Starfire (26 page)

The name of the place was Chong Jeontu Jib, written in both Korean and Latin characters, on the south side of town not far from the airport. It was a simple two-story frame building, old but maintained very well, with a yard fenced in with chain link that had some exercise equipment and weights in a small workout area. Beyond the fence in the back was a gun range set up against a large round dirt wall which formerly surrounded petroleum tanks that stored fuel during World War II bomber training missions. The window in front was covered from the inside with United Korea and American flags, and the glass front door was covered with a large U.S. Air Force flag. Inside he found a counter, and beyond that a large workout room with the floor covered in a blue gym mat. The walls were covered with all sorts of awards, trophies, photographs, and martial-arts weapons.

A short, thin man with a shaved head and gray goatee approached from a back room. “Dexter?” he called out. “This way.” Brad walked around the counter and had just touched the mat when the man called out, “Don't touch the mat with your shoes on, and only with respect.” Brad hopped off the mat onto a linoleum walkway. The second room was a little smaller than the first, with another blue gym mat on the floor, but instead of decorations and awards it had a weight machine, treadmill, boxing speed bag, punching bag, and posters of arrows pointing to various spots on a human body—Brad was sure he was going to know all he needed to know about that stuff before too long. There was a back exit and what looked like a locker room in the opposite corner.

“You're late,” the man said. “I'll let you slide today because it's your first time here, but now you know where the place is, so don't be late again.”

“I won't.”

“I won't,
sir,
” the man said. “The sergeant major told me you were in Civil Air Patrol and attended the Air Force Academy for a short time, so you know something about military courtesy. Employ it when you deal with me or anyone on the team. You'll know when you can address us any other way. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Next time, show up ready to work out. I don't want to waste time waiting for you to change. This is not your private resort club where you can stroll in and out as you please.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man nodded toward the locker room door. “You got thirty seconds to change.” Brad hurried toward the locker room across the blue mat. “Stop!” Brad froze. “Get back here.” Brad returned. “Get off the mat.” Brad stepped off the blue mat onto the linoleum. “Dexter, you are in a Korean
dojang,
” the man said in a low, measured voice. “The center of the
dojang,
the mat, is the
ki,
which means ‘spirit.' You train to learn how to accept the spirit of martial arts, the merging of inner peace and outer violence, when you step on the mat, which means you must respect the spirit that resides over it. That means you never touch the mat wearing footwear, you are prepared for a workout and are not in street clothes unless the lesson calls for them, you get permission to enter and leave the mat from a master, and you bow at the waist facing the center of the mat before you step on the mat and before you step off. Otherwise, go around it. Remember that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now get moving.” Brad trotted around the mat and returned wearing his workout gear in record time.

“My name is James Ratel,” the man said when Brad returned, “but you don't have to worry about real names or call signs because I'm ‘sir' or ‘chief' to you. I'm a retired U.S. Air Force chief master sergeant, thirty-three-year veteran, last serving as chief master sergeant of Seventh Air Force at Osan Air Base, United Korea. I'm a master parachutist with over two hundred combat jumps in Panama, Iraq, Korea, and Afghanistan as well as dozens of classified locations, completed Army Ranger School, and I've got two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. I am also a fifth-degree black belt and master instructor in Cane-Ja, a fifth-degree expert black belt in Krav Maga, and a nationally certified firearms and baton instructor. Here I give private self-defense and firearms lessons, mostly to retired military. I expect one hundred and ten percent each and every second you are in my
dojang
. Give respect and you will get it in return; slack off and your hour with me will be pure living hell.”

Ratel retrieved a small device with a neck strap and tossed it to Brad. “Self-defense training takes months, sometimes years, and the danger facing you is immediate,” he said. “So you're being given this device. Wear it always. It works almost anywhere in the country with a cell signal. If you are in trouble, press the button, and myself or anyone on the team that might be nearby will be able to track you down and assist. More likely, given the adversaries you face, it'll help us locate your body faster, but maybe we'll get lucky.” Brad gave Ratel a stunned expression.

“Now, since this is your first day, you're probably still hurting from being clubbed on the head, and you came in late, which I excused, we're just going to do a fitness evaluation today,” Ratel went on. “I want to see your maximum number of pull-ups, crunches, dips, and push-ups until muscle failure, with no more than ninety seconds' rest in between, and your best time on a two-mile run on the treadmill.” He motioned to the other side of the room where the treadmill and other exercise implements were waiting. “Get moving.”

Brad trotted over to the exercise area on the other side of the room. He was thankful that he did so much bike riding, so he thought he was in pretty good shape, but it had been a long time since he had been in a gym, and he had never been fond of pull-ups. He started with those and managed six before he couldn't pull himself up again. The crunches were easy—he was able to do eighty-two of those before having to stop. Dips were fairly new for him. He got between a set of horizontal parallel railings, grasped them, extended his arms, lifted his feet off the linoleum, lowered his body as far as he could, then extended his arms again. He could manage only three of those, and the third was an arm-trembling strain to complete.

His arms were really talking to him now, so Brad decided to do the running test next, and he got no complaint from Ratel, who was watching and taking notes from across the room. Now he was more in his element. He cranked the treadmill up to a nine-minute-mile pace, and found it fairly easy. He used the time to rest his weary arm muscles for the push-ups, which he thought would be easy as well. After the two-mile run, his arms felt pretty good, and he dropped down for push-ups but found he could only manage twenty-eight of them before his arms gave out.

“Dexter, you wouldn't have been able to graduate from Air Force basic training with those numbers, let alone the Air Force Academy,” Ratel told him after he trotted around the blue mat and stood before him. “Your upper-body strength is pitiful. I thought you were a high-school football player—you must've been a place kicker.” In fact Brad was not just a high-school football place kicker but a punter, and could snap a football twenty yards. “We can work on that. But what bugs me the most about what you just did was your lousy stinking give-a-shit attitude.”

“Sir?”

“You were dogging it on the treadmill, Dexter,” Ratel said. “I get you're a bike rider and in pretty good shape aerobics-wise, but it looked like you were just taking it easy on the treadmill. You set a lousy nine-minute-mile pace—that's not even an ‘average' score in basic training. I said I wanted your best time on a two-mile run, not your lackadaisical time. What's your excuse?”

“I needed to rest my arms before finishing the tests,” Brad said. “I thought a nine-minute mile was pretty good for starters.” With every word he spoke, the little man's tiny little eyes got angrier and angrier until they looked as if they were going to pop right out of his head. Brad knew there was only one allowable response: “Sorry, Chief. No excuse.”

“You're damned right there's no excuse, Dexter,” Ratel snarled. “I told you about respect. There's nothing respectful about only doing things half-assed. You don't show respect for me, and you sure as hell don't show it for yourself either. It's your first day here, and you haven't showed me one damned thing I can respect you for. You came late, you were not ready to work out, and you took it easy on yourself. You're not showing me squat, Dexter. One more session like this, and we might as well call this thing off. Get your stuff and get out of my sight.” Brad retrieved his gym bag by the bathroom, and by the time he came back, Ratel was gone.

Brad felt like crap as he mounted his bike and pedaled back to Cal Poly, and he was still in a somber mood as he made his way to Poly Canyon and Jodie Cavendish's apartment. She gave him a big hug at the door, which he failed to return. “Uh-oh, someone's cranky,” she observed. “C'mon in, have a glass of wine, and yabber at me.”

“Thanks, Jodie,” Brad said. “Sorry I smell like the bottom of my feet. I didn't shower or change after I left the gym.”

“You're welcome to use the shower here if you'd like, mate,” Jodie said with a wink. Brad didn't notice the obvious suggestion. He made his way to one of the bar stools at the counter surrounding the kitchen, and she poured a glass of Chardonnay and set it before him. “But it doesn't bother me. I like a bloke who smells like a bloke and not like a trough lollie.” She waited a few seconds, but Brad said nothing. “You're not even going to ask what that is? Wow, you must've really come a gutser today. Tell me about it, love.”

“It's not really that big a deal,” Brad said. “I show up for this workout session, a little late, but he said the first time was excusable. The instructor is this retired hard-core chief master sergeant. He has me do this fitness test. I thought I did okay, but he harangues me for holding back and being lazy. I thought I did okay. I guess I didn't.”

“Well, there's always next time,” Jodie said. “Fitness instructors are trained to shock and awe their students, and I think he was putting a Clayton's on you. No worries, Brad—we both know you're in good shape, except for that bruise on your head. How do you feel? Your bruise still looks spewin.' Maybe you should skip these workouts until that goes away.”

Brad shrugged. “I told them I'd do it, so I guess I'll keep on going until I pass out or my head explodes,” he said. The last thing he wanted to do was incur Wohl's wrath for quitting right after day one. He sat back in his seat and directly looked at Jodie for the first time. “I'm sorry, Jodie. Enough about my new fitness instructor. How was your day?”

“Apples, mate,” Jodie replied. She leaned toward him across the kitchen counter and said in the usual conspiratorial whisper she used when she had something unexpected to say: “I did it, Brad.”

“Did what?” Brad asked. Then, studying her face and body language, he knew. “The inorganic nanotube structure . . . ?”

“Synthesized,” Jodie said in a low voice, almost a whisper but a very excited one. “Right in our own lab at Cal Poly. Not just a few nanotubes, but
millions
. We were even able to create the first nantenna.”

“What?”
Brad exclaimed. “Already?”

“Mate, the nanotubes practically mesh by themselves,” Jodie said. “They're not yet mounted on the sol-gel substrate, we haven't hooked it up to a collector or even taken it outside yet, but the first optical nantenna built out of inorganic nanotubes is sitting in the lab on the other side of this very campus . . . on
my
workbench! It's even thinner and stronger than we predicted. I'm getting e-mails from scientists all over the world who want to get involved. It's turning out to be one of the biggest advances in nanotechnology in years!”

“That's incredible!” Brad exclaimed. He took her hands in his, and they exchanged a kiss across the kitchen counter. “Congratulations, Jodie! Why didn't you call me?”

“You were already at your workout, and I didn't want to disturb you,” she said. “Besides, I wanted to tell you in person, not over the phone.”

“That's great news! We're a shoo-in to get the lab space and grant money now!”

“I hope so,” Jodie said. “I might even qualify for a scholarship from Cal Poly—they wouldn't want me going back to Australia taking a breakthrough like this with me, would they?”

“You'll get a scholarship for sure, I know it,” Brad said. “Let's go out and celebrate. Some place not too fancy—I still smell like a gym.”

A sly smile crept onto her face, and she glanced very briefly at the hallway to her bedroom, obviously signifying the way
she
wanted to celebrate. “I already have dinner started,” Jodie said. “It won't be ready for about fifteen minutes.” She took his hand again and gave him a sly smile. “Maybe we can soap each other's backs in the shower?”

Brad smiled broadly and looked into her eyes, but shook his head. “Jodie . . .”

“I know, I know,” she said. “I told you I was going to try again, and maybe again and again. She's lucky to have you, mate.” She went to the refrigerator, retrieved the bottle of Chardonnay, and refilled his glass.

Brad heard his smartphone vibrate in his gym bag, retrieved it, and read the text message. “Well, how about that?” he remarked. “This is turning out to be a really great day after all.”

“What is it, love?”

“I got a room at Poly Canyon,” he said. Jodie wore an absolutely stunned expression. “Fifth floor at Aliso. I can move in tomorrow, and I can stay through the summer if we get the summer lab grant, and I can stay through my sophomore and junior years.”

“What?”
Jodie exclaimed.

“Is that good?”

“Aliso is the most sought-after residence building at Cal Poly!” Jodie explained. “They're closest to the shops and parking garage. And the top floors always fill up first because they have the best views of campus and the city! And they never allow students to stay at Poly Canyon over the summer, and you have to reapply every year and hope you keep your room. How in bloody hell did you manage that, mate?”