Chapter 7.

SOME FACES TO LOOK FOR

For the next couple of weeks, the days were filled with exercises from early morning to late night. The daily doses of training included shuttle runs, hill runs, and sand runs with bare feet. There were always dieticians and physicians at hand that made sure that the team eat well and stretched after their exercises to avoid injuries. They were given massage to keep their muscles supple and then they slowly built up to training even when they were tired, preparing them to push themselves through stresses like hunger and bad weather.

Sergeant Stillman also had them do other forms of exercises. One day he ordered them down to the lake; there they had to leap from a five-meter-high tower, into the cold water. Swim through a barrel at four meters depth, then bring up a dummy from the sea floor and tow it back into shore. And this was only the warm-up. They continued by swimming six-hundred meters in just fifteen minutes, fifty meters clothed with weapons and belt, and a further twenty under water.

They participated in weekly four-mile timed runs in boots, timed obstacle courses, swam distances up to two miles wearing fins in the ocean, and learned small boat seamanship.

Another time Stillman brought the team up in the middle of the night for a very demanding night orienteering with backpacks. Totally exhausted the trainees returned to the training camp where they were only given a few minutes to wash up and eat breakfast.

After breakfast they were given a short briefing on the days schedule: a test worked out in collaboration with the coast guard and an expert in search and rescue.

The trainees were flown out over the sea in a helicopter. Suddenly they were given the order to jump. The high jump, almost a hundred feet, and the cold water was a shock for several of them. The weather was stormy and the psychic pressure straining. Despite good knowledge in swimming, the recruits were put in lethal danger.

The training exercise had the recruit's swimming with rescue harnesses, and they were instructed on how they should move, how they would conduct the necessary observations, how they would keep themselves safe and how to use the equipment.

A rescue barge was dropped from the helicopter, and the trainees had to locate the distressed, a dummy placed out in advance, then help it aboard the barge and perform the necessary CPR techniques. After that practice, all the trainees were given a day off.

Despite the hard training, there were still moments for the team to just lounge around. There were a lot of activities for them in the day room, like a pool table. But some trainees, like Morten Øygard and Jacques LaFleur, preferred to sit in the shadow of a tree instead and just relax.

Matt came back to the camp after a ride into town one afternoon when they had been free from training. He found Bruce sitting in the grass, talking with Marvin Rico as well as Gloria and Paul.

"I have just picked up a birthday present for Scott." He said, putting his bag down. "He'll turn ten next week."

"Will, my oldest son will turn eleven in a few months," Bruce informed. "So they are almost the same age."

"What did you get him?" Paul asked Matt.

"I bought him a new skateboard." Matt revealed. "He's almost green with envy at all the kids in his school who skates around after class. So I bought a complete set with skateboard, helmet and knee and elbow pads."

"We bought Dani a pair of roller blades when she turned twelve," Gloria told. "But she never uses them. She's more interested in riding, so for her next birthday, we're going to get her a new set of riding gear."

Marvin Rico straightened up in surprise.

"Hold on a minute here," he said. "How old did you say you were?"

"Don't you know that you should never ask a woman about her age? It's rude!" Gloria gasped, pretending that she was offended, then she added; "For your information, I'm twenty-nine."

Rico´s jaw almost dropped into his lap as he heard this.

"So you're twenty-nine and your daughter is twelve? You can't have been more than seventeen when you got her!"

Gloria exchanged a look with Paul, then smiled.

"Yeah. I gave birth to her when I was seventeen and then I married her father when I was eighteen."

"That was early." Matt agreed. "I was twenty-three when Amanda, my first wife, and I got Chloe."

"I was thirty-two when I became a father." Bruce added.

"Well, I was kind of early." Gloria admitted. "But at least I'm still hanging around with my high school sweetheart, something the other girls in my school can't brag about!"

She leaned backward with a happy sigh, placing her head in the lap of Paul. He bent forward and kissed her on the forehead.

"That's not so bad." Bruce admitted. "Lin and I have also been together since high school."

"I can't brag about that at all," Matt said with a smirk. "I never even got far enough to marry my high school sweetheart, and I'm already into my second marriage."

He gave Paul and Gloria a curious look.

"Both my children are living in my place back in Denver with my wife, but where do your daughter live now that you are busy training for this team?"

"She's currently staying with Gloria's mother." Paul replied. "But if we make it into the team, we will try to get a place near the camp, so she can live with us again."

Gloria looked over at Bruce.

"So how many kids have you got?"

"Three." Bruce replied. "I have two sons, Will eleven, Eric nine and little Dinah who is three."

When they began to show each other photographs of their children Rico grew tired and moved over to Morten, Hondo and Calhoun who was playing cards in the grass.

"Those guys are just nuts!" Rico told the others. "They are training to join the country's most daring, highly trained special mission force and then they just sit there talking about their children!"

"It's not as odd as you might want it to sound." Hondo pointed out. "The perfect soldier you seem to want to refer to is not necessarily a gun-loving maniac."

"What do you mean?" Rico asked. "A rifle is the soldier's best friend. A soldier sleeps with his rifle, he is married to his weapon!"

"Jesus Christ, you're telling me that you bought that crap the drill instructors was trying to feed us?" Calhoun spat.

He had a somewhat supercilious attitude towards others, and it was never more evident than moments like this, when he could be almost rude.

Morten, the funniest looking of the group with thick curly hair, a goatee, and small round glasses, silenced him by putting a hand on his arm.

"Let me tell you something about the perfect soldier, Marvin." Morten said politely, but with an unmistakable edge in his voice. "The perfect soldier is a man who sits around dreaming of coming home. Who writes his girlfriend because he has nothing to do because there are no more wars. The perfect soldier hangs up a sign and goes fishing because he's out of work. That's the perfect soldier!"

"If that's how you feel, Morten," Rico asked. "Why are you in the army?"

"The army does other things than just fight." Morten lectured. "They help people, educate people. When a natural disaster has hit an area, the army flies in supplies and medicine. If a settlement is facing the risks of being flooded by a river that risen too rapidly after a long period of heavy raining, the army moves in and builds embankments and digs drains. That is why I'm in the army – to help and educate people. I hope that the Special Missions Force will also be able to do a lot of good for other people."

"You're still quite young, Marvin." Hondo pointed out. "In time you will begin to see things differently. Find other priorities."

"And grow old like Trakker, Sato and Bishop? Nah, that's not for me. I want a fast life, with a lot of action."

Several weeks of vigorous training commenced. The team undertook lessons of navigation and map reading, and where then required to do navigation runs and night tags in the near woodlands. They carried sling less rifles that they had to hold in their hands as they climbed up the slopes and jogged down again.

They made freefall parachuting from ten thousand feet into the ocean at night, travelled with a Rigid Inflatable Boat for a hundred miles, conducted a mission before travelling thirty miles out to sea to rendezvous with a submarine.

There was combat SCUBA (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) training. The trainees were taught two types of SCUBA: open circuit (Compressed air) and closed circuit (one hundred percent oxygen). Emphasis was placed on long distance underwater dives with the goal of training them to become basic combat divers, using swimming and diving techniques as a means of transportation from their launch point to their combat objective.

This was followed by a training phase that concentrated on teaching land navigation, small-unit tactics, patrolling techniques, rappelling, infantry tactics, and military Explosives.

Week after week of training passed and several of the trainees dropped out, among them Brent Sharpe and George Blanks. Brent was unable to keep up the pace of the training, while George suffered some injuries that forced him out.

Because of his role as the leader of the team, Matt still had to make trips down to New Orleans for meetings with Hugh and his staff, meetings where he would be briefed about important information that would be crucial once they were operational.

As he stepped out of the elevator on the nineteenth floor, he said hello to Helena who sat by the desk then knocked on the door to the conference room. He was admitted inside.

"Good to see you again, my boy." H.H said cheerfully. "I see that the exercises have put some more muscles upon your frame. You look well.

How is the team coming along?"

"I have been able to start determine the stronger sides as well as the weaker sides of the members." Matt explained. "Still, these first weeks has mostly been physical training, so I don't know how they will work out on the field. I believe that only Everett, McLean and Dabrowski have seen real action."

"You'll get a chance to see them out on the field soon." H.H promised. "We have a combat exercise in progress that the team will undertake, but you will be briefed on that in due time."

Matt was motioned to take a seat, while Lisa Moore activated fired up the projector. On the screen appeared the photographs of two men and a silhouette of a third.

"During the last weeks we have managed to uncover three members of the Syndicate. Two of them are identified and are the men you can see on the screen, the last one is only known by his alias."

Matt studied the men. The first one was a man in his late twenties with goatee and dark trimmed hair with a shock of light on the forehead. The other man was younger, at most twenty-five with short black hair, clean shaven and with a dark complexion.

Lisa thumbed a key on the computer and the screen cropped to only show the young man.

"This is Cesar Bonica aka Icarus." She informed. "Born to wealthy parents in St Louis twenty-three years ago. He attended the best schools, and he was quick on the uptake, popular with the girls and good in athletics. Obviously, things were too easy for him, so he tried to find other thrills and challenges and in primary school he begun to sell answers to the exams to the students. In high school he had acquired new contacts and took part in selling drugs. He was caught and sent to a correctional institute, from which he later escaped. He's a sadistic knife-carrying killer. We believe that he gets the Syndicate some of their funds via his drug dealing."

She thumbed the keyboard again, and now the image changed to that of the other man.

"This is Curt Harker. He is known as something of a fixer in the criminal world. He's very suave and has a motto of being able to get anything a customer wants if the price is right. He's a con artist with a very high intelligence, the type who can walk straight into a police station and report that an armoured car has been stolen just to keep the polices attention diverted while another crime he's participating in is taking place. We suspect that he's one of the organisers in the Syndicate. Our man Henderson caught up with him in Robbinsdale two days ago."

"So, is he behind bars now?" Matt wondered.

"No. He pulled one of his famous getaways." Lisa explained. "He discovered that he had a tail, so he walked into a garage. The men quickly relocated to cover the exit, and in the meantime, he calmly walked out through a side door, crossed the street, hotwired a car and drove off. The car was found only two blocks away, but by then Harker was long gone."

"What about the other guy, Icarus?"

"We had a man on him as well, but he was tipped off and has been lying low since then. These guys recognise a police officer just as good as a teenager recognises a pop musician. He use to hang out on a local pub in Weirton. The man we have there went into the pub to take a look at him. It didn't take Cesar long to come up to his side and offer him a drink."

"Why did he do that?" H.H asked.

"It's a way for some criminals to show the police that they know that they are being tailed." Lisa snorted. "I guess they also want to show themselves, as well as others how brave they are, or they are trying to hide their nervousness by fooling themselves into believing that they are not afraid of the police."

"But they are?"

"Extremely."

"What about the last man?" Matt inquired.

"The last man is one tricky customer." She told. "We believe that he is one of the key members of the Syndicate, something of the spider in the centre of the web. He goes by the nick Ulysses and seems to know everything that happens even before we know it. A trafficker of information. We can't track him because he's extremely skilled at covering his tracks. As far as we know he might even be an insider."

"Do you mean that he works in this building?"

"I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility." Lisa shrugged her shoulders.

"Have you been able to learn anything more about the Syndicates organisation?" Matt carefully asked.

"Nothing worth mentioning." Lisa said, as she leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. "It's likely that they have a network of deep cover agents that enables them to get financial assets all over the world. They also have several sub-operators like Curt Harker and Cesar Bonica. We believe that they might be performing industrial espionage and are using the money they earn by selling this information to run right-wing extremist political candidates into important positions."

"Sounds like quite a lot of information, I think." Matt noted.

"But nothing that tells us what people it is who forms the core of the Syndicate." Lisa sighed. "It would be vital to know if they are working independently for profit, or if they have allegiance to any hostile country or government."

"What about the participants in those riots? Have they been of any help?"

"Some of the more cooperative ones has identified both Curt Harker and Cesar Bonica." She admitted, rubbing her temples. "And we are following up other people they have been describing, but we have been unable to determine if they have a connection to the Syndicate."

Matt realised that Lisa and her department was on top of things.

Once the briefing was over, he took the elevator down to the engineering section, eager to see how the construction of the vehicles was going.

The work floor was full of activity as always, even though most of the vehicles seemed to be completely re-constructed by now. Matt walked around, checking out the vehicles closely. It amazed him that it was totally impossible to tell them apart from a conventional vehicle. Apart from the cars of different sizes, there were a speedboat suspended over a water tank as well as a small one-manned submarine. There were even a jetfighter standing on the work floor. It had a body that reminded of a YF-22, but the plane was more than half the size of the larger aircraft.

Andy stood by the computers, watching his every move. He beamed with pride.

"Quite amazing, aren't they?" he asked.

"They all look impressive," Matt admitted. "Perhaps you could give me a demonstration?"

Andy smiled.

"Sure."

He led the way over to another computer. Leaned over it, stood a well-groomed man, carefully studying some diagrams.

"This is Maurice Billington. Our resident computer whiz." Andy said. "He can explain what you need to know."

Maurice appeared to be in his middle forties. He was dressed in a three-piece suit with grey-brown hair and a full beard. He shook Matt's hand and had a very correct English manner.

"I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Trakker. Your brother has been talking so much about you that I almost feel like I already know you."

"The pleasure is all mine." Matt replied. "So, you are the one who's designed the computer system that we will be working with?"

"Quite an exaggeration I would say." Maurice dismissed. "The computer technology that will be used has been under development of the U.S military since the second world war. It's the result of years of science."

Andy carefully interrupted him.

"Matt would like to have a demonstration of the target computer."

"Certainly." Maurice said, switching on a screen. "We have fitted all vehicles with both primary and secondary weapon systems. The vehicles are also fitted with the best in computer technology; the absolute latest in intercepts and Electronic Countermeasures, Heads up displays, on-board computers... the target computer will pick up signals fed via a computer enhanced GPS, supplying it with updated sensor scans. It can also lock-on to targets via infra-red spotters."

"Like a heat-seeker?" Matt asked.

"Not really." Andy dismissed. "A heat-seeker can be fooled by a stronger heat source, but an infra-red spotter will pinpoint the target, allowing the target computer to identify the target and get a secure lock."

Maurice nodded his agreement.

"If you will please study the computer you can see exactly how the computer will receive and convert radar-readings into a graphic that can be easily used by the pilot of each vehicle. The computer enhances and magnifies targets that are too small to be defined by the naked eye. High-resolution camera inputs are run through a computer-enhanced grid.

The computer will then rotate the geodesic grid and filter out stationary ground features like mountains and vegetation and only pick out what is anomalous. The background will appear in a light shade of green and the likely targets is translated into red circles."

As he spoke, Maurice showed how the signal was broadcasted directly from the satellite, and how the image was slowly refining itself until it became clearer. A grid was then put over the image, and the background begun to fade out until it only appeared in the light shade of green Maurice spoke of, leaving small objects that was the likely targets.

"Well, I begin to see how it will be used." Matt said.

"Good. I think it will become clearer to you once you actually begin to utilize the system during your vehicular training." Andy encouraged.

"I hope so." Matt glanced at his watch. "I must get going. I have to check in at the airport in two hours."

During the second month of the training, the trainees, who was now down in sixteen, only three more to go before they reached the desired number for the team, begun vehicular training. It was much theory, but they also studied cooling systems, fuel system, exhaust, and other things that the instructors felt was important knowledge.

There was also practical vehicular training, and the trainees practiced in groups, assuming positions as drivers, gunners, or co-pilots against moving targets, as well as detailed realistic weapons handling, demolition, and small patrol tactics.

Missions in a conventional war as well as those in special situations requires the deployment of qualified men capable of using various models of high precision rifles to obtain the most accurate impact. The operators of those sophisticated weapons systems are normally high-ranking soldiers and their target tend to be missile launchers or surveillance radar. In the case of the Special Missions Force, everyone undertook that training.

The training in the use of high precision weapons included both theoretical and practical cycles. The theoretical material included how to conceal oneself using the natural environment (i.e., camouflage), how to optimize a shot by calculating peripheral distances and how to adjust the scope and adapt it for night-time use. The trainees were also submitted to qualification tests in different areas such as snowy mountains and water, to become familiar with the influence of temperature and moisture on the result of a shot. They also participated in exercises against targets located at angles that were not optimal and familiarized themselves with different sniper rifles.

In order to manoeuvre easily and complete missions successfully, it was fundamental for the team to understand the techniques of concealment which enabled a soldier to take advantage of natural and personal resources to hide from enemy surveillance in the form of patrols, seismic sensors, thermal cameras as well as antipersonnel radar. Marksmen are deployed with camouflage uniforms that allows them to find the most suitable location from which to neutralize a variety of targets. The trainees tried out the Guillie suit, a special uniform made from different materials like old uniforms ripped to pieces, that allowed the marksman to conceal himself in a variety of environments. The team referred to this suit as a scarecrow suit.

Lisa Moore also came out to the training center to give the team a few lessons on police work and the background of terrorism.