God's Dogs

Order or disorder depends on organization; courage or cowardice on circumstances; strength or weakness on dispositions.

Sun Tzu

“We’re doing what?” Moss exclaimed.

Quinn grinned a sly grin. “We’re going to Amazonia to see if their people are up for recruitment into the Coyote program.”

“Whose great idea was this?” Moss persisted.

“Master Chin.”

“Oh,” Moss mumbled.

They were having dinner in the monastery cafeteria. For the last month, they had been in residence working primarily with fifth-year Coyote candidates.

“We leave tomorrow,” Quinn informed them. “It’s a couple of weeks to get there, but we’ve got lots to learn about Amazonia to keep us busy.”

River glanced at her teammates and said, “Amazons, right? Mythical female warriors that cut off their right tits so they could shoot arrows better.”

“Something like that.” Quinn’s sly grin returned.

They boarded the Satya the next day and began the journey.

“Hey, guys,” River called to them as they lounged in the galley reviewing the information about Amazonia. “It says here the original Amazons were Celts.”

Moss scratched his head. “Weren’t Celts from Ireland?”

“According to this,” River said, “they occupied lands from the Black Sea to Ireland long before Rome rose to power.”

“Huh,” Moss grunted.

Captain John entered the galley and announced, “Quinn, we’re taking a side trip to Central. Master Chin wants to talk to you.”

Quinn nodded and replied, “Sounds good.”

The stop at Central was short. No one disembarked for liberty. Master Chin met the Satya and immediately boarded once the ship docked at the space station.

The ancient monk called all of them to the galley – team and crew together.

Quinn knew the crew but not well. Other than the captain, whom he knew the best, there were two teams or watches that included a navigator, pilot, communication/sensor officer, weapons officer, an engineer and three engineer ratings, and a medic. Then there were the crews for the shuttles, and they were backup for the ship’s crew.

They crowded into the galley, and Master Chin began, “We think – well, I think the Amazonians, because they follow their own shamanic tradition, that should give them the basics necessary to qualify for Coyote training. It’s up to you to test that hypothesis.”

“How?” Moss wondered out loud.

Chin smiled at Moss. “I’m sure you can think of something.”

Moss chuckled.

Quinn said, “I take it the Senate approved the Penglai Exception, and we will need a lot more Coyotes.”

“Yes. When I return to Penglai, I’ll set up the infrastructure to accommodate the expansion of our training resources. What I’ll need to know is how much, if any, remedial training will be necessary.”

Pax said, “So we need to ascertain how much they know about the different levels of Spirit.”

“And how well they can operate in each,” Chin added. “I suspect a lopsided expertise in some areas and limited or no ability in other areas.”

“What about their fighting abilities?” River asked.

Chin smiled. “They’re Amazons. Their ancestors took down the Greeks and Romans.”

Quinn asked, “What’s our timeline?”

“That is the unknown. If they are where I hope they are, we can put them through a streamlined training program. If not, then we’ll see.”

Chin paused. Then he went on, “We must take the offensive. We cannot win a war playing defense.”

Captain John spoke up, “What is my crew’s role in all this?”

Chin answered. “You are Penglai educated and trained, yet you don’t carry the mystique the Coyotes do. You’ll hear the things they won’t. Mission success, strangely enough, will be in your hands. If there is a glue to bind us to Amazonia, you are that glue.”

Captain John’s eyes flashed to each of his crew. After their surprise faded, he could see resolve harden in each man and woman.

“One other thing,” Chin said. “You are taking a passenger with you back to Amazonia. She’s a marine corporal, the niece of the ambassador, and she will be carrying our operational plan back to her superiors.”

“Can we pick her brain?” Moss smiled.

“Absolutely,” Chin replied.

Corporal Belinda Morrison came aboard a few hours later, and Satya continued its journey.

River took over the duties of making Linda, as she preferred, welcome in their home. Linda was a compact woman with bowl-cut blonde hair, dark blue eyes set in an angular face. She moved well, and the next morning, River invited her to their workout area.

Like so many other military organizations, Linda trained in hand-to-hand combat by sparring. River agreed to a sparring match as an object lesson on its inferior methodology.

The match lasted moments. As soon as Linda moved to a get-ready position, she was down from River’s double punch: an open hand to her throat and a piston punch to her solar plexus. River pulled the throat punch.

Linda lay on her back trying to catch her breath. She finally managed, “You could have killed me.”

“Yeah. We don’t get ready to fight, we fight,” River said. “And as you can see, you can’t train lethal technique by sparring. It’s too dangerous.”

Linda rolled to her side on the mat. “Then how do you train?”

“Like wiring circuits in your brain,” River replied. “We build a network of conditioned reflexes.”

“Okay,” Linda groaned and slowly got up. “You’ll show me?”

Nearby, Moss paused in his weight training to lament, “No. Not yet. Come on, River, at least go one more round. Maybe two out of three?”

River rolled her eyes. “What he’s doing, in his obnoxious way, is point out that competition retards training.”

Linda nodded as awareness dawned. “Because the ego gets involved.”

“Whoa,” Moss exclaimed. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

Quinn paused on the treadmill. “Maybe Master Chin knows something you don’t.”

Moss laughed. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Pax, who was finishing a yoga routine, chuckled with him and observed, “I’m not sure we can handle a subdued and humble Moss.”

“It would probably be welcomed by the militias we play OpForce for,” River jabbed.

“I haven’t been hard on them for months,” Moss replied. “At least, months.”

As the banter continued, Linda looked to River for direction. The marine, while comfortable with bantering, wasn’t sure how she could fit in with this tightly knit team.

River caught Linda’s discomfort and told her, “You’re one of us now. Master Chin vouched for you. Just be yourself. We won’t accept anything less.”

“I can do that.”

“We’ll see,” River replied with an enigmatic look.

“What?”

River decided Linda could handle the deeper considerations and said, “Your authentic self is what becomes a Coyote. All the false selves we constructed to deal with childhood, friends, enemies, bosses, parents, others’ expectations, and on and on, have to go. You’ll stand naked before the masters, stripped of all those false selves, and then you’ll pass or fail the final tests.”

“Oh,” Linda said in a small voice.

“It’s not so bad,” Moss consoled her. “After all, they’re false selves.”

Pax jumped in, “Easy for you, since your true self is bad enough.”

“You know you love me, Pax.”

“Yeah,” Pax agreed sardonically. “What’s not to love?”

Quinn climbed off the treadmill and said to Linda, “Watch how River and I work out. You should be able to pick it up pretty quick.”

Quinn and River engaged in a fifteen minute workout, alternating between attacker and defender. When finished, Quinn gestured for Linda to sit on the mat with them.

“The Japanese call it uki-tori or one-step sparring,” Quinn explained. “For us, it’s more sophisticated. You’re training on both sides of the technique. The obvious training on strikes, throws, or leverages, and the not-so-obvious training to slip punches, go with the throws and leverages, and still keep your center.”

“It’s so fluid and explosive,” Linda commented.

River stood. “Want to begin?”

Linda grinned. “Yeah!”

Quinn smiled and left the workout area and returned to his cabin to continue reviewing the information on Amazonia. The review triggered a review of his own life.

He grew up with a strong, even domineering, mother. She was the department head of the University of Penglai’s Fine Arts program. Dad was a physics professor at the same institution. The two couldn’t have been more different. Dad was emotionally unavailable; Mom over-parented.

Luckily Quinn shared this confusing home life with a younger sister who possessed an ironic, somewhat iconoclastic sense of humor. Barely two years apart in age, the siblings comforted, cajoled, and challenged each other through childhood. They both benefitted from each other’s support.

It came as a shock to Quinn when offered a shot in the Coyote program. His sister said she knew he was Coyote material all along. Mom was horrified. Dad shook his head in confusion.

The challenge during the years of training was Quinn’s lack of self-confidence. Quinn knew it, but didn’t know how to overcome it. The masters knew it, and during Quinn’s third year they put him in charge of defending Mount Gut Check against an assaulting militia battalion. Quinn’s third year class numbered seventy-five Coyote candidates. The enemy battalion numbered 525 combatants. Roughly five to one odds.

The masters told Quinn the objective was to bleed the enemy before retreating. He was to preserve as many of his troops as possible. He would be graded on that above all else.

The mountain was a well-known training ground, and prepared positions existed, fields of fire were cleared, and ambush locations were marked. It was expected that Quinn would find a creative use of the known terrain to provide a realistic challenge for the militia as he withdrew under fire.

After days of research, Quinn decided on a different approach. He kept coming back to a Sun Tzu quote about ‘desperate ground.’ It related to a force with its back to the wall. The quote was haunting in its pure symmetry: “Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live.”

He worked out his strategy and instructed his men and women on their duties. As Coyotes, they could conceal themselves better than most soldiers. With each of them concealed, Quinn planned to construct linked ambush scenarios. They could – each of them – account for at least five of the enemy once the ambushes were sprung. That would not be possible if they fought a conventional defense of the mountain. Instead, they would fight to win or die trying.

Each man and woman in his company would act independently, wire up simple ambush charges around their hidden positions, and they would coordinate their fire to take advantage of a confused enemy response. Then they would retreat down the mountain, through the enemy’s support vehicles to a rendezvous point in the nearby town – the pub the militia claimed for themselves, replete with banners, pictures on the wall, and other symbols of their rich history.

Quinn gained criticism for this last indignity, but the battle was still studied in subsequent militia NCO schools.

The operation began as the battalion scouts moved through the woods in advance of the two lead companies. They let the scouts pass unmolested. Once the two companies were in range of the ambush, Quinn subvocalized to his group, “Fire the first charges.”

Mines detonated every twenty yards within the militia formation, and the soldiers ran for cover right into the secondary prepared charges.

“Fire two,” Quinn directed.

Then the Coyotes waited for the third and fourth companies to race forward.

“Fire three, and break cover.”

They broke cover and knifed through the demoralized survivors. At the run now, they spread out, lit up their active camo and ghosted through the rear forces.

Then they seemed to disappear for an hour. The battalion commander, who was with the support vehicles, received a call from the bar that there were a bunch of camouflaged people toasting the demise of the local militia. When the colonel got there, though, no one was in the bar, except for the tied-up bartender and a half-drunk waitress. And a lot of the top shelf liquor was gone as well.

The next day, Quinn was called into Master Lu’s office. He had to ask directions to get there but made it on time.

Master Lu let Quinn stand at attention before the massive desk for a long few minutes.

Then he said, “I suppose you’re wondering why you’re seeing me rather than Master Chin or one of the senior monks in charge of training.”

“Yes, master. It does seem irregular.”

“What is your problem, Quinn? What must you do to break through to that place where you show up to take charge of your life and commit to fulfilling your destiny? What is it?”

Quinn didn’t want to sound like a whiny kid, but he spoke the tired cliché anyway, “I need to believe in myself.”

Lu snorted. “That is such a meaningless phrase. It is or it isn’t. Belief cannot create reality. Don’t be so stupid!”

Taken aback, Quinn recovered to say, “What is? I led my company to annihilate a battalion.”

“True. What did you learn about yourself from this?”

“I’m good?”

“But –”

“I can’t let it go to my head.”

“How does one accomplish that?”

“I don’t know. Minimize it, don’t brag about it, don’t let my ego run with it….”

“So you repress it. When you repress something you make it stronger. Your plan won’t work.”

“Then I don’t know,” Quinn said in defeat.

“Quinn, it’s all just experience. You think this happened, therefore it means X about you. Then that happened, so it must mean Y about you. It doesn’t. What does it mean?”

Quinn was caught like the proverbial deer in the headlights. He came face-to-face with his block to operating exclusively from his authentic self. That truth broke free from its restraints.

“I need to do my best at everything I chose to do. Outcomes don’t matter.”

Lu smiled. “In that case, I have a task for you. You and your ‘platoon’ of ambush experts.”

Quinn felt both dread at the impending punishment and a deeper sense of joy that bubbled up within him from some effervescent place beyond time and space.

Lu continued, “You will reconstruct your ambush in the briefing room with the militia leadership. Then you’ll instruct them on how to detect the ambush. Then you’ll return to the field to redo this exercise so the militia can have the opportunity to defeat you.”

Quinn sighed in resignation, but the bubbling joy pushed away that tired feeling. Then he slowly grinned. “Okay. It’s all just experience.”

Lu nodded and smiled. Then he said, “As you know, I’m the director of Coyote operations. Master Chin oversees the entire program, but especially training. What you may not know is I’m also responsible for keeping our militia and any other planetary militias that come here sharp and well trained.

“The militia battalion you chewed up used to think quite highly of themselves. It’s the easiest way to lose one’s edge – by losing one’s humility, so to speak. The humiliation they suffered at your hands creates a teaching moment for them.”