Free Full Assault Mode by Dalton Fury

were saved for the most seasoned Delta sergeants. Just the way it should be, Kolt always thought.

 
    FIVE
    Isolation Cell Black—Black Ice—undisclosed location
    Cindy “Hawk” Bird’s four-by-four-foot box leaked from the top. It leaked bad. But she was as comfortable in the water as a Navy SEAL, so water drops she could handle. Now, waterboarding—that was a different matter. She hoped it wasn’t coming to that. But she knew she had been stubborn throughout her seventy-two hours in the box, including during five interrogations, for which she was strapped to a chair in a very cold and musty room. She couldn’t be sure. Some of the bruises were certainly from her struggle with the two gorillas from the light blue Ford Focus outside Macy’s. Others were from the interrogator, including the severe pain she felt near her floating left rib. But it wasn’t the box, the raindrops, the hard interrogation tactics, or the awful stench of her own urine that was driving her crazy. No, those were unsettling, for sure, but it was clearly that damn baby crying for her daddy.
    Hawk tried to adjust the angle of her long, unshaven legs inside the tiny-ass plywood box. She palmed both ears to drown out the loud screams of the wailing babies. Over and over, the same tape played. And it played loud. The only relief was the intermittent but unpredictable spurts of Middle Eastern music. Hawk recognized the variety of songs praising Liwa’a Abu Fadl al-Abbas, Syria’s pro-Iranian Shia “International Brigade,” which curtly insulted nonbelievers and blatantly threatened the Syrian rebels. But given a choice, she’d take the music over the crying babies.
    If this was the Delta-operator life she so wanted to be a part of, or “living the dream,” as she so often heard the boys in the Unit say throughout the Spine, she was certainly having second thoughts. How long have I been here. Is this just training?
    Actually, it had only been just under forty-eight hours since Hawk was rolled up. It’s easy to lose track of time when you are in the box. Your ability to think clearly is conceded early. Tracking time is a bitch. Simple arithmetic is compromised. Trying to stick to your cover story while scooting away from your own shit is even dicier.
    But it wasn’t like she hadn’t been warned. No, her superiors at Delta had made it very clear to her that selection was an ongoing process, and even though she had proved valuable to the command on several occasions now, she wasn’t entirely accepted. There were still some naysayers. Older, very seasoned operators that had been around for decades, by nature, didn’t impress easily. Old-school mind-sets that never believed the pilot program was a smart idea in the first place. Women had no place in the unit or on the battlefield, they argued. More so, in their eyes, women just got in the way of the male operators actually, well, operating. But the Delta commander, Colonel Jeremy Webber, saw it differently. From his perspective, Cindy Bird had validated his long-held assumptions that a female could help an operator ensure a successful mission. Webber wasn’t looking for female operators, nor was he arguing that the Unit should even consider female operators. He just wanted the eye candy, but from a performance perspective only. No airheads. They had to be switched on. And as far as Webber was concerned, results mattered most.
    Hawk’s performance in Lybia at the fall of the Ghadhafi regime two years earlier, and the unique help she provided to Major Kolt Raynor and his AFO cell on the streets of Cairo, had been commended. Moreover, the fact that her performance had been widely talked about and debated inside the halls of the Unit validated Webber’s every assumption.
    In fact, Cindy Bird was the first female guest at a place called Isolation Cell Black. To the guards it’s known simply as Black Ice. And, yes, it was training, vital training, for sure, but it was the kind that nobody really