The naked edge

3

Raoul had no idea where he was being taken. After he used a pay phone to tell his parents that he was heading north to find a job in Denver, the stranger drove him to a small airport, Double Eagle, west of Albuquerque. There, the stranger returned his rental car. No security check was required as they walked toward a small jet. A few minutes later, they soared into the cobalt sky.

"I use small airports," the stranger explained, as if Raoul understood what the hell he was talking about. "I stay below eighteen thousand feet. That way, I don't need to file an instrument flight plan, and I don't turn on my transponder, which is how radar would otherwise track me."

Raoul had trouble concentrating. Until now, he'd never been in a plane. Vertigo threatened to make him vomit. But there was no way he'd let the stranger realize he was afraid. Although his palms were slick with sweat, he kept them firmly on his knees. He forced himself not to tremble.

The secret was not to look down, he decided. He began to wonder if this was some kind of sex thing, that the stranger would be like the predators Raoul had fought off in prison. But the stranger made no moves of that sort. In fact, after paying Raoul the promised two thousand dollars, all he wanted to talk about was fighting.

"Ever want to join the military?" the stranger asked.

"Hell, no." The jet engines were muffled through the earphones the stranger had given him.

"Don't you think it would be cool to carry a handgun and an assault rifle as part of your job?"

"That part. But who wants to go through all the bullshit of taking orders?"

"One goes with the other." The stranger had powerful-looking forearms. His sun-darkened face was gaunt, with a crease down each cheek, and an unusual intensity in his hazel eyes. "Nobody's going to give you a gun without telling you how and when to use it."

"I already got a gun."

"That piece of junk thirty-two? Even if you'd shot me with it, I could have reached you, grabbed it out of your hand, and shoved it down your throat. We'll get you some real guns. Ever fired an MP-5?"

"A what?"

"A submachine gun. Do you know the difference between a submachine gun and an actual machine gun?"

Raoul didn't even know there was a difference.

"A submachine gun fires pistol ammunition. Nine millimeter. A machine gun fires rifle ammunition. A point two-two-three cartridge, for example. The kind that goes in an M-16. Wicked. The bullet flips end over end when it hits something. Rips the target to shreds. Ever fired a submachine gun?"

Raoul hesitated, afraid he'd lose face if he admitted the truth. "No."

"We'll make up for that deficiency. There's nothing as sweet as firing an MP-5 on full auto, thirty rounds zipping through that gun in two seconds. Raoul, you might not have made love to the most beautiful woman. You might not have tasted the greatest whiskey. You might not have driven the fastest car. But I'm telling you, when you put thirty full-auto rounds through an MP-5, you can definitely say you've shot the world's best submachine gun. But to be given the chance to do that, and to get the further money I promised, you need to follow some orders. I mean, that's in any job, right?"

"I realize nobody's gonna give me money and not expect me to do something," Raoul said. "But you asked if I ever wanted to join the army. There's no way I'm gonna make bunk beds and bounce quarters off them and shit like they show in the movies."

"Movies, Raoul? You like movies?"

"Sure."

"Did you see any movies when you were in prison?"

"On TV."

"Sounds like a cushy prison."

"Try it sometime. See how cushy you think it is."

"Oh, I've been in prison, Raoul. Believe me. But the kind I was in didn't have TVs. What they had was red-hot needles under my fingernails and electrodes on my testicles."

Raoul noticed the scars on the stranger's fingers.

"When you're not learning about MP-5s and fun stuff like that, you're going to have a different kind of fun, watching a lot of movies," the stranger said. "Quite a job, huh? To get paid three thousand dollars a month to watch movies?"

"What movies?"

"Action movies. I think we'll start with Thief. Michael Mann directed it. James Caan's the star. Ever seen it."

Raoul had no idea who the hell Michael Mann and James Caan were. "Sounds like an old movie. I don't watch old movies."

"I guarantee you'll love this one. At the end, Caan goes into a house and blows away a bunch of gangsters, using a handgun. It's one of the first times a gunfight had an accurate look in a movie. Mann uses terrific technical advisors. The way Caan holds the pistol. His balance. His footwork. Amazing. I've got a bunch of other movies like it. Ronin. Proof of Life. Spy Game. The Recruit. The thing is, Raoul, you need to ignore the plots and concentrate on the individual scenes, on what the characters do and the way the actors handle themselves, because those movies had terrific technical advisors too, and except for a few spots, they're accurate in their tradecraft."

"Tradecraft?"

"The way operators-professionals-do things. You'll catch on to the vocabulary as we go along. You'll watch Black Hawk Down, of course. And the TV series, The Unit, which is about Delta Force. And Dark Blue. Kurt Russell plays a corrupt cop. The director Ron Shelton got a really good technical advisor. The gun stuff is accurate. And there's a moment when Kurt gives a speech and says, 'I'm a gunfighter. I come from a family of gunfighters.' That's a first. I never saw a movie before in which somebody like a police detective who earns his living with a gun calls himself a gunfighter. In life, of course, privately they do call themselves that. Gunfighter. You like the sound of that word, Raoul?"

"Sounds like an old western."

"A western. Good idea, Raoul. I'll make sure you look at The Wild Bunch."

The sun was behind them. The expanse of the landscape changed from mountains to flats, from brown to green. Sunset occurred swiftly. Soon they flew in darkness. Raoul controlled his dizziness by staring at the faint glow of the lights on the cockpit's dials.

"You impress me," the stranger said.

"What are you talking about?"

"You're afraid to fly."

"Who says I'm afraid?"

"But you don't show it."

"Who says I'm afraid?"

"Not me."

Raoul continued to stare ahead, surprised by how much light was on the ground. Towns glowed. Cities glared. Headlights blazed on freeways. There were seldom stretches of pure black. He hadn't realized how many people there were and how bright the night could be. When they reached one of the few sections of black, the stranger aimed the jet toward the heart of it.

Immediately, two rows of lights appeared in the gloom. As the stranger guided the plane down toward them, Raoul's stomach rose toward his throat. He repressed the urge to be sick. But by God, he wasn't going to show the stranger any of what he felt.

Descending, he suddenly had the sense of high trees on each side of the lights. Then the lights got big, and he felt a nudge through the plane as the wheels touched down. The stranger steered to the right, toward other lights, which were in a corrugated-metal building that had its large doors open. At once, the lights on the runway went out, but not before Raoul looked back and saw men scurrying across the runway, pulling something over it. A net. They were covering the runway with a camouflage net. The stranger shut off the plane's engines. In the blessed silence, their sound still echoed in Raoul's ears.

When the stranger opened the exit hatch, humidity enveloped Raoul. Sweat moistened his face and threatened to make his clothes stick to his skin as they stepped from the plane. The air weighed on him.

Where the hell was he?

There was too much else to think about. Three men waited for the stranger and him to climb down. They wore thick-soled camping shoes, pants with numerous pockets, loose shirts hanging out, and baseball caps over what their short sideburns suggested was closely cropped hair. One was Anglo. One was Black. One was Hispanic. The latter made Raoul feel less isolated. It took him a moment before he noticed that, although he thought of them as men, two seemed younger than his twenty-three years, but something about the way they carried themselves made clear they were definitely men.

"Everything's on schedule?" the stranger asked.

"Yes, Mr. Bowie," the black man said.

At last, a name for the stranger.

"This is Mr. Ramirez," Bowie said, indicating Raoul.

Despite his uneasiness, Raoul felt proud to have been introduced in that formal manner. Mister. No one had ever called him that before.

"He's smart," Bowie said.

No one had ever spoken about Raoul in that way, either.

"He'll be an excellent contribution to our group." Bowie turned to him. "Won't you, Mr. Ramirez?"

Yes." Then an amazing thing happened. Raoul didn't think about the next thing he said. He just did it. "Yes, sir."

"See?" Bowie told the three men. "An excellent contributor. Get him squared away. Clothes, equipment, something to eat. Show him where he'll be bunking. Mr. Ramirez, as you can tell from these representatives of our group, this is not a white-bread operation. If you have any problem relating to various races, you'll need to get over it in a hurry. We follow the one true god here, and that is Discipline."

Sudden gunshots made Raoul flinch. In an instant, he tucked down his head, bent his knees, and raised his hands to defend himself.

"Quick reactions," the Anglo said.

The shots came from behind the building.

"He shows promise," the Hispanic agreed.

The shots persisted: a steady rattle. His stomach on fire, Raoul stared past the plane toward the rear of the building. He had no idea how thick its corrugated metal was, and the only thing that kept him from diving to the concrete floor was that no one else in the group seemed alarmed.

"It's a night-training exercise," Bowie told him. "You'll be involved in them soon enough."

Out there, something exploded. Again, no one else reacted.

"And when you're not training," Bowie said, "you'll learn to sleep despite the noise. Sleep is the operator's friends. Fatigue is among the legion of his enemies. Always sleep and eat whenever you get the chance, although you won't have much time for rest here. Do you like video games, Raoul?"

"Uh, video games?" The seemingly weird question made Raoul frown as he glanced nervously again in the direction of the shots.

"Video games, sir."

"Sir. I used to. In the joint, there weren't any."

"Well, that's different now. Here, when you're not in classes or watching movies, you can play video games as much as you want. The latest versions. Soldier of Fortune. Mortal Kombat. Doom. The U.S. military licenses that one and encourages its soldiers to play it. Medal of Honor. Brothers in Arms. Men of Valor. Full Spectrum Warrior. America's Army. We've got every action video game on the market. Hone your reflexes. Have a ball."