“Mueller, let’s add a little incentive to the mix. Get a detachment from Bravo Team to set up some ‘loot’ of hot coffee and spare hoods in a few of those buildings.”
“Yes, sir.” David Mueller grinned evilly, understanding the confusion it would add to the exercise to have a bunch of random troops running around who were working for neither side.
The explosions on the demolitions course sent up plumes of dust and smoke through the holes in the roofs. SOCOM’s Training Command had set up the courses with dummies and VR hostiles. DAG units not only had to navigate a complicated course involving the location and “demolition” of selected targets, they had to do so under directed and suppressive virtual fire from said hostiles. The course was a fiendishly difficult test of a unit’s ability to shoot, move, and communicate in concert with a primary demo mission.
The observation tower for the demolitions course was set well back from the activity, serving both for simulation and live runs, so that Mosovich had to use the enhanced features of his field goggles more than he would have liked. He was fine with the zoom, but he’d never quite gotten comfortable with shifting the view so that he was looking out from the eyes of one of his officers or men. He wasn’t happy using it in combat against humans at all. After Vietnam, Jake had a healthy respect for the wits of the enemy. He considered the use of the “alternate eyes” feature to be a serious breach of radio discipline and a prime example of assuming the enemy was stupid. DAG primarily fought humans. Assuming the enemy would be smart enough to do what he would do had kept him alive more than once before, and he wasn’t about to get lazy just because Posleen didn’t fight that way. Well, okay, there was that time down in Georgia, but that must have been the Posleen equivalent of military genius, because we’ve never seen it again. Not that I ever heard of, anyway.
He turned as Mueller climbed onto the platform, holding his mug out for a cup of strong coffee from the thermos his sergeant major seemed to have grafted onto his web gear for field exercises. He zoomed back in on the action, watched for a minute, and shook his head.
“You know, you would think that looking at a red-headed troop I should know exactly who the guy is even if I can’t see his insignia. What is it with all the redheads?” the colonel asked.
“Yeah, it’s funny, but have you noticed we tend to get a lot of two kinds of guys? There’s the little red-head guys. Most of ’em are kinda stocky but it’s all muscle. Then there’s the really big dark-haired guys. It’s kinda weird, like the war did something to the gene pool or something.” Mueller wrinkled his forehead, taking a big sip of the steaming coffee.
“Now that you mention it, Top, it is a bit strange. I don’t think I can even make a guess at what could cause it. Probably just some bizarre coincidence. Go figure.” The use of the traditional nickname, “Top,” for the ranking NCO in the command was a mark of respect and appreciation used by everyone, officer or enlisted, to distinguish that NCO from all others. It marked the NCO thus named as the go-to guy for all the thorniest practical problems of service life that someone hadn’t been able to solve at a lower level. He, as an infinite fount of military wisdom, would exercise near-magical powers to slice through whatever Gordian knot the Service had provided this time.
Jake watched his men glide through the course as smoothly as if they’d done it a dozen times. He’d looked it up. The course had been substantially redesigned since the last time they’d been through. Whatever personal problems the previous CO had had, he had left behind a first-rate outfit.
The service had DD’ed the bastard after JAG caught him banging a sixteen-year-old girl, then flushed the unit’s senior NCO who, far from reporting it, had been blackmailing the jerk. He’d seen a picture of the girl from Mueller’s buckley, and you almost couldn’t blame the guy. Almost. Still, a juv at least three decades her senior had one hell of an unfair advantage. Which made the sonofabitch enough of a sleaze that Mosovich wasn’t too surprised to hear that shortly after discharge that pair — the guys, not the girl — had gone on a drunken binge, gotten behind the wheel and smashed themselves into whatever hell was reserved for old men who preyed on high-school girls.
There was one thing niggling at him, though. Sure, sometimes good officers could be sleaze-balls. Soldiers weren’t by any stretch plaster saints. But everything he’d seen about the guy indicated that he was a grade-A clusterfuck. Both the commander and the sergeant major.
Usually, when you had a grade-A clusterfuck in charge of a unit, no matter how elite, the unit went to shit. They might get the job done, but they weren’t top-drawer.
DAG had cruised along as if it didn’t matter. As if having a commander who was a daily clusterfuck wasn’t a problem. Might even have been preferred.
As if the commander just didn’t matter. As if having an incompetent in charge was not such a bad thing. As if there was the Unit and then there was whatever screwball the brass had saddled on the Unit.
As the new commander, Mosovich wasn’t too sure how he felt about that.
The charcoal and red shades that blended on the Grandfather’s walls appeared to shimmer three-dimensionally. The dragons were so real you wanted to reach out and touch them just to make sure they weren’t there. Most observers would assume there had to be some clever tricks of Galtech materials involved in the illusion. A very close look would reveal that not only were the patterns two-dimensional, the dragons were each individuals. Each had five toes, as befit its noble stature. Yet each had its own body and face among the rest. The artist had spent only God knew how long bringing each dragon into its own semblance of life.
Stewart was early, or he wouldn’t have been waiting. The Grandfather believed in punctuality, and achieved it within his organization by always displaying it himself. “Lead from the front” was one Western aphorism that the Grandfather wholeheartedly agreed with. Precisely as his watch clicked over to two o’clock Greenwich Mean Time, the door opened and a man walked in. His hair was still completely black. Stewart suspected the use of hair dye, since his face showed the deep lines and dryness of rapidly advancing age. An advancing age that was tragic for his friends and colleagues as well as the organization. Unfortunately, there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. In the early days of the war, a handful of the Tong hierarchy had been successfully rejuved. Unfortunately, the stolen drug sets had been improperly handled, through ignorance. Since then, the ignorance had been remedied, but too late for the ill-fated first generation — the first generation of Tong rejuvs would get about a tenth of the benefit of a proper rejuvenation. The botched rejuv suffered from its own lacks, plus the seemingly impenetrable wall the Galactics had come up against that limited the original process. Once the initial nano-repair mechanism was fully set in motion, its own processes prevented its ever being repeated. The Grandfather and the upper echelon of the Tong had lived well into the twenty-first century, and had succeeded at passing on their institutional knowledge to the next generation, but at what now seemed a very high price.
The head of humanity’s largest and most powerful organized crime syndicate was a blocky, solid man. He wore a black, European-cut suit, moving with a fluid grace that belied his arthritic knee joints. He walked behind the large walnut desk and sat, folding his hands in his lap to face the freshly-minted older brother who had asked for this unprecedented meeting, after dispatching a large chunk of expensive Tong resources on an unexplained errand. Stewart knew this meeting would lead to a permanent change in his position in the Tong, one way or another. He watched the old man suppress a sigh and put his hand to his heart. The man’s fondness for Szechuan cuisine was well known. As was his distaste for taking medication he deemed unnecessary. Even antacids. Given his experiences, it was hard to blame him for his skepticism.