Tom Clancy's op-centre_ mirror image - Tom Clancy [77]
"I understand," said Aho, whose sonorous voice, like his carriage, had great dignity.
Leaving an aide behind to work as a liaison with the ground crew, Aho waited while Private George accepted and tendered a round of good-luck wishes, then escorted him to a waiting car. Both men sat in the back.
"Have you ever been to Finland, Private George?" Aho asked.
"Sir," said the soldier, "until I joined the Army, I'd never been out of Lubbock, Texas. After I joined, I never got out of Virginia till now. I wasn't around for the first mission. On the second mission, to Philadelphia, I was sick. On the third mission, to Korea, I got myself bumped by a General."
"In life as in chess, king takes pawn." Major Aho smiled. "At least you'll be making up for it this time out. You get to visit two countries."
George returned his smile. There was a priestly benevolence to the Major's expression and a softness in his fair eyes that George had never seen in a military officer. But beneath Aho's tight brown uniform, George also saw muscle definition he'd never seen, except in bodybuilding competitions on cable TV.
"But you're fortunate," said the Major. "The Viking men believed that a foreign warrior who came to Finland first, in peace, is invincible in battle."
"Only the men believed that, sir?"
Aho sighed. "It was a different world, Private. And-- you haven't met your partner, is that correct?"
"That's correct, sir, though I'm looking forward to it," George said diplomatically. In fact, she worried him. He had read the dossier that was faxed to the plane and wasn't at all sure he was ready for a civilian barnstormer.
"I wouldn't say this to her," Aho said, leaning toward him conspiratorially, "but Viking society was always about warrior men. Each man carried an axe, a dagger, and a sword on his person at all times, and wore garments of fox or beaver or even squirrel that left one arm free, his fighting arm. Each woman wore a box on either breast, made of iron, copper, silver, or gold, indicating the wealth of her husband. She also wore a neck ring to show her subservience to him. We had a bit of a row in the schools years ago about how to teach the history of these people." He settled back into his seat. "You can't offend women, you can't offend the British who were victims of the Vikings, you can't offend the Christians who were killed by the heathens-- heathens who didn't want to see their cultures destroyed like those of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Lombards, and Alamanni. Fortunately, accuracy won over political expedience. Can you imagine being ashamed of a history such as ours?"
"No, sir," George said, then looked out at the starry night sky. It was the same sky the Vikings had looked at-- in awe or fear? George wondered. He couldn't imagine that the Vikings were afraid of anything but dishonor. His own training, like the training of Navy SEALs and the Army's Delta unit or the Russian spetsnaz, emphasized attitude as well as physical skills: not just twenty-hour marches with a fifty-five-pound rucksack to keep you in shape, but the belief that while death is fast, failure stays with you for a lifetime. And George believed that utterly.
Still, he couldn't deny that he felt a lot better when he "overdressed": wearing a hip pouch stuffed with flash grenades, a Kevlar bulletproof vest with lapel daggers for hand-to-hand combat, his Leyland and Birmingham respirator, and carrying a few spare 9mm magazines. Instead, in his rucksack, he had AN/PVS-7A night-vision goggles, an AN/PAS-7 thermal viewer to see hidden objects by the heat they generated, and his Heckler & Koch MP5SD3 with a collapsing stock and integral silencer-- even the bolt noise was absorbed by rubber buffers-- which, used with subsonic ammunition, couldn't be heard fifteen feet away. And his passport. He had that too. That was the exit strategy Darrell McCaskey had come up with.
"I don't think your ancestors did anything like what we're doing, though, sir," George said, trying