Chapter 13, Part 1: The Instructor

        Tracker was awakened by the same rotund soldier who had brought his breakfast the day before. Knowing the General, he didn’t understand why he allowed one of his men to be so fat.
        ”How is it that Castile lets someone like you stay in the organization?” he asked cautiously.
        ”You mean because I’m so fat? Oh, don’t apologize,” he interrupted as Tracker started to do just that, “The General has no say about me.”
        ”Huh? But … the General ….”
        ”Him? A fool. He tried to have me fired, but my commander said if I went, his entire force would leave.”
        ”Why?”
        ”Simple. I’m the second best cook on base. My sergeant is the best cook.”
        ”But, I still don’t understand. Who is your commander if it isn’t the General?”
        ”Major Samms. The men call him Slammin’ Samms. We’re a mercenary force hired by the General.”
        ”You mean not all of the men here are Castile agents?”
        ”Oh, no. About two-thirds of the force here is ours.”
        ”Oh! Okay. Maybe I could get you to do something about my meals, then.”
        ”No, I’m sorry, I can’t. The General said that you were to have raw meat at blood temperature and nothing else.”
        He straightened up and headed out the door, shoving the two guards out of the way as he passed.
        Tracker thought as he ate. He had been here for three days now, and it seemed that the Defenders hadn’t been able to trace him; not that he expected them to. From the printing on the ambulance, he was in Oregon, so it could be months before they found him, if ever. He knew Magnum would continue hunt for him, but running the base and trying to maintain a nationwide manhunt at the same time would be difficult at best. He’d probably get FORCE to help out, but even with their resources, they won’t know where to begin and without some clue he could provide, they’d probably have no more luck than Magnum, himself. But too much could happen by the time they located him. He was on his own.
        After breakfast, he went to the gym for his workout. Again, there was a crowd of spectators around his mat when he finished. This time he expected it. He studied the men, looking for some kind of identifying emblems. The only thing that he could find similar was the fact that none of them were dressed alike, though they all wore similar wristbands. If his guess was right, these were all members of Samm’s Slammers. After hanging up the practice sword, he began a series of blocks and parries. This time his chosen partner, a wiry, middle-aged man with flaming red hair and beard, came onto the mat and tried to match his movements.
        Tracker watched as the mercenary ran through the exercise, showing skill but lacking some of the finer details of balance. Wordlessly, he motioned him to run through the moves again, but this time he moved in and worked side by side with the larger human. At times he stopped and adjusted the other’s stance.
        It didn’t take long for the mercenaries to realize that Tracker could teach them something, and soon he had all of them on the mats practicing. Tracker stood back and watched them, then motioned to the one he had originally selected.
        ”Would you keep them at it for another hour, please? And remember, speed is not the goal, control is.”
        The mercenary nodded. “Can do. Would you be willing to teach more men?”
        ”Yes, but only in the mornings for the next few days.”
        ”I’ll assemble a class for you. Oh-nine hundred hours?”
        ”That’ll be fine. Now I must go.” Then he bowed to the mercenary, turned, and left.
        That day he finished building the jungle gym and stood back to study it. Twenty feet tall, twenty wide, and over fifty feet long, it was a maze. The pipes were mounted seven feet apart both horizontally and vertically with bars missing at random. Climbing to the top, he began to leap from bar to bar all the way down its length. Every time he came to one of the gaps, he would leap across the space and land upright on the next bar unlike Antoinette’s more gymnastic approach of leaping and swinging under the bar and up onto it. Then he started weaving through the maze from top to bottom and back again, spanning its entire length and breadth. After only a short time, he came back to where his guards were sitting and flopped on the ground, panting. With his bionic energy supply kept depleted, exercises that he’d previously taken for granted now exhausted him.