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There is a lot of unlearning to do, Alex decides, as he rappels down the end of the assault course. His feet are underneath him, just like they showed them in the demonstration, and it feels weird. Ian had always been keen on what he called Australian Style. Head first.
Alex doesn’t like not being able to see the ground.
It makes him slow.
It makes him cautious.
It makes him weak.
“You call that a time?” Wolf sneers at him over dinner. “I’ve seen sprogs do better with one hand tied behind their back.”
Alex says nothing, as he has found is the best way.
Tactical awareness training the next day is similar. Ian had taught him how to do this. It isn’t too different how they teach them to do it here, but it is different enough that Alex finds himself double guessing himself.
One high, one low, you and your partner covering each other’s blindspots.
It’s good.
Really good.
It isn’t what Ian taught him.
Ian taught him to do it by himself. Fast. Furious. Aggressive. Keep the gun up, but stay low. Push the door in, but don’t rush in. Slice the pie. Sweep the room. You only get one life, Ian had told him, so don’t rush it.
Or, as he showed him once and only once, go in fast. Be fast. Don’t hesitate. Roll the dice.
Knowing what he knows now, he wonders whether it was the second type of working alone that got his uncle killed.
Whatever the case might be, Alex knows you must be decisive.
He glances up at the stopwatch as they get through the last room. The squad around him has ignored him. Treated him as a useless dead weight, rather than part of the team. They’ve lost a lot of time because of it.
Wolf shoves his shoulder hard, sending his dinner spilling across the floor. Alex takes a deep breath, cleans it up, and then gets a second tray. There is less on the second one. He is hungry when they go to bed.
This one isn’t his fault either.
Though, Alex thinks, Wolf was the one who stayed in the fatal funnel. The hesitation at the start of every room. The little pause as he adjusts to the other side of the threshold.
Alex is new to working in a team, but even he recognises the risks that come with that approach.
Wolf is going to die if he doesn’t change his ways.
Alex wishes he felt confident enough to tell them that, but the differences between how Ian did things and how these guys do things haunt his dreams.
He isn’t sure if Ian taught him wrong, or if these guys just do it different, or if what he knows is better.
Once he starts thinking about the assault course properly, the differences get more obvious. He thinks he could fly through this, if they allowed him to do it the way that he was brought up. The way that he was trained, he suspects in hindsight.
Ian has been thorough in giving him a childhood that leads him to this place.
Maybe it wasn’t the intention to do it at this time, but Alex is pretty sure that he would have come here at some point, no matter what happened with Ian. It just makes sense to him. If Ian wasn’t training him for this, then what was he being trained for?
It is only after he has kicked Wolf out of the aeroplane and gained the respect of the somewhat surly squad leader that he begins to build up the confidence to speak up.
They set a new squad record for clearing the CQB sim. It takes them seventeen attempts, but Wolf isn’t standing in the middle of the door after the fourth, and by the sixth they are trusting his judgement. Trusting his calls.
Then they set the squad record on the second CQB sim that is set up the following week.
He passes RTI training with flying colours. He comforts Eagle, who is not taking it as well. He reassures Snake, who thought he might crack. He smirks at Wolf, who doesn’t know how to take it when a teenager is the one who did best on it.
It doesn’t matter, Alex wants to tell him, who did it best. What matters is that they all did it well enough.
He asks the Sergeant if he can do the assault course his way the following morning.
“Your way?” the Sergeant asks. “What do you mean your way?”
“I’m struggling to adapt to the way you train these guys,” Alex tells him.
“You’ve had prior training.”
Alex tries not to look his age. “Yeah.”
“The only requirement is that you complete the course,” the Sergeant tells him. “You do that, Cub, and I don’t give a shit whether you go down the final descent upside down and back-to-front.”
Alex smirks.
A frown crosses the Sergeant’s face. “You are, in fact, not planning to rappel upside down, Cub?”
“I will complete the course,” Alex tells him, “as you have requested.”
His next time around the assault course is much faster. His bag is repacked, like Ian showed him, to redistribute the weight. To make it easier to sprint. To climb. To run.
Every movement is efficient. He pushes through the water with his eyes fixed on the other side. His crawl through the mud uses all four of his limbs, propelling him forward faster. It is more exhausting, and that is why they might not want them to do it at this stage of the training, but it is what is right.
Alex likes doing what is right.
He runs down the final descent with his eyes fixed on the floor and his gear pushing him on rather than dragging him down. His gun is up, ready to eliminate any target that appears.
There won’t be one, but Ian has taught him well. Always be prepared. Even when you think you don’t need to be. Especially when you don’t need to be.
He is aware there is a grin on his face as he approaches the Sergeant, the gun feeling light in his hands.
The Sergeant nods slowly, “That’s a personal best, Cub. Keep it up.”
No more is said.
Wolf is pale underneath the mud. He is scared of heights, Alex thinks, and probably wouldn’t be able to adopt the carefree insanity that is required to launch yourself off a height headfirst and then sprint toward the ground.
“You’ve had prior training,” Fox says.
Alex nods.
“Firearms too?” Fox asks, something assessing in his eyes.
Alex thinks of nights out in the woods, a rifle against his shoulder, waiting for the morning sun to bring the deer back out.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Show me,” says Fox.
The older man doesn’t say anything as Alex puts rounds down the range using Fox’s sidearm. He doesn’t say anything in a way that is deafeningly loud.
“Problem?” Alex asks.
“That isn’t how we’re trained to shoot,” Fox tells him bluntly.
“What do you mean?”
“You see the gun as an extension of your body,” Fox says. “You look at the target, not the sights. You use your peripheral vision to assess the environment.”
There is a criticism in there somewhere, Alex thinks, and he considers whether or not to point it out. Then Fox pulls the target back and they look at it together.
It won’t set any records, but Alex wasn’t expecting to. He’s rusty.
Fox hands over his rifle without a word and lets the target drift down the range.
Alex shoots as he’s been taught. Two in the chest. One in the head. Fast, controlled, by instinct.
Fox’s face is inscrutable when they see how closely grouped the bullets are.
“You can shoot,” he says eventually, looking like he is conflicted over saying even that much. He thinks for a moment, and then adds, “Better than most people here, I’d say.”
“I had a good teacher.”
“I’ll say.”
“You don’t seem happy.”
“What did you say your teacher did? Where did he get his training?”
Alex could say a lot of things. He shakes his head nonetheless. “I’m not really sure.”
It’s safer than claiming it is classified, he thinks. Fox seems to have pieced it together anyway.
The rest of the squad know by the next morning, and when the Sergeant comes a few days later to stick him in a car back toward London, Alex is almost sad that he is heading off. He has been here barely two weeks, and he is finally settling in.
But there is a reason he was here, and that reason wasn’t to fit in.
“You misbehave out there, Cub, okay?” says Wolf, slapping him on the back.
“Good luck,” Fox tells him, “on whatever mission it is you’ve got.”
Eagle gives him a nod. Friendlier than the one he got at the start.
Snake says little, but then Snake rarely says much at all.
And Alex feels like he has learnt something that Ian hasn’t taught him before. About fitting in. About finding a home. About bringing people onto your side. About being a team.
He hopes he won’t need it.
He thinks he might.
Why else would MI6 have sent him here?