Without remorse - Tom Clancy [163]
'Just like looking at the photos,' Cas observed quietly, looking around the training site; they knew what the lecture was about. 'Why the playground stuff?'
'My idea,' Greer said. 'Ivan has satellites. The overhead schedules for the next six weeks are posted inside Building A. We don't know how good the cameras are, and so I'm going to assume that they're as good as ours, okay? You show the other guy what he wants to see or you make it easy for him to figure out. Any really harmless place has a parking lot.' The drill was already determined. Every day the new arrivals would move the cars around randomly. Around ten every day they would take the mannequins from the cars and distribute them around the playground equipment. At two or three the cars would be moved again and the mannequins rearranged. They suspected correctly that the ritual would acquire a great deal of institutional humor.
'And after it's all over, it becomes a real playground?' Ritter asked, then answered his own question. 'Hell, why not? Nice job, James.'
'Thank you, Bob.'
'It looks small this way,' Admiral Maxwell said.
'The dimensions are accurate to within three inches. We cheated,' Ritter said. 'We have the Soviet manual for building places like ibis. Your General Young did a nice job.'
'No glass in the windows in Building C,' Casimir noted.
'Check the photos, Cas,' Greer suggested. 'There's a shortage of window glass over there. That building just has shutters, here and there. The callback' - he pointed to Building В - 'has the bars. Just wood so that they can be removed later. We've just guessed at the inside arrangements, but we've had a few people released from the other side and we've modeled this place on the debriefs. It's not totally made up from thin air.'
The Marines were already looking around, having learned a little of the mission. Much of the plan they already knew, and they were thinking about how to apply their lessons of real combat operations to this perverted playground, complete with child mannequins who would watch them train with blue doll eyes. M-79 grenades to blast the guard towers. Willie-pete through the barracks windows. Gunships to hose things down after that ... the 'wives' and 'kids' would watch the rehearsal and tell no one.
The site had been carefully selected for its similarity with another place - the Maines hadn't needed to be told that; it had to be so - and a few eyes lingered on a hill half a mile from the site. You could see everything from there. After the welcoming speech, the men divided into predetermined units to draw their weapons. Instead of M16A1 rifles, they had the shorter CAR-15 carbines, shorter, handier, preferred for close work. Grenadiers had standard M-79 grenade launchers, whose sights had been painted with radioactive tritium to glow in the dark, and their bandoleers were heavy with practice rounds because weapons training would start immediately. They'd start in daylight for feel and proficiency, but almost immediately their training would switch exclusively to night work, which the General had left out. It was obvious in any case. This sort of job only happened at night. The men marched to the nearest weapons-firing range to familiarize themselves. Already set up were window frames, six of them. The grenadiers exchanged looks and fired off their first volley. One, to his shame, missed. The other five razzed him at once, after making sure that the white puffs from their training rounds had appeared behind the frames.
'All right, all right, I just have to warm up,' the corporal said defensively, then placed five shots through the target in forty seconds. He was slow - it had been a mainly sleepless night.
'How strong do you have to be to do that, I wonder?' Ryan asked.
'Sure as hell isn't Wally Cox,' the ME observed. 'The knife severed the spinal cord just where it enters the medulla. Death was instantaneous.'
'He already had