Elena had never been more aware of every sense. The smell of copper from blood. The smell of burning propellant from her weapon. The sound of rounds cracking past, the deeper boom of friendlies engaging with heavier weapons. The texture of dirt under her body. The weight of Callahan’s gear. The specific tension in the CAT tourniquet’s windlass.
Time became strange.
Everything happened very fast and very slow simultaneously.
Air support arrived nine minutes after the initial contact.
Apache helicopters, their chain guns turning the ambush positions into dust and fire.
The firing stopped.
The team medic reached them ninety seconds later, took over treatment, started IV fluids.
Medevac helicopter landed six minutes after that.
They loaded Callahan, still conscious, eyes locked on Elena’s face.
The interpreter didn’t survive.
His body was recovered, handled with respect, prepared for a return home.
Major Callahan survived the helicopter ride to Bagram by ninety seconds.
The field surgeon later wrote in his report that without the tourniquet application and sustained pressure under fire, she would have bled out in under three minutes.
Elena’s actions had bought enough time for professional medical intervention to work.
Three days later, Elena stood in the hospital at Bagram Air Base, looking at Major Callahan in the ICU. Tubes and monitors and the steady beep of machines tracking her vitals.
The major was barely conscious, but her eyes found Elena’s face. Her hand moved weakly, grabbed Elena’s wrist.
“They’re coming for you,” Callahan whispered, voice rough from intubation. “Special program. Women operators. Say yes.
“That’s an order, Ravencraft.”
“Ma’am, you need to rest.”
“Promise me. Say yes.”
“I promise.”
Callahan’s grip relaxed. She closed her eyes.
She died that night from a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot that broke loose and traveled to her lungs.
The wound had been survivable. The complications killed her anyway.
War doesn’t care about fairness.
Elena stood at the memorial service wearing her dress uniform, holding herself together through discipline and training. Callahan’s personal effects were shipped home to family in Tennessee. Among them were two sets of dog tags: the ones she wore and a spare set she kept with her gear.
After the service, a woman approached Elena. Tall, lean, early fifties, wearing civilian clothes but moving like military. She had the look of someone who’d spent a lot of time in places that didn’t appear on regular maps.
“Sergeant Ravencraft,” the woman said. “Lieutenant Colonel Katherine Voss. Special Activities Division. Can we talk somewhere private?”
They walked to an empty maintenance bay, far from listening ears.
“Major Callahan sent me a message six hours before she died,” Voss said without preamble. “She said I needed to talk to you. Said you were exactly what we were looking for.”
“For what, ma’am?”
“A program. Classified. Training female soldiers for missions requiring cultural access in denied areas.
“Not officially special operations, but using their methods, their standards, their instructors.”
Voss paused, reading Elena’s expression.
“Twelve slots. Forty-eight applicants. Selection standards equivalent to Special Forces Assessment. Training conducted by tier-one instructors: Israeli Krav Maga specialists, Delta Force close-quarters battle experts, Ranger-qualified medical personnel.
“Eight months. Fort Bragg. At a compound that doesn’t exist on any official map.”
Elena pulled out the spare dog tags she’d been carrying—the ones from Major Callahan’s personal effects that someone had quietly given her. She held them up.
“What would I be doing exactly?”
“Things that matter. Things that save lives. Things male soldiers can’t do because of who they are.
“You saw it yourself. Half the population we couldn’t access. That’s changing. You’d be part of that change.”
Elena looked at the dog tags, thought about her father, about the four veterans who trained her, about Callahan’s last words.
“When do I start?”
Voss smiled slightly, reached up, and pulled back her right sleeve just enough to show a small tattoo on her inner wrist. A dragon, stylized, no bigger than a quarter.
“Welcome to the sisterhood, Sergeant Ravencraft. Welcome to Operation Sphinx.”
And that’s where the real story began.
The compound at Fort Bragg didn’t appear on any official map.
No signs marked the turnoff from the main road, just a gap in the tree line and a dirt track that wound through North Carolina pine forest for two miles before reaching a chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
The guards at the gate wore no unit patches, no name tapes, just blank fatigues and weapons held with the casual competence of people who knew how to use them.
Elena arrived on a gray morning in May 2021, one month after Major Callahan’s death, sitting in the back of an unmarked van with five other women.
Nobody spoke during the drive.
They’d all received the same instructions: pack light, tell no one, prepare for eight months of training that officially didn’t exist.
The compound itself was spare and functional. Barracks built from concrete blocks. A medical facility. A kill house for close-quarters combat training. An obstacle course that looked like it had been designed by someone with a sadistic imagination. And a classroom building where the windows were covered with blackout material.
Forty-eight women stood in formation that first morning, ages ranging from twenty-two to thirty-four, drawn from combat MOSs across the Army: infantry, military police, intelligence specialists, medics.
They’d all volunteered. They’d all passed preliminary screening. Most of them wouldn’t finish.
Lieutenant Colonel Katherine Voss stood before them in running gear, her dragon tattoo visible on her right wrist. She was fifty-four years old, had spent twenty-six years in service doing things she’d never be able to talk about publicly, and she looked at the formation with the expression of someone evaluating raw material for a difficult project.
“Operation Sphinx,” she said, her voice carrying clearly in the morning air, “exists to create a capability the United States military currently lacks.
“Female operators who can access denied environments, conduct intelligence collection, perform direct-action missions in contexts where male soldiers cannot effectively operate.”
She paused, let that sink in.
“The selection standards are equivalent to Special Forces Assessment. The training pipeline uses tier-one instructors and methodologies.
“Approximately twenty-five percent of you will graduate. The rest will return to your units with no record of being here. No explanation beyond ‘temporary duty reassignment.’
“This program is classified. If you discuss it outside authorized channels, you will face criminal prosecution.
“If you fail, you will forget this place exists. If you quit, same result.
“Questions?”
Nobody raised a hand.
Voss smiled slightly.
“Good. Week one begins now. Run.”
The first two weeks were designed to break people.
Not physically—though the physical component was brutal: twelve-mile ruck marches with sixty-five-pound packs in under three hours, obstacle courses run until muscle failure, combat fitness assessments that pushed everyone past what they thought were their limits.
But the real pressure was psychological.
Sleep deprivation. Constant evaluation. The grinding awareness that every mistake was being recorded, every weakness identified.
Fifteen women quit in week one.
They simply decided the cost wasn’t worth the reward, walked into the administrative building, and signed the paperwork that would send them back to their previous assignments.
No judgment. No shame. Just a recognition that this particular path wasn’t for them.
Nine more were cut in week two, not because they quit, but because the cadre determined they didn’t have the right combination of attributes. Too slow to adapt. Too rigid in their thinking. Unable to handle ambiguity.
Good soldiers.
Just not right for this specific mission set.
Elena survived those first weeks by remembering everything her father and his friends had taught her.
When the ruck march felt impossible, she heard Gunnery Sergeant O’Sullivan’s voice:
Pain is just information. Note it and move on.
When the sleep deprivation made her want to quit, she remembered Chief Kowalski:
Fatigue makes cowards of us all. The warrior acknowledges the fatigue and performs anyway.
When the evaluators pushed her to make decisions under pressure, she heard Colonel Blackwood:
Perfect information doesn’t exist. Make the least bad decision with what you have.
By week four, twenty-four women remained.
The cadre shifted from breaking people to building them.
The Israeli instructor arrived in week five.
He was short, compact, maybe forty years old, with scars on his hands and a manner that suggested he’d seen more combat than he’d ever discuss.
He’d served with Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s premier special operations unit, and he taught Krav Maga not as a martial art but as a survival system.
“Fighting is not sport,” he said on the first day, his accent thick but his English clear. “Fighting is chaos.
“Fighting is when someone is trying to kill you and you must kill them first or die.
“Everything I teach you is about that moment. Forget fair. Forget rules. Survive by any means necessary.”
The training was brutal and practical.
Eye strikes. Throat strikes. Groin attacks. Joint destructions. How to fight from inferior positions. How to access weapons when you’re being controlled. How to create space when someone larger is trying to crush you. How to transition from empty hand to knife to gun in a single fluid movement.
Elena absorbed it like a sponge.
Her father had taught her the fundamentals, but this was the advanced course, taught by someone who’d used these techniques in actual combat.
She practiced until the movements became automatic, until she could execute them exhausted, injured, under stress, in the dark.
The instructor noticed.
After a particularly intense session, he pulled her aside.
“You’ve trained before,” he said. “Not Army training. Something else.”
“My father. Gulf War veteran. He and his friends taught me.”
The instructor nodded slowly.
“They taught you well. You have foundation. Now we build the house.” He tapped his temple. “But remember: the best fight is the one you don’t have.
“Be invisible. When you must be seen, be undeniable.”
Week eight brought SERE training—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—the practical skills of staying alive in hostile territory and resisting interrogation if captured.
They were driven into the woods with minimal equipment, given a grid coordinate forty kilometers away, and told to reach it within seventy-two hours while a hunter force tried to capture them.
Elena partnered with a woman named Lieutenant Jessica Torres, twenty-nine years old, intelligence specialist with two previous deployments.
They moved through the North Carolina wilderness using techniques Chief Kowalski had drilled into Elena years earlier. They avoided trails, moved at night, used terrain for concealment.
They reached the extraction point in sixty-eight hours.
Then came the resistance phase.
Captured. Hooded. Placed in stress positions. Subjected to sleep deprivation and simulated interrogation.
The point wasn’t to teach them to resist forever. Nobody could.
The point was to teach them how to buy time, how to manage information, how to protect critical intelligence even under extreme duress.
Elena broke on hour sixty-eight, gave up false information, fed them a cover story that sounded plausible.
The interrogator smiled and released her.
In the debrief, the instructor explained she’d held longer than most Delta Force operators in the same scenario.
“But remember this feeling,” he said. “The helplessness, the fear, the knowledge that you told them things you didn’t want to tell them.
“Remember it and do everything in your power to never be captured for real.”
Eight more women quit during SERE Week.
The psychological pressure was too much. They’d volunteered for challenge, not torture.
No one blamed them.
Week twelve brought trauma medicine, taught by Ranger-qualified physician assistants who’d done multiple combat deployments.
The training went far beyond standard Combat Lifesaver certification.
Surgical cricothyrotomy—creating an emergency airway when someone’s throat was crushed.
Needle decompression for tension pneumothorax—when air trapped in the chest cavity was crushing the lungs.
Hemorrhage control for wounds that regular tourniquets couldn’t address.
They practiced on pig cadavers, on high-fidelity mannequins that bled realistic blood, and eventually on each other under controlled circumstances, actually performing procedures up to the point where real damage would occur.
The training was designed to remove hesitation.
In combat, hesitation killed people.
They needed to be able to cut into human flesh without freezing, to make life-or-death medical decisions in seconds.
Elena’s hands never shook.
The instructors noticed. That night in Afghanistan with Major Callahan had prepared her for this in ways most of the other students hadn’t experienced.
Four more women were cut during medical training. Not because they couldn’t learn the procedures, but because they couldn’t perform them under stress.
In the simulations—where explosions were detonating, instructors were yelling, and multiple casualties needed treatment simultaneously—they froze.
Good people, but not ready for this level of intensity.
By week sixteen, twelve women remained.
The cadre announced they’d survived selection.
Now came the actual training.
Delta Force instructors taught close-quarters battle.
Room clearing with live ammunition, multiple shooters moving through structures, making split-second decisions about threats.
They learned to transition seamlessly from rifle to pistol, to shoot while moving, to engage targets in confined spaces where one mistake could kill a teammate.
The training was conducted in the kill house, a modular facility that could be reconfigured into different layouts.
At first, they used simulation ammunition. Then they progressed to live fire with role players acting as hostages and threats.
The stress was immense.
The learning curve was steep.
But gradually, over hundreds of repetitions, the skills became ingrained.
Elena’s background with O’Sullivan gave her an advantage. She already understood marksmanship fundamentals, already knew how to manage a weapon under stress.
Now she was learning to apply those skills in three-dimensional environments with teammates depending on her judgment.
Cultural operations training came from instructors who’d spent years working in denied areas.
They taught the nuances of engaging with populations that didn’t trust Americans, didn’t trust outsiders, didn’t trust women in nontraditional roles.
How to build rapport. How to ask questions that didn’t sound like interrogation. How to observe and gather intelligence while appearing to do something completely different.
“Your gender is your advantage,” one instructor said. “In most traditional cultures, women talk to women about things they’d never discuss with men.
“You can access information that male operators cannot. But you must be culturally competent. You must understand the local context. You must build genuine relationships, not just extract intelligence.”
The training included language basics for multiple regions, understanding of religious and cultural practices, and practical skills like how to dress appropriately, how to navigate social structures, how to recognize when you’re being tested or deceived.
Week twenty-four brought the integrated training exercise, a seventy-two-hour field problem that combined everything they’d learned.
Navigate to multiple objectives. Conduct reconnaissance. Perform a direct-action mission in the kill house. Provide trauma care to simulated casualties. Evade a hunter force. Extract to a designated point.
Elena’s partner was Jessica Torres.
They’d trained together since week eight, developed an understanding that came from shared hardship.
The exercise began at midnight on a cold October night.
They were given minimal equipment, a series of grid coordinates, and instructions that were deliberately vague.
For sixty-eight hours, everything went according to plan.
They navigated successfully. They gathered the required intelligence. They executed the direct-action mission in the kill house flawlessly, cleared four rooms, neutralized six threats, extracted a hostage role player without injury.
Then, at hour sixty-eight, Jessica landed wrong coming off a rope obstacle and broke her ankle.
The sound was audible, a crack that made Elena’s stomach drop.
Jessica went down, couldn’t put weight on the leg, face pale with pain.
They were eight miles from the extraction point. The hunter force was between them and the objective.
The rules allowed for calling a safety abort, but that meant automatic failure of the exercise.
Elena looked at Jessica. Jessica looked back.
“Leave me,” Jessica said. “Complete the mission.”
“Not happening.”
“That’s an order, Sergeant.”
“With respect, ma’am, I’m not leaving you. We finish together or we don’t finish.”
Elena fashioned a splint from branches and paracord, gave Jessica an improvised crutch, and then simply picked her up in a fireman’s carry.
One hundred thirty-five pounds of soldier plus gear, plus weapons.
She settled the weight across her shoulders and started moving.
Eight miles through North Carolina forest in the dark, carrying a casualty, evading a hunter force that had thermal optics and superior numbers.
Elena drew on everything Chief Kowalski had taught her about land navigation and movement.
She used terrain for concealment, moved during the hunter force’s shift changes when they were less alert, paused when Jessica needed to catch her breath.
They reached the extraction point at hour ninety, twenty minutes before the deadline.
Elena set Jessica down gently, and they both collapsed.
The evaluators found them there, exhausted beyond description, but mission complete.
The lead instructor, a grizzled Special Forces sergeant major with twenty-eight years in service, looked at them and shook his head slowly.
“First time anyone’s completed this exercise carrying a casualty the full distance,” he said. “Most people call the safety abort. Some people leave their partner and complete solo.
“Nobody carries someone eight miles and makes the timeline.”
He extended his hand to Elena.
She shook it, too tired to speak.
“You’ve got something special, Ravencraft. Don’t ever lose it.”
Week thirty-two, graduation day.
Twelve women stood in formation. Twelve out of the original forty-eight who’d started.
They’d survived selection, completed training, proven they belonged.
They represented something the American military had never had before: a cadre of female operators trained to the same standard as special operations forces.
The ceremony was private.
No cameras. No press. No official record.
Just the twelve graduates, the cadre who trained them, and a handful of senior officers who’d supported the program from the shadows.
Lieutenant Colonel Voss gave a short speech.
“You are weapons the enemy will never see coming.
“Invisible until necessary. Undeniable when revealed.
“You don’t exist on paper, but you exist where it matters. In the dark places where this country needs you most.
“You will do missions that cannot be acknowledged. You will face dangers that won’t be recognized. You will save lives that will never know you saved them.
“That is the burden you have chosen to carry. I’m honored to serve with you.”
Then came the tattoo ceremony.
One by one, each woman received the small dragon mark on her inner right wrist. The symbol of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, protector of women.
Small enough to be discreet. Permanent enough to last forever.
A mark of completion, of capability, of belonging to something that officially didn’t exist.
Elena sat in the chair and watched the tattoo artist work. The needle stung, but she barely noticed.
When it was done, she looked at the small dragon on her wrist and felt something shift inside her.
She was no longer just Elena Ravencraft, infantry soldier.
She was something more, something harder to define but impossible to deny.
The sisterhood, the twelve who’d survived.
They didn’t all like each other, didn’t all agree on everything, but they shared something that no one else could understand. They’d been through fire together—literally and metaphorically—and come out forged into something new.
The missions began immediately.
They were split into teams and deployed to different theaters.
Elena found herself back in Afghanistan for six months, then Syria for four months, then Yemen for three months.
The work was exactly what they’d trained for. Accessing populations male soldiers couldn’t reach. Gathering intelligence through relationships male operators couldn’t build. Providing medical care that opened doors conventional forces couldn’t open.
She worked village operations in Afghanistan, building networks of women who provided information about Taliban movements.
She conducted medical support missions in Syria, treating children in areas where any American military presence was officially denied.
She tracked high-value targets in Yemen by developing relationships with their family members, particularly the women who knew everything but told male interrogators nothing.
The work was dangerous, exhausting, and absolutely essential.
Elena saw the impact directly.
Intelligence she gathered led to the capture of three Taliban commanders. Medical care she provided saved dozens of civilian lives and built goodwill that made populations more willing to cooperate with coalition forces. Relationships she developed provided early warning about attacks that saved American lives.
She was good at it.
Better than good.
Her natural empathy combined with her technical training created something powerful. She could project strength when needed and vulnerability when appropriate. She could read people, understand their motivations, build genuine connections even across vast cultural differences.
But the program had enemies.
People in Congress who questioned the cost. People in the military who thought it undermined traditional standards. People who simply didn’t believe women belonged in these roles regardless of their performance.
The political pressure built slowly.
Then suddenly.
A congressional oversight committee began asking questions about classified programs and black-budget spending. A senator demanded detailed accounting for every dollar spent on “unauthorized gender-integration programs.”
The Pentagon, facing budget cuts and political headwinds, made the calculation that Operation Sphinx was too controversial to defend publicly and too classified to defend effectively.
In October 2022, the order came down.
Operation Sphinx was officially dissolved.
All twelve graduates would be reassigned to conventional units. Service records would be sanitized, with the fourteen months of Sphinx training marked simply as TRAINING — SPECIALIZED PROGRAM.
All mission files would be destroyed. The compound at Fort Bragg would be repurposed.
For official purposes, Operation Sphinx had never existed.
The twelve women were scattered across the military, given conventional assignments, told to resume normal careers.
The training remained. The skills remained. The knowledge remained. But the institutional support vanished overnight.
Elena took it hard.
Not the dissolution itself, but what it represented.
The acknowledgment that politics mattered more than capability.
That perception mattered more than performance.
They’d proven the concept worked. They’d conducted successful missions. They’d done exactly what the program was designed to do.
And none of it mattered, because someone in Washington had decided it was politically inconvenient.
But the worst moment came in Mosul during what was supposed to be her final mission before reassignment.
The mission was supporting a Delta Force hostage rescue operation: American aid workers held by ISIS remnants. Intelligence indicated they were being moved, window of opportunity closing fast.
Elena’s element was providing outer security and preparing to conduct immediate medical treatment on freed hostages.
The breach went perfectly.
Delta assaulters hit the compound at 0300 hours, cleared it in ninety seconds, secured the hostages.
Elena’s element moved forward to begin casualty care.
That’s when the secondary IED detonated.
It was command-wire initiated. Someone watching from a distance, waiting for the perfect moment.
The explosion hit one of the up-armored vehicles in Elena’s element, the blast powerful enough to flip it. The secondary fragmentation turned the interior into a kill zone.
Elena was twenty meters away when it happened.
She ran toward the burning vehicle without thinking, pulled open the damaged door, started dragging people out.
The first two were injured but alive.
The third was Lieutenant Jessica Torres, her partner from training, her friend from a hundred missions.
Jessica was still alive when Elena got her out of the vehicle, but the injuries were catastrophic. Fragmentation through the torso. Internal bleeding that no field medicine could address.
Elena knew it immediately. Had seen enough combat casualties to recognize unsurvivable wounds.
She held Jessica anyway, applied pressure to wounds that were bleeding too fast, called for medevac that would arrive too late.
Jessica looked up at her, blood on her lips, recognition in her eyes.
“Tell my daughter,” Jessica said, voice barely a whisper. “Tell her I was doing something important.”
“You’re going to tell her yourself. Stay with me.”
“Tell her I loved her. Tell her I died doing something that mattered.”
Jessica’s eyes lost focus. Her breathing stopped.
Elena felt the moment her heart stopped beating, that terrible stillness that separated the living from the dead.
She sat there holding Jessica’s body until the medics physically pulled her away.
At the memorial service, Elena stood in her dress uniform and received Jessica’s spare dog tags from the unit commander.
Two sets now. Major Callahan’s from Afghanistan. Lieutenant Torres’s from Iraq.
She kept them both in a small wooden box, carried them everywhere. Reminders of the cost of this work.
When the orders came through reassigning her to conventional duty, Elena called her father.
Thomas Ravencraft was seventy-one years old now, still living in Seattle, still sharp despite the years.
“They’re shutting down the program,” Elena said. “Pretending it never existed.”
“But you existed,” Thomas said. “You did the work. They can’t take that from you.”
“Feels like they’re trying to.”
“Then you find another way to use what you learned. The institution fails all the time. Individual warriors still have purpose.
“Find yours.”
Elena thought about that for a long time.
Find purpose.
Use what she’d learned.
Teach the next generation.
Eventually, the path became clear.
She volunteered for the Modern Army Combatives Level Four instructor course at Fort Moore, not running from her past—weaponizing it.
If the Army wouldn’t let her operate anymore, she’d teach others to operate.
If Sphinx couldn’t exist officially, its knowledge would survive through the people she trained.
The paperwork went through. Orders to Fort Moore, Georgia. Eight-month course. If she graduated, she’d be qualified to teach the Army’s highest level of hand-to-hand combat to instructors across the force.
She arrived in September 2024, twenty-eight years old, carrying two sets of dog tags and a dragon tattoo that told a story no one would believe.
What she didn’t know was that Staff Sergeant Jake Brennan had been at Fort Moore for six months, working as an assistant instructor, and he’d already decided she didn’t belong before he ever met her.
What she didn’t know was that Command Sergeant Major Frank Garrison had just arrived at the installation with a vendetta against programs like Sphinx and a willingness to use soldiers like Brennan as weapons.
What she didn’t know was that Command Sergeant Major Raymond Thorne had been watching her file with interest, making quiet inquiries, trying to understand what those classification markers really meant.
The stage was being set. The players were moving into position.
And in seventy-two hours, everything would come to a head in a training ring where three men would try to prove she didn’t belong.
And she would teach them a lesson about underestimating warriors who’d earned their place in the hardest possible way.
But first, there were three weeks of watching, evaluating, and preparing.
Specialist Derek Maddox approached her after the second day of training. He was twenty-four, infantry, second-deployment veteran, and he moved with the careful awareness of someone who’d seen combat.
He waited until they were alone near the equipment shed.
“Ma’am,” he said quietly. “My uncle served Force Recon during Gulf War. He told me stories about experimental programs. Women trained for specialized operations. Said they had a marking. A dragon tattoo.”
Elena looked at him carefully, evaluating whether this was a threat or an opportunity.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because Brennan and his crew are planning something. I’ve heard them talking. They think you don’t belong here. Think you’re proof of lowered standards. They’re going to try to prove it publicly.”
“And you’re warning me why?”
Maddox met her eyes.
“Because my uncle said those programs were necessary. Said women could go places men couldn’t. Do things men couldn’t do. Said the military was better for having them, even if people didn’t want to admit it.
“If you’re one of them, you deserve better than what Brennan’s planning.”
Elena was quiet for a moment, then slowly rolled up her right sleeve, showing the small dragon tattoo.
Maddox nodded slowly, something like awe in his expression.
“I knew it. My uncle was right.”
“This conversation doesn’t leave here.”
“Understood, ma’am. But be careful. Brennan has friends. Command Sergeant Major Garrison just arrived, and he’s been encouraging this whole thing. They’re setting you up.”
“Let them.”
“Ma’am?”
“Let them set it up. Sometimes the only way to teach a lesson is to let people learn it the hard way.
“I appreciate the warning, Specialist. But I can handle Brennan.”
What Elena didn’t say was that she’d already identified Brennan as a threat on day one.
She’d watched him, studied his movement patterns, noted the old shoulder injury that made him favor his right side, cataloged his techniques and tendencies.
She’d done the same with Dalton and Westbrook.
She’d run through scenarios in her mind, planned responses, prepared for confrontation.
Because that’s what Sphinx had taught her.
That’s what her father had taught her.
That’s what four Gulf War veterans had drilled into her when she was a teenager in a garage in Seattle.
Be ready. Be prepared. When the moment comes, execute without hesitation.
Command Sergeant Major Thorne watched Elena teach a class on day ten and saw something that confirmed his suspicions.
The way she moved. The way she broke down techniques. The precision of her demonstrations.
This wasn’t someone who’d learned combatives from Army instructors.
This was someone who’d been trained by people who’d used these skills in actual combat, in contexts where mistakes meant death.
After class, he made a phone call to an old friend, a retired Special Forces colonel he’d served with in Iraq.
“I’ve got a captain in my instructor course,” Thorne said. “Service record shows fourteen months of classified training. Classification markers I’ve never seen before.
“She moves like your guys. Teaches like your guys. What am I dealing with here?”
The colonel was quiet for a long moment.
“Ray, I can’t talk about specific programs,” he said. “But if you’ve got a soldier with that kind of background, my advice is simple.
“Trust her. Protect her if you can. And for God’s sake, don’t underestimate her.”
“That’s what I thought. Thanks.”
Thorne hung up and made a decision.
Whatever Brennan was planning, whatever Garrison was encouraging, he would allow it to proceed—to a point—but he would maintain control.
He would be the safety officer.
He would ensure it didn’t go too far.
And if Elena was who he thought she was, she’d handle herself just fine.
On day twelve, Brennan filed his formal complaint.
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