Extremis

1 Like the young mule deer in his rifle scope, Viktor Mialkovsky was a patient creature who preferred to spend a great deal of time monitoring his surroundings before making a decisive move. But unlike that timid mammal -- who now sat trembling in fear approximately two hundred yards from his high-point position overlooking the rocky clearing below -- Mialkovsky was the furthest thing imaginable from harmless. Thanks to a considerable amount of progressively intense training and experience, all paid for by the United States government, Viktor Mialkovsky was perfectly capable of killing human and wildlife alike with a wide range of lethal weapons that specifically included his bare hands. As a result of that same training and experience, he was also considered an expert hunter, tracker, and survivalist by the small number of peers and supervisors who were personally aware of his skills. On the summary sheet in his personnel jacket, the words "mission-oriented" and "emotionally detached" had been highlighted and underlined for emphasis. Had Mialkovsky possessed a similar degree of camaraderie, and respect for teamwork and authority, he would have been the ideal government hunter-killer: an infinitely adaptable human weapon to be judiciously applied to the most difficult tactical problems. That was certainly the plan, as far as the succession of people responsible for his training and duty assignments had been concerned. But it hadn't taken each of these veteran supervisors long to conclude that their supposedly ideal hunter-killer was indifferent to authority and regulations in general, to the rules of engagement in particular, and to the other men and women attached to his missions without exception. Most of them were convinced that Mialkovsky's heralded "emotional detachment" had far less to do with his ability to control his emotions than with a general lack thereof. These were serious flaws that should have terminated Viktor Mialkovsky's government career long before his skill set became unmanageable; and certainly would have, had he not also possessed from early childhood an almost feral ability to conceal himself -- both his mind and his body -- within the organizational structure of his environment. No aptitude or personality test ever confirmed the suspicions of his supervisors, none of his questionable actions had ever been documented, and no eyewitnesses had ever stepped forward to report what they had heard or seen. In effect, to his supervisors and to his external world at large, Mialkovsky remained irrefutably who and what he chose to be at any particular moment. And that, in addition to his formidable skill set, made him extremely dangerous to anyone or anything that happened to cross his path. Thus the fact that Mialkovsky and the young mule deer had chosen to conceal themselves on adjacent sets of narrow rocky mesas overlooking this particular high-mountain clearing on this particular night certainly bode nothing good for the animal. But the presence of the terrified deer seemed only to amuse the supposedly emotionless hunter-killer, who had briefly held the deer's head in his crosshairs before methodically shifting his view to the next sector. It was a casual decision that would have undoubtedly intrigued the legion of government psychiatrists who had diligently probed Viktor Mialkovsky's psyche over the years with their batteries of standardized but ultimately unrevealing tests. This particular decision by Mialkovsky was revealing, because it would have taken the hunter-killer only a fraction of a second to send one of his modified 7.62x51 NATO hollow-pointed bullets through the deer's exposed head. In doing so, he would have confirmed the functionality of his primary weapon, acquired some extra meat for his freezer, and reduced the number of unpredictable factors at the scene by one; all positive results achieved at minimal risk to hGoddard, Ken is the author of 'Extremis ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416574767 and ISBN 141657476X.