Code Name: Camelot (Noah Wolf #1)(27)

Gary nodded, and threw Jackson a grin of his own. “You got it,” he said, looking at the others and letting his eyes come to rest on Noah. “Try to stay close, okay?”

Gary took off at a fast jog, and Noah was easily able to keep up. Angie and Marco were right beside him, and the rest of the group was strung out over twenty feet or so, making for an interesting game of follow the leader.

Noah had expected them to go back toward the little concrete building, but Gary took off in an entirely different direction, back toward Alley Town. Noah had noticed several different buildings along the road, but hadn’t paid a lot of attention to them. Suddenly, he wished he had.

It wasn’t all about buildings, though, which Noah quickly discovered. Gary took off from the road onto a path through the woods, and soon they were leaping over fallen trees, bouncing off of rocks, even swinging on vines as they made their way through the patch of wilderness, but it soon opened up into a cleared area with a number of structures. Many of the buildings in this region were several stories tall, reminding Noah of some downtown district in a typical American city. People were moving about the streets and sidewalks, and there was a considerable amount of vehicular traffic, as well.

“What’s this?” Noah asked, and it was Angie who spoke up first to answer.

“Urban sprawl,” she said. “This is the administrative area, where all the offices and such are. A lot of the big shots from Washington come in here, so that’s why there’s a big hotel and all these office buildings.”

“Yeah,” Marco said, “and it also gives us an urban-type training area. We run mission scenarios here, where we have to deal with opposition by city cops and such.”

Gary suddenly picked up the pace, and Noah and the others had to pour on the speed in order to keep up. They all followed as he climbed over a dumpster onto a semi trailer, then jumped from it onto a window ledge. One by one, they jumped and climbed from one ledge to the one above it, until they were all on top of the building, more than five stories above the ground.

Gary didn’t slow. As soon as everyone was on top, he took off again, running straight to the far edge of the building and throwing himself into the air. Noah was third in line, with Angie just ahead of him, and when she also flew off the building, Noah simply followed. He pushed off at the last second with everything he had, and then realized that he had just made a leap that had to carry him more than fifty feet forward, even as he dropped down two full stories to the roof of the building across the street.

A split second ahead of him, he saw Angie hit and roll, and followed suit. The parachute training he received in the Army came in handy, for he knew how to take the hit on his feet, then roll it out and come back up on to them. They were still moving, and he didn’t let himself slow down. He just kept following the girl in front of him.

Gary snatched open a door and disappeared down a flight of stairs, with Angie and Noah hot on his tail. Noah didn’t look back to see where Marco was, assuming that he would be there, somewhere. He was too busy concentrating on following and keeping up.

Angie leapt up onto the railing beside the stairs and slid down, but when Noah tried it, he ended up rolling down the steps themselves. A few bruises on his backside told him that he would need more practice for some of these moves, so he got to his feet as quickly as he could when he hit the landing, then ran down the steps three and four at a time after that.

Gary veered off on the third floor, opening the stairwell door and flying down the hallway. He went through an office where several people were working at computers, literally flying directly over some of them to get to a window across the room. When he reached it, he threw himself through it but caught the window ledge with a hand and swung himself downward.

Angie hesitated, and Noah passed her, flying through the window just as Gary had done, and using the ledge to stop his forward momentum and drop to a balcony just below. Gary was already inside, back through the window beside the balcony and running like mad through another office full of computer terminals. Noah dived through the window and rolled to his feet just as Angie hit the balcony behind him, but he didn’t wait to see if she followed.

The shortest route to the door Gary had disappeared through was diagonal, so Noah jumped up to run right across the tops of several desks. The people sitting at them were screaming and yelling, and sliding themselves away from their desks, and Noah realized that he had stepped on and broken at least one keyboard, but simply yelled, “Sorry!” as he ran out the door.

Gary went into another room, this one apparently just for storage, and Noah got to the door just in time to see him going out the window on the far side. Noah followed, of course, and found himself once more on top of a trailer, but then they ran down the cab of the truck and onto its hood, sliding off onto the road in front of it and continuing their run.

Up this, over that, leap here, run there—for more than an hour, Gary kept them moving, but finally, they were back at the exercise yard. Noah estimated that they had run a good twelve miles, and he didn’t even want to think about how many of those miles might have been vertical. The entire group collapsed onto the grass of the field, breathing heavily and gratefully accepting the bottles of water that were being passed around.

“So,” Noah heard Jackson’s voice, “how did that feel?”

Noah looked up at the man, and managed a very feeble grin. “At the moment, the stitch in my side feels a lot like I’ve been shot, but I think that will pass. We do this every day?”