“Yes, sir!” Sutherland said. “Ma’am.”
“Good.” The woman’s voice lost its edge. “The men in this camp think women are soft. Do you think women are soft?”
“No, ma’am.”
Paine glanced at her comrade and grinned. “We will prove them wrong. Now get your ass outside for calisthenics. Hup.”
Sutherland marched out the door of the women’s barracks, swinging her arms like a wind-up soldier, and stepped out into the cold mountain air to join the half-dozen other recruits. Krause stood in the background watching the sergeant put them through their exercises with no change in his pit bull expression. Sutherland started gasping for air after a few sets of jumping jacks. Paine cut the session short, told the recruits they were pathetic, and said they had fifteen minutes to wash up and head toward the mess hall.
Sutherland went back into the barracks and splashed cold water onto her face. She booted up her computer. Kurtz had emailed her so there must be a wireless signal. She found the link, easily figured out the entry code, which was HAK, then she logged off and put the pack holding her computer under the cot. She would feel naked without her computer, but couldn’t risk damaging it. She slipped her phone under the mattress and smoothed down the blanket.
Halfway through breakfast — Froot Loops and skimmed milk — the sergeant burst into the mess hall and ordered everyone outside. The sky was graying with a pre-dawn light. She told them to line up according to height. As the only female, Sutherland was the shortest. Paine marched the motley column past the other barracks to a road leading into the woods.
“Normally we start the day with a five-mile run, but this crew is clearly incapable of anything more strenuous than feeding your face, so we will make it a brisk three-mile walk.”
Boot camp had begun.
On the road, Sutherland saw other groups, more tightly disciplined, as they trotted past with full pack and weapons. She broke the people in the camp into two groups. Some were citizens trying to look tough. Others had the easy swagger that comes with real experience as a soldier.
After the hike, they were given fake wooden rifles and put through bayonet practice. There was a short break for a lunch of protein bars and water. Next were martial arts and finally, the shooting range.
Many of the other recruits were hunters, and reasonably good shots, but they were tired from their exertion and barely able to lift their rifles. The sergeant’s scorn faded when she saw the tightly grouped holes Sutherland put in the target.
“Well, we got a real Annie Oakley here.” She clapped her hands. “Back to your barracks to clean up. Then supper and political orientation conducted by General Hak.”
She patted Sutherland on the back and told her she had made the men look like girl scouts.
On the way to the barracks, Sutherland glanced up at the mountain, recalling from her research that it was honey-combed with mines. She wondered whether it would be possible to sneak off on an exploration. She could pretend she got lost. But as she trudged back to the barracks, she saw that she had more pressing matters to worry about.
General Hak barred the door to the barracks. Standing slightly behind him, rifle resting in the crook of his arm, was Krause. The general was holding her phone.
He growled, “What the hell are you doing with this thing?”
“You never said anything about phones.”
“That’s because most of them don’t work out here. This one does.”
“A lot of places don’t have phone service, General Hak. I was a woman, traveling alone. It would have been dumb not to have communication.”
He gazed thoughtfully at the phone. “Yeah, I guess, so. But we’re confiscating this. For as long as you’re here, there is to be no communication with the outside world.”
She snapped off a salute that provoked a slight smile.
The other man who had met Sutherland in the Jeep came out of the barracks. “General. Could you come inside, sir? There’s something you should see.”
As she was marched through the door, Sutherland saw her laptop on the cot. The man picked the computer up and handed it to the general, who gazed at the screen then turned it to face her.
Before leaving the B and B, she had backed up all her files on a remote data storage center then eliminated them. She expected to see a blank screen except for a few icons, but someone had written her an email.
The general read the message, handed the laptop off to Krause and bore into Sutherland with narrowed eyes.
“Girl,” he said in a menacing tone. “You are in deep, deep trouble.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
When the Global Logistics plane landed at Dulles, waiting for it was an executive jet Abby had arranged with full crew and handlers who quickly transferred gear from the big plane to the Gulfstream G150. Abby had also arranged for a taxi to take Cait to her condominium, as it had been decided that she would stay and see what she could find out about the coin while the others continued on to Colorado. Within minutes, the sleek Gulfstream leapt into the air like a fighter plane on alert and headed west.
Cait watched the plane disappear from sight, then got into the taxi and gave the driver directions to her condo. She stepped into the living room and dropped her duffle bag on the floor. As she stood there breathing in the stale air, surrounded by familiar furniture and out of date magazines and newspapers, her adventures in Afghanistan seemed like a dream.
The dashing Hawkins was like a hero from one of the bodice-ripper romances she had read as a girl, ready to swoop in and save the fair maiden from the clutches of the nasty villain. Calvin looked as if he could walk through a brick wall unscathed. She had grown to like Abby, and sensed that she still had a lot of affection for her ex-husband, although there seemed to be a barrier between them. If Abby didn’t want Hawkins when they returned from their trip out west, Cait would be willing to step in.
Holding the Prester John coin in her hand to reassure herself that her adventures had not been in her mind, she called Nelson Black, a coin expert acquaintance. Cait had drawn upon Black’s expertise when she was writing her Silk Road books, and his name came to mind the second she saw the Prester John coin. She had contacted him earlier from the 747 saying she had a highly unusual coin he might like to see. He tried to tease out the details, but she said he would have to wait until she arrived to examine it in person.
“Hello Nelson,” she said. “Cait. I’m home.”
“Please hurry. You’ve got me all excited with your mysterious phone call from high in the sky.”
Cait smiled. “On my way.”
Twenty minutes later, she arrived in National Harbor, Maryland, where Black lived. He had been impatiently awaiting her arrival and eagerly led the way to his coin vault. The spacious basement room contained the shallow drawer filing cabinets that held his collection and a wooden table he used to examine and sort coins.
“Well, what do we have, Dr. Everson?”
She handed him the Prester John coin in a plastic bag.
He slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, extracted the coin, and held it by its edges, examining both sides. Then he placed it under the magnifier, squinted through the ten-power lens for a moment, flipped it over, took it off and weighed it, rolled it between his fingers, and turned to Cait.
“If I may ask, Dr. Everson, where did you find this coin?”
“In Afghanistan.”
He narrowed his gray eyes. “Specifically?”
“It was discovered in what was apparently a tomb in the central part of the country.”