SPY LIFE

TRAINING

FOR THE HUNDREDTH time, Alan cursed Mark Spencer, using language he hadn‟t even realized he knew. It was almost five o‟clock in the evening, although it could have been five o‟clock in the morning; the sky had barely changed at all throughout the day. It was gray, cold, unforgiving. The rain was still falling, a thin drizzle that traveled horizontally in the wind, soaking through his supposedly waterproof clothing, mixing with his sweat and his dirt, chilling him to the bone. He unfolded his map and checked his position once again. He had to be close to the last RV of the day—the last rendezvous point—but he could see nothing. He was standing on a narrow track made up of loose gray pebbles that crunched under his combat boots when he walked. The track snaked around the side of a mountain with a sheer drop to the right. He was somewhere in the Brecon Beacons and there should have been a view, but it had been wiped out by the rain and the fading light. A few trees twisted out of the side of the hill with leaves as hard as thorns. Behind him, below him, ahead of him, it was all the same. Nowhere Land. Alan hurt. The 22-pound bergen backpack that he had been forced to wear cut into his shoulders and had rubbed blisters into his back. His right knee, where he had fallen earlier in the day, was no longer bleeding but still stung. His shoulder was bruised and there was a gash along the side of his neck. His camouflage outfit—he had swapped his Gap combat trousers for the real thing—fitted him badly, cutting in between his legs and under his arms but hanging loose everywhere else. He was close to exhaustion, he knew, almost too tired to know how much pain he was in. But for the glucose and caffeine tablets in his survival pack, he would have ground to a halt hours ago. He knew that if he didn‟t find the RV soon, he would be physically unable to continue.

Then he would be thrown off the course. “Binned” as they called it. They would like that. Swallowing down the taste of defeat, Alan folded the map and forced himself on. It was his ninth—or maybe his tenth—day of training. Time had begun to dissolve into itself, as shapeless as the rain. After his lunch with Mark Spencer and Mrs. Sami, he had been moved out of the manor house and into a crude wooden hut a few miles away. There were nine huts in total, each equipped with four metal beds and four metal lockers.

A fifth had been squeezed into one of them to accommodate Alan. Two more huts, painted a different color, stood side by side. One of these was a kitchen and mess hall. The other contained toilets, sinks, and showers—with not a single hot faucet in sight. On his first day there, Alan had been introduced to his training officer, an incredibly fit black sergeant. He was the sort of man who thought he‟d seen everything. Until he saw Alan. And he had examined the new arrival for a long minute before he had spoken. “It‟s not my job to ask questions,” he had said. “But if it was, I‟d want to know what they‟re thinking of, sending me children. Do you have any idea where you are, boy? This isn‟t a holiday camp. This isn‟t Disneyland.” He cut the word into its three syllables and spat them out. “I have you for twelve days and they expect me to give you the sort of training that should take fourteen weeks. That‟s not just mad. That‟s suicidal.” “I didn‟t ask to be here,” Alan said.Suddenly the sergeant was furious. “You don‟t speak to me unless I give you permission,” he shouted. “And when you speak to me, you address me as „sir.‟ Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Alan had already decided that the man was even worse than his geography teacher.

“There are five units operational here at the moment,” the officer went on. “You‟ll join K Unit. We don‟t use names. I have no name. You have no name. If anyone asks you what you‟re doing, you tell them nothing. Some of the men may be hard on you. Some of them may resent you being here. That‟s too bad. You‟ll just have to live with it. And there‟s something else you need to know. I can make allowances for you. You‟re a boy, not a man. But if you complain, you‟ll be binned. If you cry, you‟ll be binned. If you can‟t keep up, you‟ll be binned. Between you and me, boy, this is a mistake and I want to bin you.”

After that, Alan joined K Unit. As the sergeant had predicted, they weren‟t exactly overjoyed to see him. There were four of them. As Alan was soon to discover, the Special Operations Division of M16 sent its agents to the same training center used by the Special Air Service—the SAS. Much of the training was based on SAS methods and this included the numbers and makeup of each team. So there were four men, each with their own special skills. And one boy, seemingly with none. They were all in their mid-twenties, spread out over the bunks in companionable silence. Two of them were smoking. One was dismantling and reassembling his g*n— a 9mm Browning High Power pistol. Each of them had been given a code name: Wolf, Fox, Eagle, and Snake. From now on, Alan would be known as Cub. The leader, Wolf, was the one with the g*n. He was short and muscular with square shoulders and black, close-cropped hair. He had a handsome face, made slightly uneven by his nose, which had been broken at some time in the past. He was the first to speak. Putting the g*n down, he examined Alan with cold dark brown eyes. “So who the hell do you think you are?” he demanded. “Cub,” Alan replied. “A b****y schoolboy!” Wolf spoke with a strange, slightly foreign accent. “I don‟t believe it. Are you with Special Operations?” “I‟m not allowed to tell you that.” Alan went over to his bunk and sat down. The mattress felt as solid as the frame. Despite the cold, there was only one blanket. Wolf shook his head and smiled humorlessly. “Look what they‟ve sent us,” he muttered. “Double 0 Seven? Double 0 Nothing‟s more like it.” After that, the name stuck. Double 0 Nothing was what they called him. In the days that followed, Alan shadowed the group, not quite part of it but never far away. Almost everything they did, he did. He learned map reading, radio communication, and first aid. He took part in an unarmed combat class and was knocked to the ground so often that it took all his nerve to persuade himself to get up again. And then there was the assault course. Five times he was shouted and bullied across the nightmare of nets and ladders, tunnels and ditches, towering walls and swinging tightropes that stretched out for almost a quarter of a mile in, and over, the woodland beside the huts. Alan thought of it as the adventure playground from hell. The first time he tried it, he fell off a rope and into a pit filled with freezing slime. Half drowned and filthy, he had been sent back to the start by the sergeant. Alan thought he would never get to the end, but the second time he finished it in twenty-five minutes, which he had cut to seventeen minutes by the end of the week. Bruised and exhausted though he was, he was quietly pleased with himself. Even Wolf only managed it in twelve. Wolf remained actively hostile toward Alan. The other three men simply ignored him, but Wolf did everything to taunt or humiliate him. It was as if Alan had somehow insulted him by being placed in the group. Once, crawling under the nets, Wolf lashed out with his foot, missing Alan‟s face by an inch. Of course he would have said it was an accident if the boot had connected. Another time he was more successful, tripping Alan up in the mess hall and sending him flying, along with his tray, cutlery, and steaming plate of stew. And every time he spoke to Alan, he used the same sneering tone of voice. “Good night, Double 0 Nothing. Don‟t wet the bed.” Alan bit his lip and said nothing. But he was glad when the four men were sent off for a day‟s jungle survival course—this wasn‟t part of his own training. Even though the sergeant worked him twice as hard once they were gone, Alan preferred to be on his own. But on the tenth day, Wolf did come close to finishing him altogether. It happened in the Killing House.

The Killing House was a fake—a mock-up of an embassy used to train the SAS in the art of hostage release. Alan had twice watched K Unit go into the house, the first time swinging down from the roof, and had followed their progress on closedcircuit TV. All four men were armed. Alan himself didn‟t take part because someone somewhere had decided he shouldn‟t carry a g*n. Inside the Killing House, mannequins had been arranged as terrorists and hostages. Smashing down the doors and using stun grenades to clear the rooms with deafening, multiple blasts, Wolf, Fox, Eagle, and Snake had successfully completed their mission both times. This time Alan had joined them. The Killing House had been booby-trapped. They weren‟t told how. All five of them were unarmed. Their job was simply to get from one end of the house to the other without being “killed.” They almost made it. In the first room, made up to look like a huge dining room, they found the pressure pads under the carpet and the infrared beams across the doors. For Alan it was an eerie experience, tiptoeing behind the other four men, watching as they dismantled the two devices, using cigarette smoke to expose the otherwise invisible beam. It was strange to be afraid of everything and yet to see nothing. In the hallway there was a motion detector, which would have activated a machine g*n (Alan assumed it was loaded with blanks) behind a Japanese screen. The third room was empty. The fourth was a living room with the exit, a pair of French windows, on the other side. There was a trip wire, barely thicker than a human hair, running the entire width of the room, and the French windows were alarmed. While Snake dealt with the alarm, Fox and Eagle prepared to neutralize the trip wire, unclipping an electronic circuit board and a variety of tools from their belts. Wolf stopped them. “Leave it. We‟re out of here.” At the same moment, Snake signaled. He had deactivated the alarm. The French windows were open. Snake was the first out. Then Fox and Eagle. Alan would have been the last to leave the room, but just as he reached the exit, he found Wolf blocking his way. “Tough luck, Double 0 Nothing,” Wolf said. His voice was soft, almost kind. The next thing Alan knew, the heel of Wolf‟s palm had rammed into his chest, pushing him back with astonishing force. Taken by surprise, he lost his balance and fell, remembered the trip wire, and tried to twist his body to avoid it. But it was hopeless. His flailing left hand caught the wire. He actually felt it against his wrist. He hit the floor, pulling the wire with him. The trip wire activated a stun grenade—a small device filled with a mixture of magnesium powder and mercury fulminate. The blast didn‟t just deafen Alan, it shuddered right through him as if trying to rip out his heart. The light from the ignited mercury burned for a full five seconds. It was so blinding that even closing his eyes made no difference. Alan lay there with his face against the hard wooden floor, his hands scrabbling against his head, unable to move, waiting for it to end. But even then it wasn‟t over. When the flare finally died down, it was as if all the light in the room had burned out with it. Alan stumbled to his feet, unable to see or hear, not even sure anymore where he was. He felt sick to his stomach. The room swayed around him. The heavy smell of chemicals hung in the air. Ten minutes later he staggered out into the open. Wolf was waiting for him with the others, his face blank. He had slipped out before Alan hit the ground. The unit‟s training officer walked angrily over to him. Alan hadn‟t expected to see a shred of concern in the man‟s face and he wasn‟t disappointed. “Do you want to tell me what happened in there, Cub?” he demanded. When Alan didn‟t answer, he went on. “You ruined the exercise. You fouled up. You could get the whole unit binned. So you‟d better start telling me what went wrong.” Alan glanced at Wolf. Wolf looked the other way. What should he say? Should he even try to tell the truth? “Well?” The sergeant was waiting. “Nothing happened, sir,” Alan said. “I just wasn‟t looking where I was going. I stepped on something and there was an explosion.”

“If that was real life, you‟d be dead,” the sergeant said. “What did I tell you? Sending me a child was a mistake. And a stupid, clumsy child who doesn‟t look where he‟s going … that‟s even worse!” Alan stood where he was. He knew he was blushing. Half of him wanted to answer back, but he bit his tongue. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Wolf half smiling. The sergeant had seen it too. “You think it‟s so funny, Wolf? You can go clean up in there. And tonight you‟d better get some rest. All of you. Because tomorrow you‟ve got a thirty-mile hike. No rations. No lighters. No fire. This is a survival course. And if you do survive, then maybe you‟ll have a reason to smile.”