only trouble was, they had a certain advantage, for the time being, in any debates that might develop, because he was supposed to knuckle under and obey their orders.
All things considered, he wasn’t looking forward to the next week.
“How’s your judo?” Lembick fired the question at him a little later, when they reached the drill hall, a vast hangar-like structure between the main house, which they had just left, and the block where the Saint’s room was.
“Rusty,” he replied untruthfully, gazing around at the scene of varied combative and callisthenic activity.
He counted five pairs of men practising judo, grunting and flurrying and thudding on to the large canvas mat in one corner. Two pairs of men with boxing gloves, nearer to him, were sparring without pulling many punches. The area in another corner was laid out as a more-or-less conventional gym, with a horse, bars, rings, and the rest; and these facilities too were in full use.
“We believe in total physical fitness,” Lembick commented, with a fanatical glint in his eye. “All this isn’t for fun, or sport.” He spat out the word with distaste. “A man — a soldier — has to be properly fit.”
“We got a system here,” Cawber put in. “For the first two weeks, you train. That means we get you fit, if you ain’t already. And you won’t be,” he added, baring his ill-assorted teeth in what his mother might have called a smile. “And after we’ve gotten you fit, we keep you fit. We have a daily program. Except when you’re on assignments.”
“In your case,” Lembick said as they entered another building, “the training’s going to be squeezed into one week instead of two. The boss seems to think you can take it. Today we’ll start finding out if he’s right.”
“We’re gonna have to work you twice as hard!” said Cawber with exaggerated relish.
They were in a small storage warehouse. The racks that lined the walls were piled up with a bewildering variety of military, police, and other uniforms, that made the Saint catch his breath with amazement.
Lembick followed Simon’s sweeping gaze.
“Nice, eh? You name it, we’ve got it. Naval ratings, police, U.S. Army, all ranks, plenty of British regimental stuff — including some Scottish regiments,” he said with something as close to pride as that hard-edged voice could have come.
In the rest of his brief tour Simon was given a sight of everything in that same cursory way. The armaments store was a real eye-opener; and he quietly filed away what he had seen in his memory for future reference, at the same time noting that some of Pelton’s figures were confirmed as questionable in the light of the racks upon racks of the latest military-issue weapons he had seen: gleaming new Lee-Enfield 303’s, and Webley .38 revolvers, among other interesting items of more specialised issue.
And all the time, in the back of his mind, he was trying to form a hypothesis to explain the persistent sensation that he was a piece in a game he didn’t fully understand. In an obscure way he was reminded a little of another adventure, just a short while ago, when a certain Greek tycoon had made the mistake of thinking that he could manipulate the Saint for his own ends, and had very nearly succeeded.
Simon Templar’s week of fitness training began.
He knew it would be tough — even for him. He knew he was already about as fit, about as general-purpose fit, as a man could be. He had always kept himself that way — not only because his active career demanded it, but also from a sheer zest for living, a zest which quite naturally included a real and enduring pleasure in the perfect functioning of hand and nerve and eye and muscle. And he had started out, he knew, with enviable physical assets. He had the kind of frame that yielded maximum power and speed in relation to its bulk. It is well known that bigger bodies are less efficient machines, other things being equal, than smaller ones, and it was well known to Simon Templar. Size for size, a flyweight Olympic weightlifter is a deal stronger than his more massive counterparts in the heavy division. Yet in life, he also knew, you were usually dealing with absolutes: on the whole, bigger men were stronger, and it was more important to be strong, period, than to be strong for your size.
The Saint was tall, but with not an ounce of surplus weight on his body. His reflexes were razor-sharp, which was another advantage that came partly from the dice-game of heredity and partly from practice and habit. So he was as well equipped to face any challenge to his agility and endurance as any man could have been.
But he knew something else, too. He knew that there was general-purpose fitness, which he had, and there were also various kinds of special-purpose fitness. A man could be in the peak of condition as a boxer, say, but as soon as he tried pole-vaulting, or some other activity out of his usual field, he’d find muscles aching that he never knew he had.
Simon Templar couldn’t have run the hundred yards in nine seconds, but he could sprint creditably enough when the need arose. Equally he could have run or jogged for mile after mile without serious signs of distress, though he wouldn’t have won the marathon. But long hard runs, at pace, and with an increasing weight of stones in the rucksack on his back, were something for which it inevitably took a bit of time to develop the special-purpose fitness.
And until you did develop it, every muscle in your body, after a certain time, felt as if some malefic little arsonist had been at work at its centre; every limb seemed to be encased in concrete which made it weigh half a ton; and every joint felt as if its bearings had seized.
The Saint, in addition to these discomforts and the comparable ones of wrestling with Cawber, practising judo with Lembick, and doing all kinds of exercises for hours at a time, had a strategic problem to settle: how much he should hold his performance back to something nearer the average? By shining too much he might be inviting Lembick and Cawber to make things still harder for him; on the other hand, they seemed to be spurred on to higher sights of happy sadism by any show of weakness in their charges — as witness the case of Ungill. None of the others were having quite as much difficulty as that, but some were a good half-way to exhaustion by the Saint’s second day: for some of them, their eighth or ninth. And whenever any of them showed signs of flagging, Lembick or Cawber would instantly pounce and make still greater demands. In the end, the Saint compromised by doing a little less well than he could have in the weighted runs and other non-combative departments, and considerably less well than he could have in the physical tussles with the two trainers, though just well enough not to get hurt. If he had needed to, he could have taken either of them in any form of unarmed combat, but he judged that that would have been an affront which might have provoked them to some vicious form of revenge. Also, there could be an advantage in keeping his superiority a secret for the time being.
Rockham had chosen his two trainers well. They might be crude and uncultured, with no interest in the finer things of life, but they were tough and relentless slaved-rivers. Perfect, in other words, for what the Saint saw as the main object of that so-called training. It certainly wasn’t to produce what Simon had represented to himself as special-purpose fitness, unless Rockham foresaw significant numbers of missions in which his troops would need to run long distances wearing rock-filled or otherwise weighted rucksacks. It was simply to put new recruits to the test; a tough test that got down to the guts of a man, that took him again and again to the point of physical exhaustion or nausea, whichever came first; that drove him on to find more in reserve, another ounce of effort, when he thought he had been emptied of it all. And this against the continual goading and taunting and beating — sometimes literally — by those two despots of the drill-hall. It was make or break.