The Rift (10 page)

“You gentlemen are late,” the dickhead said. “My name is Master Sergeant Twackhammer.”

“You gotta be shitting me,” Mac said in a low voice.

“What was that?” Twackhammer demanded.

“It’s on his shirt,” Roland observed, immediately bonding with the fellow large human being. “Hey, Master Sergeant Twackhammer. How’s it going?”

“Shut up!” Twackhammer shouted. “Your Selection began yesterday. I don’t know who pulled strings to get you in, but I’m going to be watching you.” To emphasize the point, he put a finger just below his left eye and pulled the skin down. “You gentlemen are late to my course and that makes me very, very upset.”

“
Your course
?” Mac said.

Twackhammer started yelling, getting them moving through the supply hut to get field gear; then they were out of there, into what was now a downpour, and over to the Nasty Nick obstacle course, where mud-covered Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) candidates were being put through the grinder.

“I’m too old for this shit,” Eagle said as Twackhammer slid them in line.

So they began the mile-long course, hitting the obstacles every so often, all of which seemed made of a lot of rope (vertical and horizontal), a bunch of mud-smeared tunnels, and lots of wood configured by a mad carpenter making a person jump, leap, shimmy, and climb up and down and sideways.

“Ms. Jones must be really pissed,” Kirk said as they completed another obstacle and were forced to wait, as a backlog of students was in front of them, all of them facing a wall that had them stymied.

“Get to the other side!” a staff sergeant was screaming at the candidates.

“I think Moms might have been the one who suggested this,” Eagle said, trying to scrape some mud off his fatigue shirt, a futile effort. “I doubt Ms. Jones even knows what the Nasty Nick is.”

“Yeah, but how is this supposed to help us?” Mac asked.

“Get to the other side!” the staff sergeant’s voice went up an octave as the bewildered candidates clawed, jumped, and fell off the vertical face of the eighteen-foot-high wooden wall. There were no handholds, just a single tantalizing rope that hung down four feet from the top and was knotted on the bottom. Realizing they couldn’t reach the rope on their own, the candidates began working together, trying to build human pyramids to get someone to the rope.

No such luck.

Eagle sat down on a fallen tree, watching with a bored expression. Mac, Kirk, and Roland joined him. Across the muddy path, glaring at them through the rain, Twackhammer suddenly appeared.

“What are you girls doing?” he screamed. A major was next to him, his green beret soaked and drooping on his head. Everyone in Special Forces agreed that a beret was the most worthless of headgear. Hell, Girl Scouts wore green berets. The major was quiet, watching, observing, and they knew he was the one who could wash a candidate out with a stroke of his pen. He walked with an odd gait, which meant one of his legs, if not both, were no longer flesh and blood, a common occurrence nowadays with those no longer physically fit for deployment duty and slotted to faculty positions.

“Waiting, Master Sergeant Twackhammer,” Roland said. “The wall’s a bit crowded at the moment.”

“Get your asses off that log!” Twackhammer yelled.

They got to their feet.

“Drop right where you are and give me forty.”

The four looked down. They were standing in a couple of inches of mud. If Ms. Jones and Moms had wanted to humble the four, they’d succeeded. Being treated like newbies—when they’d all gone through several training programs like this years ago, served in elite units in combat, and were now Nightstalkers, the best of the best, et cetera, et cetera—was hitting home. It was obvious Twackhammer had no clue who they were. The major, on the other hand, had his head cocked to the side, evaluating.

The major was no fool. He could see the clear difference between these four and the younger men flailing away at the wall, trying to get to the rope, their ticket to the other side of the wall. Besides the obvious scars on Roland and Eagle, all four were older and held themselves differently. Other services and agencies and even foreign governments sent people to go through the Q Course at Bragg, the Special Forces Qualification Course, but even those people were usually younger and more enthusiastic about the opportunity. And most bypassed SFAS, going straight to the Q.

They dropped down and began doing push-ups, but in a way that said “yeah, yeah” rather than the anxious desperation of a candidate. Any Spec-Ops person who had been through a selection and assessment course, and especially if they’d ever been cadre in such a course, understood the reality of what was going on. Certainly it was important to weed out those who didn’t belong and to evaluate the candidates, but much of the screaming and the yelling was by rote, a routine that can begin to numb one out.

So they languidly did their push-ups, except Roland, of course, who was done first, knocking them out without even breathing hard. He snapped out five more, just for shits and grins, then hopped to his feet.

Eagle was last, and he was breathing hard.

The major ambled over, obviously not worried about getting his feet wet and muddy since he didn’t have feet. He smiled at the four. “Welcome, gentlemen. Someone named Ms. Jones says hi. And gung ho.”

Then he moved away.

“What the frak was that about?” Mac asked, wiping a hand across his forehead, which only served to move mud around. “We know Ms. Jones sent us here. She’s rubbing it in.”

“Gung ho,” Eagle repeated. “That’s it.” He nodded at the other three. “It’s an American version of two Chinese words that were appropriated during World War Two.
Gong
, which means ‘work,’ and
he
, which means ‘together.’ In China it was actually the name of a corporation, but a marine major named Carlson decided to use it as the motto of the Second Marine Raider Battalion. Now everyone’s heard of it.”

“You are just full of arcane stuff,” Kirk said.

“Huh?” Roland said.

“Great history lesson,” Mac said. “Couldn’t she have just
told
us to work together?”

Kirk spoke up. “How well do words work on you, Mac?”

Mac bristled for a second, but then his shoulders lumped. “Yeah. I get it.”

“I work with everyone,” Roland said.

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Kirk said. “You all did the unauthorized mission to help me in Arkansas. And you”—he indicated Roland—“did an unauthorized mission with Neeley in South America. I think Ms. Jones is trying to get us to stay on the reservation.”

“
This
ain’t the reservation,” Mac said.

The cluster of candidates still hadn’t defeated the wall. Some were arguing with each other now, teamwork breaking down in the face of frustration. Lightning flashed in the distance and thunder rolled through the pine trees.

“Still in loner mode,” Kirk said, nodding at the ones arguing.

“I think that’s the other point,” Eagle said.

Kirk laughed as a couple of the candidates jumped as a bolt of lightning struck so close that everyone could feel the static electricity in the air. “City boys.”

“Gotta remember,” Eagle said, “they’re on short sleep, short rations.”

“And short brains,” Mac said. “Geez, how long do you want to watch this frak-up?”

“Hey.” Kirk was pointing. “I think that guy’s crying. You can’t tell ’cause of the rain, but he’s fraking crying. Ranger up, dude. Damn SF weenies.”

“He won’t make it,” Eagle said. “There’s no crying in Special Ops, fella.”

“The longer these guys take,” Mac said, “the longer we’re going to be standing here in the rain. How about we gung ho up?”

Roland nodded. “Let’s finish this thing and whatever else
Ms. Jones wants us to do here so we can get back to the team room and just have Moms and Nada give us shit. This is ridiculous. I set the course record on this thing ten years ago.”

“So you know what they’re doing wrong, right?” Mac asked with a grin.

“They’re not listening,” Kirk said. “I never went through the Q Course here, but I went to Ranger school. People think the
N
in
Ranger
stands for ‘knowledge,’ but we learned to listen to orders. And we had the Darby Queen to negotiate, which wasn’t no cake walk.”

Some of the candidates were now piling their rucksacks, trying to build a platform, to get them closer to the knotted rope.

“How did you get over the wall, Roland?” Eagle asked. “It wasn’t here when I went through.”

“I threw a little fellow up there,” Roland said. “He got the knot and then held on for his life. I jumped, grabbed his legs, used him as part of the rope.” Roland flushed. “Dislocated both his shoulders. But the instructors were impressed.”

“I don’t think that was or is the correct solution,” Kirk said.

“Worked for me,” Roland said.

“You aren’t in the bell curve,” Eagle said.

“No one here is supposed to be in the bell curve,” Kirk said.

“The rope is a MacGuffin,” Eagle said.

“A what?” Roland asked.

A cluster of candidates had their top man come within a foot of the rope, before the pyramid collapsed into a muddy pile.

“It’s a term Hitchcock used for something that seems important and everyone is focused on it, when it really isn’t important,” Eagle explained.

Kirk was the first to get it, as he usually was. “It’s misdirection. What if the rope wasn’t there?”

“No way anyone could get over that wall,” Roland said. “Even working together with what they got.”

“Yeah,” Kirk said, “but what was the instruction?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Get to the other side.”

Mac laughed. “Well, shoot. Even in Texas we’d figure that out. Eventually.” He shouldered his rucksack. “Ready, guys? Watching these newbies is making me wish I was in a different army.”

The Nightstalkers shrugged on their weighted backpacks, then simply walked around the wall. Roland was last and he paused, looking at the candidates. “Coming?”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Twackhammer screamed.

“We’re going to the other side of the wall,” Roland said. And then he was gone.

The muddy candidates stood confused, staring at the wall, and then at Twackhammer, and then at the Nightstalkers. It was only when the major started to laugh that they got it. They grabbed their packs and followed the Nightstalkers around the wall.

And they were better soldiers for it.

Gretchen was sipping cheap white wine and getting a wonderful foot massage, which kind of made up for the trimming of her ingrown big toenail. She put the glass down and closed her eyes. Her mind wandered to that boring morass of wondering what she was going to make for dinner, which was inevitably a few hours from now. She did find it odd, perhaps even ironic, that her wife never cooked. Never learned, never wanted to try, and it was not a subject to be discussed. Nope, cooking was Gretchen’s, except s
he’d never really learned either.

You’d
think in a marriage of two women that one of them would have learned to cook. What were the odds?

Gretchen, however, could make a mean smoothie and that’s about it. She tried to remember what was in the freezer because she might have a couple of chicken fillets to nuke and then half scorch. She opened her eyes and reached into her purse, pulling out her phone. She Googled a recipe for chicken. She’d spent thirty-six years working in IT for the government, although her partner thought she’d worked for the IRS. As if. Gretchen had worked deep in the bowels of the Pentagon for Mrs. Sanchez, but much like the women who worked at Bletchley Circle in England during World War II, once she retired, that was it. One never, ever, discussed that world with outsiders.

There were many reasons for that beyond the secrecy oath they swore. But even that issue outsiders had a problem with; some didn’t think oaths were worth that much, but for those in the covert world, their oaths meant everything to them. Also, outsiders didn’t understand. They couldn’t. One had to live the life, experience it, to understand.

And last but not least, speaking out of house could bring a very unfriendly visit from the Cellar.

As she scrolled through recipes, Gretchen smiled as she remembered watching the movie
RED
with her wife. Her wife had thought it stupid, but Gretchen had just howled and wondered who’d whispered the little truths to the screenwriters. Retired. Extremely. Dangerous.

The covert was over for Gretchen, even though the closest she’d come to the front lines were the bundles of millions of dollars of cash she and Mrs. Sanchez had prepped to be shipped overseas to be used to bribe, acquire, and who knew what else.

The woman rubbing her feet was the best and Gretchen tried to remember her name for the next time.

Then her
other
phone gave its distinctive Warren Zevon ringtone for the first time and Gretchen was reminded for the first time since she retired that her covert life was
almost
over. It was like the mafia: Just when you thought you were out, they pulled you back in, even though the Loop was technically, well, out of the loop.