Читать книгу The Fallen Heroine - Fabienne Gschwind - Страница 8

The next day nothing else was going on, Emily and Gabin were working out in our gym or reading theory sessions. I had been given the shooting room at Tartelette's request. I practiced as much as I could. My survival depended on it, as it slowly dawned on me, and that created incredible motivation.

Tartelette had put us through a rigorous program, as I now saw. The program included strength training, mobility training, relaxation exercises, shooting exercises, machete training and theory blocks. In between, long-distance ocean swimming, running, hand-to-hand combat, climbing, first aid, zoology, survival training, and all that military procedure.

"Hop, don't be lazy, Gabin 100 pushups, Emily 50, me 120! Ship's boy, you're on break!", Tartelette also commanded and everyone gathered on the floor in our gym groaning. But nothing came of my break. Thibault rumbled into the basement and grabbed me by the collar. He was wearing his headset and data goggles so he could answer emergency calls immediately.

He rushed me through all the military drill. To make matters worse, he pulled out a thick book of ranks from between the storage shelves and gave it to me to memorize. A little pissed off by this order, I returned to the others. They were standing in the small control room to the shooting cellar and evaluating the protocols.

The logs also showed that Tartelette had done several thousand hours of simulated combat, not just repro battles, but everything the software could give. She seemed to train two to four additional hours almost every night. When she slept was a mystery to me. "It may be that I'm genetically predestined ... I've always been more athletic and stronger than others. But everything else is practice, practice and practice," she told me. “During a mission you are only as good as you are in your worst training”.

In the evening we went straight on and for me shooting training was on the agenda again. I began to wonder what had happened to all the free time we had been promised during the two weeks of basic training.

After all, they had said that we would only have a four-day week. And after heavy deployments, at least three extra holidays. Maybe that was the case with regular units, but certainly not with Tamara's unit.

Tartelette also came down to the basement again after she had done her office work and gave me a telling off. For the twentieth time she stressed that I should finally take up marathon running. "Your endurance and agility are grotty. So now get out of here, I want to practice."

That must have been around ten o'clock at night. At home, my refrigerator was yawningly empty and I had gotten something to eat from a brasserie.