Chapter 1

She had the brightest blue topaz eyes I’d ever seen.

Almost clear, a perfect pale blue, even in the dim light.

They flashed furiously as she struggled to free herself from my grip and my weight as I pinned her to the rough asphalt, her dark curly hair spread out in in a lush fan. Her skirt was 10 feet away next to the matching yellow purse where I’d thrown them; her blouse hung in shreds and the plastic front snap on her bra was broken, leaving it hanging off of her as an irrelevant scrap of blue lace. What modesty she had left was only preserved by a matching pair of light blue lace thong panties nearly the same color as her eyes. That modesty wasn’t going to survive long – as soon as I could trap both her wrists in one hand, I planned to rip the waist band through and tear them off her. It was, honestly, proving to be difficult – she was stronger than she looked, and she wasn’t wasting her breath screaming for help. Instead she had sunk her teeth into my right forearm. I’d managed to tear it free in a spray of blood that spattered both of us, then had to fight to recapture her wrist. Her second bite attempt bought her an elbow to the mouth that split her lip. More blood, hers now, mixing with mine.

I’d made pretty good progress on my initial attack, catching her guarded, but uncertain in the darkness of the empty lot, dimly lit by a distant, dying, streetlight. I’d yanked the heavy purse from her arm – no point in risking a gun or pepper spray - and ripped the skirt off in almost one motion, zipper teeth flying everywhere, while bearing her to the ground. I pinning her down, working my body between her legs. Despite her small size – maybe 110 pounds total – she was in very good shape and, as it turned out, she was a fighter.

We locked eyes for an instant – just a fraction of a second – and at that moment, I saw a slight smile curve her lips. I could feel myself grow hard against her between her legs– she clearly noticed, eyes widening as she hissed in renewed fury.

Then everything went wrong.

She snapped her teeth at my right arm again – and when I tried to arch it out of the way, her trapped left wrist shot straight out, dragging my grip with it; then she drove her right knee into my left hip – I was instantly overbalanced. I might have recovered, but I had to stretch my left leg out to compensate – and she promptly drove her knee into my groin. The world exploded in pain and stars of brilliant white light, as I felt her tear free of my grip. I kept rolling to my right, trying to gain distance to get to my feet. Her nails raked at my eyes, but I was moving too fast and had shut my eyes tightly against the pain. A fortunate accident more than anything else. Even as I got to my hands and knees I heard rushing feet and felt three rapid-fire sledgehammer impacts into my side. Ribs cracked and snapped under the blows. It almost seemed impossible for a person her size to deliver that kind of power in a kick. I rolled again using the force of her third kick, but this time I kicked my own legs out in a hard sweep, feeling it slam into her legs. I heard her slam into the ground as I rolled to my feet. Even so, as I locked eyes on her, she was already up – in the easy, upright, bouncy stance of a Tae Kwan Do practitioner. That at least explained those brutal kicks. I dropped into a lower, more grounded, Shotokan combat stance. She was covered in beads of sweat and blood, mouth open, panting with exertion, chest heaving, her small brown nipples crinkled by the cool air. She seemed to be favoring her left leg, so I stepped to circle to the injured side for a better attack angle.

A Klaxon blasted, jarring both of us. I straightened up and dropped my hands to my sides, watching out of the corner of my to make sure she did the same. She did. Watching me.

“Lights!”

Illumination grew as the grim, grey-ponytailed instructor walked over from the jersey barriers that circled the asphalt training floor. I could see Tier Two students staring wide-eyed from outside the barriers. They were filing in from an observation room. The training floor was asphalt and gravel, roughly the size of a basketball court. A row of cars sat parked along one edge.

“Agent.” She turned more toward him wordlessly, still keeping check on me out of the corner of her eye.

“I know he outweighs you, but when you force dismount him, you have to follow, keep your hip into his inner thigh. Gaining positive control form the superior position is the goal of that move. As you found out, even a solid strike to the groin isn’t necessarily disabling if your opponent has a high pain threshold. You really should have taken the option to flee when faced with an opponent who is this much bigger and stronger. Still. Passed.”

“Sergeant.” I half turned to him as well – still tracking her cautiously.

“Good initial attack, and rolling out of the dismount was a good choice, but you should have thrown the sweep the first time. That would have saved you some broken ribs. Passed. End exercise. End of training.” Green lights lit at that command and tension fell off us both.

He turned and walked off back to the T2 students – the men were openly gawking at my thong-clad opponent, while the women glared at me with a mixture of horror and revulsion.

The agent staggered a bit as she tried to step off; she almost fell, but caught herself, barely staying upright.

I peeled off my sweat-and-blood soaked t-shirt and extended it to her. She nodded tersely and took it, dropping her shredded shirt and bra to the ground before pulling it on, bouncing lightly on her one good foot. It made a pretty good mini-dress on her. It was more to protect her from getting the chills than for modesty – if, in fact, she had any modesty left after “Junior Woodchuck” (Outdoor Survival), “Alibies and Lies” (Covers and Legends) and “Advanced Beatings” (Counter Interrogation) classes.

“Infirmary?” I asked.

She nodded, then wiped her bleeding lip on the collar of the t-shirt. “I can’t walk at all. I don’t think anything is broke, but it won’t support my weight for a while.”

“The sweep?”

She nodded again. “Probably a bad bone bruise. Damn good thing this is my last day.”

“I can carry you there if we keep your weight on my right side. I need my ribs bound anyway.”

She nodded again. Social pleasantries like “Thank you” and “please” were firmly discouraged here – part of keeping students from getting to know each other. I knew she was a Federal police officer of some kind – BATF, FBI, or DEA, maybe - because he had addressed her as “Agent”. Likewise she knew I was with Military Intelligence as I was addressed as “Sergeant”. Civilians from intelligence agencies like CIA were generally addressed as “Officer”. Names weren’t used here at all.

The female T2 students watched in shock and disbelief a she let me gently pick her up and even more so when she draped an arm around my neck. They didn’t understand. They weren’t field operatives, they were just being given familiarization on how we trained here.

Where was “here”?

That would be a bit problematic. Suffice to say that it was somewhere east of the Mississippi. Maybe. It didn’t really have a name, just an ever-changing alphanumeric designator; so, in the irreverent tradition of spooks and spies everywhere, it went by several names: Saint Tristan’s Academy for Wayward Girls and Wicked Boys, Mistress Dominique’s Emporium of Pain, and, most commonly, Anti-Social Behavior 101. The schooling consisted of several classes geared to teach things not covered in a standard college curriculum - students were given a course of instruction based on their mission set.

What we had just finished was the final exercise for “No Means No”, a comprehensive anti-rape training set for female operatives. Rape is understandably a big fear for many female operatives working under cover, and the class was designed specifically to at least partially counter that. For the final scenario, male students who had completed “Mayhem” well above standard were selected at aggressors. We’d been given very specific instruction – and some training – for the scenario to make it as terrifying and as real as possible. We were matched with female students as much as possible to magnify the fear based on their psych profile.

It sounds horrifying, and it’s meant to be.

There are only half a dozen female operatives in training at any time, and it was simple to have them report to the admin office from the ersatz restaurant where they were finishing a cover exercise (what is more harmless than a waitress?). The easiest route was across the apparently empty, darkened, training room. After 6 months of training, they wouldn’t be completely unguarded, but they’d never even been told there was a final exercise for “No Means No”. The only warning they had was when the red “Exercise Begin” warning light kicked on with its accompanying klaxon; which also signaled the aggressor to attack. Even the gaudy yellow and red waitress uniform, with its too-short skirt and flimsy blouse was intended to make them feel vulnerable – and to signal all instructors that the exercise was underway. It also ensured that the aggressors weren’t accidentally triggered against a lost T2 student. And the aggressors were encouraged to be very aggressive – we could fail the exercise as easily as the female operatives. Anything short of actual penetration was allowed, even encouraged.

For us, this was the last exercise of the last class – the male students departed this evening, and the female students would leave the following day. Both after a careful screening interview.

We didn’t talk as I carried her down the hall, it just wasn’t done here. It was a short trip - someone had wisely designed the building so that the infirmary was on the same floor as the unarmed combat training room. Personnel got hurt here. A lot. There were no pads or mats on the training floor; knives were blunt, but metal, guns fired reduced load rubber bullets that hurt like hell. We didn’t write greeting cards for a living and everything here was intended to inculcate that.

The few personnel we passed simply ignored us; weird clothing and injuries were hardly unusual here. As I walked into the infirmary, the nurse simply said “Room 3”, so I carried my charge into the room and set her on the exam table as carefully as possible, although she still winced as her weight settled. Then I sat down in a side chair. Somewhere nearby, muffled sobbing filtered through the walls. She listened for a second, her blue eyes flickering around the room.

Quietly “Someone failed.”

I nodded “I’d guess.”

There was a long pause. Finally, without looking up, she asked, “So what was up with the hard-on?”

I had been so hoping she wasn’t going to mention that. “In six and a half months, the most meaningful human contact I’ve had was getting water boarded in Advanced Beatings. A pretty girl with blue eyes, pretty much naked under me? I’m only human, this practically qualified as a romantic evening out, considering.”

“I get that, I mean why only toward the end? A girl could take that as an insult”

I laughed. “I’m not into rape. Doesn’t do a thing for me. But when you smiled – probably thinking about how you were planning on smashing my balls – I knew that you knew it wasn’t real.”

She actually smiled at me. “I really got my head straight when I got my teeth into your arm. That was when I really accepted that it was another training scenario. When I smiled it was because the thought struck me that if I stopped struggling, I might actually get laid for the first time in half a year. Hell, if I’d have just waited another 30 second to throw the dismount, I’d have had an orgasm.”

“I wonder how the instructors would have handled that? Probably would have criticized our technique.”

She snickered “I can hear it now ‘Agent, you need to put more power into your thrusts and your angle needs improvement.’”

She buried her face in her hands as she fought to suppress her laughter, not entirely successfully, which had me fighting to do the same.

Then she looked up at me, tears of laughter streaming from her eyes “Can you imagine the T2 students?!”

At that point we both lost it and it took a while to catch our breath.

Before we could continue our conversation, a slightly harried doctor breezed in and began to examine her, which resulted in her being handed a pair of crutches. He also put a wrap on my ribs, mostly to stabilize them so they wouldn’t hurt as much. As usual, he didn’t bother with pain meds for either of us, just some anti-inflammatories. Once in the main hall, as we turned and headed in different directions, she looked me in the eye and smiled.

I watched her disappearing form and pondered the stretch she’d made in my arms as I carried her to the infirmary. I was pretty sure there’d been something, something important in that stretch and yawn. It only dawned on me as I got on the plane later that she still had my t-shirt.

****Two Years Later****

The Division Chief, Donna, had called me off of a well-earned leave with instructions to come in to the office immediately. So I headed in, unshaved, wearing sandals, shorts and a “Joe’s Crab Shack” T-Shirt. As soon as I stepped past her secretary and into the conference room I saw the “his-and-hers” suits, with standard issue government filler seated at her table looking at me expectantly. Deliberately ignoring them, I turned to Donna.

“What’s with Mulder and Scully here? Please tell me this isn’t an assist to the Feebees.”

She shot a glance at the two, who were looking me over with obvious distaste. “Long term covert surveillance, they’ll be in charge. This is coming down from the Director. We have to play ball – they need the language and tech capability.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes for a second. “Donna, completely aside from my personal feelings about this, look at them; they might as well have ‘F.B. fucking I.’ stamped on their foreheads. Anyone with a traffic ticket is probably running from the building right now - there is no way a cover operation using these two will work.”

The woman was glowering at me while the guy was trying to compose himself. Donna looked at me with exasperation, but she had to know this was coming.

The female agent finally spoke “What’s your damn problem?”

I yanked the side of my t-shirt up to expose the bullet scars on my side. “Last time I played with you guys, one of your agents went all law-and-order cowboy and got three of us shot up, including himself. I recovered his gun and settled the issue, and in return your agency wanted to prosecute me based on my failure to follow instructions. I wasn’t supposed to have a gun, so apparently, when he went down, I was supposed to just die in place. And if he would have waited 30 minutes like I told him to, the local LEOs would have helped take the ring down and there would have been no problems. But he didn’t want to share the fucking credit.”

She paused, glancing at her partner. To him she said “I told you that report looked odd.”

Back to me “I’m hardly going to go undercover, Executive Assistant Directors rarely do. For the record, I’m the one that squashed the intent-to-prosecute. The report just smelled wrong. Look, we brought an agent who is just as skittish about using untested military assets as you are of working with us. If the two of you give the operation a no-go, we’ll look at different options.”

I bit my tongue and nodded rather than reply – an Executive Assistant Director (EAD) at the FBI was a little higher up the food chain than even I was prepared to tell to fuck off. Donna was looking a little too smug – we’d have to discuss this one later.

A second later, the door opened behind me and a female voice, started “Ma’am, the tech looks good, if they just train me on the equipment, we don’t need...”

As I turned, the voice drained away and she stood staring at me wide-eyed and mute. I was just as silent, lost in the impossible blue topaz eyes.

She found her voice first. “Sergeant”

“Agent”

I could sense the confusion from Donna and the other FBI agents. It was about to get worse.

“I still have your t-shirt. Have your balls healed?” Her eyes sparkled with amusement.

“Oh yeah, they’re fine. How’s your ass?”

“As good as new.”

“You can keep the t-shirt. I was never at Rutgers.”

Her lips curved in a Cupid ‘s bow. “I was planning on keeping it – it’s my favorite sleeping shirt. The blood never did really come out, I forgot to wash it in ‘Cold.’ Set the stains permanently.”

Donna arched one eyebrow at me in amusement “Friend of yours?”

“Old school chum from St. Tristan’s.”

The agent gave me a wicked smile. “We had a very short, very intense, very, very, physical relationship. I couldn’t walk for a month.”

Two could play this game, I returned her smile. “She broke my heart, and my ribs.”

Her two supervisors looked confused and more than a little uncomfortable. The agent noticed and decided clarification might be a good idea.

“We were opponents in scenario based individual combat training during a specialized course for undercover operatives a couple years ago.”

The male agent still looked lost, but the EAD nodded with comprehension.

“That course has a reputation for being rather brutally realistic.”

The dark haired woman continued on to explain the scenario, although it sounded rather clinical and detached compared to my visceral and intense memories. At least she didn’t mention the hard-on.

Donna looked a little concerned. “This may not work – I did my training there, too. I’m not sure how I’d handle trying to work with my former ... opponent. And it has been nearly ten years for me.”

The agent smiled “I’ll be fine. Not that it wasn’t terrifying at the time, but it was a training scenario and he was following his instructions.”

Donna looked impressed, then turned to me. “So are you willing to do this?”

I nodded, reflexively watching the agent out of the corner of my eye, “As long as we can work out the details to make sense, I’m willing to work with her. We generally have the same training and she keeps her head under pressure.”

Emma. Her name was Emma. And she was brilliant.

She had done much of the planning for the operation and it didn’t remotely resemble the usual cookie cutter goat-fucks that federal LEOs (law enforcement officers) usually came up with. Instead of surveillance vans disguised as telephone linemen or whatever, we were simply going to rent a house and work in the area. Emma had actually gotten her LPN license somewhere along the way and kept the license current – that way the FBI could put fake LPN documentation in a different name without taking risks that she would be over her head. With her working part time at a low-cost women’s health clinic on the edge of the neighborhood and me working as a substitute teacher for the High Schools nearby, we had pretty good control over our schedules and ample time to work the target. We could hide in plain sight. Emma and I built our cover. We would present ourselves as newlyweds, who had spent six months apart because I had been teaching overseas to complete a scholarship requirement. The target was a Romanian neighborhood where the FBI had multiple tips that weapons were being smuggled to drug cartels and, more importantly to me, terrorist cells in the US. Important to me because the anti-terrorism rules allowed me to be seconded to the FBI as a technical asset as a linguist. Several tips led to the same neighborhood, but none of them named specific people – the court order request must have been spectacular, because we had almost carte blanche for the surveillance based on “Compelling need of the state”. We’d have a suite of cell phone intercept equipment, parabolic microphones and a plethora of other equipment ranging from lipstick cameras to audio bugs disguised as all kinds of items.