Chapter 1

When she came back from the Middle East, Abby was uncertain how she would ever fit back into normal civilian lifestyles after the violence and bloody chaos of rooting out the infrastructure of terrorists hiding in plain sight in the midst of a frightened populace.

Her last assignment almost ended in disaster because she was shot two times at the outset losing a chunk of her left breast and taking shrapnel in both her buttocks. She was able to shrug that off and make the shot that finished Ali Ben Quetta and his reign of terror south of Babylon. The sight of his head splitting open like a watermelon in her optics was more satisfying than being eaten by some friendly female officer with time on her hands.

It took longer for her ass to heal than her tit and that surprised her but the shrapnel was wicked jagged and had some nasty chemicals ingrained in the surface. The plastic surgeon was able to replicate her missing part of tit and there was no scar visible even in full daylight.

Her buttocks were another story. Both of her cheeks were peppered with white lines on her light brown toned skin and she looked like she had dandruff all over her ass. After some thought, she decided to decorate both cheeks with a couple of tattoos that covered the scars and made viewers think she was a fan of both angels and devils and gave them equal status on her posterior.

After a careful review, they allowed her to re-enlist despite her full house of five purple hearts and pneumonia spots on her x-ray that were a carry-over of her time in the freezing POW prison where she had a lot more to worry about than silly x-rays.

Her only problem was that the Central Command didn’t want her around anymore because a few high-ranking Officer types had gotten it into their heads that she knew too much about their sometimes poorly-arrived-at decisions and might blab to one of the outside agencies that she often worked for on-loan from Headquarters.

When her orders finally arrived, she was scheduled to be transferred to some outfit that came under the new Homeland world-wide line of defense that was designed to end a threat before it could even begin. They were billeted on a private island off the coast of Sicily and were instructed not to enter Sicily with firearms unless on an assigned operation that required their transit by land and not sea.

She had been promoted against her will to a Warrant Officer and her job description was as a specialist in field acquisitions, whatever the fuck that was, because she had no idea at all. It would be hard to explain her need for various weapons including the sniper rifles that went with her wherever she went.

A sealed envelope gave her new official U.S. identification papers that documented her employment as a civilian contractor for the U.S. Forces in Italy as a traveling Hairstylist tending to male and female DOD and State Dept. personnel assigned to duty in both Italy and Greece combined. A separate envelope gave her credentials to travel in Italy and Greece but a warning in capital letters stated she was not to enter Turkey at any time for business or pleasure because a warrant had been issued against her for several deaths at undisclosed locations in Turkey and adjoining regions. She assumed that would be Syria, Iraq and Iran and quite possibly Lebanon because she had been active there doing contract work for an alphabet soup agency that vowed they had never heard her name.

Warrant Officer First Class Abby Cox was sitting quietly in the rail station waiting room fully aware that at least three cameras were scanning over her left to right, back to front and even up and down with technical precision. Of course, the whole thing was run by the Carabineri and they tended to keep all details to their internal use not sharing with either the local police or the Americans on the large base just outside the city. The Airbase was a hub of activity for the entire southern flank of NATO and flights across the Mediterranean were ongoing both day and night. She didn’t look much like an American and certainly didn’t look like she was in the Air Force with her Orange tinged hairstyle and her skintight black leather pants that made her look like one of those “biker” girls that ran with the wild guys.

A couple of young Airmen in uniform made a half-hearted effort to pick her up even though they were on a tight schedule and certainly had no time for fooling around with some strange female in a foreign country. Still, you had to give them an “A” for effort from the way they tried to use their limited Italian to talk her into going with them to the nearby bar for a drink.

Abby smiled at the young guys knowing they were just trying to make their European tour a little spicier than burgers at the snack bar on base. In a way, she felt a little sorry for them because they didn’t quite fit in between the two worlds of military life on one side that gave most of the benefits to the officers and saved damn few for the enlisted swine that were needed to make the whole thing work and the outside world of European lifestyles that considered the military as losers with no future and useless drainers of the profits from civilian taxes for no specific purpose except to insulate the uninformed Americans from the reality of doing business with the Russians and staying out of trouble in the Middle East.

She pretended she didn’t understand a word they were saying and her blank poker face was working just fine with that objective. The younger one kept looking at a little phrase book and saying silly things like “Do you like to drink wine?” in very bad Italian making the other Italians in ear range smile with derision at their pathetic effort at linguistics. Abby didn’t say much because she didn’t want to clue in the others around them that she was actually not a native herself. She spoke and understood Italian pretty good but from experience she knew a non-native speaker was always at risk from detection because it was easy to make a small mistake without even knowing your fault.