第50节

lly animal

furs. Meals were delivered twice a day via a small service elevator.

They were a surprise too. It was Mute food. When the first dish of

hot spicy stew arrived Steve understood what was happening. He was

being conditioned. They were going to send him back to the

overground.

Steve was not only required to become dirty and sweatstained, his body

had to be tanned and weathered to the point where his skin peeled, then

became raw and blistered and his lips cracked. With over two hundred

years of experience behind it, MX had brought the process to a fine

art.

It was hard to concentrate on anything beyond just staying alive when

you were being blasted by driving salt spray in a wind chamber but,

during the time' he lay under the banks of UV lamps, Steve was required

to continue with his video studies, committing to memory pictures of

various locations so that when tested, he could recognise them

instantly and describe the route from one point to another.

Apart from Lisa's screen image, Steve did not come face to face with

anyone. The instructors he met during the live training sessions, or

via the tv screen, all wore close-fitting helmets with tinted visors

and on such occasions he was required to do the same. And he had been

addressed not by name but as 'Zero-Two', the number sewn on the front

and back of a sleeveless cotton jacket he had been ordered to wear over

his fatigues.

The three years of specialist training at the New Mexico Flight Academy

had already furnished Steve with many of the skills required by a

member of the Intelligence Commando and after a month of twelve-hour

workdays and seven day weeks, his anonymous instructors judged him

ready for 'insertion' - an MX term for transfer to a specific field

assignment on the overground, or within the earthshield. There were no

parades or presentations, no back-slapping celebrations; one morning,

towards the end of his stay, he was simply informed by Lisa that he had

completed his period of instruction, and had been given the code-name

HANG-FIRE.

Steve, who had never heard the word before, was unaware that it was a

term used by the military before the Holocaust to describe an artillery

shell whose propellant charge had not detonated. The procedure for

dealing with a hang-fire consisted of opening the breech of the gun,

and waiting for several minutes before attempting to remove the faulty

charge. Artillerymen traditionally regarded it as a risky business for

there was always the danger the charge could explode when being removed

from the gun - with fatal effects for the person handling it. Given

Steve's background, it had seemed an apt label and its choice had given

Commander-General Karlstrom a certain amount of dry satisfaction.

As he rode back down the line to the White House to be briefed on his

first mission, Steve reflected on the weird set-up he had just left.

He'd been obliged to undergo several kinds of hell to become a member

of the Intelligence Commando but he had been unable to discover

anything about the unit's organisation, the scope of its operations,

the number of people involved or their identity. Apart from knowing it

was linked directly to the President-General and that Karlstrom was its

Operational Director, MX itself remained as secret and as impenetrable

as ever.

The only person he could have picked out of a crowd was Lisa, the

member of the reception staff who had been assigned to look after

him.

Considering AMEXI-CO's obsessive concern with security it seemed a

curious omission especially since Lisa and, presumably, her colleagues

would be in the position to identify everyone who passed through Rio

Lobo.

What he did not know was that Lisa only existed as a pattern of pixels

on the screen of a cathode ray tube. She was a computer-generated

image created by COLUMBUS - like the view through the windows of the

Oval Office. The ability of COLUMBUS to create talking heads was one

of the many things Steve had yet to discover about the world created by

the First Family.