“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Kennedy shook her head and asked, “Are you trying to say my recruit bested you?”

“Damn close.” Hurley turned his attention to his drink and mumbled to himself.

“Your boy had him beat,” Tschida interjected with a smile, “but Stan here broke the rules and put the kid’s balls in a vise.”

“You think this shit is funny?” Hurley barked.

Tschida smiled and nodded.

Hurley looked like he was going to launch his glass across the room at him, and then at the last minute decided to use the bag of ice.

Tschida stuck out his right hand and caught the bag with ease. “Don’t be a baby. After all the asses you’ve kicked around here, it’s about time you got a little taste.”

“My problem,” Hurley shot back, “Is getting ambushed by this young woman here. Someone I helped raise, by the way.” Hurley turned his one good eye back on Kennedy. “No military experience, my ass. Where did you find this kid?”

Kennedy was still in a bit of shock. She herself had seen Hurley tie NFL-sized linebackers into pretzels. Nowhere in her research had she found anything that would lead her to believe Rapp was capable of going toe to toe with Stan Hurley. “Stan, you need to trust me. I had no idea he could best you.”

“He didn’t best me! He almost did.”

“Yeah, but you cheated,” Tschida said, taking perverse pleasure in the torment he was causing Hurley. “So, technically, he beat you.”

It took every last bit of restraint to not throw his glass at the gloating Tschida. Hurley turned his attention back to Kennedy and asked, “What are you up to? Why in hell would you try to sucker me like this?”

“Just calm down for a minute, Stan. I am telling you right now, we found nothing in our research that said he was capable of this.” Kennedy gestured at Hurley’s battered face. “It was my sincere hope that someday he would be able to do this … but not this soon.”

“Then your research sucks. You don’t learn how to fight like this in your basement. Someone has to teach you.”

Kennedy admitted, “He’s been going to a martial arts studio for the past year.”

“That would have been nice to know,” Hurley fired back.

“Stan, you have been bitching up a storm that this guy is a waste of time because he hasn’t had Special Forces training. You think a year of training in a strip mall is equal to what the army puts guys through?”

“That depends on the instructor.”

“And the student,” Tschida added.

Kennedy folded her arms and thought long and hard before she spoke. “There is one other possibility.”

“What’s that?”

“I know you don’t like to talk about your age, but is it possible that you’ve lost a step.”

Tschida started laughing so hard his big barrel chest was rising and falling with each chuckle.

Hurley was seething. “I’m going to put your ass in the ring with him, first thing in the morning. We’ll see how funny you think this is then.”

Tschida stopped laughing.

Kennedy pulled up a chair and sat at the table across from Hurley. “Please tell me what happened.”

“You’re not jerking my chain?”

Kennedy shook her head.

“You weren’t trying to pull a fast one on me? Set me up?”

She shook her head again and said, “No. In fact I was worried that he would be on the receiving end of a beating. Not the other way around.”

Even through his anger- and bourbon-induced haze, Hurley was starting to grasp that Kennedy was telling the truth. “Where did you find this guy?”

Kennedy gave him a look that he instantly understood.

“Shithead,” Hurley said to Tschida, “go check on those clowns, and if they’re screwing around bust ’em out and make ’em snap off a hundred up-downs.”

“Got it.” Tschida moved out, all business.

As soon as the screen door slammed, Hurley looked at Kennedy and said, “Who is he?”

She couldn’t keep him in the dark forever, but she would have preferred to wait a few more days. Setting her apprehension aside she said, “His name is Mitch Rapp.”

CHAPTER 6

RAPP lay on his cot, his head propped up on a lumpy pillow and a bag of frozen peas on his groin. Dinner had been served buffet style on a folding table at the far end of the barn. His appetite wasn’t really there, but he forced himself to eat. There were seven of them plus two instructors, and among them, they polished off a giant pot of spaghetti, a plate full of rolls, and all the salad and corn on the cob they could stomach. The men were tired, hot, and ragged, but they stuffed their faces all the same and washed it down with pitchers of ice water and cold milk. Rapp had spent the last five years eating at a training table and knew how it worked. Tough drills in heat like this didn’t exactly spur the desire to eat. It had the opposite affect, but you had to ignore it and shovel down the food. The physiology was pretty straightforward. They would be burning five-thousand-plus calories a day, and that meant either they had to eat a ton of food or they would begin to lose weight. With his frame and current weight, Rapp could lose ten pounds, but anything beyond that and he would open himself up to injury and illness.

Rapp tossed the copy of Time magazine on the floor and adjusted the bag of frozen peas. One of the instructors had pulled him aside as he was clearing his plate and told him he wanted him to get on his back and start icing. He then gave him strict orders to report any blood in his urine. Rapp simply nodded and took the bag of peas. After his sparring match and before dinner he’d had a few hours to reflect on what had happened while one of the instructors led him through a tough circuit of calisthenics and then a ten-mile run through the woods. Rapp made it seem like he was struggling, but he wasn’t. Especially with the running. He could last all day if he had to, but he didn’t want to show these guys too much too soon. Besides, give a teacher the choice between a straight A student who has all the answers and an earnest one who gets better over time, and they’ll pick the earnest one every time.

Rapp was still trying to absorb what lesson there was to learn from his earlier throwdown with the man whose name he still did not know. He was not happy that the man had changed his own rules in the middle of a fight, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it now. He had to focus on how it would affect things going forward. It was important to know how far he could push it, and if these instructors weren’t going to abide by the rules, they could hardly expect him to do so.

Rapp’s first chance to meet the other men was after his run. They were at the pull-up bars behind the barn doing four sets of twenty-five. In addition to the mean old bastard running the place, there were three more instructors. Just as his recruiter had told him, no one was to use his real name or discuss any personal information. The first two instructors were easy to keep straight. The short skinny one was called Sergeant Smith and the tall skinny one was called Sergeant Jones. They would start their days with Smith and end with Jones.

Rapp had to do two sets of twenty-five with a thirty-second rest between so he could catch up with the other recruits. After each man had polished off a full one hundred pullups Sergeant Smith went nuts. He lined them up and paced back and forth dumping disdain on them.

“One of you faggots doesn’t think he needs to do a full pullup,” The instructor started. “Thinks he can go halfway down and not quite all the way up. Well, I don’t like anything done half-assed so you ladies get to start over.”

Then the invective really started to fly as he called into question their manhood, honor, intelligence, and lineage. Rapp noted that he treated them as a group rather than singling out the supposed offender, who he wasn’t so sure even existed. He’d watched the other men, and none of them seemed to be slacking off. The sergeant was simply moving the goal line in hopes that one of them would grow sick of the games and quit. As he looked around, though, he didn’t see that happening. The other six were hard individuals.