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Keshawn slowly let go, looking deeply into the half-closed eyes of the body on the ground for signs of life. He saw none. He smiled and whispered, “Allahu Akbar.”

Finally, after years of waiting, he had begun his part of the jihad.

5

I heard Radford’s transmission in disbelief. I just couldn’t picture Jennifer completely breaking down. Then again, she had never been placed under so much pressure in so little time. Even given her experiences last year.

Turbo, the guy in charge of this section, said, “Well, that’s it. Let’s wrap this up and go get a beer.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “We don’t do anything until we get a debrief from Radford. Let it continue.”

Turbo rolled his eyes and said, “Pike, are you shitting me? You think your chick’s going to come through that door? Radford’s right, and you know it. This whole thing was a waste of time and money.”

Like most of the men inside the Taskforce, Turbo was a he-man woman hater. Any thought of a woman encroaching on his meat-eater world caused a fit. He wanted Jennifer to fail, with all of his heart. I used to be just like him, but after she saved my life, I became a believer. I had convinced her to do this, and wanted her to succeed more than I was willing to admit. Even if it looked like it was going to go Turbo’s way, I wasn’t doing anything until I spoke to Radford.

“Another couple of minutes won’t hurt. She’s only got eight minutes left anyway. Let it ride.”

Turbo grimaced and stomped away. Knuckles, the man to my right, finally spoke up.

“You sure you want to continue? You think she can handle the RTL again? Even if she says yes, do you think it’s fair to put her through that?”

I said, “She can do this.”

“Pike, I know she did some amazing shit overseas last year, but maybe this is just too much. She came pretty damn close, and that’s going to mean something to the boys.”

Knuckles was somewhat of a woman hater as well. He had been my second in command before I left the Taskforce and was now in charge of my old team. He’d gotten mixed up with Jennifer and me in a chase for a terrorist in Bosnia last year and had seen Jennifer operate a little bit. Not as much as me, but he’d seen enough to wonder. If Jennifer made it through this, he’d be a believer too.

Even so, Knuckles might have a point. Maybe I was overambitious in asking Jennifer to attempt Assessment. She wasn’t coming onboard as an official operator. She was just a partner in our business — a cover organization designed to support Taskforce activities, not execute them. Given that, she would be the first Taskforce female who came even tangentially close to the sharp end of the spear. We had plenty of female intel analysts and a smattering of case officers, but they all exited stage left when we did an Omega operation. I knew the meat eaters would need to trust Jennifer, sometimes with their lives. They wouldn’t do that unless she earned their respect, and I figured there would be no better way than to make her go through Assessment just like the males.

All of the Taskforce operators were invited to the unit by word of mouth through the Special Mission Units of the Department of Defense or the Clandestine Service of the CIA. As such, we didn’t need to run a full-on selection process. We let the SMUs handle that, then picked the cream of the crop. Even so, every meat eater loves a challenge and wants to feel like they did something to earn admittance, so the commander of the Taskforce had invented Assessment.

It was basically a seven-day gut check, starting out in the RTL — the Resistance Training Laboratory — where the prospective candidate resists interrogation for a couple of sleepless nights.

If he succeeds in not giving anything away, the candidate is given a mission that involves obtaining a package from a contact. From there a scavenger hunt from hell begins, all with a hostile security force trying to capture him or retrieve the package. If he does everything right, he continues. If he screws up, he goes back to the RTL, or The Hole, as the guys called it, and starts over. Knuckles was asking if maybe having Jennifer start over was just cruel.

I was thinking about my answer when I heard Knuckles say, “I don’t fucking believe it.”

“What?” I said, running around the desk to see the monitor for myself. My face split into a smile.

Jennifer had just entered the building.

Inside his office, Colonel Kurt Hale grinned when he heard the radio transmission from North Carolina. As the commander of the Taskforce, he ordinarily didn’t pay much attention to any single evolution of Assessment, mainly because he’d already hand-selected the men who would try out. He knew they’d do fine and had only invented the damn thing to give them some bragging rights for leaving their previous units. This assessment, however, was a little different. This one had someone who was really trying out, with a ton of people hoping she would fail. Kurt didn’t hold that same hope.

Two years ago, Pike had been one of the best operators the Taskforce had ever seen — until his family had been brutally murdered while he was on an operation. Blaming himself because he’d volunteered for the deployment, he’d fallen apart. Kurt had tried to help him, but Pike had continued self-destructing until he posed a threat to the very existence of the Taskforce. A classified organization operating outside the bounds of U.S. law, it couldn’t risk having a loose cannon as an operator. At Pike’s request, Kurt had cut him free.

A year later, after Pike had averted a terrorist threat, Kurt asked him to return to the Taskforce, but he had refused. Instead, he had broached a crazy scheme of starting a business with Jennifer as a partner. A business that the Taskforce would use to facilitate their operations. It would be just another cover organization, like the myriad of other ones the Taskforce used on a daily basis — from corporate air charters to shell boating companies — but with a distinct difference; this one would be run by operators. Kurt had thought the idea of a cover organization with a full-on operator at the helm had merit, and had agreed.

Once that happened, Pike had sprung the Assessment request. Kurt had drawn the line at that, but Pike was relentless. Kurt had finally given in, and Pike had spent the better part of a year teaching Jennifer a host of skills to get her ready.

At first, the men had all just grumbled. When Pike finagled her into the same hostile environment tradecraft course that the men attended, the grumbling got louder. Teaching her some hand-to-hand was one thing. Pushing people out of the way so she could do HETC was something else. When he began to teach her to shoot, it grew into a howl. If she makes it through the next ten minutes, people are going to scream like a baby. Kurt smiled at the thought, glancing up as a man entered his office.

“What’s going on, Mike?”

Kurt knew Mike was tracking the Assessment just like he was, probably down to the second.

“You tell me, sir. Where’s Pike’s protégé?”

“She made it to the house of pain. The last hurdle.”

“Jesus. Pike must have swayed it in her favor.” When Mike saw Kurt scowl, he backpedaled. “Just kidding. I know it’s legit…. Uhh… You got a call on the unclassified military line in the Ops Center.”

“Who is it?”

“Some colonel from the embassy in Cambodia. Want me to transfer it?”

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

Kurt picked up the phone, wondering who on earth would be calling him from Cambodia. The line was rerouted from the Pentagon, so whoever was calling was dialing Kurt’s cover job as a staff weenie in the J3 Special Operations Division of the Joint Staff. It could be anybody with a Pentagon phone book.

He identified himself and asked how he could be of assistance. After the first sentence, he forgot all about Assessment.

6

Jennifer stopped in the doorway to let her eyes adjust to the gloom of the sleazy roadside saloon. It wasn’t that impressive. Just a large open area with a smattering of chipped tables and the overpowering smell of stale beer. To her front was a cheap pine bar that ran down the length of the room, dead-ending into the wall. The ceiling had no tiles, just open rafters made of two-by-fours. The wall behind the bar didn’t even extend to the top, looking like it had been made as an afterthought, with a four-foot gap between it, the roof, and the room beyond. Not counting the bartender, there were five other people in the bar. All men. And all staring at her.

One of these guys should be the contact. She waited for a pregnant second, hoping someone would approach. She really didn’t want to use her vetting phrase on a stranger. When nobody stood up, she went up to the bartender and got his attention. He looked at her like he’d just wiped something off his shoe, but came over.

“You lost?”

“Uh… I don’t think so. I’m looking for someone.”

The bartender simply stood mute. One of the men ambled over and took a seat next to her. Shit. I’m going to have to say it. Stupid, stupid Taskforce humor.

She glanced at the man on the barstool, then back at the bartender. Swallowing hard, she said, “Maybe you can help? I’m looking for an inbred redneck with shit for brains?”

She immediately knew neither was the contact when both of their eyes went wide, no recognition of the bona fides at all.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. It just popped out.”

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