The first deception, p.6
The First Deception, page 6
part #1 of Jack Noble Prequel Series
“Why don’t you go fist yourself,” Calhoun said.
The other three recruits snapped to attention at the utterance. Had he lost his mind? The guy had been rolled once, and judging by the attitudes of the instructors toward him, was lucky he had been given a second chance. He did something daily that made Noble think the guy didn’t want to be there. Why come back at all?
Bray looked right, left, behind him, up to the lingering stars, and down at the frozen ground. “Did someone really just say that to me?” He paced in front of the four trainees, stopped in front of Noble. “What did I just hear?”
Noble stared straight ahead, ignoring the instructor’s stare. Bray damn well knew what he heard, and Noble wasn’t repeating it.
“I asked you a question, Noble.”
“I was busy paying attention, not focusing on what others were doing.”
Bray shook his head. “You used to be good for something, Noble. Even if that something was pissing me the hell off.” He paced down the line, back again, stopped in front of Bear.
The big man stared down at Bray, a snarl across his face. Nothing had fazed Bear during the training. Want him to do two-hundred pushups? Fine. Make it two-fifty while you’re at it. Run twelve miles in the rain? Bear didn’t care. He’d stay up all night, do PT until he puked, and go three days with nothing more than a few bottles of water and no sleep, and the guy didn’t complain.
“What’d you hear?” Bray said to him.
“A man signing his ticket out of this place.”
It was hard to tell by the look on Bear’s face whether he spoke about Calhoun or Bray. Apparently Bray agreed, because he didn’t linger in front of Bear for too long. He moved in front of Spinks, rolled his eyes, and walked behind Calhoun. The ground crunching under his boots gave way to the silence of night. A stiff breeze rustled through the trees, sending dying leaves spiraling toward the ground.
Bray grabbed a handful of Calhoun’s sweatshirt and pulled him back so the man was off balance. “You wanna say that again?”
Calhoun grinned. “Go fist yourself.”
Bray struck low and fast, sweeping Calhoun’s legs out from underneath him. He landed hard on his side. The frozen ground offered no padding to break his fall. Calhoun rolled over, grunting, and grabbed his ribs. His face turned red as he fought to breathe.
“What was that again?” Bray teed off on Calhoun, kicked him three times at the site of the injury. “What did you want me to do?”
Calhoun clenched his face tight, took a slow breath. His features relaxed. He closed his eyes, exhaled, said, “Go fist yourself.”
None of the other recruits could move fast enough to stop Bray’s assault on the wounded man. He followed up another steel-toed kick with a diving knee into Calhoun’s sternum. Two strikes to Calhoun’s face drove the guy’s nose left of center and knocked out a tooth.
It was more than Noble could take. He avoided Bear’s attempt to stop him and dove on the instructor. Bray toppled over with Noble on his back, locking his arms down and threading his arm around Bray’s throat.
Floodlights lit the area up like it was one in the afternoon. The ground crunched under no fewer than three pairs of boots. Bear grabbed Noble by the collar and pulled him off the instructor. Bray collapsed to the ground with his hands on his neck.
“The hell is going on here?” Cribbs stood over Bray, who was up on a knee, head cocked sideways so he could look up. “Well?”
Bray dropped to his hands, head hanging.
Cribbs’ gaze shifted to Calhoun, then he turned to Noble and Bear. “Can you two offer any insight?”
Adrenaline coursed through Noble, making him too amped to speak coherently. Bear spoke up.
“Bray went off, went nuts, attacked Calhoun.” He left out a couple of details, which Bray was quick to offer up.
“Little prick told me to fist myself.” Bray got to his feet and stood bent slightly at the waist. “I had to put him in his place.
Cribbs knelt at Calhoun’s side, performed an assessment on the man. They hadn’t seen the man look so concerned. Cribbs looked back at another instructor. “Get him to the hospital now. I think he’s got a collapsed lung.”
One instructor took off in a dead sprint for the van parked nearby while another tended to Calhoun.
Cribbs got in Bray’s face. “The hell were you thinking? We’re past this point in training. Someone pisses you off, you exhaust them, not beat them. This is twice now with this same guy. Why won’t you learn?”
The reason Calhoun was rolled from the previous class became clear. Cribbs was no innocent flower in this mess, but you could reason that what he had done to this point had been to test the men. Bray was a different specimen. It seemed he wanted to hurt the trainees if they pissed him off enough.
The van’s headlights washed over the ground. Two instructors lifted Calhoun and put him inside the vehicle, then sped off. He didn’t look good, and Noble wondered if the man would make it back to the camp for a third try. He knew his stubbornness would drive him to do it. Hopefully Calhoun had people in his life who could dissuade him from making the mistake again.
Cribbs turned to Noble, Bear and Spinks. “The three of you head back inside. I’ll be in to interview you soon.” He walked over to Bray, grabbed him by his shirt. “You and me are going to my place.”
Chapter Ten
Alexa Steele answered the phone on the third or fourth ring. She wasn’t sure which. The blaring phone woke her from the most solid stretch of sleep she’d had in four weeks. Such was life in her position. She had far too many people reaching out to her at all hours for updates, followed by a game of twenty questions.
She licked her lips and cleared her throat and croaked out a dry, “Hello?”
“It’s Cribbs.”
“OK.”
“Aren’t you wondering why I’m calling so early?”
She glanced at the clock. Four-thirty. “I’d say it’s rather late.”
“The hell time you get up, girl?”
Alexa swung her legs over the bed and sat upright. “By five am. And I told you not to call me girl anymore. I don’t know why you won’t—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cribbs said. “I got it. Sorry, Miss Steele, but in my professional opinion, you should be up and out of bed by now. The world doesn’t sleep, and neither do we.”
“I got that memo, too.” She crossed the room and slid her feet into her slippers. The smell of coffee brewing hit her in the hallway. “So, what’s up, Cribbs? Everything OK?”
“Not exactly.”
She stopped at the top of the stairs, waiting for him to continue before she descended. Last thing she wanted was a bombshell dropped on her, causing her to trip and roll down a flight. “What do you mean by that?”
“One of the recruits got busted up pretty bad this morning.”
While Steele oversaw the program now, she knew there were only two recruits that mattered to her in Cribbs’s eye. And of those two, the man hated Noble the most. Probably more than any other trainee he’d ever had the displeasure of laying eyes on. Maybe more than any enemy he’d ever faced. She hurried down the stairs. “What happened to Noble?”
Cribbs exhaled into the phone. “No, not him.”
“Logan?” She reached into the cupboard and pulled out a wide coffee mug with the phrase CIA Agents Do It Under Covers. It had been a gift from her uncle when she graduated training.
“Calhoun.”
Alexa recalled the man. It was his second attempt at training. He had been injured pretty badly the first time with a broken femur. When she had asked for details, Cribbs had been vague. She wouldn’t let him get away with the same behavior.
“What happened?”
“Still trying to get to the bottom of that.”
“That’s ridiculous, Cribbs. You wouldn’t be on the phone with me at four in the morning if you didn’t know.”
“Four-thirty.”
“Spit it out, and don’t hold back like you did last year when he got hurt.” She filled her mug during a long silence. Steam rose and enveloped her hand. When Cribbs still hadn’t spoken up, she said, “I’m getting in my car in fifteen minutes and coming out there.”
“Now wait a minute, you don’t have to go through all that trouble.”
She waited a few seconds for him to continue. “Well? Are you going to tell me why?”
“First off, let me state that I’m going to handle this internally. I mean, I’m handling it now.”
She turned and leaned back against the counter. She’d known her uncle her whole life, and had come to know who Cribbs really was over the last decade. It wasn’t in his nature to pussyfoot around like this. In fact, she couldn’t recall a time when he had ever stalled in such a way. “You need to quit babbling on and tell me what is going on, or I’m gonna show up in three hours and put the entire camp on lockdown. And before you think you can call McKenzie to put me in my place, know that he recently told me he’s turning the entire thing over to me.” She paused and smiled at the thought of Cribbs’s anger rising. “That’s right, I’m gonna be in charge of all of this. Your interview for this job begins now.”
She could practically hear his blood boiling over the line.
“Like I said, Alexa, I’m handling it.”
“Handling what, specifically?”
“One of my guys got a little out of hand with Calhoun.”
“Which one?” She already knew the answer but asked the question anyway. When Calhoun had been injured the previous year, she questioned him. He stuck with the company line through most of the interrogation, but toward the end, nearly cracked. There was something to the way he looked at her after she listed off the instructors one a time. When she mentioned Bray’s name, Calhoun’s eyes widened a touch and his pupils dilated quickly. There was a memory there.
Cribbs had gone silent. Had he hung up?
“Hello?” she said. “You there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Well? Which one? Bray?”
Cribbs coughed into the phone a couple times. “Yeah.” He spoke low and soft, as though he were defeated and had resigned himself to the fact Steele was about to get far more involved in instructor selection the next go around.
“What’d he do?”
“He lost it. We knew it was a possibility.”
“We? Suddenly I’m being blamed for this?”
“I knew. It was all me. I knew the guy might snap, and he did. Thing was, we were past that point. We’d made it to the part of the program where the trainees are doing it all on their own. There was no need for him to react that way.”
“I want him detained until I can get someone there to bring him back to Langley. Understood, Cribbs?”
She knew it killed him to tell her yes. But he had no choice.
“What’s the damage?” Alexa asked. “To Calhoun, not your guy.”
“Broken ribs. Possibly a broken sternum and collapsed lung.”
“Jesus,” she said. “What are we going to do if he files a lawsuit, or goes to the press about this? Do you even think about that kind of thing when selecting these people to do your dirty work?”
“Now hold it there,” Cribbs said. “We are not training girl scouts here. Last I checked, friggin Hezbollah isn’t buying cookies from us. I need to turn these worthless recruits into killers capable of blending and operating anywhere at any time. You think any old DI can do that? You think you can do that? I challenge you to come here and lead these men for a day.”
“That’s not what I’m saying and you know it.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re saying, because you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Miss Steele.”
She took a sip of her coffee and set the mug back down in the ring it left behind on the counter. They could go on all morning like this, but it wouldn’t do anyone any good. “Have Bray ready to go when our guys get there, or I’ll be showing up tonight and making a decision on whether to suspend operations permanently.”
The threat was legit, and Cribbs knew it. He also knew that would spell the end of his career with the Agency.
“OK, Steele. He’ll be ready to go.”
Chapter Eleven
The weeks following the Calhoun incident flew by. They were told he’d needed emergency surgery, pulled through, and was recovering on his grandparents’s farm in Iowa. Pretty part of the country, from what Noble remembered. They’d driven through the state on the way from Wisconsin to Nebraska on a cross country trip when he was a kid. Lots of rolling hills that gave way to flatland. Farms everywhere.
For Bray’s part in the fracas, he received the equivalent to a slap on the wrist. Spent a week on suspension. Came back and spent another week serving food to Noble, Bear, and Spinks. He returned to his work as an instructor, but in a much more subdued capacity. Since his return he hadn’t shouted anything but encouragement at the trainees.
In fact, it had been that way all around.
Noble wished he knew what went on behind the scenes. Who did Cribbs report to, and what power did they have over him? He assumed if he made it through training, he’d find out who he was working for. No point in revealing their identity sooner. And there was no way Noble would be thrown into general population. He might go a year or two and not meet any of the geeks slaving away behind tiny computer terminals at Langley.
The three men rose to start their day, threw on their PT gear, and headed outside. They led themselves at this point. No longer did they have to be goaded into a ten mile run through the woods in twenty-degree weather.
They just did it.
Cribbs watched from the porch of the mess hall as they returned. The older man had a smug look on his face. Was he reveling in what his backwards training methods had produced? All three would kill him in his sleep for free. Maybe that’s what Cribbs wanted. The camp leader hopped off the porch and met them in front of the stairs.
“Gentlemen,” he said with a nod. “Kicking off our last week. How does it feel?”
“Pretty damn good,” Spinks said. “Might feel even better if I could get some pancakes to start my day.”
Cribbs tipped his head back and laughed. “Tell you what, you three ess-oh-bees have done a hell of a job lately. Head on into the kitchen and whip up whatever you want.”
Noble couldn’t believe he’d just heard the man say that. For over two months the guy had kicked their asses throughout these woods, and here he was giving them free rein to make whatever they wanted for breakfast? Perhaps it was his distrusting nature taking over, but Noble didn’t buy the nice-guy act.
Spinks darted inside with Bear close behind. Noble lingered for a moment, studying Cribbs.
“What is it?” Cribbs said.
“What’s the catch?” Noble said.
“Christ, man, I’m showing you guys some leniency.”
“I get that. I also get that ain’t in your makeup to do so.”
Cribbs’ smile faded. He squared up to Noble. “Get in there and eat, or we’ll have a repeat of our day on the mat together.”
Noble paused a moment to soak in a breath of cold air. Even a few weeks ago, his response might’ve been to step forward, go toe-to-toe with Cribbs. That’s what the guy wanted, right? Why not give it to him? But with one week left to get through, he failed to see the point. He broke off eye contact, leapt over the stairs and headed inside and into the kitchen.
Spinks worked a stainless mixing bowl full of flour. Bear watched on. Noble grabbed a mug and filled it with coffee, then moved to the other side of the room to watch.
“Not having anything?” Bear said.
“I’ll start with the coffee, then maybe some eggs. And I’d recommend you two do the same.”
“The hell you talking about?” Spinks said. “We’re in the home stretch. Almost finished.”
“I knew a few SEALs growing up,” Noble said. “You know what they call the last week of BUD/S?”
Bear pulled the spatula from his mouth and wiped away excess batter clinging to his beard. The look suited him well, and he’d said on more than one occasion he had no plans on ever shaving it off. “Hell Week.”
“Right,” Noble said. “We heard all about it. So what do you think they’ve got planned for us here?”
Spinks scooped half-cooked pancakes off the griddle and dumped them in the trash. “Screw you, Noble. Such a damn buzzkill.”
The look on Cribbs’ face when the three men emerged from the kitchen with plates consisting of four eggs, six strips of bacon, and two pieces of toast was priceless. Noble thought someone had stolen his favorite stuffed animal.
“The hell happened to the pancakes?” Cribbs said.
“There’ll be time for that crap when we’re done training,” Spinks said.
Noble shoved a strip of bacon in his mouth to keep from laughing. This was what happened when a man was taken to the woods, stripped of contact with the outside world and left only with a few people to talk to. He found the slightest off-kilter look hilarious when it was plastered across the face of a man he despised.
“Eat that garbage and get back outside. You’ve got five minutes.” Cribbs kicked the door open and slammed it shut.
“Guess we did our jobs right,” Noble said.
“Good call, Jack,” Bear said. He’d taken to calling him Jack more in recent weeks.
“I really can’t wait for those pancakes,” Spinks said. “Day after we’re done with this mess, no, that night, I’m finding an IHOP or Waffle House and going to town.”
“No pancakes at Waffle House,” Bear said. “Made that mistake before. Wasn’t let down though.”
“Whatever,” Spinks said. “I’m having a batter-laden feast right after I tell that old cocksucker to go stick a tree branch up his ass.”
“Careful,” Bear said. “You saw where that got Calhoun.”
“That guy was an idiot who brought it on himself. You’d think he’d have learned after that day in the gym. I mean, Noble over there figured it out.”
