Undersea Prison (29 page)

Christine’s parents regarded her macho aspirations as delusional, superficial and immature until the day she returned home for dinner after a game of ‘Smear the Queen’, a full-contact American football game without pads or helmet. She was clearly in pain as she sat down for the meal but stoically refused any attention. It later transpired that her collarbone had been broken in two places and she had several cracked ribs, a fractured wrist and a broken thumb. What was more, Christine had received the injuries at various points throughout the game but had refused to leave the field until the end.

By the time Christine attended college she had not only grown into a very beautiful girl but her femininity had blossomed along with it. Her interest in boys was growing beyond them as mere objects to compete against physically but although there was never a shortage of admirers she found it impossible to attract one who matched her strength of mind and spirit.

Christine attended the University of Virginia to begin an MBA course but soon after arriving she was invited to take a Juris doctorate. Her parents were keen on her becoming a lawyer and so Christine accepted the challenge but only if she could take up barrel racing. They agreed.

 

In her final year at university she placed second in the Quarter Horse World Championships and graduated
summa cum laude
, finishing third in her class.The prospect of becoming a lawyer failed to inspire her but she had put the work in, achieved the grades and had to face the simple fact that dreams were dreams and reality was reality. And so it was with a sense of fatalism and little enthusiasm that she prepared to apply for an internship.

But things were never to develop in that direction and fate played its hand. The law school held a job fair the week of her graduation which Christine decided to visit out of curiosity. To her surprise she happened upon a recruiting booth for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The agent who ran the booth did not make it sound as attractive as she had expected although she reckoned it was still more inspiring than becoming a lawyer. But any desire to sign up was squashed when he explained the qualifications required. Christine would need at least a college degree, an MBA and three years’ work experience or be fluent in a foreign language. She had the degree but not enough work experience and no foreign language.

Christine left the booth and as she headed for the exit she was consumed by a feeling of loss and disappointment. She stopped to look back in the direction of the FBI booth, wondering if there was any other way she might be able to join, when she saw a booth inviting applications for the United States Secret Service.

The Secret Service did not interest Christine as much as the FBI did but for reasons she could not explain she felt compelled to talk to the agent. After telling him about her qualifications he offered her a position on the next recruit intake. He was much older and wiser than the FBI agent and, although her academic certificates were more than enough, what impressed him more were her other accomplishments. He noted that her riding showed dedication, her captaincy of the college hockey team and her position as pitcher for the local baseball team displayed leadership and toughness, and her experience as a hockey referee indicated an ability to make quick decisions and to stick with them. A month later she was on her way to the Secret Service Training Center in Beltsville, Maryland.

The course began with a two-week initiation phase designed to assess the candidates’ general fitness and their skills with small-arms weaponry. On completion, the recruits travelled to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia where they spent ten weeks learning small-arms skills, hand-to-hand combat and basic law concerning arrest, search and seizure. The final phase took place back at the Secret Service School in Maryland, specifically at the famed James J. Rowley Training Center where the remaining students faced gruelling physical tests while at the same time learning personnel-protection procedures and investigation skills. Christine graduated top of her class in all disciplines, including fitness, outdoing all the men. But at the end of it she suddenly doubted that her new career would give her the adventures she had always yearned for.

After graduation the new agents were asked to list their job preferences and, unsure of what she now wanted to do, Christine selected the Presidential Protection Division, a competitive posting with a long waiting list. It was beginning to look as if her destiny was to be little more than a glorified bodyguard. But fate was not yet done with her.

The First Lady wanted a female agent as her personal minder but her son, a keen sportsman in his early teens, baulked at the idea. The President’s wife also doubted whether the service had a woman who would be able to keep up with him but she asked to see a list of candidates anyway. When she read Christine’s resumé she demanded that the agent should be fast-tracked to the residence immediately.

When Christine learned that she was to be a babysitter it gave her even more pause for thought. But with little choice in the matter she took on the job, albeit with forced enthusiasm. The boy was soon impressed with Christine’s knowledge and experience in so many sports disciplines, none of which he could best her in. He was a polite, disciplined and pleasant boy whose company Christine eventually began to enjoy though it did little to erode the lingering doubt that she was wasting her time.

A few months into the job Christine accompanied the First Lady and her son on a short politically motivated holiday to Cape Town. During an early dinner at a popular restaurant three local robbers, one of them armed with a revolver, chose the location to practise their profession. They were unaware that the wife of the President of the United States was dining inside at the time and apparently did not notice the collection of immaculate black-tinted suburbans and limousines outside the front, each with a smartly dressed driver at the wheel.

The robbers, posing as staff, made their way through the kitchen and into the dining room without attracting the attention of the Secret Service agents having dinner at a table in a corner away from the VIPs. Christine was eating with the First Lady, her son and a South African dignitary when the dastardly intruders revealed their purpose with a shout, the one with the revolver coincidentally holding it up near the First Lady’s head.

The robbers ordered everyone to lie face down on the floor and contribute their watches, cellphones, jewellery and the contents of their wallets. Every agent had a concealed semi-automatic pistol but the robber with the weapon was behind the First Lady, thus presenting a difficult situation for them. They could never allow any harm to come to their charges which meant they could do nothing to escalate the situation.

Christine’s pistol was in her tailor-made bumbag around her waist but she was directly under the gaze of the robber with the gun. The First Lady showed her grit when she looked at Christine with an expression of stone-cold malevolence. The robber was swinging his gun around as he shouted, the barrel sometimes moving to aim at the President’s son who was looking extremely nervous, his eyes darting between Christine and the other agents as if he was about to run to them. Christine gestured to him to stay calm, worried that he might do something to increase the nervousness of the robbers.

The handful of people at the surrounding tables began lowering themselves to the floor when the First Lady got up from her chair and looked contemptuously at the armed robber. ‘Why don’t you lower your gun? Then perhaps I’ll do what you say,’ she said.

Christine initially feared that her boss was simply flirting with the danger and then a second later realised she was deliberately trying to distract the man. She was later overheard saying she knew Christine would take the opening.

As Christine lowered herself to the floor she paused in a position not unlike that of a hundred-metre sprinter waiting for the starter pistol.

‘Shut up!’ the robber shouted, pointing the revolver directly at the President’s wife. ‘Get down on the floor or I’ll shoot you.’

When Christine made the lunge she put all her power behind it. On making contact with the robber, her outstretched hand pushed the barrel of the weapon towards the ceiling and she practically knocked the man out as her shoulder struck him in the side of his ribcage. The blow launched him across the room and over a table where his head hit a wall, finishing off the job.

The other agents did not lose a second in tearing into the other two crooks, throwing them to the floor where, seconds later, they were bound tightly in plastic cuffs, napkins secured over their eyes. Christine quickly ushered the First Lady, her son and the dignitary out of the restaurant and into the limo which sped away, followed by a couple of the heavy suburbans.

The incident hit the media, although the identity of the agent who saved the day was kept secret, except around the Washington corridors of power. The President heard the details first-hand: his son gave him glowing accounts of Christine’s lightning reactions and decisiveness.

A couple of weeks later a vacancy for a Special Secret Service Operative to the Oval Office occurred and Christine’s name was placed on the list. But despite her recent heroics it was reckoned that she was unlikely to get a position that in the past had always been filled by men. Another argument against her was her lack of experience.

The First Lady, however, was determined to reward Christine for her valour in the Cape, intuitively aware that the young woman would much rather be doing something more adventurous than working as a bodyguard and sports instructor. Despite stiff opposition from several senior staff members the First Lady demonstrated her influence over the President and within a month Christine was swearing her allegiance to the country’s leader in a private ceremony before heading off to Fort Bragg to begin a three-month training course. It was the first of five different locations in the USA and two in Europe where she would learn a variety of skills that included the use of sophisticated communications systems, imaging, the handling of explosives and a variety of weapons, unarmed combat, aggression training and, finally, a couple of weeks learning a special operative’s general knowledge base of skills and techniques.

When Christine graduated she was provided with an apartment in Alexander and received instructions to no longer associate freely with her former Secret Service colleagues. Those agents also understood that if they were ever to see her outside the confines of the White House they were not to acknowledge her.That included an agent with whom she was having an affair, which was a blessing since he was madly in love with her but she could not reciprocate to the same extent. It was not a major concern to her that she seemed unable to find a man who was even remotely right for her but she was beginning to wonder if the problem lay with her own personality. But this was the wrong time in her life to cultivate any kind of relationship anyway and so it wasn’t even worth thinking about. She could only hope she was kept busy enough so that she did not have time to dwell on such issues. She was not to be disappointed.

She got her first assignment a few days after she’d settled into her apartment, although it was no more than a simple courier task to an embassy contact in Warsaw. Her next dozen jobs were similarly low-level adventures and even though she suspected that she was still being assessed she did begin to wonder if there was ever going to be anything more interesting for an Oval Office operative. And had the world remained on the same even keel the chances were that she might not have seen a great deal more excitement. But if history really is ‘philosophy by example’ the world will always be a roller coaster swooping up and down between war and peace.

Christine had been an operative for only nine months when New York’s Twin Towers were brought down by Muslim extremists, after which her life - like those of so many others - was never to be the same again. The tasks she was assigned suddenly became more intense, secretive and dangerous as America’s Cold War infrastructure was ripped out by its roots and the machinery to wage a world war against Islamic terrorists was hastily assembled. There was an immediate shortage of experienced operatives and Christine found herself busier than she could ever have imagined. In between jobs she was sent on crash courses to learn Arabic and Farsi where she was taught to converse, read and write in those languages at a basic but workable level.

There is nothing like a war to sort the true men and women from the boys and girls and within two years it was hinted to Christine by a senior member of the White House staff that she was near the top of the most-favoured-operatives list. A year later, when she was called to a briefing and given her task at Styx prison, she knew she had finally arrived at the place she had dreamed of since her youth.

But the more difficult and dangerous a task, the greater the risk of failure: the higher one climbed the further one could fall. As she listened to the details of the mission it became clear that it could be a matter of physical survival, not just of boosting her reputation.

Christine closed her laptop, got to her feet, sat on her bed and lay back on the pillow. It was time once more to go through thoroughly the various steps she needed to take in this final phase, to examine the many things that could go wrong and, as far as possible, to determine what her reactions to them might be.

Stratton woke up to the sound of his cell door depressurising and the feeling of his ears popping. He struggled to open his eyelids - they’d been sealed shut by the dried eye discharge that everyone in Styx appeared to suffer from while they slept. He felt for a bottle of water on the floor by his bed, dabbed some on his eyes and pulled the lids apart as someone came in.

Hamlin walked unsteadily into the room and the door closed as he sat down heavily on his bed. The drastic depressurisation of the mess hall during the riot had clearly taken its toll on the older man. Stratton had recovered minutes after the pressure levels had returned to normal but several of the inmates, particularly the injured, had required medical attention. Hamlin was one of those who’d been taken away on a gurney. Some people were more susceptible than others to variations in the pressures of the gases that make up air, notably in the oxygen level. Hamlin was one of those who did not fare well under such conditions and judging by his startled reaction immediately before the ‘attack’ he had obviously experienced something like it before and had known he was about to suffer.