(Author's Note: I formatted this entry differently than the first, so I apologize if it doesn't work out.)
I remember back when they let me into the Academy...or rather, forced me into it. You see, the Company is something you join only semi-willingly. To understand this, you have to know what's really going on in this wonderful wide world of ours.
You read the tabloids, friend? Because most of that is completely untrue. It's so much worse you can't really get it until you see it. The Greys exist, and they're chipping people and raping women, trying to find a way to reproduce on our planet before they all die out. Gargoyles lurk in old cities, killing humans for fun. Half of the serial killers you know- Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, Leatherface -they were sadistic nonhuman bizarre creatures we call demons. Psychics are active, and they roam the face of the earth, causing as much death and destruction as they can in a twisted joyride. Either that or they seclude themselves in Masonic organizations, trying to rule the earth. All this, and so, so much more...but back to the point at hand.
You see, before joining the Company, I was just this regular guy. I mean, sure, you have to be in good shape to join the Company, but I wasn't anything overspecial. See...the reason they loved me was one day, I was coming back from the doctor's with a friend...
I had just been over to the local physician's office with Ron, a decent friend of mine, because he'd been feeling sick and out of it lately. You know the type, cold really bad, had been going on for about a week, no real symptoms other than a low-grade fever and a slack face, but you can definitely tell there's something wrong with them.
We were coming home, me in the driver's seat. A few block away from his house, I notice about 4 houses ahead they're holding a drug bust- or at least, that's what it looked like, since there were guys in combat gear breaking down the door- so I slowed down, because no one wants to tangle with angry feds. Well, just as I'm going past, one of the guys came out the front door and looked around. Then he noticed Ron and, of all things, shot him in the head. I'm sitting there, covered in brains, not sure what's going on, and panicked beyond all hell because my friend's sitting there in my lap minus an important nerve cluster. I did the only thing I could.
I shot back.
Little did I know the guy I had just shot and killed was a Company team's Secop. Wasn't my fault I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, wasn't my fault Ron was being brainsucked, and wasn't my fault this guy shot at my friend. It happened anyway. I was kidnapped and smuggled over to Company headquarters 4 hours later, by said same team. I'll give them this; they were courteous enough to give me time to change and clean up.
So there I was at Company Headquarters in (Well, I can't exactly tell you that) standing there tall and proud with the class of 2002. Right under the Spire, that huge black monolith with the name of every Op who ever died in service, and every recruit who washed out the hard way. My name's up there now, but I'll get to that later.
The academy is hell. Pure, unadulterated hell. Think of a commando unit, any commando unit. Navy SEALS. Army Green Berets. RDF. The SAS. Any op who makes it past year 1 can do each one of their training courses, back to back, and then be ready for the days workout. It's amazing, what you do in the Academy.
There are five years of the Academy. First year is for washouts and esprit de corps, they're as mean, nasty, and bloodthirsty as they can to weed the cream of the crop from the cream of the crop. First year is complete endurance training. Summer camp, for example. After a nice 20 mile run, there's nothing like spending 3 weeks in the wilderness with no food, water, or equipment. They push you past the limit, and quite often past it. Each house is expected to lose at least 30 cadets to training accidents, suicide, or "flunking"; ie, snapping and making a run for it. Second year, after you've taken what they can give you, they pit you against each other. This year is designed to find out which cadets perform the best, and give us something to fight for other than the instructors whipping us. Third year, we get into all the wonderful details of combat, from sniping with a Special Services .50-cal, to hitting something in the face with a full-auto burst from a SIG 550. Also included are various and numerous martial arts techniques, and "What to do with knives." In the fourth year, the academics flourish, and you're forced to choke down all you ever didn't want to know about sociology, politics, psychology, economics, etc. In the fifth and final year, the instructors carefully polish the cadets into well-rounded teams, designed to work together and cover every possible aspect.
You learn things you never even thought humanity knew, and a lot which mainstream humanity does not. I remember subjects from the fine points of Algerian wines to Bangladeshi politics to nuclear physics. The company teaches us their own unique brands of martial arts, named bluntly, "skullcracking" and "manhandling." And so many weapons...high explosives, swords, knives, crossbows, and guns, but mostly guns. Speaking of which...
Standing there in the shadow of the Spire, that intimidating and comforting structure which sees every op in the end, they gave us the welcome speech. Very inspiring, but I was still there against my will. Then they split us up into barracks. I was standing next to this tall muscular blue-eyed guy, and that's who they roomed me with. Found out later that his name was Ward Blacklocke.
Ward and I became decent friends, even if he was more the joker and I was the quiet type. I've had people call me a pushover, as a matter of fact, because it just doesn't bother me to be rolled over. In contrast, Ward was the kind of rough and tumble joking loudmouth that everyone in boot either loves or loves to hate. He still is.
That's the thing, though. No one rolls over my friends. No one.
We were finishing up The Gauntlet, one of our obstacle courses, and Ward was having a bad day. He was just out of it...he'd run this one four times on his own, and every time, he just could not make the time. Our Sergeant was new, and frustrated with Ward. So he goes out there and starts ripping Ward a new one. Literally, not figuratively.
So I shot him, too.
That one almost earned me a washout. Also almost earned me death by firing squad. However, Ward stuck his neck out for me, told the right things to the right people. As it was, we both had to run the Crucible (the real thing, not that toned down walk in the park Marines are so proud of) five times in two weeks. Which was fine with Ward, he loves that course. After that, we were unseperable, and still are. I'd stick up for him when he needed it and vice versa, throughout our entire stay at the Academy.
I learned a lot about Ward after that. He'd lived most of his life in Wolfsburo, New Hampshire, a nice little quiet town with some great scenery. Actually, his wife and most of his immediate family still lives there. He's one of the few ops with any familial ties. He was out duck hunting one season at the age of seventeen with his sister Brenna at Lake Winnipesaukee, when weird things happened. He woke up to the sounds of his dog barking, his sister screaming, and he saw some strange lights. Then he heard something akin to sizzling metal, and his dog suddenly stopped. Well, by this time he was out of the tent with his Remington 870 loaded and in hand, which he proceeded to unload into the chest of a Grey carrying his now-unconscious sister. (He tells me he really liked that dog.) The others left in a hurry.
After the Grey, Ward returned to town, tried to convince everyone about the occurences around the lake, and was shunned as a result. So he left and joined the National Guard. There, being Ward, he got in lots of trouble. With the NYC Mafia. Ends up with him married to the boss's daughter, Regina, and that's where he is today. Besides, of course, being drafted into the Company for knowing too much and being good at killing things.
About nine or so months into year five, disaster struck our squad. We were doing the Six-Day Maze, the name of one of the courses they make you run. In this course, they set you down in a canyon full of mountain lions, traps, crocodiles, traps, robot snipers, and a few small hidden caches of weapons. They give us, being an eight man squad, a knife, a pistol with five shots, and some clothes. Our job is to go ten miles to the end of the canyon, retrieve a badly sealed box full of brown recluses, and come back. I think the record time is 2 days, 5 hours, and 43 minutes. What they didn't tell us, because they didn't know, is that Greys decided to join those mountain lions.
On Day 2, we were about nine miles into the canyon, when one of the Grey ships comes down right on top of us, and takes us out pretty quick. Ward and I ran like hell, seeing them pick up our paralyzed buddies and load them into the ship. After that, I don't really remember much.
I came to approxiamately five months afterward, in a cushy room with an attendant and everything. I knew where I was; I'd been here before, once, visiting some of the permanently disabled ops. I lay there for a few days, wondering what was going on, then someone comes in and tells me Dalton Rogers, head of the Combat Department, wants to see me in two hours. I was suitably impressed.
Two hours later, I walk into the big man's office. We talk about the weather, my experiences with the Academy, who my friends are, what I think of the departments, and so on. This was suitably anticlimactic. Thereafter, he gave me my own private graduation ceremony, which was not. He told me to come back in a few days, because we had a plane to catch. A plane to catch? I didn't understand, but he'd remedy that for me.
After I came back, I was given a plane ticket on a private jet. Quite a nice treat, but I was still wondering what was going on. What was so special about me, and why was that film going so slow? I could see each individual frame, something must be wrong with the recording. Once I got off the plane, I was greeted by something close to what I'd expected; a bunch of secops bustling me off somewhere. There's no mistaking a secop, though, they have that particular manner which points out that they know things you don't, and they don't plan on sharing. They brought me inside a building, and down some corridors, and after a while, I was hit straight in the face by cold air smelling faintly of Honduran cigar smoke, and pure, unadulterated shock.
"I've always liked Honduran more than Cuban, Honduran seems a bit more tame, a bit domesticated. Perhaps it's the green count," said General Davis Steele, oldest surviving member of Argus.
"Really, I don't think you need to worry about being wild in our line of work, Dave," joked Steven Hawking.
I couldn't believe it, but there I was, standing in front of the twelve most important men in my world. Men so important they weren't even supposed to iexist/i. And they were turning their attention toward me.
I noticed, for the first time, also toward Ward.
"Gentlemen," Steele took over, "You are now officially dead. Your names have been etched on the Spire. Here's what we want from you..."
So Argus explained to Ward and I our new mission; we were to be an "elite" two-man squad of "scout ops", we went to places where things were going on that the Company hadn't seen before, we found out what was going on, and we killed it. There were stipulations to this; since we were officially dead, if we were ever found by a team of ops we would be considered renegades, to be shot on sight. We wouldn't have all the resources of a normal squad, both because even the Combat head (who we were officially directly connected to now) couldn't necessarily cover mysterious equipment disappearances, and because we wouldn't be with any Technology Ops. Although, out of necessity, all the Department heads would know of our existence. It was explained to us that we were the only true survivors of that fateful event in the Six-Day Maze, that everyone else was either dead or completely insane. We were told the circumstances of our discovery. Ward was found wandering around somewhere in Barbados with no recollection of anything past being hit by a neurolash, and I later showed up in the Siberian wastes, kept alive by a miracle of hypothermia. We were asked if there was anything we had questions about. Ward asked a few, about leave to see family, and such, but I had none. Argus explained how life would be pretty much normal, as far as that word goes for a Black Op, except we'd never see Company HQ or any other ops for the rest of our lives.
That's when the incorrigible Ward Blackelocke said, "Great! When do we start?"
I remember back when they let me into the Academy...or rather, forced me into it. You see, the Company is something you join only semi-willingly. To understand this, you have to know what's really going on in this wonderful wide world of ours.
You read the tabloids, friend? Because most of that is completely untrue. It's so much worse you can't really get it until you see it. The Greys exist, and they're chipping people and raping women, trying to find a way to reproduce on our planet before they all die out. Gargoyles lurk in old cities, killing humans for fun. Half of the serial killers you know- Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, Leatherface -they were sadistic nonhuman bizarre creatures we call demons. Psychics are active, and they roam the face of the earth, causing as much death and destruction as they can in a twisted joyride. Either that or they seclude themselves in Masonic organizations, trying to rule the earth. All this, and so, so much more...but back to the point at hand.
You see, before joining the Company, I was just this regular guy. I mean, sure, you have to be in good shape to join the Company, but I wasn't anything overspecial. See...the reason they loved me was one day, I was coming back from the doctor's with a friend...
I had just been over to the local physician's office with Ron, a decent friend of mine, because he'd been feeling sick and out of it lately. You know the type, cold really bad, had been going on for about a week, no real symptoms other than a low-grade fever and a slack face, but you can definitely tell there's something wrong with them.
We were coming home, me in the driver's seat. A few block away from his house, I notice about 4 houses ahead they're holding a drug bust- or at least, that's what it looked like, since there were guys in combat gear breaking down the door- so I slowed down, because no one wants to tangle with angry feds. Well, just as I'm going past, one of the guys came out the front door and looked around. Then he noticed Ron and, of all things, shot him in the head. I'm sitting there, covered in brains, not sure what's going on, and panicked beyond all hell because my friend's sitting there in my lap minus an important nerve cluster. I did the only thing I could.
I shot back.
Little did I know the guy I had just shot and killed was a Company team's Secop. Wasn't my fault I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, wasn't my fault Ron was being brainsucked, and wasn't my fault this guy shot at my friend. It happened anyway. I was kidnapped and smuggled over to Company headquarters 4 hours later, by said same team. I'll give them this; they were courteous enough to give me time to change and clean up.
So there I was at Company Headquarters in (Well, I can't exactly tell you that) standing there tall and proud with the class of 2002. Right under the Spire, that huge black monolith with the name of every Op who ever died in service, and every recruit who washed out the hard way. My name's up there now, but I'll get to that later.
The academy is hell. Pure, unadulterated hell. Think of a commando unit, any commando unit. Navy SEALS. Army Green Berets. RDF. The SAS. Any op who makes it past year 1 can do each one of their training courses, back to back, and then be ready for the days workout. It's amazing, what you do in the Academy.
There are five years of the Academy. First year is for washouts and esprit de corps, they're as mean, nasty, and bloodthirsty as they can to weed the cream of the crop from the cream of the crop. First year is complete endurance training. Summer camp, for example. After a nice 20 mile run, there's nothing like spending 3 weeks in the wilderness with no food, water, or equipment. They push you past the limit, and quite often past it. Each house is expected to lose at least 30 cadets to training accidents, suicide, or "flunking"; ie, snapping and making a run for it. Second year, after you've taken what they can give you, they pit you against each other. This year is designed to find out which cadets perform the best, and give us something to fight for other than the instructors whipping us. Third year, we get into all the wonderful details of combat, from sniping with a Special Services .50-cal, to hitting something in the face with a full-auto burst from a SIG 550. Also included are various and numerous martial arts techniques, and "What to do with knives." In the fourth year, the academics flourish, and you're forced to choke down all you ever didn't want to know about sociology, politics, psychology, economics, etc. In the fifth and final year, the instructors carefully polish the cadets into well-rounded teams, designed to work together and cover every possible aspect.
You learn things you never even thought humanity knew, and a lot which mainstream humanity does not. I remember subjects from the fine points of Algerian wines to Bangladeshi politics to nuclear physics. The company teaches us their own unique brands of martial arts, named bluntly, "skullcracking" and "manhandling." And so many weapons...high explosives, swords, knives, crossbows, and guns, but mostly guns. Speaking of which...
Standing there in the shadow of the Spire, that intimidating and comforting structure which sees every op in the end, they gave us the welcome speech. Very inspiring, but I was still there against my will. Then they split us up into barracks. I was standing next to this tall muscular blue-eyed guy, and that's who they roomed me with. Found out later that his name was Ward Blacklocke.
Ward and I became decent friends, even if he was more the joker and I was the quiet type. I've had people call me a pushover, as a matter of fact, because it just doesn't bother me to be rolled over. In contrast, Ward was the kind of rough and tumble joking loudmouth that everyone in boot either loves or loves to hate. He still is.
That's the thing, though. No one rolls over my friends. No one.
We were finishing up The Gauntlet, one of our obstacle courses, and Ward was having a bad day. He was just out of it...he'd run this one four times on his own, and every time, he just could not make the time. Our Sergeant was new, and frustrated with Ward. So he goes out there and starts ripping Ward a new one. Literally, not figuratively.
So I shot him, too.
That one almost earned me a washout. Also almost earned me death by firing squad. However, Ward stuck his neck out for me, told the right things to the right people. As it was, we both had to run the Crucible (the real thing, not that toned down walk in the park Marines are so proud of) five times in two weeks. Which was fine with Ward, he loves that course. After that, we were unseperable, and still are. I'd stick up for him when he needed it and vice versa, throughout our entire stay at the Academy.
I learned a lot about Ward after that. He'd lived most of his life in Wolfsburo, New Hampshire, a nice little quiet town with some great scenery. Actually, his wife and most of his immediate family still lives there. He's one of the few ops with any familial ties. He was out duck hunting one season at the age of seventeen with his sister Brenna at Lake Winnipesaukee, when weird things happened. He woke up to the sounds of his dog barking, his sister screaming, and he saw some strange lights. Then he heard something akin to sizzling metal, and his dog suddenly stopped. Well, by this time he was out of the tent with his Remington 870 loaded and in hand, which he proceeded to unload into the chest of a Grey carrying his now-unconscious sister. (He tells me he really liked that dog.) The others left in a hurry.
After the Grey, Ward returned to town, tried to convince everyone about the occurences around the lake, and was shunned as a result. So he left and joined the National Guard. There, being Ward, he got in lots of trouble. With the NYC Mafia. Ends up with him married to the boss's daughter, Regina, and that's where he is today. Besides, of course, being drafted into the Company for knowing too much and being good at killing things.
About nine or so months into year five, disaster struck our squad. We were doing the Six-Day Maze, the name of one of the courses they make you run. In this course, they set you down in a canyon full of mountain lions, traps, crocodiles, traps, robot snipers, and a few small hidden caches of weapons. They give us, being an eight man squad, a knife, a pistol with five shots, and some clothes. Our job is to go ten miles to the end of the canyon, retrieve a badly sealed box full of brown recluses, and come back. I think the record time is 2 days, 5 hours, and 43 minutes. What they didn't tell us, because they didn't know, is that Greys decided to join those mountain lions.
On Day 2, we were about nine miles into the canyon, when one of the Grey ships comes down right on top of us, and takes us out pretty quick. Ward and I ran like hell, seeing them pick up our paralyzed buddies and load them into the ship. After that, I don't really remember much.
I came to approxiamately five months afterward, in a cushy room with an attendant and everything. I knew where I was; I'd been here before, once, visiting some of the permanently disabled ops. I lay there for a few days, wondering what was going on, then someone comes in and tells me Dalton Rogers, head of the Combat Department, wants to see me in two hours. I was suitably impressed.
Two hours later, I walk into the big man's office. We talk about the weather, my experiences with the Academy, who my friends are, what I think of the departments, and so on. This was suitably anticlimactic. Thereafter, he gave me my own private graduation ceremony, which was not. He told me to come back in a few days, because we had a plane to catch. A plane to catch? I didn't understand, but he'd remedy that for me.
After I came back, I was given a plane ticket on a private jet. Quite a nice treat, but I was still wondering what was going on. What was so special about me, and why was that film going so slow? I could see each individual frame, something must be wrong with the recording. Once I got off the plane, I was greeted by something close to what I'd expected; a bunch of secops bustling me off somewhere. There's no mistaking a secop, though, they have that particular manner which points out that they know things you don't, and they don't plan on sharing. They brought me inside a building, and down some corridors, and after a while, I was hit straight in the face by cold air smelling faintly of Honduran cigar smoke, and pure, unadulterated shock.
"I've always liked Honduran more than Cuban, Honduran seems a bit more tame, a bit domesticated. Perhaps it's the green count," said General Davis Steele, oldest surviving member of Argus.
"Really, I don't think you need to worry about being wild in our line of work, Dave," joked Steven Hawking.
I couldn't believe it, but there I was, standing in front of the twelve most important men in my world. Men so important they weren't even supposed to iexist/i. And they were turning their attention toward me.
I noticed, for the first time, also toward Ward.
"Gentlemen," Steele took over, "You are now officially dead. Your names have been etched on the Spire. Here's what we want from you..."
So Argus explained to Ward and I our new mission; we were to be an "elite" two-man squad of "scout ops", we went to places where things were going on that the Company hadn't seen before, we found out what was going on, and we killed it. There were stipulations to this; since we were officially dead, if we were ever found by a team of ops we would be considered renegades, to be shot on sight. We wouldn't have all the resources of a normal squad, both because even the Combat head (who we were officially directly connected to now) couldn't necessarily cover mysterious equipment disappearances, and because we wouldn't be with any Technology Ops. Although, out of necessity, all the Department heads would know of our existence. It was explained to us that we were the only true survivors of that fateful event in the Six-Day Maze, that everyone else was either dead or completely insane. We were told the circumstances of our discovery. Ward was found wandering around somewhere in Barbados with no recollection of anything past being hit by a neurolash, and I later showed up in the Siberian wastes, kept alive by a miracle of hypothermia. We were asked if there was anything we had questions about. Ward asked a few, about leave to see family, and such, but I had none. Argus explained how life would be pretty much normal, as far as that word goes for a Black Op, except we'd never see Company HQ or any other ops for the rest of our lives.
That's when the incorrigible Ward Blackelocke said, "Great! When do we start?"