by Harper Steen
Both men stopped abruptly and their eyes widened in surprise. A woman jumped out of the helicopter—a woman in combat gear! Stunned, the men watched for a moment, speechless and staring. The woman turned around, looked inside the helicopter and laughed at something her partner, still inside the helicopter, apparently said to her. It was impossible for Gray and Chris to catch any of their conversation. The noise coming from the helicopter blades was simply too loud.
Gray’s breath caught when he saw the second person jump out of the helicopter. It couldn’t be!
The helicopter lifted off again, distancing itself from the base at a rapid speed, until only a soft hum could be heard. And still Gray stared at the woman in front of him, completely spellbound. Finally he found his voice and whispered in shock, “Liz?” But he didn’t say it softly enough. Chris looked at him in amazement.
“You know her? From where?”
“I met her at a dinner party, at her family’s place.”
Chris had already heard from Gray about his unusual encounter with a rebellious, disrespectful tomboy. He’d learned about this only because he’d squeezed the information out of his friend like juice from a lemon, after noticing how uncharacteristically absentminded and distracted Gray had become. Up until that point, nothing and no one had ever been able to distract his partner from a job.
Chris couldn’t help but ask, “You’re telling me she’s the one you locked up in her own family’s toolshed?”
“Yes, she’s the one.” The humorless comment made Chris roar with laughter. Of course, that drew both women’s attention to him.
Liz glowered at the man who was laughing, assuming that he was making fun of them. It wouldn’t have been the first time that happened. Her eyes wandered alternately from the laughing man to the man who stood next to him.
When Liz saw who was waiting there for her, her eyebrows shot up and she caught her breath. It couldn’t possibly be true! That was just her rotten luck. Never in her life had she expected to run into someone in her line of work who also knew her family. After a moment of panic she relaxed and sighed, resigned to the situation. Since these operations were classified, she didn’t have to be afraid of being betrayed. Her secret would be safe with Gray.
Resolutely she walked up to both men. She stopped in front of them and, as subordinates, she and her team partner were the first to salute. Gray and Chris returned the salute. At the sight of the easy smile that played on Gray’s mouth, Liz knew that further formalities wouldn’t be necessary.
“Mr. Blackwood, what a pleasant surprise to meet again so soon. Are you well?”
“Uh, yes, actually, Ms. Gibson. I remember our enjoyable conversation quite fondly. Did you get home alright?” Liz gave a respectful smile and nodded pleasantly. Gray kept his eyes glued on her while he absentmindedly turned to his friend. “May I introduce you? Chris, this is Elizabeth Gibson. And, um, uh, Miss…?” Gray extended his hand to Liz’s colleague, pleasantly surprised by these tough women...
“Langner. My pleasure!” Jennifer introduced herself with a nod.
“Ms. Langner will also assist us, I assume.”
“Exactly. And am I right in assuming that you’ll be briefing us and monitoring the show?” Jennifer was the smaller of the two women, but her forthright manner impressed Chris a lot. Her green eyes blazed and she raked one hand through her sassy short black hair.
“That’s it, to a T. I suggest we speak less formally. Do you have any objection?” The women confirmed that they didn’t.
“We’ll brief you and be with you by radio and satellite connections. You’ll be told everything you need to know at headquarters. Just follow us!” Gray and Chris turned and led the way off the landing field and back to the sprawling, one-story building where they worked.
The two men seemed to recover pretty quickly from the surprise of getting two women as reinforcements. But not all doubts were eliminated. Liz and Jennifer didn’t miss the dubious looks. Chris and Gray had looked them over briefly and smiled in a way that betrayed a bit of skepticism. Time and again, they came up against similar reactions by the men they worked with on their missions, but they always stood their ground.
They shouldered their backpacks and followed the men who would act as their eagle eyes into the tiny, windowless command center from where the operation would be monitored.
***
While Liz walked next to Jennifer, her thoughts wandered back to the fateful night seven years earlier that had changed her life. It was simply by chance that on this particular night she had been at work in a small bar on the edge of town. Liz was covering for a sick colleague and the last thing she’d imagined is that she’d be recruited the next morning by a Lieutenant General named Townsend for training in his Special Forces unit.
Even if Liz had known that the four men who had gotten into the wild brawl were in the Army, she wouldn’t have handled the situation any differently. The men were not only clearly outnumbered, they had already had several drinks, which didn’t exactly give them an advantage once the fighting started. And a simple flirtation had been the catalyst.
The soldier couldn’t have known that he was stepping on dangerous ground when he started flirting with Liz’s coworker. More than anything, Rosie liked to toy with the men who came into the bar and to pit them against one another. Brazenly, she moved close to him, and that fueled a jealous reaction in her boyfriend, who also happened to be there that night. Naturally, it didn’t take long for him to step in and his twelve friends joined him. The thirteen tough men lunged at the unsuspecting foursome without warning.
When the first chair flew, Liz called the police. Then a bar stool sailed just over her head and within seconds she’d made a decision which would alter her future: Liz jumped into the fray.
Thanks to years of karate training, which she practiced simply to reduce stress, Liz was more than able to hold her own. She singlehandedly knocked four men out cold and didn’t stop fighting until the soldiers finally had the upper hand and ended the brawl.
The police showed up just in time to witness Liz instructing those who could still stand to clean up the bar and mop the wooden floor. The four soldiers, on the other hand, sat at the counter of the bar, each with a cup of coffee in front of him.
When the door opened again, a US Army commander stepped into the small, smoky bar. He stood in the middle of the room and looked around calmly before his penetrating gaze landed on the four men at the counter. Authority radiated from him and everyone but Liz seemed to sense that.
While the police took away the thugs and Liz’s coworker for questioning, Lt. General Townsend turned to the soldiers, who clearly wished they were someplace far away. He gave them so much hell, they seemed to shrink on their stools right before her eyes. Liz listened to Townsend’s lecture for a while and then she decided that they’d had enough. She positioned herself between the lieutenant general and his subordinates, straightened up to her full five feet ten inches, and glared as she proceeded to rake him over the coals. In her opinion, she told him, there was no reason to rip into the men like that, since they hadn’t done anything wrong.
Liz would never forget the stunned expression on his face. Townsend obviously wasn’t used to someone acting like that toward him. He looked Liz over from head to toe and nodded. With a slight inclination of his head he indicated that his men should immediately exit the bar.
After the door had closed behind them, Liz was alone with Townsend. They stood across from one another, sizing each other up, each silently looking the other in the eyes for a moment. Suddenly a smile flashed across Townsend’s face, as if a brilliant idea had just occurred to him. He nodded goodbye, turned around and disappeared into the night, but not before saying the words Liz could still hear in her head: “See you later!”
“See you later?” Hardly, thought Liz at the time as she took stock of the wrecked, empty bar. With a sigh, she picked up the mop and eliminated the final traces of the brawl.
Two hours
later, Liz locked up the bar, shouldered her backpack and walked to her motorcycle. Just then, an SUV that clearly belonged to the United States Army fleet drove into the parking lot. She didn’t have to read the graphic printed on the side to know whose it was. She paused and waited. The vehicle stopped an arm’s length away and Lt. General Townsend climbed out of the driver’s side door. He walked around the vehicle, opened the passenger door and indicated the interior with a gesture.
“Please get in, Ms. Gibson. I would like to talk with you for a bit.”
“Why should I get in your car? I’m not crazy!” Townsend pointed patiently with his right hand to the open door and in a pleasant and almost gentle tone repeated himself, “Please get in.” Liz hesitated, but then complied.
To this day, Liz still couldn’t say exactly what had induced her to climb into the car. Most likely, she had gotten in simply because she sensed that in doing so, she would be triggering the start of a new chapter in her life, and she was curious about what that chapter would be.
***
For hours, she spoke with Townsend in a small, windowless room at the nearby Army base. She didn’t have any idea that she had passed a personal aptitude test casually administered during this conversation or that Townsend had already looked into her family background until he told her these things. He even pulled a copy of her college diploma out of a folder and placed it on the table.
“What exactly are you qualifying me for? Why give me a test?” Liz was bewildered, and when Townsend answered her questions, she found herself speechless for perhaps the first time in her life.
Townsend offered her a spot on a Special Forces unit that was under his direction and made up only of people he’d hand-picked himself. He explained that for some time now, the unit had included personnel who did not actually possess military expertise. Of course, prospective personnel had to master certain skills during the preliminary stages of the application process. But he said that these would be taught to Liz, if she so chose.
Liz didn’t learn anything else that morning. Townsend simply told her that there would be a spot for her in his Special Forces unit if she completed all her training and passed the tests.
The Lt. General told her she had an hour to think about it and left the room. Exactly sixty minutes later, the door opened and Townsend returned. He gave her an expectant look and broke into an easy smile when Liz said, “I’ll do it!”
She hadn’t had any idea what she was getting herself into with those four little words. The coming weeks, months and years would be pure hell for Liz. After the nine weeks of basic training, which every Army recruit had to work through, the real training began—although “torture” would be a far more accurate description of what Liz went through. Liz shifted from one training camp to another in order to master various unarmed fighting techniques, and she devoted herself so exhaustively to the study of weaponry, that before long she could dismantle, clean and assemble the HK MP7—a sub-machine gun by the German manufacturer Heckler & Koch—in her sleep. This was only one of the weapons she studied that would later become part of her standard equipment. Tactics, remote reconnaissance, asymmetric warfare, anti-guerilla warfare and sabotage were all part of her “class schedule,” and she also underwent frequent psychological and physical tests.
The most alarming experience of her training period was the first simulated interrogation she was put through, to prepare her in case one day she was captured. As part of the experience, several men Liz didn’t know dragged her from her bed in the middle of the night, knocked her unconscious and hauled her off to an obscure location. When Liz regained consciousness, she was sitting in only her underwear, shackled to a chair in an ice-cold, dark room. Her feet and legs had already begun to go numb from the cold. A man in a ski mask walked up to her chair and began to question her about her training. No matter how much he abused her and hurt her, she didn’t say a word. Eventually, Liz crumpled over unconscious on the chair: bloody, with two broken fingers, her body peppered with bruises. Some time later she awoke on something soft and white: a bed in a military hospital. Townsend even came in person to tell her that she had passed the test.
Liz had to endure this kind of interrogation two more times and in the process discovered that her weird sense of humor well served the goal of surviving the torture. Liz drove the interrogators to desperation by speaking nonsense in several different languages. In French, she told them about the Eiffel Tower and other points of interest located in Paris; in Spanish, she explained how to make delicious paella; and in German, she recited important historical events in chronological order, from the Middle Ages to the present.
Admittedly, each interrogation still ended with Liz in the hospital, but, despite the pain, she felt much better now that she’d found a way to cope. She had paid them back in the only way her shackled condition would allow. And because of that, she had managed to pass every test.
Altogether, Liz’s ruthless training lasted four years, since she hadn’t had any previous military experience. The training that had been drilled into her made her what she had become three years ago: Special Forces Agent Elizabeth Gibson, member of the maverick Top Secret Special Unit known as TDA: Townsend’s Dozen Agents. She had a SFSU-IV security clearance—Special Forces Security Unit level four—and she’d been licensed to kill. Just like James Bond, except not in the service of Her Majesty.
Once they got to the control room, Liz took a deep breath. She pushed back the memory of her training period and set her backpack down next to the door. Her eyes darted towards Gray, who sat in front of a computer monitor.
This man was in close contact with her family. For a brief moment, she again felt a wave of fear that he might inadvertently reveal her secret to her father or John, but Liz quelled this concern immediately. There was no point in worrying unnecessarily about something that would never happen; Gray was sworn to secrecy; he had taken an oath just like she had.
Her family could not—and never would—learn anything about her true job. That would only put them in danger by linking them with a Special Forces Agent, a TDA, who had her security grade. This was why Liz had kept her distance from them for so long. It was the only way she knew to protect her family.
***
“Twenty AGM-88D type air-to-surface missiles were stolen a week ago from a US Air Force convoy. The AGM-88D are tactical anti-radar missiles with fragmented warheads that can be guided by GPS. Your mission will be to destroy them before they’re brought out of the area and sold.” Chris brought them up to speed while Gray stayed in the background. “Unfortunately, we’re dealing with special circumstances that make retrieval impossible in this case. All we can do is cut our losses. What’s essential is that we keep them from falling into the wrong hands.”
“As if they weren’t already in the wrong hands,” Liz said sarcastically. “Why doesn’t the Air Force Special Operations Command send in someone to collect what their own people lost? That would seem to make the most sense.”
“Sure. But we didn’t make the decision about who would handle the mission, Lt. General Townsend did. And, like I said, there’s one small, but not insignificant problem that makes retrieval impossible. The missiles are located in an area to which we don’t have official access.”
“No kidding!” Jennifer’s smart aleck comment caused Chris to get up from his workstation at the computer and cross to the table in the middle of the room. With a marker he roughly outlined the target and explained the situation further.
It was clear that the operation would definitely not be an easy one. The storage facility was located in a flat site in Virginia where the sparse vegetation growing from parched ground offered little protection. There was one paved access street, but it had been ruled out as an option from the beginning. The dense stands of trees that surrounded the area were also of no small concern as the protection they offered could benefit Townsend’s team and their opponents, equally. Beyond the storage site, the terrain grew increasingly hilly.<
br />
“This strip of trees is on land that belongs to the wife of a foreign national,” Chris explained. “She was born in America; he’s a Russian diplomat with political immunity. Of course he denies that there has been any illegal activity on her property. Our government has to adhere strictly to the law in order to avoid stirring up conflict between our countries. It isn’t any secret that our relationship with the Russians is still on shaky ground, and that doesn’t make matters any easier. We can’t simply expel a diplomat from our country; we would need evidence in order to do that. Unfortunately, we don’t have a warrant to enter his wife’s property and we don’t have time to waste in trying to convince him to cooperate. The missiles would be long gone by then—and we’d be left looking like idiots.”
“So it’s the political immunity of this man, who appears to be a rather big deal, that’s brought into the game; am I right?” guessed Liz.
“Exactly. If our Air Force friends were to be associated with a return deployment to this area, then the shit would hit the fan, as the eloquent saying goes. Even if the Air Force found the weapons, there would be huge political repercussions. That’s why the assignment is: enter the enemy’s camp, destroy the missiles, and get out again—all as quickly and as inconspicuously as possible. If all goes well, neither the Americans nor the Russians will talk about it afterwards. It’ll be like it never happened.” Chris sat down on a chair, leaned back, and crossed his arms over his chest as he gave Liz and Jennifer a curious look.
“Sounds like an honorable way to handle the situation,” said Liz. “But what about a remote detonation by satellite? Why weren’t the things blown up long ago? Surely they’re fitted with GPS too.”
