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of his heart. I used to be just like him, but after she saved my life, I became a believer. I had convinced her to do this, and wanted her to succeed more than I was willing to admit. Even if it looked like it was going to go Turbo’s way, I wasn’t doing anything until I spoke to Radford.
    “Another couple of minutes won’t hurt. She’s only got eight minutes left anyway. Let it ride.”
    Turbo grimaced and stomped away. Knuckles, the man to my right, finally spoke up.
    “You sure you want to continue? You think she can handle the RTL again? Even if she says yes, do you think it’s fair to put her through that?”
    I said, “She can do this.”
    “Pike, I know she did some amazing shit overseas last year, but maybe this is just too much. She came pretty damn close, and that’s going to mean something to the boys.”
    Knuckles was somewhat of a woman hater as well. He had been my second in command before I left the Taskforce and was now in charge of my old team. He’d gotten mixed up with Jennifer and me in a chase for a terrorist in Bosnia last year and had seen Jennifer operate a little bit. Not as much as me, but he’d seen enough to wonder. If Jennifer made it through this, he’d be a believer too.
    Even so, Knuckles might have a point. Maybe I was overambitious in asking Jennifer to attempt Assessment. She wasn’t coming onboard as an official operator. She was just a partner in our business—a cover organization designed to
support
Taskforce activities, not execute them. Given that, she would be the first Taskforce female who came even tangentially close to the sharp end of the spear. We had plenty of female intel analysts and a smattering of case officers, but they all exited stage left when we did an Omega operation. I knew the meat eaters would need to trust Jennifer, sometimes with their lives. They wouldn’t do that unless she earned their respect, and I figured there would be no better way than to make her go through Assessment just like the males.
    All of the Taskforce operators were invited to the unit by word of mouth through the Special Mission Units of the Department of Defense or the Clandestine Service of the CIA. As such, we didn’t need to run a full-on selection process. We let the SMUs handle that, then picked the cream of the crop. Even so, every meat eater loves a challenge and wants to feel like they did something to earn admittance, so the commander of the Taskforce had invented Assessment.
    It was basically a seven-day gut check, starting out in the RTL—the Resistance Training Laboratory—where the prospective candidate resists interrogation for a couple of sleepless nights.
    If he succeeds in not giving anything away, the candidate is given a mission that involves obtaining a package from a contact. From there a scavenger hunt from hell begins, all with a hostile security force trying to capture him or retrieve the package. If he does everything right, hecontinues. If he screws up, he goes back to the RTL, or The Hole, as the guys called it, and starts over. Knuckles was asking if maybe having Jennifer start over was just cruel.
    I was thinking about my answer when I heard Knuckles say, “I don’t fucking believe it.”
    “What?” I said, running around the desk to see the monitor for myself. My face split into a smile.
    Jennifer had just entered the building.
    Inside his office, Colonel Kurt Hale grinned when he heard the radio transmission from North Carolina. As the commander of the Taskforce, he ordinarily didn’t pay much attention to any single evolution of Assessment, mainly because he’d already hand-selected the men who would try out. He knew they’d do fine and had only invented the damn thing to give them some bragging rights for leaving their previous units. This assessment, however, was a little different. This one had someone who was really trying out, with a ton of people hoping she would fail. Kurt didn’t hold that same hope.
    Two years ago, Pike had