Protocol 15

Chapter 6

6

QUANTICO

FBI Academy, Marine Corps Base Quantico, Quantico, Virginia. About twenty-seven miles south of Washington, DC. June 19.

Jana pushed upwards, but the hill was daunting. Not only was she out of shape after spending four months at the hospital and physical rehabilitation center, but hot pain radiated from her spine. On that day at the bluegrass festival in Kentucky, one of the bullets fired by Shakey Kunde had pierced her Kevlar vest, clipped the seventh thoracic vertebrae, and come within a fraction of a millimeter of piercing her spinal cord. Had that happened, she’d have been strapped into a wheel chair for the rest of her life.

The physical pain wasn’t so bad when she was sitting or holding still. And sometimes walking wasn’t so bad. But running the obstacle course at the FBI training ground on the Marine base at Quantico resulted in a thrash of pain that pounded with each step. She began to hate her running shoes, although she knew they had nothing to do with it. And at one hundred and seventy-five dollars a pair, they’d better not.

Surrounded by a new class of FBI trainees traversing the running trail at Quantico, she struggled to keep pace. All but a few were faster than she was, and weakness lay on her mind like a cold weight. Pain or no pain, Jana wasn’t giving up, and she damn well wasn’t going to tell anyone about it. The FBI and its male-dominated leadership would just have to accept the fact that she was as tough as they were. She had proven that once already by jumping into the line of fire and facing down a terrorist.

Physical pain was one thing, but it was the mental demons that Jana found most disturbing. The bullets not only tore holes in her body, they tore a vicious gash up the middle of her psyche as well. And the damage to her psyche carried a much deeper component to it than she let on.

She first noticed it on the firing range after detecting a slight tremble in her right hand. The tremble came and went, but became most pronounced when she was on the firing line with her finger on the trigger of her SIG Sauer. Then, things got worse. Just the sound of gunfire began to unnerve her. Waiting her turn on the firing line began to rattle her to the core.

Worst were the nights when she’d wake from one of two recurring nightmares. In the first, Jana found herself dangling from the stairwell on the twelfth floor of the Thoughtstorm building. Gunfire permeated the space, and the air was filled with white smoke that felt like acid in her lungs. Her friend, Agent Kyle MacKerron, leaned over the stairs and put a vice grip on her arm. He was yelling to her, you go, we go! But then an eruption of gunfire tore through Kyle, killing him, and Jana fell down, down, down, into a screaming oblivion.

In the second, she’d relive the horrifying scene at the bluegrass festival. In the dream, she ran full speed toward the white van; its sides brightly decorated with a bouquet of balloons. She fired three rounds into the lock of the back door, ripped it open, and found herself face to face with Kunde. Then her g*n would jam. The horrifying face of the terrorist roared, and he fired repeated rounds into her chest. He laughed a monstrous laugh, then plunged his hand into the steel canister and detonated the nuclear device. The white-hot flash was blinding. And afterward, Jana would face the horrors of the dead. They walked the earth all around her, most of their flesh burned off from the nuclear radiation.

In both dreams, Jana would awaken, screaming. Since she was not technically a member of this new class of FBI recruits, Jana had been assigned a dorm room all to herself. That was a good thing because not a single time had someone heard her scream in the night. If they had, they would have been duty-bound to report the dangerous post-traumatic stress that embroiled much of her sleeping and waking hours. Jana could tell no one. She was alone, alone with her fears.

And the truth was, she missed being around Kyle now that his retraining period at Quantico was over, and he had been reassigned. But mostly, she missed Cade, although she would never admit it.