One by one the guys tricked out of the barn and fell in. Victor was last, which was becoming a common theme. Sergeant Smith was walking quickly beside him giving him an earful in a hushed voice. They had all been warned that there would be no yelling on the line. This wasn’t the only place on the lake, and voices carried across the water. Inside the barn with the door closed, however, the decibel level went through the roof. Victor fell in at the far end from Rapp.

Sergeant Smith stepped out in front of the seven recruits and with a clenched jaw said, “You puds better get your shit together, or I’m gonna start knocking some heads. I’ve seen Cub Scouts do better than this. This is damn sloppy. It shouldn’t never take you morons more than sixty seconds to get your ass out of bed, dressed, and on the line. When you go to bed, you make sure your shit is ready. You lay it out on your footlocker so it’s ready to go. We start PT at five every morning.”

Rapp watched the DI’s eyes shift to the opposite end of the line. He leaned forward and saw Victor had his arm raised.

“Sarge, when are we supposed to take a piss? I gotta go so bad I’m about to drown.”

Sergeant Smith walked over to Victor and got in his face. “Maybe if you had gotten your lazy ass out of bed when I told you to, you would have had time to piss.” He stepped back and looked down the line. “We’re going to do a quick warm-up. As much as I hate you idiots, the powers that be don’t want you ladies getting hurt until they see if you’ve got some potential. I have tried to dissuade them, as you are the biggest collection of shitlickers I’ve seen come through here in some time.”

“Sarge, I gotta go real bad,” Victor whined.

“Then piss yourself, you big idiot.” His head snapped to the group. “If you can’t take care of your business and get out here in sixty seconds, I’m going to have to treat you like a bunch of toddlers … so go ahead and piss yourself, Victor. The rest of you who need to go I suggest you wait until we head out for our run. You can pull over on the trail and take care of business. Now drop and give me fifty, and if I see any of you pussies cheating we’ll start over.”

They did the fifty push-ups, followed by one hundred sit-ups, fifty up-downs, and then a few minutes of scissor kicks and a couple of stretches, and then Sergeant Smith led them into the woods. Eight of them in a nice neat line, with Victor trailing. Rapp guessed they were moving at just under a six-minute pace. He could keep a five-minute pace for ten miles, so he was feeling good. They finished the five-mile run and found themselves standing in front of an obstacle course in the middle of the woods. The place looked like a relic from an abandoned Renaissance festival. Sergeant Smith had his stopwatch out and was clocking them.

Rapp positioned himself fifth in line, carefully placing one man between himself and Victor. He wanted to see how these other four guys navigated the course, guessing that they’d all done it when they’d gone through boot camp. His idea kind of fell apart when Sergeant Smith started sending guys at thirty-second intervals. The course started with a low wall. It was a ten-foot-tall wooden, moss-laden wall with two telephone poles stuck in the ground in front of it. The first telephone pole stuck out of the ground about a foot and a half and was four feet in front of the wall. The next telephone pole was two feet in front of the wall and stuck out of the ground three feet.

Rapp watched as the first recruit headed for the wall, picking up speed. Right before the telephone poles he did a quick stutter step and then as nimbly as you could imagine, he placed his left foot on the first and shorter telephone pole, using it as a step. His right foot then landed on the second telephone pole and he launched himself up and onto the wall, grabbing the top with both hands and pinning his knee to the wall just a few feet from the top. It was like a controlled collision. The recruit was up and over, dropping to the soft ground on the other side.

The second guy did it the same way, and the third tried something slightly different that involved doing a pull-up. After the low wall was a forty-foot dash to a fifteen-foot-high wall with ropes hanging on the face. There was nothing fancy about this one. You just grabbed the rope, put your feet on the wall, and walked your way up. Next in line was barbed wire. Again, pretty straightforward. Dive under, keep your butt down, and do an infantry crawl to the other end. After that was a forty-foot cargo net strung between two towering pines. Beyond that was a set of logs set up in a zigzag pattern about three feet off the ground. They acted as a sort of foot bridge to test your balance.

Rapp didn’t have a chance to see what came after the balance logs because it was his turn to start. He quickly dried the palms of his hands on his shorts, and then when Sergeant Smith gave him the signal, he ran toward the short wall, mimicked the exact steps of the first recruit, and threw himself up and at the top of the wall. He caught it, pulled himself up and over, and landed with ease on the other side. The second, taller wall was easy enough to navigate, and the barbed wire was about as primal as it got. If a guy couldn’t grasp the simplicity of crawling he should just quit and go home. The cargo net proved to be the first real challenge. About a third of the way up Rapp realized there was too much slack in the middle so he moved over to the side. After that it was easier. The balance logs were a breeze, the tires were nothing, and the transfer ropes were playground 101.

Then he came across something that looked like a set of uneven parallel bars, like the kind female gymnasts use. He paused, not sure how to attack the two horizontal telephone poles, and then almost on cue, one of the DIs was right there barking orders at him. Telling him what to do, and to do it quickly. Based on what the DI was telling him, it sounded like a great way to break a rib, but Rapp could see no other way, so he launched himself into the first pole and then the second and then it was more tires and a thing called the Burma bridge. After that there were more logs, ropes, and walls to negotiate and a sprint to the finish.

When Rapp crossed the line Sergeant Smith was staring at his stopwatch and shaking his head. He glanced at Rapp, contempt on his face, and said, “You suck.”

Rapp was doubled over with his hands on his knees, acting more tired than he was. He wanted to smile but didn’t. He couldn’t have done that badly. The guy in the number-six position had yet to finish. Rapp turned to see how the last two were doing. At the edge of the course, about fifty yards back, he saw the blond-haired guy he’d seen on the porch earlier in the morning. The man was standing at the edge of the woods staring straight at him, again making no effort to conceal his interest.

CHAPTER 12

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

KENNEDY parked in the east lot and entered the Headquarters Building at exactly eight-oh-three. She’d used the hour-and-a-half drive up from Lake Anna to try to prioritize her ever-increasing list of responsibilities, both official and unofficial. Much of her job was off the books, and that meant no notes and no files. She had to keep it all organized in her own mind, and every time she came back to HQ she needed to have her story straight. When the elevator doors parted on the sixth floor one of her bosses was waiting with a deeply concerned look on his face.

Max Powers nudged her back into the elevator and said, “Problem.”

Powers was the Near East Division chief. It had taken Kennedy a while to get used to his style. Powers was famous for speaking in one-word sentences. His colleagues who had worked with him over the years called him Musket Max.