Chapter 267

As I was getting off the plane, I was greeted by Frank along with several men I did not know. After a closed door meeting in the pilot's office, I realized we were facing a dilemma. The mission for this group of trainees had been pushed up a week.

Ching Lee and I no longer had the luxury of another full week to train them. I did not like it, a lot of things were going too passed over or just lightly touched upon. The mission had to go next Thursday night. That meant the training was over Tuesday. It would take Tuesday evening and Wednesday just to get the team into position. The only solution was to train Saturday and Sunday. The answer to the first question was 'yes', we would do it.

In the mornings, the group was receiving their Intel on this upcoming classified mission. I assumed they were going over all the logistics what was expected to happen before and after the 'go' hour. I took that to mean that whatever the extraction produced had to be carried to a secure facility. It would also explain the need for heavy hand to hand combat training

After the cloak and dagger events that took place after 911, Europe was no longer a safe place to carry out long term interrogations.

Nearly every safe house and quarters the intelligence structure had was reveled by the NY Times and similar liberal news organizations trying to make the Bush Administration, the war in Iraq and America in general look bad. The end result was it put covert missions like snatch and grabs a very dangerous profession.

European politicians threw in their hands and ran like a bad case of the diarrhea to get away from the media glare. They denied they knew anything and passed all kinds of laws banning participation in covert ops.

If the agency still had a place in Europe it had to have been buried deep. Even Gitmo was Ass-hole deep in lawyers now that our liberally insane administration had decided that terrorist had more rights and special privileges than honest hard working Americans.

I assumed that there were some other facilities in Central America that the agency could use, deep in the jungle. The agency had been heavily involved in covert operations there since Ronnie was President. In the fast changing world of terrorism old enemies become new friends when the threat comes close to your home.

Never forget the old saying in a time of war, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." It always made strange bed partners in many places in the world even so, you still sleep with one eye closed.

All that was above and beyond anything I could do. What I could do was train them to the best of my ability in the short time we had left and hope not hurt any of them in the process.

Ching Lee and I split the group as we usually did and worked hard at teaching aggressive hand to hand combat techniques. We spent equal time teaching defensive and offensive maneuvers; to drill attack and defend over and over again.

In the back of my mind I wondered why the agency was putting so much emphasis on hand to hand. Usually hand to hand was a last resort stance. These tactics were used when the enemy had overwhelmed your defensive lines or the lines had been infiltrated by some covert action or you were flat out of ammunition and to willingly surrender was not an option.

That was one of the reasons I taught myself to count my rounds I fired from my pistol in combat during my time in the sandbox. I had seen firsthand what they did to their own women when they were tired of them. It was a short thought for what they would do an American female soldier captured alive. Death would come painfully and slowly over several days, weeks or even months. I wanted to have the one last round for me if it ever came to making that choice.

Hand to hand meant that the agency had a plan to infiltrate the structure in strength and disable as many as possible while leaving them alive for extraction to interrogate later. Bullets in the heat of the moment left few alive or not for long.