Here we go.
The Taskforce was a he-man, women-hating organization like no other. You hear about Wall Street in the ’80s or NFL football teams, but none held a candle to a bunch of operators who’d spent their lives in a Darwinian arena where getting to the top of a career field didn’t mean risking bankruptcy or free agency, but death. There was no comparison.
We were the perfect gentlemen with our families, but definitely Neanderthal in our perceptions of the fairer sex when it came to the job. Getting Jennifer into Assessment and Selection was a hurdle in and of itself. Getting her through it would be damn near impossible. I knew this because I would have been the first person who would have cut the legs out from underneath her.
Before she’d saved my life, that is.
I said, “Jennifer, I know I’m walking on thin ice, but please understand that nobody in my world wants you to succeed. Nobody. They hate the idea of you as an operator because of your gender alone. You need to be better than they were at A-and-S. Better than a man. Better than me.”
I handed her the pistol. She took it, shaking her head. She said, “There’s no way I can be better than you guys. I’ve seen you and Knuckles. You’ve had years of training. I can’t duplicate that in a few months. I don’t think I could ever reach that level.”
I said, “Yes. Yes, you can. I’m not training you as a door kicker. You have your own unique skills to contribute. You have a talent few possess. I’ve seen it.”
Fiddling with the Springfield, she looked up at that comment. “What talent?”
“I can’t explain it. Look, you’re right. You can’t be better than me or Knuckles on an operation, but A-and-S isn’t an operation. It’s a selection course. It’s full of false shit and skills tests. You can beat it. I know you can beat it. The course is designed to be about seventy percent mental and thirty percent skills. I can give you the skills, and you have the mental ability already. I know it. You make decisions that are correct. That’s more important than the physical side.”
She placed a magazine in the well, then racked the slide. She said, “Why do you care so much about what they think of me? Does their opinion alter yours?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. At the end of the day, Jennifer was a college student. A much older student than most, but a college student nonetheless. A life lived in an academic environment protected from the real tragedy that occurs on the world stage. Our little detour to Guatemala for her uncle had pulled her from her cloistered college world and plunged her into a hammer-jack of firefights and feral violence. She’d done very, very well, showing real skill. But even then, I would be lying if I said I didn’t trust the opinion of a group of men I’d been under fire with.
I punted, saying, “What they think only matters to get what I want. No more.”
She took a two-handed grip and sighted down the barrel, her hands and stance looking okay to the uninitiated, but woefully pathetic to me.
I said, “Stop. Here’s where we begin.”
And we started shooting for real.
Chapter 2
The drive from the makeshift range inside Francis Marion National Forest back to our office in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina took close to forty minutes. We spent the time with small banter. I tried to stick with the shooting, but she kept bringing the questions around to what to expect at Assessment and Selection. I gave vague answers, which annoyed the hell out of her.
As the name implied, Selection was all about figuring out who was or was not a good fit for our little top-secret organization. There were plenty of physical skills that I was more than willing to help Jennifer hone, but at the end of the day, as I’d told her, it was mental. Giving away the secrets of what to expect would only taint the entire experiment. She needed to go into it cold, just like every male before her had. The minute anyone thought I’d given her an “answer key,” she’d be dismissed out of hand.
Not that she wasn’t going to get dismissed anyway.
Getting her a shot at A&S was proving damn near impossible. I hadn’t told Jennifer, because I didn’t want her to lose what little enthusiasm she had for the training, but so far it was being roundly dismissed. Since she had no military or intelligence experience, the entire notion was being treated as ridiculous. With all the fighting to get her in, her failing never crossed my mind. Neither did her reluctance to attempt it in the first place.
We pulled into our brand-new office on Shem Creek, a marsh-front, townhouse-looking building that we leased for a song due to the depressed real estate economy in Charleston. Apparently, the previous tenant was some bank/brokerage/investment firm that had packed up its bags in the middle of the night and fled, leaving a healthy mortgage that had to be paid by the landlord.
Jennifer questioned whether our little company even needed an office, but I was adamant. An office meant we were real. More than just a handshake between us. Much harder to sever ties — which was something I greatly feared she would do. Besides, it was right down the street from a couple of great creek-front bar and grills.
I parked out front and let Jennifer get the door while I secured the firearms. By the time I’d gotten inside, she was on our little desktop computer, reading an e-mail with a look of wonder on her face.
We hadn’t gotten around to renting a full-on office suite, so we shared the single desk, the rest of the room open with a scratched hardwood floor and a single vinyl chair in the corner, left over from the previous tenants.
I opened a closet door and pulled out a weapons cleaning kit, the pungent smell of Hoppe’s No. 9 solvent filling the room. I sat in the cracked vinyl La-Z-Boy, small bits of stuffing coming out, and broke down the 1911, saying, “What’s up?”
Still reading, she said, “It’s from my brother. He got us a job.”
“Job? What are you talking about?”
“Remember I told you about my brother? The reporter in Dallas? He did some story on UFOs in Roswell, New Mexico, and while he was there he ran across a guy in the preservation society. Apparently, there’s a site the guy believes contains Indian artifacts near the banks of a stream off the Pecos River. The owner of the land is about to build a dam there, burying the site underwater.”
She looked at me as if that mattered, then scrunched her eyes when I apparently missed the glaringly obvious point.
I said, “And? So what?”
“Really? And they need someone to prove it’s an actual archaeological site. My brother told him about us locating the temple, and the guy subsequently found that article in the Smithsonian magazine about our trip. He wants to hire us to consult on the site so he can get a court order to stop the dam.”
“Why us? He’s in a preservation club, right? Surely he does this all the time.”
She scowled, not liking the logic of my words. Enamored of the thought of getting to dig around some old pottery shards, she was willing to ignore the obvious.
She said, “I don’t know. Maybe he wants an outsider. Maybe he’s already exhausted his internal ability. What difference does it make? He’s willing to pay us.”
“Jennifer, we don’t have time for this. You’ve got about three months before Selection, and we need every second of it.”
She said nothing for a minute, then popped a hole in my balloon. “Pike, I heard you talking to Kurt. I know you want this really badly, but they’re never going to let me go. You need to face that.”
As the commander, Kurt Hale was ultimately the person who would give her the green light to attend. He’d called yesterday to find out how our company was coming along, wanting to start seeding it with “employees” from the Taskforce, and I’d immediately begun needling him about Jennifer and A&S. He’d blown up, telling me in no uncertain terms she wasn’t going. Period. I hadn’t realized Jennifer had heard.