The Wizards Series, Book One

COMBAT WIZARD

A Paranormal-ESP Thriller

By Jack L Knapp

 

By the author:

The Wizards Series

Combat Wizard

Wizard at Work

Talent

Veil of Time

Siberian Wizard

Magic

Angel (a short story in the Wizards Series)

 

The Darwin’s World Series

Darwin’s World

The Trek

Home

The Return

Defending Eden

 

The New Frontiers Series

The Ship

NFI: New Frontiers, Inc

NEO: Near Earth Objects

BEMs: Bug Eyed Monsters

MARS: the Martian Autonomous Republic of Sol

Pirates

Terra

Short Novel

The Wizard’s Apprentice

 

 

 

COPYRIGHT

COMBAT WIZARD

A Paranormal Thriller

Book One, The Wizards Series

Copyright © 2013 by Jack L Knapp

Second edition, Copyright © 2023 by Jack L Knapp

Cover Art Copyright Mia Darien

Stock Images from Fotolia.com

 

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.

Disclaimer: The persons and events depicted in this novel were created by the author’s imagination; no resemblance to actual persons or events is intended.

Product names, brands, and other trademarks referred to within this book are the property of the respective trademark holders. Unless otherwise specified, no association between the author and any trademark holder is expressed or implied. Nor does the use of such trademarks indicate an endorsement of the products, trademarks, or trademark holders unless so stated. Use of a term in this book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark, registered trademark, or service mark.

 

For Patricia

Who has been in my life, through good and bad, for half a century
I’m grateful

 

 

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Interlude One

Interlude Two

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

Prologue: Wizard at Work

Chapter One, Wizard at Work

Chapter Two, Wizard at Work

About the Author:

 

Chapter One

The full moon hung low in the western sky and the sun had just peeked above the eastern mountains when I got to the muster area. A light breeze stirred the brown dust, still cool this time of the morning. The temperature would be climbing by the time we got back, on its way to the century mark.

Staff Sergeant Bill Mackey, assisted by Sergeant Willis, third in command today, had gotten there before me and was still inspecting the troops. Serious man, Mackey; all business before a patrol. I approved.

He had almost finished checking that the men had full loads of ammo, water in their camelbacks, fresh batteries for their radios, things like that. He’s on his second tour and there’s not much he doesn’t know about infantry combat in the Middle East. A lot more, in fact, than I know. He might have been leading this patrol had I not been available, but then, I’ve got that reputation for being ‘lucky’. Or maybe it was because I’m a short-timer like the others, and available.

But no alert orders. I’ve already been here more than a year and I’ve had enough of this rockpile!

Paperwork glitch, or maybe the Agency worked on a different schedule. Remembering back to when they’d offered me the assignment, nobody had mentioned how long I’d be expected to stay.

Maybe they had no place to send me. Certainly not to where I’d been before, because the school no longer existed. A friend messaged me a while back to tell me it had been shut down. People warned not to talk about it, the usual draconian threats made, then transferred out with barely time allowed to pack.

I decided that when we got back, I’d send a message up the chain. Maybe they’d just forgotten about me. It wasn’t as if I was some ordinary square peg in the appropriate hole.

One staff sergeant, Mackey, second in command and highly experienced. A buck sergeant, Willis, third in the chain. Eleven short-time infantrymen, strangers except for Kazinsky; he had been a driver at the time, assigned to a Stryker unit when I joined it TDY. One carried the backpack radio, two carried SAWs, and two others had grenade launchers attached to the underside of their rifles. That was the patrol.

The squad automatic weapons are in reality light machine guns, but light only in the sense that they differ from the M2 heavy machine gun.

Mention light weapons infantryman, the job description for the patrol’s members, and you’ll get a chuckle. Or maybe a curse. ‘Light’ is a misnomer; infantrymen are informally called grunts for a reason, the reason being the heavy loads they carry. The riflemen, in addition to their basic load of rifle and ammunition, carried extra ammo today for the grenade launchers and machine guns.

Every member of a patrol is armed, including the medic. The Muj are equal-opportunity assholes and a medic is just another target.

Not enough men for a combat patrol, but plenty to patrol the village. If the Muj had managed to reach the village during the night, we were the ones most likely to find out the hard way. They’d be gone by now, but improvised explosive devices, IEDs, and booby traps could be anywhere. I’d found more than a dozen since being assigned here, part of why I’m considered to be ‘lucky’.

There would be another patrol later in the afternoon and snipers were on rooftops watching all the time. More activity is better, so the afternoon patrols rarely saw action.

The compound was a big target, and important. Counting the outposts on Route 47, the commanding general controls more than 1600 square kilometers of mostly open country. Or so we say; the jihadists come down from the border at night to argue the point.

The outposts are small, a squad or two, but backup is available. A relief force can arrive in half an hour, sometimes less. When the Apaches are available, and most of the time they are, air power is no more than ten minutes away from the farthest outpost.

All by themselves, the attack helicopters can break up an assault. Not to mention strewing good jihadists across the landscape. You know, the only good jihadist is...everyone’s heard that one too.

The Muj, short for mujahideen, don’t have enough people to do more than harass us. IEDs are the usual tactic nowadays, and once in a while there’s a suicide bomber or an occasional ambush when they think they can get away with it. The rest of the time, they lob in a few shells from a hidden mortar and beat feet. Doesn’t do much damage, other than wake people up and make them nervous.

That’s what the patrols are for, to keep them from building up a force big enough to do real damage. Drones and helicopters and ground-attack planes can only do so much; to really control territory, you’ve got to have boots on the ground.

Rules of the game, up here where the Pak border is so close. Despite our patrols, they still manage to mortar the compound about once a week.

It’s better now than it was when I arrived; not great, but better. Ambushes were a lot more common a year ago, but we’ve created a lot of good jihadists since then. They were new and enthusiastic back then, kill the infidel and all that. But there aren’t nearly as many old jihadists now.

I waited for Mackey and Willis to finish and listened to the troops bitch. A bitching troop is a happy troop, so they say. It might even be true, at least some of the time.

***

“So what’s this clusterfuck about?”

Kazinsky; it figured. Somehow, the FNG was always the one asking a question no one could answer.

“Just another patrol,” Myer said wearily. “We walk through the Ville, wave at the locals, get back in time for chow.”

“Why not a Stryker?” Kazinsky persisted. “Maybe two? Just drive around and wave?”

“What, you don’t like the infantry?” Johnson snorted. “We take long walks, in case you’ve forgotten, but the real reason is that the roads aren’t wide enough. Mud walls on both sides, too narrow for a Stryker to get through.”

“So why not a couple of hummers? With Ma Deuces up top?”

“Fuck, Kazinsky! Why don’t you let the general know how to run this shit-storm, next time he invites you over for tea?”

“Wise ass.” Kazinsky glared, but quieted when he spotted SSG Mackey glaring back.

He formed up the patrol and nodded at me. I nodded back, then walked through the gate and turned right. Behind me, the men filed silently out through the gate and moved immediately to take up positions on both sides of the dirt track. The last ones waited for the others to move out, before following. They might accordion closer together later on, but for now, they were keeping a good combat spread. That was Mackey’s problem, not mine.

Mine was to stay out ahead and try to sense anything unusual, because unusual can get you killed. But we were still close to the walls and the trouble, if there was to be any this morning, would come later. I had time to think.

It’s not really luck, what I do. My place is out front because my special Talents have a better chance of working if I’m not surrounded by others. That’s how I’ve spotted ambushes in time to avoid them, found a couple of buried IEDs too, but only after I got close. I have to be close; the closer I get, the stronger the hunch is. Meters count, sometimes even centimeters do.

If I’d been back in the middle of the patrol, the lead scout might have, probably would have, set off that buried booby trap. But he didn’t, because I spotted the nearly-invisible thin wire that was stretched across the dirt track. And understood that the way to disarm this particular bomb was to cut the wire. A tug, what you’d get if a boot pulled on the wire, would have released the trigger.

The Agency, actually the people who sent me over here who act for the Agency, considers me a failure. I suppose I am, in their eyes because I can’t do more, but more-or-less by accident they put me in a place where I can do some good. I’m not a failure here.

Not that it helps, sometimes. My paranormal Talents don’t always work, which is why I get nightmares. If they were only reliable...!

The Agency’s School produced a number of strong telepaths, people whose Talents always work. They’re good, better than me, but then that’s all they can do. I’m not a strong telepath, but I’ve got other Talents. I just wish I could rely on them.

A good school-trained telepath can pick up thoughts from almost anyone. I can too, sometimes, but for me it’s hit-or-miss. I’m only reliable when communicating with, ‘comming’ as we call it, another telepath. The School’s administrators would probably have booted me like they did the other failures, but I was the only multiple Talent they’d ever found. So they kept me around, more or less as an experiment. Maybe my Talents would firm up or something, and if not I might develop others. Abilities no one suspected.

I tried; over and over again, I tried. Plug in the helmet, try to follow the instructions of the computer’s artificial intelligence, but it kept showing me Rhine cards, the ones designed by Dr Rhine, and my mind always went off in other directions.

And after every session, there were the headaches. Nausea-inducing migraines, every time.

My telepathy Talent, TP, is reliable if I’m communicating with another telepath. It’s not a problem except for the headaches, but as for picking up conversations between normals, most of the time all I get is static. No voices, just a kind of buzzing. I have had one other success, what I call the ‘bubble’, and the Agency doesn’t know about it. I didn’t bother to tell them, it only affects me, but I’ve found it very useful over here in this rockpile where almost everyone hates us.

Anyway, the headaches don’t happen immediately. They may hold off for a couple of hours after I use some sort of Talent. I wish aspirin would work. It did, before the computer and the AI, but now it doesn’t. It’s some kind of side effect.

The agency spent a lot of money on me before they gave up, I’ll give them that. Most of the time they boot people early, but I’m their only psychokinetic, PK, so they kept trying. Unlike telepathy, my PK is reliable but weak and distance is important. It only works out to about a hundred meters, and at that range it’s so weak as to be almost useless. Some sort of inverse square rule, maybe. Halve the distance, about four times the strength? One of these days, I’ll try measuring it, despite knowing that I’ll pay for the effort with pain. I can also sense the future sometimes, not like a picture or anything, but it’s handy when you walk into a casino. Any game, doesn’t matter; if the hunch is not there, a feeling of certainty, I don’t bet. When it comes, then it’s time to put down as many chips as the house will allow. It’s also useful for avoiding ambushes and IEDs when it works.

There’s a word for almost-successful: failure.

Precognition? For whatever reason, I didn’t tell them about that either. I was paranoid by the time I discovered it, which might be another side effect of the hours under the helmet. Or maybe it was another hunch. I don’t know. Anyway, it’s just a way of using my PK to protect myself. I had a hunch, so I kept my mouth shut. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me.

Not a twinge from my precog Talent today.

No clue, that in less than an hour my luck would finally run out.

***

My subconscious got the message before my conscious mind did, and the bubble formed almost as soon as the thump hit my boot soles. Then the shock wave arrived and blew me clear across the dirt road. Bouncing off the mud wall further disoriented me, but I was alive, if stunned, and my bubble had saved me again. I wasn’t thinking clearly, I knew that much. I was flat on my back, cushioned by a few centimeters of bubble-field underneath and looking up at a layer of dust over the top.

I collapsed the field and the dust fell, making me sneeze. It helped; after I sneezed, I was able to shake off the numbness from the explosion. If this was an ambush instead of an unattended IED, I couldn’t do anyone any good by making a target of myself. I stumbled to the opposite wall and took cover, but no one was shooting as far as I could tell. I heard only a kind of crackling, ringing noise, at first, but after a few moments I heard moans.

The radioman was down, hurt but alive. The radio was dusty but otherwise undamaged, so I tried the handset. The response was reassuring; communication, when you’re in combat, is a priority. I called in a situation report, a SITREP, and the major I spoke to assured me help was on its way. Just as soon as he could contact the RRF, and if they were still on station, air support, but they might not be. Manning problems, now that we were drawing down our in-country forces.

I ended the contact, and the nausea got me before I’d taken three steps. My mouth suddenly filled with saliva and I vomited up everything I had eaten for the past month.

Delayed reaction from being bounced off that wall? Maybe. Or maybe it was the bloody things on the ground. Even psi’s can be shocked. We’re human, after all.

I swished my mouth out with water and felt a little better. Doc, the medic, was alive but stunned. I gathered up bandage packs from the dead men, added my own combat dressing, and collected others from Doc’s pack. Functioning, not good, but better. I posted two men, including one that appeared to be deaf, where they could see anyone coming up the road. Not much protection while we worked, but it would have to do. I didn’t sense danger, so no follow-up attack? Or maybe it wasn’t working, because it’s like that. Unreliable, meaning don’t rely on it. It would take the quick reaction force at least half an hour to reach us, maybe longer. Assuming the jihadists hadn’t managed to plant an IED. Ambush the relief force is a common tactic over here.

Sergeant Mackey and the walking wounded bandaged themselves and the other leakers. I got the concussed guys behind cover and we settled in to wait, but not long. Half an hour later I heard the grinding of motors and spotted the scouts when one waved at me.

The reaction force had a pair of up-armored HMMVWs and a medic with more supplies, including canvas stretchers for the wounded. Scouts out front, an infantry fire team ahead of the vehicle looking for more IEDs, a full squad trailing. Somebody thought we were important, or maybe it was just a slow day at the Compound. I guess I’m a little bitter.

The regular hummers also had pedestal-mounted Ma Deuces, the name for our elderly but still effective .50 caliber M2HB Browning machine guns. Two men manned the machine guns while the others dismounted. The infantrymen spread out to provide protection, the medic worked on my wounded. It didn’t take long.

The trucks carried the wounded to the field hospital, the squad leader took the remaining troops back to their company area, and I reported to the S2 for debriefing.

Except for the paperwork, the patrol was over.

***

I had reason to be bitter. I’d been leading patrols for more than half a year now, and as far as I could tell the people who’d sent me here had forgotten all about me. Paranoia? Maybe, maybe not. It probably doesn’t matter. Out there, in what the troops call the suck, it’s every man against the IEDs, every man against the bullets.

When they’re targeted at your men, even if you’re not afraid for yourself, there’s fear. You fear what will happen to them.

Soldiers expect much from their leaders, rightly so. Why does the Army insist I take out so many others? If they’d only let me patrol alone! But it’s not the Army way.

Writing letters to the next of kin is torture. Why them? Survivor’s guilt…

I can’t explain, and they wouldn’t believe me if I tried. As far as the Army’s concerned, I’m just another junior officer and a misfit at that, but I’m a good patrol leader so that’s what they’ve got me doing.

Nightmares...they’re just part of being a soldier, Chief. Suck it up, don’t mean nothing. Push on.

It didn’t start out this way. I had an assignment, work with the Talents and see if they were of any use in combat. Follow along, try to stay out of real soldiers way. Every outfit seemed to have a guy called magnet-ass, because if there was fire in the area, he would be the one to draw it. People noticed that I was the opposite of a magnet-ass. Some of the men around me had been lightly wounded, but none had been killed and I hadn’t even been injured. I was a misfit, but somehow a lucky charm misfit, and since I didn’t have a real job to do…

Fuck it, put him to work! We’re short of NCOs and anyway, he’s a warrant, but since he’s here and we need him?

So I became, more or less by accident, a patrol leader. But that’s a job for a sergeant, mostly, so maybe a patrol commander? Not that it matters. Do a good job and you get more jobs to do and somehow, they’re never ‘good’ jobs, never easy. It’s the army way.

Exhaustion wars with fear, not for myself but fear just the same. Even a psi can get survivor’s guilt. Do it enough, you too can have an empty stare at nothing, far off in the distance. Early on, I acquired the thousand-meter stare, where my mind drifts and my consciousness wanders. Hatred is part of my mind-set too.

When they’re targeted at your men, even if you’re not afraid for yourself, there’s fear. You fear what will happen to them. I learned to hate the jihadists, and to also fear PTSD.

Soldiers expect much from their leaders. I should be able to do more! It’s frustrating! Why does the Army insist I take out so many others? If they’d only let me work alone! But it’s not the Army way…

Survivor’s guilt…nightmares...they’re just part of being a soldier, Chief. Every night, I wake up sweating and just lie there in the darkness. I always try to go back to sleep, but the nightmares are waiting. Writing letters to the next of kin is torture. Why them? I can’t explain, and they wouldn’t believe me if I tried. As far as the Army’s concerned, I’m just another junior officer, and not a ‘real’ officer at that! But I’m good at leading patrols, so that’s what they’ve got me doing. Suck it up, don’t mean nothing. Push on.

The troops have someone to talk to. I don’t; I’m probably the most-alone person in Afghanistan. I’m different, meaning there’s no one I can share with, no way for me to release the tension.

The Army’s got a slogan, An Army of One. Every time I hear it, I cringe. I want to scream. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

***

Wonder of wonders, my name wasn’t on the new duty roster. Had my long-overdue orders finally come in? I was entitled to rotate back stateside at the end of a one-year tour, wasn’t I?

Confused, no patrol assignment and no orders, I headed across the compound to where junior officers are quartered. My CHU, containerized housing unit, isn’t much, but it’s home. I shucked my gear, dumped my dusty BDU’s on the floor, and crashed. Then the dreams came, and took over. Hazy, but I recognized the place. After all, I’d been dreaming about it for months, and understood what was about to happen even if I couldn’t stop it .

I was fairly new in country at the time, still serving as assistant to the patrol commander while trying to find out if my paranormal Talent would work in combat. He was up near the middle of the patrol, I was walking near the back.

The lead scout approached the crossroads, hesitated, then darted across. He crouched, held up his hand, and listened.

His hand was still up when we started taking fire. The jihadists had Russian AKs, assault rifles, and a PK machine gun. They were on a slight rise, firing down at us from between scattered mud-brick houses. It was a good position and it should have worked, but someone got anxious. If that overeager jihadist had waited a few seconds longer we’d have been out in the open. But he opened up early, and missed.

The attackers had the high ground, we had thick mud walls for cover. They were anxious, not expecting the ambush to be triggered, and the first shots missed.

I scampered back behind cover and took stock. Our guys had SAWs, M4A1 carbines, and M320 grenade launchers. We were also in a pretty good position, despite being cut off. Just contact headquarters—I could hear the patrol leader’s voice on the radio, so he was already doing that—and wait for the Quick Reaction Force. The jihadists knew they’d be coming, so they’d break off the attack and beat feet. Their usual tactic is to just slip away, hide their weapons and blend in with the population.

No artillery support for us, not here, and no air support; in built-up areas there’s too much chance of collateral damage. Senior officers are afraid of bad publicity, so supporting fires won’t be approved.

Just hunker down and wait; the QRF will get here soon.

The assault rifles popped from just past the row of houses. A PK, or maybe it was a PKM, the modernized version of Kalashnikov’s machine gun, was on the hilltop, overwatching the rifle positions. As a result, we weren’t going anywhere.

No question, it was a good ambush. If that one eager fanatic hadn’t opened up when he did, we’d have been caught in the middle or cut into two parts.

If the jihadists had RPG’s, they hadn’t used them. Saving them for the reaction force? Maybe, but probably not; most don’t have that kind of discipline. More indiscipline; that PK gunner was going to burn out his barrel if he kept putting out the same high volume of fire! Poor training, or lack of experience?

Clouds of fine dust drifted, obscuring details. Bullet strikes stirred up some of it, more came from muzzle blasts. Weapons firing near the ground kick up a lot of dust.

One of our grenadiers spotted something and fired a 40mm HE grenade. The shell hit a rock and blew up. It had happened less than 50 meters up the slope, the rock was close enough to be within range of my psychokinesis, so I rolled it down the hill. Wasted effort, as it turned out, because no one was behind it.

More dust puffed, a thin brown haze that drifted across the slope.

Stalemate; we didn’t have enough room to try fire and maneuver, so we stayed under cover and popped off rounds to keep them honest while waiting for the QRF to arrive. They’d have to expose themselves to rush us, and the narrow spaces between the houses made perfect killing zones. Time was not on their side either, unless they’d brought enough people to not only ambush the patrol but also ambush the QRF before they could reach us. Not such a great location for an ambush after all! Still, between that PK and the rifles, we were taking a lot of fire. The PK could chew through the mud walls, given time. But so far, the gunner wasn’t trying to knock down our cover.

If they had waited a bit longer, hit us while we were out in the open, it might have worked. But they hadn’t. Maybe they had a new commander as well as a rookie machine gunner.

They knew what our guys would do; SOP, after all, and if a patrol commander is aggressive, he won’t wait for rescue. Up the hill, some were already moving around despite our fire, trying to find better positions. They had an excellent chance to bring flanking fire on us if they could reach the other side of the square, and over there they could fire straight down the road. They would also have cover, we would have none.

I slipped ahead to a collapsed section of wall where I would have a better view. One of the structures up-slope was a kind of duplex, two small mud houses sharing a common wall. We would be hidden from the machine gun, but even if we reached the building the AKs could sweep its front. I went back to watching the slope. Now and again, one would pop up and dart to a better position.

Where was the QRF? I'm sure I wasn’t the only one wondering.

That PK was the biggest threat. Snap decision; if he moved, I would try to take him out. I would have to; if he got that MG across the square, we were not just in trouble, we be likely not survive until the QRF came up. If they did.

We waited, they moved around. The machine gunner wisely remained behind cover but an ambusher ran out, screeched “Allah Akbar!” and emptied his magazine in our direction. Stupid, but yeah, they really do that. I reached out with my PK and tripped him before he could get back to cover. Bullets finished the job.

Just call me tanglefoot! Give Allah my regards, dipshit.

Half a minute into the firefight and during a short lull, the little girl walked out in front of the duplex.

She was rubbing her fist against her face. She had probably been asleep when the shooting started, that’s what the fist meant. Strange how you notice details like that. Alone, sleeping, she woke up and was scared.

I didn’t see her open the door. She was just there, walking uncertainly toward the next doorway. Was that where her mother was?

I knew what was coming. The precognition ability, PC, worked perfectly. I could see what was about to happen…

My boots slipped, I couldn’t get traction, I couldn’t get to her. I was still trying when she went down. The bullets tossed her backward, ripped and broken, to lie in the dirt. I screamed my frustration…

And woke up tangled in a sweat-soaked sheet.

More than once I’d fallen out of bed, thrashing around, trying to get my legs to move. Not your nightmare, this one is mine alone. I had known what was coming. I watched the little girl die. But I couldn’t reach her.

The duplex was thirty-five meters up the hill, no more than that, but as soon as I managed to stand up the bubble snapped into place around me. My subconscious did what my rational mind wouldn’t. I chose to expose myself, my lizard brain overruled me. The bubble formed, my boots couldn’t touch the ground. Helpless, raging inside as it happened, not even able to look away...

I lived it when it happened.

Now I live it again and again. Each nightmare is a reminder of failure. My failure. I should have been able to save her!

Nightmares, sleeplessness, guilt trips, PTSD. Post-traumatic-stress disorder. Combat soldiers understand. Some deal with it better than others, but as for me? I wasn’t dealing with it at all.

PTSD; if you’re a combat soldier, it’s waiting.

***

She was barely more than a baby when she died. Even with my Talent, there had been nothing I could do. The jihadists had seen movement and fired. God would correct their aim. Insh’Allah. That was when I began to hate them. They had been enemies before, but after that patrol it became personal and it still is. I see troops piss on dead enemies, but now it doesn’t bother me. I understand how they feel!

Rationally, I know my limits but knowing doesn’t help. My Talent might even be making the nightmares worse.

I always kept trying to reach the child, to get her back inside. I tried again and still I couldn’t move. That’s the way it is in nightmares. Logically, both of us would have been killed, but logic plays no role in dreams.

Other dreams are almost as bad. Were the victims trying to tell me it was my fault? Not necessary, I already knew. I survived, they didn’t. Despite my Talents, I had been just as helpless as they were.

Useless, useless...I’d give the ability back if I could, but it’s as automatic as riding a bicycle. You can’t unlearn it, it becomes part of you.

The hours connected to the Agency’s computer had changed me forever. There’s no going back, no ending short of death.

I’ve thought about it, suicide. We all do.

But my death wouldn’t bring them back, and it probably wouldn’t work anyway. I couldn’t poison myself...I would know...and I couldn’t even shoot myself. The bubble would protect me. Stupid goddamned subconscious!

Survivor’s guilt. It’s part of the PTSD, but having a name for it doesn’t help.

Sometimes the dreams were about innocents being blown up by suicide bombers. I couldn’t stop those either. A fellow believer had decided his all-powerful God needed help from a fucking locked explosive vest. Their vests are locked, you see, because sometimes the martyr decides he’s not ready after all. Fortunately, thoughtful jihadists always provide a remote trigger. All they need do is punch in a number on a cell phone, and boom; tell Allah I sent you.

I’d been in an armored HMMVW on one occasion when it happened. Dark red droplets spattered the side of the truck, all that was left of the suicider and the people around him. I glanced at the spots when I got out and wiped through the haze on the thick window. It smeared, and no matter how I wiped, the stain stuck to my fingers.

The world contains a lot of evil. In this rockpile, little girls get shot to death and sometimes they get blown up. Girls don’t matter to the true believers. That’s the major difference between them and us, that and which corrupt politician rules. If, when, the Taliban regain power, their barbaric practices will be reinstated. At least, they’re not being allowed to stone women to death, not as long as we’re here.

Madness, pure madness; Afghanistan is insanity codified and amplified!

I’d thought that I, we, might change things this time, now that we were concentrating on the combat mission. It hadn’t been a well-formed thought, just a vague feeling that there must be a reason for us being here. But the Taliban are mostly hiding in the remote tribal areas of Pakistan now, and we’re still here.

Nothing has changed; I understand now that nothing will change. New soldiers arrive, others go home, some of them in a metal box. But I’ve been here more than a year, and I still don’t have orders to leave.

***

The CHU smelled of fear, despair, helplessness, sweat; I needed to get out. There was only one place I could go. Maybe no one would be there. I wouldn’t exactly be welcome if they were, but what were they going to do, send me to Afghanistan? I almost felt like chuckling.

I had to get out.

The craziness bubbled, just beneath my consciousness, and I almost embraced it. Almost, but not yet, not this time.

Still, I would have another opportunity later, many opportunities. All I would need to do is sink into that enticing place where reality goes away, where I could laugh at the things that haunted me and never grieve for what I’d lost. My humanity, and my sense of ethics.

I had worried about ethics until I began to hate. Now, the two warred within my mind. Madness, PTSD; how different are they?

The mad ones find a way of coping, they don’t take their own lives. The sane ones, the soldiers with PTSD, it happens all too often.

Think about it; you guarantee your sanity by killing yourself. Even in sanity, there’s madness.

The casualties will continue, even after we Americans, go home again.

This war, like all the others, won’t end when the shooting stops.

 

Chapter Two

It was called, informally, the Colonel’s Club. I doubt it had a real name.

I’d been there before, but only during the early-morning hours before the sun came up. This time the nightmare woke me early, and the club was only a few hundred meters away. I had no place else to go, and I needed to get out of my CHU.

There was an opened bottle of good single-malt scotch on the table in back. I put money in the kitty, dropped a couple of ice cubes in a glass, poured, then sat down at an empty table near the back.

A few officers were sitting near the door. Others might come into the Club while I was there, but they wouldn’t sit at my table. For that matter, the others might change tables, move away from mine. The patrons were almost always field-grade officers, and none were interested in chatting with a lowly warrant.

I was an outcast, even here. But I was used to it. I’d been a disappointment at the School, too; they wanted communicators, they got me.

***

I completed the course, after a fashion; I had a small amount of the Talent they wanted, telepathy, but it never got past the rudimentary stage. I had a different ability, psychokinetics, PK. That got their interest, at least until they realized I would never get very strong. Superman I’m not.

The administrators also kept hoping my TP would get stronger, but it never happened. They finally gave up. They dismissed me from the course as a ‘graduate’, then tried to find someplace I could be useful. “What to do with him; all that money, wasted. He’s not a total failure. He surely must be good for something, mustn’t he?”

The School’s administrators sent me to the Army; they thought my PK might be useful in combat. If I worked out, the School could start a branch to develop PK’s, and even if I failed the data would be useful. The Army, or at least an officer of that service who was senior enough to decide, agreed to accept me as a tactical-intelligence technician. The new buildup in Afghanistan had begun less than a year before, courtesy of the new president, and the Army hadn’t recovered from the Sequester yet. They needed people.

Even me. “PKs can’t lift much and they don’t have good control; it’s really only a minor talent, not very useful, but maybe you can help real soldiers. The Army wants you, my boy. Make us proud; go be all that you can be.” So I went.

The School had final instructions, and I was still naive. I had no reason not to go along with them. Hadn’t they developed this marvelous Talent? “Keep your abilities secret," my adviser told me as I packed. "It’s critical that other nations not find out what we’re doing.” That was understandable, and it probably wouldn’t be all that difficult considering the limited strength of my Talent.

A TP, telepath, can hide his abilities, but a PK will sooner or later be noticed. And as soon as the secret gets out, rival nations will begin working on the problem, maybe even come up with an improved teaching method. Meanwhile, the technique the School used was new and who could tell what might eventually come of it? Secrecy buys time, so I readily agreed to what they asked.

My first stop found me enrolled in the Infantry School for a concentrated course in infantry operations such as patrolling and intelligence gathering; that was all the preparation I was expected to need. “It’s as much as we give new recruits to the Agency, right? It should be enough.” Or so their thinking went.

I was a class of one. I wore no insignia and no name tag, just nondescript BDU’s. Meanwhile, the Agency kept refining my role. “After he completes the course? Let’s make him a chief warrant officer, senior enough to be left alone, junior enough not to be noticed.” Such was the agency’s thinking. I’m sure someone thought it was funny, combat wizardry officer, the code name the agency assigned me, or chief warrant officer, CWO.

“Report to the personnel office after finishing the course, Chief. You’ll need to swear the oath and sign the appointment forms, then just pin the bars on and catch the first available plane to Afghanistan. One of the forms is a non-disclosure agreement. You know about those, right?” I agreed that I knew about them.

So I became an almost-instant CWO. The Army routinely makes instant warrants, commissioned officers too, so I was just one more, anonymous among the rest. But it would take time for the records to be completed, waivers to be granted where necessary (there are rules regarding who can be appointed, and to what duties), and a personnel file created. A slot on a transport plane would also need to be found.

The Army finds work for idle hands, so someone suggested I attend jump school while I was waiting for the paperwork to catch up and the necessary movement orders cut. That caused a few headaches.

Airborne School normally takes three weeks, but I would need to leave on PCS, permanent change of station, before I could complete the course. Perhaps, if I formed another class of one, the Airborne School could accelerate my training as the Infantry School had done? They thought they could. After all, the first men to jump from airplanes hadn’t had any training at all.

Accepting the assignment turned out lucky; I discovered the most useful Talent of all during the night jump, the 'bubble', my name for my personal protective field. It’s a side effect of my PK, and it’s stronger because it’s always short-range. As to how I found out I could do it...

Sheer fucking terror makes you do things you never knew you could.

***

Three days of lectures, endless conditioning drills to develop my upper body strength; they had almost no effect on me because of my PK, which works reasonably well at close range, but I was already in good physical shape by virtue of the life I'd lived before arriving at the school.

Jump from a mockup of an airplane fuselage and land in a sand pit? Easy. Selected classes followed, and the following afternoon I dropped from the 250-foot free tower. My parachute landing fall was sloppy, but then no one expected me to be a parachutist. The landing was considered acceptable, barely, though the cadreman frowned. I'm sure he would have recycled me or booted from the course if he'd had a choice, but he didn't.

The Airborne School knew I was a spook, just not exactly what kind. Still, they’d seen all sorts come through and I was nothing special in their eyes. “That’s good enough, Chief," he sighed. "You probably won’t kill yourself. You’ll jump from a C-130 tomorrow morning, that’s a cargo plane, then a Chinook helicopter in the afternoon. You’ll have another C-130 jump Friday morning, a fourth jump Friday afternoon, and a night jump Friday. Jumping’s fun, man, you’re gonna love it! After that, just settle your personal affairs and catch the flight to be-yootiful scenic Afghanistan Monday.”

I joined a stick of regular parachutists as last-man-out for each jump. Nothing to it, really; I just hooked up the static line and shuffled out the door behind the others. Wait for the chute to open and ride the canopy to the ground. Do the best parachute landing fall I could, stuff the chute into the jump bag and turn it in for repacking. Nothing to it!

All very routine, and yes, I did like it...until I looked up during the night jump.

No opening jolt. A cigarette roll, or maybe it was a streamer; it’s not what you want to see when you look for your canopy! I couldn’t decide which it was, because the skinny shape was silhouetted against an almost-dark sky. I only knew that I didn’t have a proper canopy and I was falling too fast. I could see a full canopy to my right, but it was above me and receding fast.

Time for emergency procedures. I knew about those, because there had been a class and I'd listened.

Try to shake the tangle loose, while bicycling frantically with my legs, but nothing worked.

Okay, try the reserve chute. Clutch the chute with my free hand, control the bag’s opening with the other, then throw the chute away as hard as possible.

That one tangled too; the two chutes were now spiraling around each other. Or maybe I was twisting in the air. I couldn't tell. Just possibly, if I’d had more instruction during my abbreviated session regarding what to do if a chute malfunctions—but it was only a brief thought, all I had time for. Panic!

It was all I had time for. I looked up, then down to see if I could spot the dark ground below, and suddenly there was a red flash surrounding me. The harness straps snapped explosively and fluttered away somewhere, dragged by the failed chutes.

I was still a hundred meters in the air, legs churning frantically. I remembered that much from the lectures, bicycle with my legs, grab the control lines, and shake them. But I had no control lines, they’d gone with the chutes and harness, and I realized I was tumbling.

I hit the ground, back first…

And bounced. The first bounce caused me to bite my tongue, the second wasn’t as bad, and the bouncing soon stopped. I tumbled slowly across the landing zone, trying to figure out what had just happened. I was still alive, but I didn’t understand why. I giggled hysterically and remembered the words of Blood on the Risers. But not me, no blood on the risers, guys! No risers at all, see?

I was still in the bubble, although I didn’t know what it was yet, tumbling slowly across the dark drop zone. No one around; the rest of the stick had drifted with the faint breeze, meaning they had landed farther down the drop zone, which was just as well because it took several moments before I managed to collapse the bubble. After a few moments it disappeared as fast as it had formed and I fell on my face, leaving me with a bloody nose and bleeding from the mouth from where I'd bitten my tongue, and a long scratch on my arm from the bush I tripped over.

The tangled chutes and ruined harness had drifted slightly, which was why I found them wrapped around the bush that scratched my arm.

The thick straps had been ripped apart.

I realized right away that I couldn’t tell the instructors what had happened. I suspected it had something to do with my Talent, but I had no idea what had triggered the incident. I also couldn’t turn the chutes in; questions would be asked, and I had no answers.

Maybe the chutes provided partial lift while I was falling, Staff Sergeant?

He wouldn’t believe me, even though I was standing there alive, if bloody and scratched. I needed an alternate plan, fast. I stuffed the chutes into the jump bag and dragged it farther into the brush alongside the drop zone. Scooping out a shallow hole, I buried the bag. Part of the reserve chute bulged out from the dirt, but without a shovel there was nothing I could do. With luck, no one would find it before I left for Afghanistan. By then, the instructors would have other things on their mind.

I climbed in the truck with the others for the ride back. I had time to think, and finally I came up with a story, even if it sounded weak. “I don’t know what happened to the bag, Sergeant. It must have fallen off the truck. Anyway, here I am.”

“Crap. Supply is gonna shit a brick. Okay, you don’t get a graduation ceremony anyway. I’ll figure out something to tell supply. Take this packet to personnel, they’re waiting for you. Good luck on your tour, paratrooper!”

I put the jump wings in my right pocket, folded the orders into my left, and headed for the personnel office.

***

I practiced until the bubble became a part of me. I could call it up on command, it would form instantly, and I could then expand it out to several meters in diameter. What I’d done instinctively, I now did consciously. And sometimes subconsciously.

So: I arrived in Afghanistan, also known as the rock pile if you're being generous, the asshole of the world if you're not, with marginal PK and a working bubble, even if my other abilities were marginal.

It was marvelous stuff, just great fun at the time. But there were drawbacks. There is no magic, no wizardry, just physics and limits. The bubble covers me completely, meaning that there’s nothing to push against because my feet aren’t touching the ground. No walking, in other words.

There’s another problem, a more serious one; if I hold the bubble in tight so it’s at full strength, I’ll eventually pass out from lack of oxygen and carbon dioxide buildup. When I extend the field, fresh air leaks through because the bubble is weaker. I practiced a lot at night while learning the limits of the bubble and how to control it. If I kept it in tight, nothing solid could get through, but then I would have only a few seconds of air before I passed out. It also takes more concentration to hold it at full strength. If I expand it out to the maximum diameter, the point where I begin to lose control, I can breathe normally and hold the field for much longer. But a bullet or piece of shrapnel might get through. Choices, choices…I wasn't willing to experiment! Hope for the best, and feel sorry for the poor bastards that had only an issued vest to protect them.

I also couldn’t use my PK, because the bubble is somehow a part of it. I can do one or the other, but not both.

The PK isn’t strong at the best of times and my weak PreCog is not reliable. As for telepathy, TP, I have to spend a lot of time around a norm—that's what we called the ones with no Talent at all—before I can pick up more than emotion. Everybody can read emotions, so really, that’s not much of a Talent. I can read people just a little more reliably and with a little more sensitivity, but I’m no empath.

Even so, the telepathy is useful if I’m communicating with someone like Surfer. That's his code name, and he's a lot stronger than I am, probably the strongest TP the School has produced.

Those were the good memories.

Since I got to Afghanistan, they were mostly bad. The whiskey helps a little, which is why the Colonel’s Club has become my late-night refuge. Unless, until, someone notices me and complains. I don’t expect it to happen. I’m the invisible man, they never look at me, never speak to me. They just ignore me.

I would have more time now, time to think and to remember. I was off the roster “temporarily”, so the clerk said, but I don’t think he knew any more than I did. I had no duties, but also no orders to rotate home, not even a movement alert. The Army might have done something, but I wasn't permanently assigned anywhere. Just attached, VOCO, who was himself a captain and therefore pretty low in the food chain himself. "Forgiveness, yes, permission no, Chief. And after I get home, me and the Guard are gonna part ways anyway!"

I spent the next few days trying to catch up on my sleep, only to wake up after another nightmare featuring the same little girl. I had no other place to go and I didn't want to go back to sleep, so once again I headed for the Club.

The Club is never locked. Senior officers and an occasional transient VIP might want in at any hour. There’s no attendant, just a small sign on the door reading Officers Only. It’s close to admin headquarters, so enlisted people know better than to ignore the sign.

I had never come here during daylight; I stopped in only during the post-midnight hours when I couldn’t sleep, and the Club was usually deserted. I figured that there might be one or two patrons at most, and that's the way it turned out. If they noticed me, none of them said anything. But it was just past 1900 now, meaning there would probably be others. I should leave, I knew it—but I was tired and grumpy. Short of sleep, pissed off at the Army and the Agency, afraid to try to go back to sleep because I knew that nightmare was waiting…

Why go to a club where I’m not wanted, when the alcohol barely affects me anyway?

It’s complicated. There’s a constant low-level sensitivity, a kind of silent mental buzz that’s a side effect of my abilities. It flows up and down my nerves and I can almost hear people thinking. Almost; I know they’re there, I know they’re awake, but I can’t tell what their thoughts are. There’s just that annoying jumpy buzz, and alcohol takes a little of it off. Enough to help me get to sleep, usually, and it also suppresses the nightmares. Not always, but some of the time. The drinks wouldn’t make me drunk, but they would suppress the buzzing.

That’s all the alcohol does, and even then it doesn't last.

This was a Talent that I’d rather not have, but my mind and the computer had made the decision without asking my opinion. My brain changed; the one I left the School with wasn’t at all the same as the one I’d had when I arrived. Now, whatever my conscious mind desires, the alcohol effect fades. After three drinks, I’ve reached the limit of what will affect me, and even then it doesn’t last long. Unfortunately, aspirin also stops working. I’ve had headaches since starting the School. There have been times I really wished I didn’t have this ability!

I went in and found an empty table. I fed the kitty, poured my scotch, sat down and swallowed half my drink in one gulp. Nice burn; I drank the rest and looked around.

The other patrons were all RLO’s. They’d made a point of not seeing me when I came in, and they ignored me now. RLO, Real Live Officer, is a common term of reference among us, those of us who wear specks on our bars. It is not a term of admiration among warrants.

I had tried to fit in at first, but that effort soon ended. The other warrants understood too, despite the insignia, that I wasn’t one of them. I was probably some kind of spook. We really weren’t alike at all.

I sat in the back of the Club and sipped my second scotch; after a bit, I got another, scrupulously paying the kitty again. The buzz slowly decreased, but the dark thoughts wouldn’t go away.

***

I hadn’t noticed the noise level drop while I sat there, thinking and remembering. I looked up as soon as the murmuring stopped, wondering why everyone had gone quiet. Then I understood.

He stood in the door.

Colonel Arschloch, the colonel behind the Colonel’s Club; one of the visiting German guys hung that name on him and it soon spread around the compound. He looked like he’d just bit into an apple and found half a worm. I didn’t need TP to read his emotions! He was pissed. At me, a lowly warrant officer in the Colonel’s Club!

Maybe I should have put on a clean ACU before heading here, but I had just wanted out when I woke up. I'd grabbed the last uniform I’d worn, and it hadn’t mattered before because there was never anyone in the club when I came in. And anyway, the club wasn’t officially off limits to me, although the presence of junior officers was strongly discouraged. The RLO’s hunkered down and looked away. No indeed; they hadn’t wanted to acknowledge me when I came in and they didn’t want to be blamed now.

The colonel was more than pissed off, and the longer he stood there the madder he got! I knew right away that this wasn't going to end well.

 

Chapter Three

Colonel Standford Minot saved the staff study and logged off the computer. Unplugging the external drive, he stored it in the safe. The drive contained the document that might get his career back on track. He was careful to lock it away each day after he finished working with it. Some of the material was classified, and Colonel Minot was very careful when dealing with classified information.

He had spent weeks gathering data for this report. It was the best study he’d ever done, he was sure of it. He’d begun by gathering reports, then organized the information they contained. He’d also looked for an equation that could anchor the report, and finally he’d come up with one. There was a nice rising curve of rounds expended per engaged trooper. He plotted this against enemy casualties, then plotted the results again against noncombatant casualties and collateral damage. The graphs supported his conclusion that moving back down the curve to fewer rounds expended in combat would improve logistic efficiency while reducing collateral casualties and property damage. Those cost the Army a lot of money; survivors and relatives were quick to file claims.

Colonel Minot was certain that cutting back on rounds expended wouldn’t reduce combat efficiency materially. There might be a slight reduction, possibly a few more friendly casualties, but logistics was also an important consideration. After all, the saying was that amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics. Colonel Minot knew there was a lot of truth in that saying. Most casualties survived anyway if they got to the hospital in time. He briefly considered that some of those casualties required expensive long-term care, then decided this was not something he wanted to include in his report.

This one, unlike the other studies he’d written, would go right to the Pentagon. His other staff studies were in a file cabinet somewhere, still here in the command, but just maybe this one would finally get him out of the career box he’d found himself in. Maybe he could transfer to where he could do something substantial!

Up or out for Colonels left little time to achieve anything noteworthy; even then, you had to be somewhere you could get noticed. Promotion to general officer involved luck as much as skill. Make general or retire; there were a lot of colonels, but few slots for generals. Most inevitably retired, whether they were prepared to do so or not. Lieutenant colonels also lived with up-or-out, and there were even more of them than there were colonels. Colonel Minot had motivation; he wasn’t ready for a porch and a rocking chair.

So the patient searches had been done, most of them after his daily tasks were finished. There had been lists of ammunition to be collected, casualty counts of the enemy, and estimates of casualties which hadn’t actually been verified. He had calculated the costs of shipping the ammunition and the diversion of space that might have been used for other purposes. The report was almost done. The only thing that remained was to formulate a few recommendations on training and new operational guidelines. As soon as he finished those, he could write the final summary. A conservative approach would be better received, something to keep in mind when writing the report. Then he would send it off and see how it helped in the decision process; more importantly, on a personal level, he would see how the report was received. Maybe consider what might be achieved if the funds made available by those new operational guidelines could be used to increase local hires, maybe do more work on infrastructure? But it was all very tiring, and a break from the keyboard would help him start fresh when he began the next phase. It would be good to see how things were going around his area of responsibility, and anyway he felt like a small celebration.

He had been made Club Officer (over mild objection; he hadn’t wanted the job, but it wouldn’t do to seem uncooperative) and it would be nice to see what his assistants were stocking this month for senior officers and visiting VIP’s. Use of alcohol was also officially discouraged in deference to religious beliefs of the host country, but senior officers could clearly work better if they had a few creature comforts. Not to mention that senior junketers, congressional VIP’s, cabinet secretaries and undersecretaries, and other important people wanted better than they could otherwise find in this backward country. Their good opinion was important; if a friendly atmosphere with a little social lubricant helped that opinion, it was a win-win for Colonel Minot. And he wouldn’t be leaving the compound, so no one outside a small number of senior officers would know he’d had a belt or two. Colonel Minot checked his schedule a final time, glanced down at his belly, and went to work out. He would visit the Club later.

He changed to shorts and a T-shirt in the dressing room reserved for senior officers before finding an unused section of the gym. He spent as much time as he could spare in the gym these days, and even so he barely held his own against creeping pudginess. Once, he’d not have been concerned, but the Army was death now on overweight soldiers. Some had been unceremoniously booted. Being out of shape physically ran a close second.

He could always retire if it came to that, but still, there was that chance of a star and an even more remote chance at a responsible command somewhere. Colonel Minot did not want to retire while still a colonel.

A number of his contemporaries had already been selected for brigadier general. Granted, they were often members of the combat arms, infantry or artillery or armor, but it was logisticians such as Colonel Minot who made sure they had what they needed to do the job. Thinkers and planners were important too. Minot had actually begun as an artilleryman, but it had been made clear to him that his future in that branch was limited. Nothing serious, just a matter of shells from a 155mm cannon that landed outside the range area. Lieutenant Minot had been in command of the gun platoon, but had managed to deflect blame so that nothing stuck to his official record. Still, some might remember what he had done, so when opportunity presented he had exercised an option and changed branches. The change didn’t look great on his record, but it could be excused and anyway, it was a long time ago.

He had worked hard since then and amassed an excellent string of OER’s, Officer Efficiency Reports. He’d punched a few tickets along the way as well, including an airborne badge. He had medically failed Ranger School (and not reapplied when the condition cleared up), but the medical report was in his record to explain the failure to finish. A Ranger badge was a clear plus, because many general officers either had been through the course or knew enough about it to respect those who had, but the lack of such wasn’t a career-killer. Meanwhile, he had gained a reputation as a good logistician, but due to his assignments he simply had been unable to add a good record in command of troops. Staff duty, administration, those were where his greatest talents lay.

Once, that would have seen him retired as a lieutenant colonel; that had happened to the great majority of his contemporaries. But Minot had prevailed; he had finally gotten his eagle, and now he wanted more. So when there was need for an officer to take additional duties, those often fell to Minot. He didn’t complain, just did the additional jobs as best he could. But 'additional duties' would not get him that coveted flag with the white star! It wouldn’t see him called “General”, it wouldn’t see him commanding a base somewhere, perhaps even heading up a joint command of some type.

Administrators were valued in wartime; one had but to consider the record of Eisenhower! But in an era when wars weren’t ‘declared’, when there were many colonels but few places to employ them… Colonel Stanford Minot was feeling the cold wind of an incipient and undistinguished end to his career.

He could always find civilian employment, of course. Colonels seldom remained out of work. There were companies who had done business with the Army, they were always looking for senior officers. Many colonels retired, then moved across the street to work for those they’d been responsible for supervising only a few months before. And it might take that long just for the retirement paperwork to be approved, the various forms executed, and the accounts he was responsible for audited. Fortunately, Colonel Minot kept those in excellent condition. The records were immaculate. Standford Minot respected records and paperwork.

But it was the disappointment of it all. He could do a good job as a general officer if only he got the chance!

***

He became the officer in charge of the command’s Officers Club. Unlike most such, this one was small enough that junior officers were encouraged not to attend, ,and was only one of the ways it differed significantly from clubs with official standing. The ordinary post O-club, as they were known, often required junior officers to be members. Failure to join saw the miscreant viewed with great suspicion, even though alcohol use was expected to be no greater than moderate nowadays. Such a lieutenant or warrant officer would find himself replying-by-endorsement to explain his failure to support the club. A bold officer might object and say so when he RBI’d the communication, replied by indorsement. He might even claim to be a teetotaler, but that was rarely good enough. O-clubs served food as well as drinks, and moonlighting sergeants often worked behind the bar or in the kitchen. Good sergeants took care to see that popular officers did not overindulge. They might listen as mildly inebriated officers uttered the occasional indiscretion, but they knew to keep their mouth shut about what they learned. Moonlighting sergeants liked the extra pay they got from working at the O-club.

But Colonel Minot had no facilities for such a club, and besides, there might be trouble if the host country found out. Best to keep it low-key. So an unused space had been found, unused by virtue of quietly moving the office that had occupied it elsewhere. There was always room to fit a desk or two somewhere, so the office furniture had gone too. Soldiers were accustomed to unexplained moves, they happened all the time, so no questions had been asked.

Certain senior officers subscribed to a fund that bought the first shipment of alcohol, very high quality goods. They had been repaid from sales, and the profits had funded new purchases since that time. An honor system substituted for the moonlighting enlisted men and it worked, because no one wanted to offend Colonel Minot.

A few tables and chairs from the dining facility completed the furnishings, and an original painting (done by a sergeant from Operations) added a touch of class. There was a bowl for payment, the kitty, and the honor system was pay-as-you-drink. Senior officers didn’t feel the urge to violate the honor system; they had far too much to lose to sneak a shot of booze without paying for it. Those officers also didn’t want to chance running afoul of Colonel Minot. He was known to be less concerned with the careers of juniors than he was with his own. So the honor system worked, and there was always enough of a profit to pay for new bottles when it was time to restock. A junketing Congressman had a drink in the Club, sharing the premises with a couple of officers whose home-of-record was in the state he represented. The Congressman made it a point to commend the Club’s hospitality to the commanding general and Colonel Minot got a letter of commendation for his files. After that, the Club became a going concern.

Senior officers, including the colonel, liked having a place they could unwind.

***

The bar was a table in the back with two or three opened bottles of choice hooch, most often scotch and brandy. There might be Russian vodka from time to time and occasionally tequila, but senior officers preferred scotch and brandy. There was usually a bottle of good bourbon around for the occasional visiting Congressman, but it wasn’t popular enough to be out on the table. Besides, the single bottle of Pappy van Winkle Family Reserve they’d bought had been horribly expensive, too much even for senior officers. Minot had simply ordered it, based on its reputation, and had quietly made up the difference in price beyond what had been expected with personal funds. Add a few bottles of mixers, some cubed ice stored in a cooler, and this was the essence of the bar, even if the senior officers referred to it as a ‘Club’.

So it had become known as The Colonel’s Club, not only for the man responsible, but for who patronized it. Colonels and would-be colonels down as far as a few senior majors liked the atmosphere.

Junior officers generally found more brass in the club than they liked, and what alcohol was available was too expensive anyway so they stayed away. Newbie junior officers might drop in once, rarely twice, and if they had friends the friends would offer a friendly word of advice. Captains, like lieutenants, stayed out of the Club.

Other junior officers didn’t object to the de-facto exclusion. I ignored it. But I was a reservist on active duty, not a regular, and what were they going to do, send me to the Rockpile? Toss my weary ass out of the Army?

Make my day, Colonel!

So I sat and sipped my scotch, very good scotch. I looked forward to the temporary loss of buzz along my nerves that the drinks would bring. Unfortunately, after two drinks I didn’t get a buzz, I lost one. It was almost funny.

***

The colonel finished up in the gym and decided to have a belt. He felt good after the workout, he deserved a drink with his contemporaries and a few subordinates. He was aware that many of them would work on polishing their noses by ingratiating themselves. He found no fault in this. He’d done a certain amount of it himself. The Colonel’s good mood lasted until he stepped into the club.

And spotted a dusty, dirty, lowly chief warrant officer, not even a real officer, sitting at a table. Drinking what appeared to be some of the good scotch! A quick glance at the bar showed that the scotch bottle was quite low. A new bottle would have to be broken out, if there was one. If there wasn’t…the man had drunk the last of the Colonel’s scotch! Even if he had paid for it, and who knew, perhaps he hadn’t!

Really, this was intolerable. The man hadn’t even bothered to put on a clean uniform! Were those stains? Where the hell had he come from? If someone had told him about the club, wouldn’t they have told him that he should stay away? Was this offense to the officer corps thumbing his nose at the Colonel and the traditions of the service in general?

No. This simply couldn’t be overlooked! A junior officer who hadn’t yet learned might get a word of advice, the sort of avuncular thing that almost all officers experienced on their way up the ladder. But not this time.

“Chief, I’d like a minute of your time. Say, in 15 minutes. In my office.”

***

This was not how I wanted my visit to the club to end, and I wasn’t going to get the sleep I needed after all. I finished my drink and went off to obey the colonel’s order.

I knocked the worst of the dust off on the way, and decided not to change. Fuck it, and fuck that pencil-pushing REMF! He was the quintessential empty suit filling a slot, and the Army has more than its fair share of them.

The buzz was gone and that was why I’d gone there in the first place. Unfortunately, something else, something darker, had taken its place. Which was why I knocked and opened the door. I was supposed to wait to be told to come in, but he’d told me he wanted me in his office, and it had been 15 minutes. So I went in and marched to the front-center of his desk, halted, came to attention, and saluted.

He glowered at me, moving from pissed to really really pissed in about a second. I could have just slouched into the room, but some of the military’s efforts had sunk in despite my anger.

I’d also been cautioned not to make waves, which didn't seem all that important now. It wouldn’t do anyone any good to have the Army wonder where I’d come from, what made me a special case. Keep a low profile they’d said, not that the Army would have believed me anyway. I’m a combat wizard, guys, not really a soldier at all. Why sure, I’ll be glad to wait until the nice doctors get here. A new white coat, just for me? How nice!

So the School had also wanted me to remain well below the radar of officialdom, and this was probably not what they’d had in mind. On the other hand, I had been here for more than a year, not doing what the School's administrators had expected me to do, and so far as I could tell there were no plans to return me to the USA.

Was I subconsciously looking for trouble? Too late now to change things, even if I wanted to. And I wasn't sure I did.

So I reported to Colonel Minot while holding the salute, then held it for several seconds. When he didn’t return it, I completed the salute and remained at attention. He left me standing there. Discourteous bastard! That thought went through my mind. Yes indeed, discourteous fit him like a glove. His discourtesy to juniors was exceeded only by toadying to superiors. Textbook pencil-pushing bean-counting REMF, Rear Echelon Mother-Fucker!

Uniform violations, said the colonel; I was a walking illustration of what not to look like, he opined. He started with that, and escalated. How important it was that officers set standards, something I obviously wasn’t doing. He didn’t mention ‘junior’ officers, but he didn’t need to; I got the idea. Attitude too, not what was expected of officers! At least he got that part right; my attitude would have to improve before it reached ‘bad’. Lack of military courtesy, said the colonel. REMF’s use that like a club; courtesy from you, a means of domination for them, and he was just getting warmed up. He wanted the name of my immediate superior.

Maybe he intended to threaten my career. Fat lot of good that would do him! Or send me a buck-slip requiring that I reply by endorsement, RBI. The junior writes, his immediate supervisor sees the report of the confession-of-sins and endorses it before sending it forward. Paper equals reward; it also equals punishment to REMF’s. I let the diatribe roll off my back like so much water off a goose, but finally it began to get through to me. The colonel advanced from minor annoyance to burr-under-the-saddle irritant.

I remembered that last patrol. While I’d been riding back in that Humm-V with Kaz and Santos, this asshole had been drinking coffee and peeking at the female soldiers in his office. Or maybe he peeked at the males. It happened. Even before I got in the truck to come back, I’d helped pick up the broken bodies. I’d also looked for Kazinsky’s missing leg, but hadn’t found it. Now this REMF lectured me on my attitude and dirty uniform! Don’t like the stains, colonel? I don’t blame you; I’m not very pleased with them either.

I thought briefly of killing the bastard, and the thought was satisfying. I could do it too! It would be easy, just reach out with my PK and feel for the heart beating just beneath his ribs. I would only have to squeeze it a little bit. There would be no external bruises and nothing to find, just a heart attack that killed another desk warrior. I could not only do it, an autopsy wouldn’t find a thing. Do it right, he would be unconscious first, dead in seconds. Or I could just leave him in a condition to be medically retired. Heart attack or stroke, both were commonplace. I answered his question while all this was running through my mind.

“I work for Convoy and Patrol Support, Colonel. Major Stevenson’s in charge.” Well, he is, this month. At least he processes the paperwork and puts my name on the patrol roster. Next month, Major Stevenson would return to the states. Someone else would be assigned.

I could choose either option, and the medical-retirement part had a fair chance of working. I would have to take it slow and be careful, but I could do it. And if he died instead, well, no one would know. The Army would be better off anyway. But underneath the anger, I knew it wasn’t worth it because killing this asshole wouldn’t bring my guys back. I knew that consciously, but it was a struggle not to let the other, darker, thoughts dominate.

The colonel absorbed my answer while I thought about killing him. Or maybe just change his attitude?

There was something else I could do, something less than lethal. I’d done it several times when I was at the School, back when I was just learning my new capabilities. It was a way to practice control, and at the same time play with the wonderful new toy my training had given me. I could be calmly talking to someone and working on PK pranks at the same time.

Start them itching; take control of a few hairs, slowly wiggle them, make the other guy itch and twitch and lose concentration. Anyone with even a small amount of PK could do that. I had discovered the ability when I became a victim of someone else’s minor, and very unreliable, Talent.

So I reached out to the Colonel.

His nose twitched. I held my mouth straight with an effort; the little hairs inside the nostrils are very sensitive.

The colonel sneezed. Then sneezed again.

I slowly ramped up the itching. I caused the small muscles under the skin of his jaw to twitch. It’s easy, just press on the nerves, then release. His mouth opened. He paused, trying to regain control. So I pulled on his earlobes, gently, first the left one, then the right one. He brushed his ear with his hand, but found nothing there. His expression went from calculated anger to puzzlement. I kept my eyes focused over his head, suddenly the very model of a proper junior getting an ass-chewing. The glee I felt was internal.

The other thing I’d done in school was locate the muscles and blood vessel structure of the anus. PK requires that you encompass an entire object in order to move it. I’d had practice. This one wasn’t quite so easy since he was sitting behind his desk, but I managed. I squeezed, constricted the muscles a bit, let the sphincter get used to the new tension, then relaxed the muscles suddenly. Very embarrassing for the victim, especially if the group included women.

The Colonel farted, noisily. I wrinkled my nose, making the gesture obvious.

He glowered, losing track of his verbal assault.

I was feeling better; this was the best stress-buster I’d found in a long time, even better than alcohol. I would remember this incident and grin next time I tried to sleep. Maybe I’d dream of this instead of that little girl.

Colonel Minot concentrated on the venom he’d not had a chance to release, getting back on track. Follow the script, colonel. I don’t mind waiting.

“…impersonating an officer; hell, impersonating a soldier! If you can’t be one, at least you can try to fool the rest of the soldiers who work…” The colonel was back in fine form. This speech had been rehearsed; he’d practiced it often enough on hapless subordinates. I ramped up my counterattack. I hadn’t gone past making others fart before, but I was irritated now even if I couldn’t show it. Those blood vessels that line the anus….

The Colonel suddenly stopped talking, almost yelling, truth be told; he got a pained look on his face. I had to really work at holding my neutral expression while he squirmed in his chair. Squeeze the veins, do it three or four times so that they stretch. And itch, oh yes, they itch.

Think three or four hemorrhoids all at once; the itch soon becomes pain. Squeeze, relax, let the blood pool in the newly enlarged cavity, then squeeze hard. Hemorrhoids are us, colonel. Enjoy the lasting memory.

“Dismissed!”

I rendered a letter-perfect salute and this time I held the salute until he returned it. I executed an about-face and exited the room, closing the door gently behind me. Finally, I could let a grin cross my face. He was, and he got.

Pain in the ass.

 

Chapter Four

I drifted after high school, no job, few prospects.

I had a few friends I played role-play games with, and I did a little gambling to keep myself in pocket money. But I was essentially homeless, crashing on someone’s couch when they hosted a game night, mooching a meal and a place to stay when no one was gaming. It was a poor excuse for a life, and I couldn’t see a better future ahead.

As for the gambling, I gained a reputation for being too lucky. My friends soon refused to gamble with me. We were playing with their dice and their cards, and even when they dealt or threw the dice, I won. Not always, but more often than I lost.

I had no reason to cheat. I figured it was skill; I’d learned to trust my hunches. As a result, even carefully-laid poker traps didn’t work and I seemed to instinctively know when it was time to quit. I also instinctively knew when I was over my head, playing against professionals. You can lose your head if you play against the wrong guys and win. The word got around. Even that source of pocket money dried up.

By the time the recruiter approached me, I was ready for a change.

***

The Agency had received a lot of publicity over the last few years, very little of it good. As a result, they were under a lot of pressure. It made them willing to try different approaches. They also had enough money to fund new and unusual methods that might lead to improvement, even some that might be considered wacky. Someone had heard of the work done by a researcher named Joseph Banks Rhine.

A biologist by training, Rhine had become fascinated by reports of abilities not explainable through ordinary science. He established a lab at Duke University and published books that dealt with his findings. He was arguably the first to put the attempt on a scientific footing, but he wasn’t the last. Even today, the research continues. Some of the people involved are hucksters and frauds. Some...but not all. Some of the results simply can’t be explained, because they lie outside mainstream science.

Was it possible, using methods that hadn’t been available to Rhine, to take his research to the next level? Could telepathy be made reliable enough that the ability would be useful to an agent? The agency decided to try.

Records describing what Banks had found, the methods he’d used, and documents describing similar efforts by other investigators had been collected, and building on their findings a program was designed. It used new developments in artificial-intelligence programming of advanced computers. This was the Agency’s approach to teaching what had never before been taught.

The theoreticians used positive reinforcement via direct computer interface, the ‘helmet’. Contact points in the plastic helmet linked the computer to the student. Brain waves were sampled using those contacts, amplified by the computer, then fed back through the helmet. In addition to the contact points, the helmet had a faceplate screen where graphic symbols from Rhine’s original experiments were flashed. The computer sampled the student’s responses to the visual stimuli, then reinforced them too. The direct flow of communication between the computer and the student, directed by programs that ‘learned’ while the student did, caused each program to morph during use until it was suited to a single individual. Whatever path that person’s brain discovered, that was what the AI selectively emphasized. An unexpected side effect: the process caused splitting headaches.

There was now a School with banks of computers and helmet interfaces, an AI to direct the learning, but who should be the students? A few experienced agents were sent, but they soon dropped out, not suited to this kind of learning. And yet, abandoning the investment before it paid off seemed unwise. A lot of the agency's money had already been spent and throwing it away could easily lead to a Congressional investigation.

The School’s interim directors, so named because a permanent director hadn’t yet been appointed, concluded they should try another approach. They would look for people who already showed promise, recruit them, and see how they reacted to the curriculum. Instead of trained agents who might become telepathic communicators, the revised plan was to develop the ability, then train the paranormals to be agents. Security and other agent training could be done later.

The School’s recruiting department, in reality a sub-department of the Agency, had been put to work even while the first agent-students were making a hash of their time under the helmet. Programmers developed a net-search ‘bot and used it to look for the kind of people the new guidelines wanted. Modified from search engines used by information providers, this ‘bot crawled the Web looking for anyone who was too successful. Gamers, gamblers, and others who were too-successful or those showing results not explainable by skill alone were sought out by the ‘bot. I was one of the people it found. Unlike the very successful gamblers who refused to give up their lifestyle, I was ready for a change.

The recruiter's pitch sounded wonderful, so I jumped at the chance and as it turned out, I would be one of the first to attend the School, and the new group, pre-selected for aptitude, showed immediate success.

Not surprisingly, there was considerable variation in the results; some barely showed improvement, but others became Talents, people with the reliable paranormal abilities the program had been designed to create. But not all the Talents were what the School’s directors wanted, unfortunately. I was the poster child for failure. They wanted a high-level telepath, they got a weak psychokinetic and a Talent whose other abilities were unreliable. Amazing success—when they worked. Unfortunately, today's success might not be repeated for a month, and next month's success might take a different direction.

Feast, then famine, equaled failure in the Agency's view.

***

I had enjoyed the challenge, at least in the beginning. The School’s structured environment appealed to me, even though the headaches began as soon as I finished my first session under the helmet. I found that the pain was bad, but endurable, and never enough to make me quit. I forced myself to keep going because the alternative was to go back to aimless drifting. The School offered me a chance to do something, maybe to be something more than I’d been! I would not allow myself to fail! I toughed my way through the headaches, and became a marginal telepath almost immediately.

But I reached a plateau, and for whatever reason that was as far as I could go. I tried other approaches, and more-or-less by accident I discovered PK, a marginal, but reliable, psychokinetic ability. Another Talent that showed up during this time was a form of PC, precognition; my hunches, a kind of feeling I had that a prospective choice was right or wrong, got stronger. This skill too wasn’t great, about the same level as my TP, but far better than most normal people have. I couldn’t foretell the future, but my hunches were more reliable now than they'd been back during my gambling days, and they also came more often than before. I told no one about my other abilities, because I had a hunch that said ‘don’t’. I just felt like I didn’t want to tell anyone, so I didn’t.

My strongest Talent, the one I told the School about, was PK, psychokinesis. I learned to move objects using mental power alone. Some call it telekinetics, but I think PK is more descriptive because 'tele' implies distance. The PK, unlike the other Talents, kept on growing and even a partial success was welcome after the failures of the agent-students. The program directors kept me in the program to see if my mind-over-matter ability would get strong enough to be useful.

As to how I do what I do, it’s a question of visualizing relationships and then changing them. The process requires energy, but only a little of it comes from me; the rest appears to be ambient energy that my brain channels to change the relationship between objects. Words don’t work very well to describe the process.

I could barely move a pencil around in the beginning, but the ability was immediately reliable. It was always there when I wanted it, and it soon became as automatic as moving an arm or grasping with fingers. It also got stronger with use, and soon I was moving larger, heavier things. The headaches got worse, but the results were so astonishing that I worked my way through the pain. I learned to relax after practice in a darkened room, a cool, wet towel across my eyes. The lack of visual and aural stimulation helped. Medications barely helped and their effect quickly wore off; I had no idea at the time why that was so, it just was.

Mainly, I toughed it out when the headaches came, and kept trying. There are limits, but I’m stronger now than anyone else the School produced. Unlike the others, where occasional PK was more parlor trick than useful ability, my strength kept on growing with practice. The School’s administrators would probably be much more impressed with my abilities now, not that I was going to tell them; what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. Hunches, my version of precognition, had made me wary; I realized that all this expensive computer time wasn’t being provided for me, but for the benefit of the agency. At some point they would expect payback, and that return on investment might not appeal to me.

I didn’t want to be dismissed from the School before I’d learned everything I could. I was suspicious by now, but I cooperated with the administration while they tried to find something I could do; after all, I had no better idea. What else would I do if I didn’t work for the agency, become a professional gambler? Boring, if you have a strong hunch about what cards the other guy’s holding or if you can affect the fall of dice or a roulette ball. Do it to make pocket money if you must, but otherwise it’s a waste of your life.

There was now a permanent administrator for the School, a former Army officer who liked to be addressed as ‘General’, just before the Agency decided to close it down. He decided to see whether I could use my PK in a stressful environment, and the Army in Afghanistan would provide that test.

Some of this I figured out long after the fact, when the final naiveté had been scrubbed away by events.

***

If the colonel had simply ignored me, I’d have gone back into the woodwork after my third drink. But he hadn’t; ignoring junior officers wasn’t something Colonel Minot did. Even so, I might have played along and let him gnaw on my ass, but he picked the wrong junior officer at the absolute wrong time. What with the nightmares and headaches, I’m about six months behind on sleep.

Had he not come in, I’d have headed back to my CHU in another few minutes. That’s what I did after leaving his office. Maybe I could sleep now. But sleep wouldn't come, because I kept thinking, wondering. Maybe I’d gone on my last mission? Had the office been following orders when they took me off the patrol roster? Was it simple SOP, standard operating procedures, to take someone with my remaining time in-country off the list?

Maybe I had just dropped through the cracks. I had no duties and apparently the Army had no orders to send me home. A possible explanation occurred to me. It might have happened because the Army doesn’t maintain all my records, only what’s needed for pay and a skimpy personnel file. The School and that three-letter agency have the only records that really matter.

That was a preview of Combat Wizard. To read the rest purchase the book.

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