he had thrown himself into the challenge of the program with a growing enthusiasm, hardening his body with the muscle-cracking wilderness training regime and clearing his thinking after too many days spent buried in the Fort Detrick laboratories of the U.S. Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
He had revived atrophied combat skills and had learned new ones: rough-terrain orienteering, hostile-climate survival, camouflage, high-angle marksmanship. And he had been introduced to the art of mountaineering. Smith had learned how to use crampons, pitons, and a rock hammer and more critically, how to trust in the rope and the harness, placing in abeyance the instinctive human fears of the fall and the high place.
The rappelling line zipped through the steel loops, the palm of Smith's heavy glove warmed, and his boots jolted against the rock twenty feet farther down the face. He felt his eyes narrow and his face tighten as the adrenaline surge hit, and once more he pushed away and sheered off another forty feet of cliff.
"Easy, sir," the voice from below warned.
For a third time he pushed off, hard, allowing himself to plummet, the rope screaming and the rappelling brake smoking.
"Easy, Colonel...Easy...Easy!...I SAID EASY, GODDAMN IT!"
Smith braked hard, arresting his fall. Pulling himself upright, he dropped boots-first the last few feet to the fir-needle duff at the cliff base. Backing off the bottom end of the rope, he rubbed the scalding heat pulse out of his glove and onto the thigh of his fatigues.
A stocky ranger sergeant in a sand-colored beret came up behind him. "Begging the colonel's pardon, sir," he said sourly, "but I hope you realize that an officer can bust his ass up here just about as bad as an enlisted man or an NCO."
"I'll take your word for it, Top," Smith grinned.
"Then when I say 'EASY, SIR,' I damn well mean it!" The climbing instructor was a twenty-year veteran of both the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and the famed Tenth Mountain Division and thus was a rather privileged individual, even to a light colonel.
Smith sobered and undid the chin strap of his helmet. "I hear you, Sergeant. I got a little full of myself up there. Bad idea. Next time it'll be by the book."
Mollified, the instructor nodded back. "Okay, sir. Beyond being a little wild, that was a good descent."
"Thanks, Top."
The instructor went back to overseeing the next student down, and Smith withdrew to the edge of the clearing at the cliff base. Shedding his helmet and harness, he removed a floppy boonie hat from his cargo pocket, slapping it into shape before settling it over his dark, short-trimmed hair.
Jon Smith was a man doing his early forties well: broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, and taut-muscled from both his recent bout of training and an instinctively vigorous lifestyle. He was handsome in a strong, man's way, his tanned features fine-planed, intent, and somewhat immobile-a face that kept secrets well. His eyes, an unusual shade of dark blue, had the capacity to cut across a room with a penetrating focus.
Taking another deep pull of the clean mountain air, Smith sank down at the base of a towering Douglas fir. This was a world he had lived in once. During an earlier phase of his career, before going into research and USAMRIID, he had done a tour with U.S. Army Special Forces as a combat medical officer on forward deployment with the Teams. It had been a good time, a time of challenges and comradeships. It had been a time of fears and despairs as well, but all in all, a good time.
A random thought had been creeping into his consciousness over the past few days: What about going tactical again, maybe for another tour in Special Forces? What about going back to the real Army for a while?
Smith recognized it to be only a random fancy. He was too senior for the field anymore. The best he could manage would be a desk job, a staff posting, probably right back inside the Washington beltway.
And then, he must confess, he was good at his current researcher's position, and it was a critical one. USAMRIID was America's first line of defense against both bioterrorism and the evolving global disease pool, and Smith was at the cutting edge of that defense. Important duty, undeniably.
And finally, there was his other tasking, the one not listed in his open service record. The one that had been born out of a megalomaniac's nightmare called the Hades Project, and the death of Dr. Sophia Russell,