Page 2 of The Woman Left Behind

Shit.Her neck just kept sticking itself out.

MacNamara turned his rabid-wolverine gaze on her, and once again silence filled the little room. He began tapping the end of his pen against the top of his desk in a rapid tattoo. His expression said he was thinking of places where he could dump her body. She imagined he knew plenty and might have used a few.

But then he said curtly, “The video games in the break room.”

Ah.A low murmur circulated. Several months ago the video war games had been installed, and a bunch of them had immediately become immersed in playing all through their breaks, competing to see who could score the highest. Jina was an old hand at computer games and had really gotten into the friendly competition, consistently racking up the highest scores and pissing off the guys who had done a lot of big talking about girls not being any good at gaming. She’d shown them. The games were complicated and very lifelike, far more advanced than anything commercially available; the coolness factor had been off the charts. Evidently so had the sneaky factor.

She held up her hand again. Jeez, was she the only one with a mouth? Why didn’t some of the others ask the questions and make the observations?

MacNamara pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something under his breath.

“I’m not qualified to go out with one of the teams.” She was a little embarrassed to be stating the obvious, but it was only God’s truth. No matter how high she had scored in the computer games, the members of the GO-Teams were like supermen. They swam and ran for miles. They spent endless hours in training. They could shoot an acorn out of an oak tree at a gazillion yards. She knew sometimes they worked with women who had field skills, but she wasn’t one of those women. She knew how to swim, she jogged around some, but Fanny Fitness she wasn’t.

“None of you are,” he snapped. “All of you will receive training. You won’t be doing the physical part of the operations, anyway.”

“Then whatwillwe—” Jina began, to be cut off by a wearily upheld hand.

“Let me remind all of you that you’re sworn to secrecy about any and everything connected with this job. The answer is, the team members are very good at situational awareness, but at a cost. Being aware of a goatherd coming toward them and how soon he’ll get there distracts from mission focus. Not a lot, because we’re talking about people good enough to be on a GO-Team, but still—seconds count. We’ve run thousands of analyses, and in every instance having an on-site operator dedicated to movement and timing and situational awareness has made a difference. The operator would be surveilling the surroundings via drone, controlled by a computer. With that extra eye, the chance of mission success increases by three percent; the chance of team member casualties decreases by two percent. The changes are small but critical.”

Especially to the team members suffering the casualties,Jina thought wryly. Okay, she could see why this was important. What she couldn’t see was herself in any field situation. She wasn’t... well, she wasn’t anything special. She wasn’t particularly athletic, she wasn’t intrepid, she wasn’t psychic so how the heck would she know which direction the goatherd was going to take, and she’d never had any ambition to be good at those things. She was good at a particular war game, that was all.

This wasn’t going to work.

“This won’t work,” she said.

MacNamara propped his head in his hands and gripped his hair with both hands, as if intending to pull it all out, though she had to admit he could be thinking about crushing her skull.

“Of course it won’t,” he snarled at his desktop. “It isn’t as if we know anything about what we’re doing, as if we haven’t considered all the possibilities and potential roadblocks, as if we haven’t analyzed all ten of you to the point we know more about you than you know about yourselves. We thought we’d just throw the ten of you out there for shits and giggles, to see how bad you can fuck things up.”

She didn’t like being analyzed without knowing she was being analyzed. It was kind of like some perv spying through a peephole in the women’s bathroom. On the other hand, she knew the analysts were top-notch at their jobs, so that was reassuring even if it wasn’t convincing.

“What if some of us aren’t interested?” she asked, because no one else was uttering a word—still,the ball-less wonders. And she was the only one in the room who didn’t have any, other than the ones in her mind.Mind testicles.Okay, gross.

“Then clean out your stuff and find another job.” MacNamara gave her the evil eye. “I don’t want quitters. People have already been hired to fill your previous positions.”

Finally—finally!—someone else spoke up. “So if we can’t handle the training, or get hurt on a mission, we’re out of a job.”

MacNamara’s mouth thinned to a straight line, and his mad-dog eyes glinted, but thank God they were glinting at someone else. “I take care of my people,” he growled. “If you get hurt, you’ll be treated the same as any other team member. You’ll get medical care, reassignment, a pension—whatever it takes. This is a hard job, people. Out of everyone who has played those games, just the ten of you scored high enough to be considered. I wouldn’t be making this move if we didn’t think the benefits were worth the risk. You won’t be in direct action unless something goes wrong, but you have to be in good-enough shape, and have sharp-enough field skills, that you won’t be a hindrance to the mission operators. Any more questions? Didn’t think so. Clean out your old desks and report back at oh-seven-hundred tomorrow, to the basement. Wear shorts and tees, and athletic shoes. You’ll be taken to another location and your PT will begin.”

PT.Oh, joy,Jina thought.Kill me now.

The decrepit, rusty, unremarkable fifteen-seat Ford Transit van came to a halt with a whine of brakes and groan of transmission. Its condition had passed “used” a long time ago and was now in the “could die at any time” category. The seats were worn and torn, and there was a hole in the floor through which Jina had watched the asphalt blurring beneath them. The motor coughed like a fifty-year smoker, the shocks were shot, and the steering groaned a protest at every move. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d had to push it to their destination.

But the vehicle had made it, not without a lot of prayer and crossed fingers. The guy sitting next to the side door opened it, and the ten of them crawled out. The last one out closed the door, and the latch had barely caught before the driver stepped on the gas and the van wheezed and growled its way back to wherever it stayed when it wasn’t needed.

They all looked around. “Where the hell are we?” one guy wondered aloud.

BFE,Jina thought, but kept her mouth shut. She’d kind of paid attention to direction and knew they were somewhere in Virginia. The van had deposited them at one end of a big open space scattered with piles of hay bales, wooden walls, giant knotted ropes, low tangles of barbwire, and other fixtures whose use wasn’t immediately apparent but were probably meant for torture—hers. A dirt track encircled the entire thing, disappearing into the forest at the far end, and even the track wasn’t a normal one. There were berms and hills and stretches of either sand or mud. What wasn’t visible was any sign of civilization, such as a coffee shop.

No longer than they’d been standing there she could already feel the red dust beginning to coat her throat, her nasal passages. She’d seen plenty of red dust in Georgia; she wasn’t afraid of it, but neither did she like it. She didn’t like dirt, she didn’t like sweating, she didn’t like anything about this.

Suck it up, buttercup.Sweating was better than unemployment—for now, anyway. She wasn’t making any promises about tomorrow.

People moved around them in a confusing tangle. She could see at least thirty men scattered around the training area, doing various things that looked impossible for normal humans. The sudden, rapid crack of full-auto weapons made her jump and look wildly around for where the shots came from, but there were no bull’s-eye targets pinned up anywhere that she could see. The acrid smell of burnt gunpowder filled the dusty air, so the shots had to have been close by. Her small group stood knotted together, silently watching the men doing the life-endangering things they themselves were supposed to learn how to do. What was there to say? Their options were this, or go job hunting. She did the buttercup thought again, trying to buttress herself.

The sun beat down. Despite herself, she was sweating anyway. That infernal dust turned her throat into Death Valley. Finally someone noticed them—or, rather, decided they’d been made to wait long enough, because she doubted anything escaped notice by this bunch—and a burly guy with a shaved head, deep bronze tan, and short gray beard ambled toward them. He wore a sweat-soaked olive-green tee shirt, khaki shorts, and desert sand boots. A fine layer of dust coated every inch of him, except where sweat had turned it into streaks of mud. He looked like a moving wall of muscle. When he got closer, he said, “You the FNGs, right?”

Fucking New Guys.They couldn’t work where they worked and not have picked up a lot of military slang, so none of them committed the embarrassment of asking what the initials meant. Instead there were some awkward head bobs.

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