At some point he realized that he was in the back seat of a car with someone beside him.
“I don’t see a head wound, but it’s obvious he has a concussion,” a female said.
The voice sounded far away, but Tom recognized it.
It was Grunn, and she was turned sideways in her seat and facing him.
“Hand me my kit,” she said to someone.
That someone—the driver—passed a MOLLE pouch between the two front seats and back to her.
Attached to it was a morale patch—a red cross on a field of black.
“He needs adrenaline,” the driver said.
His voice, too, was familiar, his accent British.
Tom’s head was lowered, his chin resting on his chest. It took all he had to raise his head a few inches, but it was enough for him to see that the driver was Hammerton.
Tom tried to say his friend’s name but couldn’t.
Grunn said, “We need to keep you awake. Do you understand?”
Tom nodded. Grunn had opened the pouch, was removing from it a six-inch-long tube—an auto-injector.
“I’m going to give you a shot of adrenaline,” she said.
Tom nodded again.
Grunn readied the auto-injector, then held it above Tom’s thigh as she made certain of her aim.
“How did you find me?” Tom asked, but as soon as he got the words out, Grunn brought her hand down, driving the injector into his leg.
Then she removed it and tossed it onto the floor.
Tom didn’t feel anything at first, not even the prick of the needle, but after a moment the adrenaline made its way through his muscle and into his bloodstream.
What he finally felt was more of a steadily building surge than a sudden jolt of energy.
Within a few minutes he was awake, though barely.
At best he had entered into a twilight consciousness.
Grunn watched as the stimulant took effect. It wasn’t till she was satisfied that Tom had stabilized that she answered his question.
“Cahill contacted Hammerton, asked him to keep an eye on you. There was a tracker in the Ranger. We got to it about a half hour ago.”
Tom thought about that, still had more questions, but he only had the energy for a single word, so he spoke the one that mattered the most. “Stella?”
“Cahill’s on his way to Montana. He won’t be there for a few hours still. And then he has to scout out the best way to get to her.”
This was for Tom confirmation that she was, in fact, at the final stage in her training.
He recalled the isolated compound where he had received his SERE training—the bare-bones barracks, the miles and miles of wilderness that surrounded the facility.
And yet what had occurred just minutes ago was significantly less clear in his mind.
It became clear to him the danger he was in.
From the front seat came Hammerton’s voice. “Hang tough.”
Tom looked at the rearview mirror. Hammerton was looking back at him.
Then Tom turned to Grunn. “Where are you taking me?”
“Hammerton has a safe house,” she said. “No one knows about it.”
“Leave me there; then you two go on out to Shelter Island like we planned.”
“Not going to happen,” Hammerton said flatly.
Tom looked at the rearview mirror again, but before he could respond, Grunn spoke.
“We tried it your way, Tom. You can’t do this alone. You’re going to need our help. We’re staying with you. We’re seeing this through to the end.”
Thirty-Two
Esa was looking for the black Mercedes-Benz SUV with darkened windows.
According to protocol, the driver would keep the vehicle in motion, circling the block until Esa had reached a specific corner—the northwest corner, in this case.
As she made her way to the designated corner, she studied the vehicles parked along the residential street, looking for anything she didn’t like.
Still cold and exhausted from the hours spent naked and drenched, she was trembling violently.
But when the Mercedes turned into her line of sight, she fought to suppress any sign of distress.
In her line of work, even long-proven allies could easily shift sides and become enemies.
So, then, no outward weakness, ever.
The vehicle headed down the street, picking up speed halfway down the block—an indication that its driver had seen her.
It pulled to a stop at the corner, its passenger window lowering to reveal the man behind the wheel.
It was Karl, the Benefactor’s personal bodyguard—the last man she had expected to be part of her exfil team.
She had only ever seen Karl in the company of their employer, and the strangeness that came with his presence now reminded her of his behavior the night before at the East River State Park.
His proximity as she and the Benefactor spoke, which had put him within earshot, was unusual.
But so was the war footing that had been indicated by the armed men standing on the periphery.
In such an atmosphere, perhaps Karl’s role in her rescue should have been expected.
“In the back,” Karl said.
Esa opened the rear passenger-side door and immediately felt the inviting warmth of the cabin.
But that promise of relief was short-lived.
Seated inside the rear compartment were two men—one in the second-row seat behind the driver, the other in the row behind that.
The man in the second row gestured to the open seat beside him.
Both he and his partner had hardened faces and quarter-inch buzz cuts and were dressed in jeans and leather jackets.
Esa climbed in and pulled the door closed. The instant she sat, the man in the third row positioned himself directly behind her.
Leaning forward, he relieved her of the plastic bag hanging from her left wrist. Then he opened her jacket, revealing the short-barreled shotgun she had concealed there.
The man behind her took that as well, and the man beside her focused his attention on her breasts, braless beneath her still-damp shirt.
He searched her for other weapons with a complete disregard for her private areas.
Karl steered the Benz into traffic, waited till the search had been completed, then looked at Esa via the rearview mirror. “I’ll take you to the surgeon. The Benefactor will want to debrief you after.” He paused. “What we need to know right now is what you told your captors.”
“Nothing,” Esa said. “I have a tape to prove it.”
Karl’s eyes remained focused on her.
She met his glance, holding it till he looked forward again.
“Sorry about this, but these are his orders.”
Before Esa could ask what Karl meant, the two men pounced, the one behind her grabbing her arms while the man beside her moved toward her with a syringe in his hand.
The drug took effect within seconds, and the last thing Esa saw was Karl’s eyes framed in the rearview mirror.
PART FOUR
Thirty-Three
The barracks, a bare-minimum shelter, was really just a frame of two-by-fours with a floor, walls, and roof comprised of sheets of plywood and a half dozen narrow windows enclosed in semiclear plastic held in place by staples.
Lacking insulation and ventilation, the ten-by-fifteen room collected heat during the daytime as the sun arced across the open Montana sky. And while much of that heat was retained well into evening, every trace of it eventually bled out overnight, leaving behind by morning a damp chill.
There was just one barracks on the compound, and of the sixteen cots crammed into the open space, only six were occupied.
Stella was the solitary female currently enrolled in the program, which was overseen by six instructors, all of whom were former special operators and male.
Alpha males, she had concluded quickly enough.
Unlike the selection programs those men had endured prior to jo
ining their respective spec ops units—programs that were designed to first eliminate the weak, then weed out the strong till only the soundest candidates remained—the training that Stella and her classmates had been undergoing was not intended to cull the ranks but rather to instruct and prepare.
That did not mean, of course, that the instructors—all hardened and highly intelligent men—took it easy on those who, for two hellish weeks, were in their charge.
The section of the program before SERE training, which had included skills such as evasive driving, marksmanship (both close-quarter and at long range), and hand-to-hand combat techniques, had been taught in a compound set on the edge of a Louisiana swamp.
The housing there had been slightly better—the barracks’ windows could be opened to allow the air to circulate—but that improvement was probably as much a safety issue in light of the climate as it was another means of making these final two weeks seem in contrast just that much more miserable.
It was during the training in Louisiana that the instructors had begun to mention the horrors that awaited their students once they arrived in Montana.
It seemed, in fact, that instilling that sense of dread was an integral part of the Louisiana-based section.
It won’t be easy, Tom had said to her in their New York hotel room. And, frankly, I hate to think of you being put through that. He had paused. In fact, that might be all I’m able to think about.
Stella had, of course, assured him that she could handle it.
Krista did it, she’d said. Grunn, too. So, yes, I need to do it as well.
The first week was devoted to ways of evading capture in a wilderness setting—all on less than four hours of sleep.
Every day Stella and her classmates were hooded, then driven to the scrub hills twenty miles to the south and given very basic supplies—and on one occasion, no supplies at all.
Then the hoods were removed and the six students, broken into cadres of two or three, were given a two-hour head start, at the end of which their instructors, skilled hunters with knowledge of the area, began to search for them.
In the hills, shallow holes called “hides” were dug, often by hand, and the cadres would lie inside them together, concealed under a cover of vegetation or, if they had been provided one, a single wool blanket, itself camouflaged with dirt and debris.
There, they would wait in silence as the former special operators tracked them down.
Never once did any of the cadres successfully evade capture, but that was the likelihood one faced in enemy territory.
As with everything that occurred at this final stage, the exercise was more about training the mind—preparing an operator for when the worst was inevitable—than building a skill set.
Each time, once they returned to the compound, five of the students spent the night posed outside their barracks in stress positions while one of them was taken away and subjected to waterboarding.
When the missing classmate was returned, they were allowed to move inside the barracks to sleep, but never for more than a few hours.
It was during the last two nights of the second week that the real work began.
After yet another failure at evasion, the cadres, their eyes covered with safety goggles spray-painted black, were transported back to the compound, where they were taken to a building they had not entered before—a metal-roofed shack known as the “resistance lab.”
It was here that the true tests commenced.
For countless hours at a time, Stella and the others were subjected to the kind of treatment that was to be expected upon falling into the hands of an enemy.
Their wrists bound by plasticuffs, the students stood as their clothing—coveralls—was cut off them, leaving each participant clad only in his or her underwear.
Stella had lost track of how long she and her classmates were left to stand there in the stifling heat of the room.
Finally, they were required to kneel with their elbows and foreheads on the plywood floor as the instructors walked among them, gunning power drills and sawing through plastic jugs with serrated knives, speaking infrequently but disguising their voices when they did and always uttering threats.
Stella estimated this had gone on for hours. And she, like her classmates, knew what was awaiting each of them.
You will hate the box, one of the Louisiana instructors had liked to say.
One of the others would add, Man, I hated that fucking box.
The “box” was a plywood container barely bigger than a footlocker. There were two, actually, and one student was placed inside one, another student in the other, the lids closed and locked.
There they would be left for hours, while the others waited, kneeling on the plywood floor, for their turn.
To increase the sense of anticipation and fear, recordings were played—a crying baby on a loop, and after several hours of that, heavy metal rock, all of it loud enough to drown out most noises.
The enemy only did to one’s mind what one’s mind allowed to be done.
That was the essence of the “resistance” aspect of SERE training.
Stella hung on to that thought, even as she endured her times in the “box”—even as her legs fell asleep and the muscles in her lower back burned.
Once released from their initial confinement—no one quit during the first round—students were placed on their backs on the plywood floor as the instructors moved around, pouring buckets of ice-cold water onto their groins.
Stella heard the grunts of her male classmates, as if the ice water was intended as an agony that needed to be endured, but she knew that the water, although applied in a less than kindly manner, was to keep them from suffering heat stroke.
She gasped as the water hit her, yes, but as the men around her shivered and fussed, she did her best to breathe.
At some point after, the confinement in the boxes resumed—two classmates at a time, the others waiting on their knees for their turn.
Despite the prerecorded racket, Stella heard the men who couldn’t take it anymore be escorted out.
One complained of muscle spasms and was freed from the box and taken outside. Another simply said that he’d had enough.
His body had held out, but not his mind.
Stella couldn’t remember how many had quit. There had been the first two, those she definitely recalled hearing. But then came her turn, and everything after that, both inside and outside the box, was just pain and anguish and noise.
After a while, all she cared about was enduring each second.
And then the next.
And then the next . . .
At one point—Stella had lost all sense of time, her mind aware of only agony and boredom—two pairs of hands grasped her elbows and lifted her to her feet.
The instructors always handled their students with care because, unlike actual captors, injury wasn’t their intent.
Considering the money being invested in them, even minor injuries were something to be avoided.
Stella was walked with the usual care across the plywood floor, then through a door and down three plank steps, after which she felt packed dirt beneath her bare feet.
Her escorts continued to lead her away from the resistance lab but didn’t speak. Stella braced herself for what was next, felt fear—colder than ice water—in her stomach as she sensed that she was being taken somewhere else.
Somewhere far from her male classmates, someplace private.
In reality, if she were ever captured, sexual assault was all but guaranteed.
Was there another place that female students were brought to prepare them in some way for that inevitability?
Or worse, were these alpha males looking to have a little “fun” of their own?
She was mentally reciting the steps to break free of plasticuffs—a skill taught back in Louisiana—when the two men holding her arms stopped.
One of the men spoke, his voice no longer masked. “Congratulations, Number Five.”
Neither she nor her classmates were ever called by name, and she often wondered if their instructors even possessed that information.
The other man said, “You spent the longest in the box. Twelve hours, total.”
“That makes you the best in your class,” the first man added.
A knife clicked open and the plasticuffs were cut.
Stella waited a moment, her ears still ringing from the loud playback. When no one said anything, she raised her hands toward her face, and when no one stopped her, she proceeded to remove the blacked-out safety goggles, seeing for the first time in more than twenty-four hours.
The two instructors were gone, and she was standing in front of the shower hut.
For the entire two weeks at this compound, Stella and her male classmates had shared the same shower. No stalls, just an open room, two dozen showerheads suspended from a pipe that ran along the center of the ceiling, and a single drain in the middle of the floor.
She’d had to wash herself along with—and in full view of—her classmates. Some had offered her privacy by looking away, at least initially, while others hadn’t bothered with that courtesy at all and treated themselves to long looks each and every time they bathed.
But Stella had met every pair of staring and roaming eyes with a roaming stare of her own, half smirking as she watched five sets of male genitals reacting to the cold-water-only showers.
By the third or fourth day, those men had begun their showers by turning their backs to her so that she couldn’t observe their shrinking manhood.
In the end Stella had outperformed them all, and in more than just the shower game. She had, in the eyes of her instructors, risen when it counted the most. And she was being rewarded now with a few moments of privacy.
It felt a little strange, once she was under the weak stream of frigid water, to be alone.
Despite the stiffness of her muscles—legs, lower back, abs—from clenching involuntarily as the icy water had been poured over her the night before, Stella knew that she needed to run.
It was late afternoon, an hour before sunset, and she was the first in the barracks to wake. They’d been allowed to sleep through the day, though that in itself wasn’t necessarily an act of kindness, since the interior temperature had risen throughout the afternoon to a miserable ninety-something degrees.
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