Laynie Portland, Spy Rising—The Prequel

by Vikki Kestell

  The instructors walked the trainees through loading and unloading their magazines, seating the magazines in the handgun, pulling back the slide to chamber a round—then removing the magazine, locking back the slide (ejecting the chambered round), and visually and physically inspecting the magazine well and chamber to ensure that they were both empty.

  Laynie performed the drill until the Beretta in her hand felt natural and the steps to load and unload as common as tying her shoes. Stripping and cleaning the weapon took longer to learn but that process, too, soon became second nature. Shooting the semiauto was also easier than shooting the double-action revolver, and the slide locked back, telling you when the magazine was empty.

  Once the trainees were familiar with both revolver and semiauto handguns, the instructors worked on their marksmanship. Some students (Black for one) were proficient shots, while Laynie, always competitive, felt that she merely muddled along, making small but noticeable improvements day by day.

  When the armorers had collected the handguns and Mr. Henry, the rangemaster, had issued the “all clear,” the instructors lowered the red flag at the back corner of the range that denoted active shooting. After that, the students policed their shooting stations, pulling on gloves, collecting the spent brass, and dumping the casings into a receptacle nearby.

  While Laynie picked up spent casings she thought, I might become a marginally capable shot someday—at close range—but I doubt I’ll be better than that. Then again, will I ever need to use a handgun except in an emergency situation?

  During her musings, it dawned on Laynie that her competence in any given “emergency situation” would likely mean the difference between life and death.

  Her death.

  Shaking her head, Laynie ordered herself to redouble her efforts to achieve more than a “passing” competence.

  THE NEXT FOUR WEEKS passed in a flurry of unrelenting work, and the trainees (down from thirty to twenty-five) were gaining confidence in their skills.

  In tradecraft they’d become proficient at brush passes, dead drops, live drops, surveillance detection and evasion, and covert surveillance of others. They’d learned and utilized differing communication methodologies: shortwave and two-way radio, Morse code, signal flags, simple codes and codebreaking. They could pick locks and pockets, duplicate keys and IDs, hotwire cars and trucks. And they’d watched countless reels of training films, learning to spot the moves that appeared on the screen (from top-tier performances, through amateur, down to the bottom—the demonstrably awful). They’d picked apart what worked and what didn’t, learned to emulate what was effective and to shun poor tradecraft. They came to value an adept performance and deride their own mistakes.

  In hand-to-hand combat, the trainees grappled with experienced fighters whose frequent “schoolings” sent trainees crashing to the mats time and again . . . until the trainees put their heart into the fight, determined to give as good as they got.

  Then the trainees tackled each other—and they burned with fierce competition.

  Although trainees wore padded headgear and mouthguards, bruises (on pretty much any part of the body) were common and no longer remarked upon.

  Their instructors advanced them into the use of weapons during hand-to-hand starting with a variety of saps, sticks, and expandable batons. They taught the students how to make a weapon from whatever furniture or articles were around them. In an outdoor arena at the back of the gym, the trainees practiced destroying melons, boards, flowerpots, chairs, and other targets—the men especially enthusiastic participants in these exercises—and how to use whatever came to hand to attack dummies identified as enemy opponents.

  The instructors taught the trainees how to handle knives of all lengths—straight, folding, switchblades, serrated, stilettos—and anything with a pointy end or a slicing edge able to penetrate human skin. They issued hard rubber knives, and the trainees practiced with them against experienced fighters less likely to wound them or be wounded. Three trainees still managed to require stitches during those skirmishes.

  The trainees learned, too, how diabolically devious Gunny’s assistants were at changing up the obstacle courses. Unexpected variations, additions, and deletions to the courses forced the teams to think collectively and outside the box, work as a cohesive unit, and lean upon each other’s strengths. As week succeeded week, the teams had to move faster and solve problems quicker to complete a course at or under the set time, developing almost hive-like communication skills in the process.

  As their sixth week on the firing range came to a close, the trainees regularly shot a variety of handguns, bolt-action rifles, semiauto rifles (including the M1 Carbine, a WWII standard phased out during the Vietnam war but still in wide circulation across Europe, the ArmaLite AR-10, Springfield Armory’s M1A, and several rifles built on the ArmaLite AR-15 design), and shotguns of varying lengths and gauges.

  Laynie’s first-choice weapon for accuracy was the Heckler & Koch HK43 semiauto rifle with its collapsible stock that fit her body well. She also liked the M6 Scout by Springfield Armory and the Steyr AUG assault rifle—but her favorite was the Mossberg 500 shotgun. It was short, easy to clean and maintain, and deadly in close-quarters.

  Too bad I can’t carry it up my skirt, right?

  She snickered to herself. Yes, the Mossberg is effective, but it’s also about as subtle as a root canal.

  IT WAS DURING THAT sixth week on the range, while cleaning their weapons, that Black smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Okay, call me dense, but I’ve just figured something out. I mean, wow. Can’t believe how dense I am.”

  “Whereas we have no difficulty believing,” Stephanie, on the other side of Black, tossed back with her pixie grin.

  Black hung his head. “You wound me, Steph.”

  Laynie, at the next station over, was preoccupied with stripping down the compact, semiauto Walther she’d just fired. “What? What are you blathering on about?”

  “At last! Someone who listens!” He turned to Laynie. “You know the training staff? All the instructors? Even the armorers? Just like our names are aliases, their names are too.”

  Laynie looked up from her task. “So?”

  “Yeah. So?” Steph mocked.

  “So, they’ve been pretty inventive with their names. In fact, I’m thinking they took some pleasure in constructing their faux identities.”

  Now he had their attention. Laynie demanded, “Do tell.”

  “I don’t know why it didn’t hit sooner. The range staff? Just list off their names. There’s Benelli, Walther, de Guerre, Weatherby, Mossberg, and Springfield—those names are all firearms manufacturers. Moreover, Benelli is an Italian manufacturer, Walther is German, and de Guerre is Belgian.

  “What? Are you saying the instructors’ names match their nationalities?”

  “We’re not supposed to delve into trainee or instructor backgrounds, remember? ‘Aliases equal anonymity,’ so I’ll just leave it right there. But then there’s our illustrious rangemaster, Mr. Henry, which only furthers my case.”

  Laynie laughed out loud. “This is great. What else have the staff put over on us?”

  “Well, that’s where they got all cutesy with their aliases. Vickers? Olifant and Stridsvagn? Do you get it?”

  Stephanie looked confused; Laynie shook her head. “Nope. Outside my wheelhouse, I guess.”

  “They’re tanks.”

  “What are tanks?”

  “Their names! Their names are tanks.”

  “Tanks? You mean, like, army tanks?”

  “Yes; their names are all tank models and manufacturers. Furthermore, Vickers is a British tank and Stridsvagn is a Swedish tank. Again, I’m not digging into their nationalities; just putting it out there.”

  “I think you’re on to something, Black.”

  “What about Chin?” Steph asked. “Is he a tank?”

  Black laughed. “Nope. Better. His moniker is that of an infamous spy, and he’s not the only
one on campus. So are Pelton, Lonetree, Montes, and Tillman. So, can you visualize it? Our stuffy, uptight senior staff and instructors getting together to plan their jokey little aliases?”

  Laynie chucked. “Oh, yeah, I can see it now: An evening of pizza, beer, and laughing up their sleeves.”

  Steph snickered. “Huh. Not as stuffy as they put on; not as tough and lacking in a sense of humor as they’d like us to believe, are they?”

  “Except Trammel. Haven’t caught on to his alias yet.”

  Laynie shook her head. “Sorry. I can’t see him choosing a tank or an infamous spy for his moniker.”

  Steph agreed. “Nope. He’s too scary. No pizza, beer, and yukking it up for him.”

  THE TRAINEES, NUMBERING twenty, gutted out a seventh week. Saturday evening at dinner, having reached the midpoint of their training, the staff rewarded the trainees with ice cream sundaes.

  Laynie, Black, Steph, Nora, and Taylor grabbed two paper cups apiece, filled them with ice cream and drenched the ice cream in sugary sauces and toppings to celebrate their accomplishments.

  “Don’t know about you guys,” Steph said, scraping the bottom of her second sundae, “but I’m looking forward to our half-day off tomorrow and a nice, long nap.”

  Nora nodded with vigor. “I’ll be honest with you blokes: I’ve never been so absolutely quanked in my life. I’d love nothing more than to sleep all afternoon—but I need to do my washing up.”

  Taylor, sprawled in his chair as usual, with an assiduously straight face focused on his last bite, muttered, “I thought I smelled something ripe. Wait—was that coming from you?”

  When Black, Steph, and Laynie howled with laughter, Nora socked Taylor in the arm.

  “You’re a beast, Tay. A perfectly awful beast.”

  Taylor leaned toward her making puppy-dog eyes. “Ah, Nora, my sweet! You do mean I’m a lovable beast, don’t you?”

  “No, you’re awful, Tay. Perfectly awful!”

  “Thank you for confirming, in public, that I’m perfect.”

  The others roundly pelted him with crumpled paper cups and napkins.

  AT THE CONCLUSION OF dinner, Trammel stood to address the trainees.

  “In recognition of your hard work up to this midpoint in your training, we will forego this evening’s AAR. However, I have an announcement to make.

  “Monday morning, you will begin a period of immersive SERE training—Marstead style. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. No, we won’t be doing every aspect of SERE training but, for this iteration, you will be bussed to a different facility, one with which you have no familiarity.

  “Listen up! The hardships and challenges you have experienced and overcome during the past seven weeks are a mere walk in the park compared to what’s coming. The best preparation—the only preparation—for SERE is this: Be ready to surmount anything. That is all. Have a good evening.”

  “‘Have a good evening,’ he says,” Nora groused. “Bloody ruined it for us, he did.”

  Chapter 8

  SUNDAY MORNING BEGAN like any other morning: PT, followed by breakfast, tradecraft, and hand-to-hand. After lunch, however, the trainees were on their own to rest and recuperate. Laynie, like most of the trainees, used the afternoon to catch up on personal chores—laundry, mending, and a quick phone call home.

  Two rooms on the hotel’s first floor were set apart for phone calls. The rooms were soundproofed and equipped with special phones and doors that locked. Trainees signed up for fifteen-minute slots on the room’s door.

  Laynie locked the door behind her and picked up the phone. A Marstead operator put her call through—and a look at a dump of those phones’ records would show that the calls came from Marstead’s D.C. offices, not a compound in the mountains of Virginia.

  “Mama? Hi, it’s Laynie.”

  “Laynie-girl!”

  “How are you and Dad? Tell me about your trip up to Vancouver? What does Sammie say about his new semester, Mama?”

  Laynie came prepared with questions because of the little she could say about her own activities. Although she missed her family and loved to hear their voices, she had also come to appreciate the wisdom of a fifteen-minute limit to calls home.

  “My classmates are starting a volleyball game soon, Mama. I promised to play, and I need to put my wet laundry in the dryer before we start. All right. I love you too, Mama. Miss you all. Talk to you next week. Bye.”

  The little lies seemed to come so easily.

  SHE DIDN’T TAKE PART in the referenced volleyball game until after dinner, but even then, she dropped out early, intent on logging a few extra hours of sleep before the SERE course began Monday morning.

  She’d been asleep less than four hours when, at 12:01 a.m., the new week officially arrived. Laynie sat up in bed, shaken awake by the thundering of heavy boots in the hall, to fists pounding on doors and shouted commands.

  She understood at once what was happening. They’ve pulled a fast one on us.

  Grateful for a dresser filled with clean clothes and for the long-sleeved shirt she’d donned before bed, Laynie grabbed a pair of camo trousers and yanked them on as fast as she could.

  Boots! Socks and boots!

  She didn’t move fast enough. She had one sock on, when her door burst open.

  “Get her!”

  Two men, features concealed by ski masks to hide their identities, rushed her. Laynie had enough time to grab her boots before the men were on her. She folded her arms across her boots and did not let go, even when they yanked her to her feet, threw a black cloth bag over her head, and herded her into the hall.

  As they traversed the hotel’s second floor, Laynie heard a woman’s scream of protest.

  Laynie ground her teeth. Note to self: Don’t sleep naked the night before SERE training.

  Her captors rushed her down to ground level.

  Blind, but aware of how important her boots would be in the coming week, Laynie clung to them, even as unseen hands pushed and pulled at her and shouted orders to her and her classmates. She was shoved into other bodies, bodies that stepped on her unprotected toes, and she could feel the warmth of those bodies, hear their panting, heavy breathing, an occasional muttered word, and one or two moans of pain.

  Evidently, a few of her fellow trainees had resisted and had paid for it.

  These instructors aren’t messing around.

  Laynie slid her boots under her t-shirt and wrapped her arms around her middle to secure them. She didn’t want to think about being stuck barefoot for a week; it was bad enough she hadn’t had time to snatch up the other sock. The impression of a raw, blistered foot rose before her.

  Someone grabbed her hands; Laynie kept her forearms and elbows pinned across her boots as a nylon noose encircled her wrists, tightened, and someone tied it off.

  “Get on the bus! Get on the bus!” their captors screamed.

  They were herded forward. Some bright trainee, stumbling at the bus steps, hollered, “Steps!” Laynie gauged the distance to his voice as best she could in her sightless state and slid in behind a male body, intending to use him as her “step detector.” As she’d expected, the trainee, unable to see the steps, rammed his shins into them. He cursed and stumbled upward. Laynie was ready and managed to navigate the steps without too much difficulty—until a hand pushed her from behind and she fell in the stair well. She struggled to her feet, climbed up, and started down the aisle; then another hand thrust her into a seat.

  “Move over! Move to the window!”

  Laynie got over into the window seat seconds before another body plunked into the seat she’d vacated. She leaned toward the body. Whispered.

  “I’m Maggie. Who are you?”

  The whispered answer came back, “Brett.”

  She knew Brett; he was an okay guy. “We’ll get through this.”

  “You telling me? Or yourself?”

  “Both of us.”

  A captor screamed, “Shut up! No talkin
g!”

  Laynie whispered anyway, “We should sleep; we’re going to need it.”

  She took her own advice, leaned against the window, and willed herself to sleep.

  LATER, THE BUS TURNED off the paved road and bumped over rugged terrain. Laynie woke, her neck stiff, the boots gouging her sides. She thought it must still be dark outside. They were offloaded into a building, a room.

  The doors banged shut behind them.

  “Listen up! My men will be going around to remove your restraints and the bags over your heads. As soon as they have, you are to sit down where you are.”

  It took about five minutes for their captors, faces still concealed, to cut their restraints and for the trainees to hunker down on the cold floor and wait for whatever came next. Laynie peered around, first to mark the location of the jailers in the room, then to locate Nora, Steph, Taylor, and Black. In addition to the ski masks, the instructors, just two of them, were dressed in ordinary dark street clothes.

  The man who’d given the order for them to be released stood silent at the front of the room, waiting until he had their full attention. He did not hide his face; his expression was hard and callous, colder than any mask.

  When the room settled, he spoke.

  “My name is Rafe, and I run this course. I will remind you that you are not soldiers but private citizens. Therefore, unlike military versions of this course, we will not instill in you a military code of conduct. We will, instead, teach you how to protect your mission, your fellow operatives, and your network—at all costs, using all possible measures at your disposal.

  “This SERE course differs in other ways from military courses, just as covert operatives differ from soldiers. As you will not be lawful combatants in a declared war, the rules of warfare and the Geneva Conventions would not apply to you in a real SERE situation. The enemy will know this and exploit it; you must know and accept it, too: All rules are off the table. Fix it in your minds now that you must survive, evade, resist, and escape though any means possible, without restriction—because the enemy will not be bound by restrictions either.