Chapter Two Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty-Two
6th July 1980
Tempelhof, Berlin
Sophie looked at the frame of her bicycle and wished that the paint would dry faster. All the parts were in boxes scattered about the shed and she needed to have it reassembled and tuned before she left for Moscow. Fortunately she had Doug helping her.
“I thought that you said that red bicycles go faster” Sophie said, unhappy about what they were doing. Giving a bicycle a rattle can finish that looked good had been something that Doug had taught her when they panted it. She had painted several other bicycles since then but had never wanted to touch the paint on this one.
“Yes, I said that” Doug said, “But I figure that whatever bike you happen to be riding is going faster, under the paint it will still be the same bicycle.”
They had stripped the red paint off Sophie’s favorite bicycle and were replacing it with the black, white, and silver, the team colors of the Black Eagles. They had already sprayed on the flat-black primer coat. Sophie had been advised that her no-name bicycle, with its bright red paint which had become famous after she won a gold medal riding it in Montreal, was considered a likely target of sabotage. This was as the team on a whole had been warned that cheating was expected to be rife at the Summer Games in Moscow despite the best efforts of the IOC and a small army of officials they had hired. Sophie was really starting to understand why so many of her elders had an almost pathological hatred of all things Russian.
Sophie sorted through the cans of gloss black that would go on the next layer. Then the rolls of masking tape, along with the cans of white and silver to finish it. They were going to do the three-color paint-scheme that was popular with racing bikes everywhere. Alida Baruch, the Head Coach of Women’s Cycling team would probably be happy to see that she had done this. It didn’t matter that Sophie was the Captain of the Black Eagles, Alida had been pressuring her to show more solidarity with the team because she was hoping that they would do better this time in team events.
“I figure that steel is a lot easier to paint than fiberglass” Doug said with a smile. He was referring to the incident last year where Sophie had helped her friend Ziska paint her prosthetic leg in bright stripes, much to the horror of Ziska’s mother. When Ziska had explained the idea to Sophie she had explained that she was tired of hiding that her right leg ended just below her knee. So why not make a statement? The trouble was that the process of painting the fiberglass was rather different from painting a bicycle frame.
“Yeah” Sophie replied.
Near Tyson, Vermont
This had not been Stevie’s idea, if anything he would have run the other way if he had been given a choice. His parents had heard that as the child of an Army Officer he was eligible to attend Camp Laconia in distant Vermont with Uncle Sam footing the bill and Dad was a Chief Warrant Officer. It would be fun they said, he would spend most of summer vacation doing all sorts of fun things as opposed to moping around Fort Meade like he had last year.
Of course, Stevie wasn’t stupid. He had lost count of how often he had to listen to his father talking about how the first rule in every Army throughout all of history was to never volunteer. And the second rule; always get cash up front because nothing was free. Doud had found all of that hilarious, because he was on the same bus that had left Fort Meade with fifty other kids back in June. The part that had been left unsaid, the thing that Stevie had been volunteered for and the real cost had been on full display from pretty much the instant they got off the bus.
As it turned out Camp Laconia was far worse than Stevie had imagined. The name said it all, Laconia. The Camp’s Staff had made a point of telling them that the name had its origins in Ancient Sparta and while throwing boys who didn’t measure up off a cliff wasn’t an option they had other means… That had something to do with him being too exhausted to do more than fall into bed each night and not wake up until they were rudely awakened just before sunrise. The days had been filled with long hikes through the woods, mostly up steep hills, followed by what were deemed practical lessons. Even things that should have been fun like swimming became grueling trials with a whole lot of yelling involved. Admittedly, the Camp Counselors teaching them target shooting with real guns had been a whole lot of fun. Stevie had never seen a .22 rifle before he had gotten here, but he had earned a marksman’s badge which he had been happy about for a few minutes.
What confounded Stevie though was Doud. At first glance, Doud would be extremely unlikely to do well in Camp Laconia. Instead, he seemed to know how to do everything that was asked of them backwards and forwards. Doud had told Stevie that it wasn’t that different from what his father demanded of him anyway. Still, Doud figured out a way to subvert the whole thing by keeping a set of D&D dice in his pocket, something that he had told no one else.