Chapter 4
Eleven years ago, Veracruz, Mexico
The navy base in Veracruz was expansive, crawling with personnel and equipment. This was the primary headquarters for the Gulf region and was where the specialized training for the country’s equivalent of the SEALs took place – the Fuerzas Especiales, or special forces. This elite team of fighters had just been created after a reorganization of the Navy’s marine infantry – the marines. The brass had decided it needed a special response organization that was trained to far higher standards than the already elite marines, and so they formed a group of five hundred specialist commandos, to be trained in explosives, parachuting, military diving, sniping, urban combat and vertical descent. They would be Mexico’s ultimate ninja squad, to be used in the most dangerous of circumstances, on the most hazardous of missions.
After the young man had abruptly departed Sinaloa he’d floated around Mexico for a few months, creating the appropriate paperwork so that he could join the navy using a virgin identity. He quickly impressed his commanding officers with his supernatural weapons capabilities and was placed on the fast track for the new group. He was the dream candidate for the job: young, athletic, a prodigy with guns, smart, fearless, and extremely tough. If there had ever been a vocation specially made for him, being one of the new navy commandos was it. Even the motto resonated with him – Fuerza, Espiritu, Sabiduria. Force, Spirit and Wisdom. He had all three in abundance and he’d arrived at the perfect place to continue the education he’d begun with Emilio. Much as he’d liked his mentor, it was clear to him that he’d learned all he could and needed to go somewhere designed to produce professionals if he was going to progress as he wanted.
He’d signed up a few months after his seventeenth birthday, although his new paperwork put his age at eighteen and a half. That was a necessary artifice, as was his selection of a name so that he could start anew, without any baggage from his past. The young man was now calling himself Raul Terenova, which was as good as any other, he supposed. Names were unimportant to him. They were disposable, as was most everything in his life.
Raul excelled in the brutal training conditions, which truth be told were kinder and more relaxed than the ones he’d imposed upon himself for years. But he learned a lot, especially on the explosives side. There was nothing like the military to proffer the kind of training you just couldn’t get in civilian life, no matter what you did. His goal was to be an expert in every aspect of combat the special forces could teach him, and with his tenacity and discipline, he’d quickly climbed to the top of his class and established records. He became the model for all men who would follow, demanding more from himself than anything his trainers could have mustered. Young Raul was far more motivated than any of his classmates to get all he could out of his service years. He viewed his time with the military as a stepping stone, whereas his peers would go on to be career soldiers.
Becoming a naval commando had been an idea he’d grown fixated with when he was sixteen, after reading about the service’s plans to create a group of super soldiers. He didn’t have any burning desire to become a marine but if he was going to excel in the field he’d been contemplating, the more skills he had, the more valuable he would be. None of which he told his recruiting officer. To the navy, he’d presented himself as a fiercely patriotic young man who wanted to escape from a dull existence at home in rural Chiapas and don a uniform that would get him instant respect – and a life of adventure and action.
During basic training, he had stood out as far above the quality of the other green recruits. His scores on the written exams had floored the instructors. Here was a candidate who was blisteringly smart, who could swim like a fish, shoot like a marksman, and had the physical prowess of a professional athlete. There had been no question about moving him ahead of the queue and putting him into the specialized marine training – and from there it became obvious that he should be one of the new elite commandos.
Today, they were working on specialized sniping – long range, which was considered to be anything over a thousand meters, or almost thirty-three hundred feet. At such extreme distances, a variety of elements came into play, including wind strength and direction, humidity, temperature, elevation, and rate of movement if it wasn’t a stationary target. While there were recorded instances of snipers successfully killing from more than twenty-four hundred meters, those were considered anomalies. At sixteen hundred meters, the target was a mile away. To hit that distance with accuracy was considered virtually impossible for any but an impossibly small group of expert marksmen, although advents like laser rangefinders and computer software that would calculate the various elements had improved the odds.
The day’s exercise was on targets at a confirmed distance of a thousand meters, or roughly three quarters of a mile. The rifle they were using for the exercise was an American-manufactured Barrett M82, a .50 caliber rifle with an effective range of eighteen hundred meters, although accuracy became iffy after nine hundred to a thousand meters. Sixteen hundred meters was considered acceptable if you were trying to hit a bomb or something larger than a human torso, but there were too many variables that could affect accuracy. Many snipers preferred the smaller .338 caliber rifles for precision, and the official sniper rifle for the marines was the Heckler & Koch PSG1 firing a 7.65 millimeter round. The problem was that the weapon’s accuracy dropped off at eight hundred meters, so special forces had secured fifteen of the much larger payload Barrett rifles as a trial for standardization – a substitute for the smaller PSG1.
Each sniper cadet had been assigned a coach, who gave the firing order and then received a report from down-field. Accuracy had dropped off markedly once the seven hundred meter threshold had been crossed, and there were few who could deliver precise hits at over eight hundred.
“What does your nose tell you?” the coach asked Raul.
“Moderate humidity.”
“Guesstimate on wind speed and direction?”
“Seven to ten knots, out of the north-east,” Raul replied.
“Temperature?”
“Thirty degrees Celsius.”
“We’re going to do this without the computer. Purely based on your observations. If you’re confident in your observations, adjust your bearings accordingly. Good luck,” the coach said, and then stepped back, leaving the young man to himself.
Raul concentrated on controlling his breathing, and soon his entire awareness was synthesized into the tiny world within the scope. He made some minor corrections for his wind-speed guesstimate then gently massaged the trigger until the weapon fired, slamming into his shoulder with its considerable recoil. He’d long ago learned never to pull the trigger, as it could throw off accuracy. A deliberate squeeze was best.
The radio crackled and the report came back. A bull’s-eye.
“Good shooting.”
They repeated the exercise for ten shots, all of which landed within a ten inch grouping.
“I think we’re done here, young man. That was impressive shooting.”
Raul looked up at the coach. He was emboldened by his success, and wanted to try for a personal best. He got along well with the man, so he floated his idea.
“Why don’t we try it at fifteen-hundred meters? Just to make it interesting?” Raul suggested.
The coach looked at him like he was crazy. “Pretty cocky, huh? That’s an impossible range with that weapon and that ammo, not to mention that scope. You want to put money on it?” the coach asked. Fifteen hundred meters was just under a mile away, and was near the absolute maximum of the rifle’s range for a human-sized target.
“Two hundred pesos says I nail it three out of five. Although I agree that this ammo is crap for that distance. I’d prefer to load it myself for better consistency, but hey…,” Raul said.
“Fine. But three misses, we go home and I’m two hundred richer.”
The coach got on the radio and issued the instructions to the man downrange, who obligingly moved the
target to the farthest point on the field before taking cover.
“It’s your funeral. Fire when ready,” the coach said.
Raul took his time, made further adjustments to the scope, then repeated his meditation process where he became one with the weapon. The discharge almost startled him, so focused was his concentration. There was no need to wait for the radio to report. He knew what it would say.
“Bull’s-eye, twenty centimeters off center,” the radio crackled.
“To the right, or the left? Or low or high? Tell him to be specific, would you?” Raul groused.
Wide-eyed, the coach studied Raul like he was from another planet, then posed the question.
The response came back. “To the right.”
“That’s what I thought he’d say. Wind’s died down a hair in the last thirty seconds. Tell him to clear,” Raul said.
Once he got the go ahead, he repeated the impossible shot. Four more times. All shots grouped with under a foot of variance.
The coach gladly handed over the two hundred pesos for the single most astounding display of marksmanship he’d ever witnessed.
“You’re a fucking monster, you know that? That’s superhuman voodoo shit right there. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve been teaching for over ten years. Before that, I was one of the top three marksmen in Mexico,” the coach acceded, studying him with a kind of wonder.
“Those that can, do…”
Both men laughed together, in spite of a twenty-five-year age difference. Raul would never again shoot with that accuracy at that distance, preferring to limit his performance to more average expectations. It wouldn’t do to show off, or to develop too much of a reputation. Better to have had a one in a million day and then graduate in the top third of the class than at the top. He remembered Emilio’s sage counsel from when he was just a sprout. Never show too much of your hand. To give your enemies information is to make a gift. And friends can become enemies. So know how good you are and then take private pleasure in that accomplishment. Becoming celebrated makes you a target. Better to be in the middle of the herd when the hunters come than at the head.
Into the evening, Raul enjoyed his place in the spotlight amongst his peers, as news of his exploit circulated. As much as he enjoyed the adulation, a part of him knew that the hubris that came from being the best was a fickle charm, so he resolved to enjoy it for now, because it would be the last time he allowed others to get a glimpse of what he could actually do. Information was power, and allowing, no, inviting others to understand his capabilities was foolhardy.
His goal was to drain what experience he could from the service and then slip away like a ghost. It would serve no useful purpose to be noticed any more than he already had been. From that point on he would adopt a lower profile and continue to accumulate the pearls of experience until his work there was done. He calculated that another three months of training and perhaps six months in the field would be sufficient, making for a total of a year and a half of his life devoted to the pursuit of excellence with Mexico’s finest.
That night, as he lay his head upon his bunk, he began a silent mental countdown.
To when he could begin his new, new life.
Patience, he told himself, was a virtue that would pay enormous dividends – it became his bedtime mantra. He needed to maximize his learning while he was still in school. That’s how he viewed his life to the point he’d arrived at – it was his education. The time would soon come when the pupil proved himself to be the master, but for now, he had lessons to absorb. He still wanted to learn special operations parachuting – not jumping out of planes and controlling his descent, but rather precision-guiding his drop to within a meter of his target point, from both high-altitude and low, which required different skills. And he still needed more hours of scuba time, as well as some orientation on flying planes and helicopters. The latter two weren’t on the curriculum, but he was lobbying to get them added. You could never know too much.
With visions of his future cascading through his awareness, he slowly drifted off to sleep, his day’s toil finally at an end.