Thriller: Code Name: Camelot - An Action Thriller Novel (A Noah Wolf Novel, Thriller, Action, Mystery Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

me from turning them in, the logical choice would be for me to kill them first.”
    She scribbled for a few seconds more. “Here’s a question,” she said. “You said that you told the men who surrendered that you were much better at combat than they were, and that they couldn’t win. Apparently, they believed you, but the question is, did you believe it yourself? Do you honestly think you’re that good, that you could have taken all of them out?”
    Both of Noah’s eyebrows went up, and Mathers read his expression as a way of saying, Well, duh!
    “Of course I did,” he said aloud. “And every one of them knew it was true.”
    She suddenly raised her eyes from the pad she was writing on and looked directly into his. “Then why didn’t you do it? Why didn’t you go ahead and kill them all, so that no one could have contested your report?”
    “I didn’t need to, they surrendered.”
    “Yes, but if you had not offered them the chance to surrender, they would’ve kept right on trying to kill you. You would have been completely justified in eliminating them all. Why didn’t you?”
    Noah stared at her for a moment. “Most of those guys were pretty decent people, for the most part, but in all the years that I’ve been studying humans, one thing I’ve found is that they tend to be a lot like certain animals. Take wolves, for example: an individual wolf will almost never attack another animal or even a human, unless it feels threatened or is starving. However, an entire wolf pack, if the alpha is aggressive toward that animal or human, will rip it to shreds. It won’t matter if they’re hungry, because they probably won’t eat it anyway. They’ll just destroy it.” He leaned forward. “Humans are a lot like that, if they have a leader who will disregard right and wrong. Humans tend to submit to authority, or at least most of them do. If an authority figure tells them to do something, or even worse, leads by example in doing something that’s just plain wrong, something they wouldn’t normally do on their own, they’ll give in to the lure of the taboo and join right in. You understand what I’m trying to say?”
    Mathers looked him in the eye. “Pack behavior,” she said. “That’s what they call the tendency for people to join in on group actions that they would normally consider unacceptable. What you’re saying is that you believe those men would never have done what they did if Lieutenant Gibson hadn’t pushed the issue, hadn’t actually allowed or even ordered them to do it. Right?”
    “Right. So that means that, in some ways, they were still innocent. They didn’t deserve to die just because they were scared of what I might do to them. Now, if they hadn’t laid down their weapons, yes, I would’ve done what I had to do. But once they did, then it became my duty to bring them in alive and unharmed.”
    Mathers sat there and looked at him for another long moment, and then began scribbling again. “There you go again,” she said. “The ironic thing is that the very problem you’ve got, this thing about not having emotions or knowing how to be human, is almost certainly what has made you one of the best men I’ve ever met. I know a lot of terrific people, but if they had been in your position out there, and known as surely as you did that they could have killed all of the others, you can bet your life that they would have come back alone and sworn up and down that the rest of their unit was wiped out by enemy missile fire. There’d be no search for bodies, so the story would hold up.”
    Noah sat silently for a moment, but then reached over and laid a hand on hers, stopping her pen from moving across the paper. “Lieutenant,” he said softly, “I don’t know about whether I’m a good man or not. I don’t have any reasonable way to judge myself. But this much I have learned, and again, mostly by watching other people. Just because you can do something that may benefit yourself