The Bodyguard Team Interview (3)
Once I was sure the team-leader candidates had their squads assembled, I went straight into the briefing.
"You will proceed on the assumption that an unknown enemy is ambushing you, and your goal is to get through that situation. At the team-leader level, your own protection skills matter — but so does commanding your people. That is the part I intend to weigh most heavily."
The applicants nodded, taking it in without argument.
I called forward the one whose name came first.
"Mr. Kim Seongguk. You and your team will carry this mannequin to the entrance and bring it back. Somewhere along the way an unknown enemy will hit you, and you are to keep the mannequin safe through the attack."
Close protection was what I had in mind, so what I wanted came down to a single thing: that they truly shield the person they were charged with protecting, no matter who came at them. The applicants seemed to grasp that well enough. They nodded, and the first man up began conferring quietly with his team.
I gave them a short interval to plan, then handed the mannequin to Kim Seongguk.
"The mannequin is standing in for a person, so you may drag it along or haul it like baggage if you like. You do understand it cannot be damaged?"
"I'll bring it back whole. Exactly as it looks now."
He answered with easy confidence, took the mannequin from me, and tucked it carefully under one arm.
He looked ready. I told him to move out, and in the same breath turned my attention elsewhere.
"Go and tell them to begin, would you?"
"Got it, cheep!"
A sparrow waiting in the corner launched itself with a soft flutter of wings, and almost at once the zoo seemed to grow a little louder.
"I'm sorry to disappoint the rest of you, but I can't tell you how it's going. You understand?"
"Yes. A test has to be fair."
I kept the feed to myself and watched the test unfold alone. Yubu was circling overhead with the equipment, sending back footage as crisp as a drone's, and I had already fitted every one of them with a microphone, so their voices reached me just as clearly.
"Our first objective is over there. The visitor information center holds a map of the entire zoo and a guidebook on the animals we can treat as the unknown enemy. It covers our rear, and we'll spot an approach easily from there, so that is where we start."
At the team leader's words, the people serving as his temporary teammates nodded in silence.
They formed a ring with him at the center and began to advance at a careful pace, backs slightly bent and bodies kept low, the ones on the outside holding a watch in every direction as they moved.
They reached the visitor center quickly, pulled a guidebook, and started checking its contents at once. The moment they had the shortest route to the entrance, they scanned for any animal drawing near, then moved fast.
"Right flank — unidentified life-form approaching!"
"A rhino! It's a rhino!"
A rhinoceros had come out of nowhere and was charging them, and even through the screen their panic was plain to see. The team leader, a veteran in his own right, never lost his composure.
"B, D, and E will stop the rhinoceros. Subdue it quickly and rejoin."
He had evidently assigned codes beforehand. He called them by letter and gave the order without a wasted word.
Three of them snapped to and sprinted out to meet the charge. The one who looked strongest planted himself in front and checked the rhino's head, while the two beside him seized its body and bled the impact away.
Perhaps it was their superpowers, but the three of them brought the rhinoceros to a halt with almost gentle ease. The horn had already been trimmed so the animals could not gore one another in a scuffle, and that helped — even so, they stopped the beast without taking a single injury.
"Drop it, bind the front legs, then we rejoin."
They shoved the rhinoceros over where it stood and lashed its thrashing legs tight with rope. Once it could no longer move, they hurried back to the main group — and found the main group already under attack.
"Kh—! You damn ostrich!"
The team-leader candidate was shielding the mannequin while an ostrich pecked him again and again. Another member was taking a switching from a monkey. A third was locked in a wrestling match with a bear. The main group was an utter mess.
B, D, and E stared at the scene for a blank moment, thrown. Then they came to their senses, rejoined at once, and drove the animals off.
"Huff... haah... Since when is an ostrich this strong?"
The candidate let out a breath and started them moving again. His vest, torn open where the ostrich had pecked through it, flapped with every step.
The ambush, though, was only just beginning.
Magpies and crows that had been clutching water balloons with great care took to the air and began dropping them on the group. They were Awakened Individuals, though, and a handful of water balloons was never going to be enough. Balloons poured down like a cloudburst, and they swatted them aside without ever breaking stride. Watching them, I found it hard to believe even stones would have done them any real harm.
"The entrance isn't far. Just a little more!"
The applicant carrying the mannequin urged his team on and pressed toward the entrance. There they met the camel known all through our zoo as the Carrot Bandit — a creature that, the instant it spotted anyone holding a carrot, would saunter over and steal it. I had, of course, ordered it to steal the mannequin instead, so the camel had its eye on that.
"A holds the camel. The rest of us reach the entrance and turn back."
While the member designated A sprinted out and locked into a contest of strength with the camel, the others tagged the entrance and doubled back at once. Coming together again, they helped the man holding the camel and brought the animal down between them.
Just as they were about to move on, they had no choice but to freeze.
"H-huh? My baton..."
"Where did you drop yours... Wait. I don't have mine either!"
"M-me neither!"
"What is going on? Didn't all of you keep hold of them?"
Every last one of them had lost the telescoping batons I had issued in advance. They were patting at their waists, hunting for batons that ought to have been hanging there.
The missing batons did not stay missing for long. A flock of geese came hustling in, and every one of them had a baton clamped primly in its bill.
"Damn it! Why do those things have the batons?!"
They could not hide their disbelief. The reason the geese had them, though, became clear almost at once.
"I heard the raccoons steal food without the tiger ever catching them... Their thieving really is something else."
Behind the geese, a raccoon was picking up a baton one of them had dropped and tucking it right back into the bird's bill. They had only a moment to marvel at those deft little hands before they rushed the geese and snatched the batons back.
"Gyaaaah! Aagh!"
The man who had gone in first took a concentrated beating from eight geese and was clearly in a great deal of pain, but they got the batons away all the same.
Recovering them was a success. Their ordeal was only starting.
The way back from the entrance to where I waited was not all that far. The problem was the animals posted along it.
Nureongi came slithering out of nowhere, closed in fast, and bound one of the team tight. The others tried to free him, of course, but peeling off a python wrapped around a man from head to toe was a distant hope.
"Go on ahead...! Please, go on ahead! Hyaaaah!"
Still trussed where he stood and shouting for the others to leave him, he let out a shrill scream as Nureongi rasped his tongue back and forth right beside his face. Once the rest were sure he was in no real danger, they abandoned him without mercy and moved on. Nureongi, needless to say, was not the only animal waiting.
"Urk!"
One man tripped over a boulder that had not been there a moment before and went down — and then a crushing weight settled over him.
"Gyaaaah! G-go on... ahead!"
He could not resist the enormous tortoise pinning him. It was Hanmu. In the end he sent the others on without him.
Those others were hardly in one piece themselves.
"Elephant! I'll take you on myself!"
One of them had locked into a shoving match with Bbwoobbwoo, who had burst in out of nowhere, and was steadily losing ground.
"I'm not losing to a tiger who loses to a cat— guek!"
Another had been ignoring Hodori while Namcat worked him over, only to eat a tiger-style Nyangnyang Punch and go tumbling across the ground. There was even a man left dangling in midair, caught in the mouth of a giraffe tall enough to lift him clean off his feet.
"Damn it. Then the rest of us move to the objective, fast! We can recover the team afterward — it won't be too late!"
The candidate chewed his lip at the sight, then led whoever the animals had not yet caught back to where I was. Along the way the crocodiles took one more of them, and another — a man who had applied to be a bodyguard — was carried off by Maru instead. Even so, they made it back.
"G-good work."
He was a wreck, and yet he had somehow kept the mannequin safe and brought it in. I found myself patting his shoulder before I quite meant to.
"It's nothing... Excuse me. I need to step away for a moment."
He looked a little spent, and yet he turned at once and began retracing the way he had come. Before long he was back, leading teammates who looked even more wrecked than he did. He had gone to fetch them. The rescue must have taken what he had left; he seemed wearier than ever.
He had kept the one he was meant to protect truly safe, and he had gone back for his people besides. I gave him extra marks for it in my head and moved on to the next team's test.
Once the others saw the state of the first challenger and understood that the test meant being ambushed by the animals, they drew up plans of their own and faced it. In the end, five team-leader applicants passed. The last of them did have part of his mannequin ruined — Namcat had barged in at the finish, and the state of that cat was something else — but I decided to let it stand.
Namcat was a thug through and through, and he might as well have been a force of nature. On top of that, a big, solid fellow with a beard like a brush had been standing there with a face that looked ready to crumple into tears. There was simply nothing else to be done.
At any rate, once I had winnowed the field, I gathered the ones who passed and set up something in the nature of a security firm. There would be times they needed to carry telescoping batons, or other gear that let them apply a measure of force.
I obtained the necessary permits from the nearest police station, and then I put the bodyguards to work in earnest. I am not the sort of man who goes around making enemies, so they had nothing urgent to do — and yet the simple fact of being under their protection left me strangely at ease.
I felt easier still watching them, after the zoo closed for the day, train alongside the animals. And at some point I even caught them running tactical drills with the sparrows, the magpies, and the crows, signaling with hands and feet alike. There was no way I could have found them anything but reliable.