I shook the water from my head, coughing and trying to catch my breath. I had lost track of time – which is easy to do when you’re being waterboarded.

Waterboarding sounds so gentle – sort of like surfing, I guess. Except it’s actually more like they’re trying to drown you, but stopping just short. Repeatedly. I hated it, which was sort of the point.

The head interrogator’s leering face came into view. “You thought you would lead an escape and embarrass us, did you?” His taunting eyes screwed up and he laughed. He had bad breath, too. “Well, unless you’re ready to tell us who helped you plan this foolish escape, we’re going make an example of you to show the rest of this scum what happens to someone who tries to be clever, but isn’t clever enough, ja?”

And they started pouring water over my face and mouth again.

When they were finally done, they uncuffed me, and frog-marched me like a limp doll outside in my soaking clothes. Then they tied me up outdoors in the cold, upright and spread-eagled, outside the mess hall, just in time for the rest of the prisoners to come in for lunch.

I took it as a mark of respect that none of the other prisoners whistled or made crude remarks about seeing me hanging there. It hadn’t been that way at the start…

~~~~~

Victor met me at Starptautiskā lidosta "Rīga," the international airport in Riga, Latvia, then rode with me east some distance to what looked like an army camp. The double-gated, barbed wire fence opened to let the car through, then shut behind us. It looked like something out of a bad World War II prisoner-of-war film. Victor told me it was used to train elite NATO troops – which left me wondering what the fuck I was doing here.

It didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. I was here for three-to-four weeks, I’d been told – unless I flunked out first.

“Why is it you think I need to be trained? What is it you want me to learn that I don’t already know?” I had asked Victor as we were driving from the airport.

He exhaled in exasperation. I have that effect on administrators and bureaucrats. “We’ve gone over this before. You’ve shown me what you can do in taking down your Mister Action, but I need you to show my organization that you’re worth investing time and money in. They don’t believe me. If you complete this course, then I’ll be free to run you in the field, with all the resources at my command to back you.”

He stared at me, then seeing I remained unconvinced, he said, “Let me put it this way: If you pass this training, then we go after the rest of the organization that killed your wife. If you don’t – well, I’m not quite sure what happens, but I won’t be able to help you.

“Is that a good enough reason?”

I stared at him for a moment. “No, but I guess it will have to do.” I sat back in the car. “I did a better job than you did before I had your help – and I can do it again if I need to.”

I looked back at him, “But I’ll admit having help made things easier.”

And that was all we had said until we got to the camp.

I got out of the car and grabbed my rucksack from the backseat. Victor stayed in the limousine, powered down his window, stuck his hand out, and said, “Good luck.”

I glared at him, then turned and walked toward two tall guys in fatigues who were watching us.

They made no comment about the exchange between Victor and me, but one of them led me into the barracks and pointed to a top bunk halfway down the row. “That’s yours. Settle in. Dinner is at 1800 hours.”

And left, muttering something under his breath.

I looked around. All I could see on the other bunks were personal effects. Men’s personal effects.

I was stashing my stuff from my rucksack in the locker at the head of the bed when I heard a couple of footsteps behind me. Turning, I looked up at two tall, obviously fit guys wearing fatigues.

“My boots need cleaning, and the toilets need to be cleaned as well. See to it.” And two dirty boots landed in front of me.

I looked at them for a moment, then straightened up. “Get your shitty boots away from my locker, asshole.”

I said it without emotion as if I were giving a weather report, then picked up the boots and tossed them into the middle of the barracks floor.

He just hung there, staring at me.

“What the fuck? I said I need my boots cleaned – and you’re gonna clean them!” He straightened up, emphasizing his height and crossing his arms, feet shoulder-width apart.

Face neutral, I moved over until I was about half a meter away, then pivoted on one foot, and lashed out with my heel, taking him squarely in the groin.

He crumpled forward, grabbing his crotch, and grunting in pain. I turned back, brought my hands down on the back of his head, pulled it down, and brought my knee up to meet his chin.

I guess he must have had a glass jaw because he just crumpled backward onto the floor, out cold.

His friend looked at his unconscious mate, then turned angrily to me, “You little bitch!” and reached for me.

By this time I had slipped between the bunks into the center of the room, to give myself more space to maneuver. As his hand reached for me, I stepped outside of his arm, grabbed the wrist, pulled hard, and rotated the arm so the elbow joint locked up, then pivoted around, pushed hard on the locked elbow, and put my leg in front of his. Using the leverage on his arm to force him forward, I tripped him and pushed his body to the floor, face-first.

Just then I heard someone start to slow-clap, and looked up.

“Bravo, bravo! Or should I say brava?”

The tall guy who had pointed me to my bunk, whom I later learned was the head instructor, was leaning against the doorway, clapping sarcastically. Heaving himself up, he walked slowly over to where I stood over the second jackass, still holding him in an armbar, foot on his shoulder, forcing his face into the floor.

“I’m not sure which of you three just made a bigger fool of yourself. Fighting on the first day of instruction.” He shook his head. “Stupid. That’s what we’ve got here. Stupid people.”

His face turned hard. “Ten laps around the compound, both of you. Right now. I’ll deal with sleeping beauty here. Go!” And he hooked his thumb out of the barracks door at the field behind.

I looked at him for a moment, then dropped the jackass’ arm and jogged through the door.

If they thought they could intimidate me, they had some surprises coming.

~~~~~

I finished the ten laps, breathing hard, without seeing either of the assholes who had confronted me. I only found out later why neither of them ran laps.

Regardless, once I got back to the barracks, I finished my small amount of unpacking, then sat on my bunk, reading and ignoring the men filing in around me. Many of them commented to each other about the chick in the barracks, and several of them tried to involve me in conversation. I ignored all of them.

Just before 1800 hours, they had us line up in front of the barracks. There were, I learned later, sixty-one of us. The lead instructor told us we were candidates for elite training, but that we would have to prove ourselves, and that what we had done elsewhere meant nothing here. We would train in specific tradecraft techniques in the mornings, then do fieldwork, weapons training, and other activities in the afternoon and into the night.

Most of us would flunk, he said. Two people had flunked already and were on their way home.

The instructor looked at me as he said it, and I guessed he meant the assholes whose butts I had kicked. I shrugged slightly when he looked at me, and I saw his eyes harden.

When he had finished what sounded like a set-piece spiel, one of the other candidates raised his hand.

“What?” the instructor barked.

“What about her?” he asked, pointing at me.

“What about her?”

“She can’t be a candidate, can she? I mean, she’s just a girl, right?”

The instructor just stared at him for a minute, then dismissed us for chow.

I turned on my heel and went into the mess. A girl’s gotta eat, I figured, and I suspected I’d better get it done while I had a chance.

I was one of the first to get food and ignored most attempts to engage in conversation. I sat by myself by the door so I could duck out quickly if necessary and ate quickly.

Unfortunately, three guys came over and sat down around me before I had finished. I thought about getting up and leaving, then decided I was going to have to make my bones sooner or later, so let’s get it done.

“What?” I asked.

All three of them were grinning. “We thought we could get friendly-like, you know? Like after dark? In the sack?”

I looked at him, then said, “Sonny, stick to pulling your own sad little wienie and leave me alone, okay? We’ll get along better that way.” And went back to eating.

Angrily, he reached across the table to grab my arm. Instead, I grabbed his thumb, yanked it back, and dug into a pressure point on his inner wrist. He jerked upright and started to grab me with his other hand when the head instructor appeared.

“What’s going on?” He looked at me when he said it.

I paused, then looked up and smiled, “I was just showing my new friend here how to deal with someone who tries to grab you. We were exchanging ideas – aren’t we?” I released the jerk’s hand and sat back.

He grabbed his wrist, rubbed it, then looked at the head instructor. “Uh, yeah. Just friendly-like. You know – exchanging ideas.”

The instructor stared hard at me. “You know,” he said, speaking slowly to me, “someone who exchanges too many – ideas – can get themselves bounced. Understand?”

I held his gaze, then nodded solemnly. “Oh, absolutely. Got it. One hundred percent.”

He stared hard at me, “I didn’t want you here in the first place, Wolf, but I had no choice. Please – give me a reason to flunk you out. Will you do that for me?”

I stared back at him, then shook my head. “A lot of people have tried to stop me. None of them have succeeded.”

I paused, then – “By the way…”

He lifted his chin, indicating I should go ahead with my question.

“What do you recommend for dessert?”

He closed his eyes and shook his head, then walked away muttering obscenities to himself.

That pretty much set the tone for the training at this camp.

It didn’t help that I was the only woman, especially because I was good-looking. Almost all of the trainees were sure this was some kind of a perverted insult to their manhood, or else a dreadful mistake, and that I didn’t belong. They resented me – especially when I showed them up. Most of the instructors resented me because they felt I was taking up a slot that a competent man should have occupied.

And it didn’t help that there was only one bath and toilet area in the barracks. It took me about thirty seconds to realize that there was no ladies’ room here, no shower room for women and that if I wanted to stick in this program, I was going to have to use the toilet stalls along with the men, and shower with them too.

Fortunately, I had practice being naked in front of a roomful of men. Unfortunately, they didn’t have practice being naked in front of a woman who didn’t give a fuck about their dinky little dicks. Even if some of them weren’t so dinky.

One asshole spit on the shower floor near my feet, and asked what a fucking piece of ass was doing in this course – or was I there for fun?

I just smiled at him and said that life had to be tough for someone with such a tiny penis. Except I said it in Russian. He didn’t speak Russian, so just stood there, puzzled, then got mad when some of the other trainees, who evidently did speak Russian, laughed at him.

To say that the others let their resentment show would be an understatement, but I was there for my Mistress, not to win anyone’s approval. I didn’t give a shit what any of them thought, including the instructors.

No, especially the instructors.

 ~~~~~

There was instruction during the mornings in things like dead drops, brush passing of messages, setting flags, signals, codes and encryption, and all the secret agent stuff you read about in novels. We practiced it until we got sick of it and people started getting sloppy – and then they started flunking people who were caught.

One of the instructors would initiate a brush pass, for instance, and if one of the other instructors caught you giving or receiving it, you flunked. When trainees complained, it was pointed out that in real life they would likely have been imprisoned or shot. That ended the complaints.

I was good and careful and was never caught. This wasn’t a game to me.

In most circumstances, I’m helped by the fact that I’m a young woman. Most people have a hard time believing I’m anything more than a pretty face attached to a shapely ass. However, in this setting, I stood out like a sore thumb. I was the only woman and was widely resented because of that. It also made the instructors work harder to try to catch me out and get rid of me.

I never gave them an opening.

The afternoons were for physical activities and weapons training.

At first, it was just fitness stuff and armed and unarmed combat. Since by this time I had spent years doing Tae-Kwon-Do, the unarmed combat was pretty straightforward for me. One of the instructors even started having me help in the instruction because big, strong, smelly men would waltz forward, not believing that they would have any trouble overpowering me – only to wind up either face down or on their asses, with bruises emphasizing their mistakes.

Then the instructor would show them what I did, and how I did it – and instruction would proceed from there. Doing it this way demonstrated that it wasn’t always brute force that won for guys that were used to being the biggest and toughest around.

“Unarmed combat,” he told them, “is a matter of doing it first and doing it fastest. It’s not a matter of muscle or proving yourself in a fair fight – unless you do it wrong. If a fight lasts more than a few seconds, you’ve screwed up.”

This earned me dirty looks from most of the trainees – and some looks of grudging respect from some of the others. Indeed, some of the trainees, often the younger ones, started to make supportive comments to me in passing – not wanting to be seen, you know, actually fraternizing with me.

I gradually got to be pretty good at guns and rifles as well. I had never even held a firearm before, let alone fired one, so I had no bad habits to unlearn. And I paid attention. This wasn’t a game to me, so I listened to the instructors, and worked at getting better. I found that I enjoyed the icy, inner calm required and the steely resolve. It made me feel good to knock down a close-to-perfect score.

And it turned out that I had a knack for it. My eyesight is excellent, I had practice at controlling my body and breath, and I took it completely seriously. Sometimes I would stay late and take extra target practice, under the eye and with the indulgence of one of the instructors.

But when I started scoring consistently at or near the top of the group, that was just one more thing they resented about me.

Fuck ’em.

Yet, gradually, the real assholes weeded themselves out and got flunked for one reason or another. Then the instructors started having us work together in teams of six.

At first, my team members grumbled – but not loudly enough for the instructors to hear. Yet when they found I could more than pull my weight – light though I was – I started to get some respect, especially as teams were combined to compensate for trainees who didn't make the grade.

Not all of the remaining trainees accepted me being there, mind. But we all learned that you don’t have to like someone to be able to work with them. Besides, if your team screwed up, all of you were punished with kitchen patrol, night watches instead of sleep, calisthenics to exhaustion, or something equally nasty the instructors would dream up.

My teams all quickly learned how to get along.

Eventually, the entire group of trainees winnowed down to just under thirty trainees – and then they started to get tough on us.

It started supposedly with a nighttime reconnaissance exercise. We were inserted by helicopter to perform stealthy reconnaissance of an area we had been shown on a map, then to return to our insertion point for pick-up. Yet, shortly after the helo had flown away, we heard sirens in the distance. The instructor told us we had been compromised and needed to execute our escape and evasion plan, with our destination a safe house twenty-five kilometers away.

I might have been able to do it alone, I’m not sure. But as a group, we were too uncoordinated and too noisy. They had no trouble finding and capturing us.

We were quickly surrounded by men with guns, shouting at us to put our hands in the air. They weren’t gentle about it. Not one of them even said please.

Eventually, we were all standing in a line while the leader – whom no one had seen before – told us that we were all under arrest, and were going to be imprisoned to await trial and punishment.

Then he stared at us for a second, and said, “One or more of you has been selling state secrets. The penalty for that is death.”

He looked at the other guards. “Take them away.”

One of the trainees tried to protest – and was clubbed in the stomach with a rifle butt. Two other trainees were tasked with dragging him out to the waiting truck where he was just tossed in the back. We were transported to a different compound, set up as a prison. It looked grim.

Except for one thing: they hadn’t commented on my presence there, and they hadn’t separated me from the others, which they would have if they truly were sent by the authorities to arrest us. The fact that they treated me like everyone else spoke volumes. Even the gut punch had been pulled. They had just knocked the wind out of the guy, nothing more.

This was part of the training, and these guys were just a different set of instructors, but it didn’t look like this part was going to be any fun.

It wasn’t.

 ~~~~~

One by one, they hauled us in front of a tribunal, with threats of reprisal, and demands that we confess to stealing and selling state secrets, plus promises of a full pardon if we helped the state find the spies. They didn’t say which state, or which secrets, or to whom we had sold them.

I noticed that some trainees disappeared after a second round of questioning – vanishing into the tribunal and not returning. I wondered whether they had flunked out, and why, but figured I’d find out soon enough.

And I did – when it was my turn.

Same tribunal, same demands – but this time, they hauled me away and threw me into solitary confinement with bright lights on all the time. Worse, every time I tried to go to sleep or started to nod off, they would blare a loud, piercing set of random sounds into the room, like razor blades being flushed down a garbage disposal.

I could stay awake and not have my ears blasted. Or try to sleep, only to be blared awake.

Finally, I dozed off despite the noise, at which point I was woken by a pail of cold water, then dragged, soaking, back to the tribunal, where I was forced to stand, swaying and shivering, in front of a triumvirate.

They kept demanding a name – any name. They said all they needed was one name, anyone, even if they were only peripherally involved, and I’d be allowed to go back to my cell and sleep.

What they didn’t know – and I didn’t tell them – was that this wasn’t the first time someone had tried to break me like this, and I understood what their game was. Moreover, since I knew this was part of the training, I guessed that if I gave them any name, I’d be flunked out. So, I started doing chess problems in my head and ignored them.

They kept this up for a long time – sleep deprivation, loud noises to disrupt any possible sleep, pails of water, then being hauled in front of the tribunal. I gave them no satisfaction.

Finally, they relented, and I was returned to the compound where all the remaining trainees were kept. They even gave me some clothes from my footlocker in the barracks – another mistake. One of the guards even smiled at me and complimented me on how I had frustrated “those assholes” who were interrogating me.

I sort of relaxed, at least for the moment, but wondered if this was just another trick. But I also decided that two could play that game.

So I organized a prison break.

I had watched the routine of the guards, examined the layout of the prison compound – which was, after all, relatively small – and started talking to a couple of the other trainees that I had worked with in my team.

Together, we identified the weak points in the routine and the compound and agreed on a breakout at 4 a.m. two nights hence.

So, of course, I was hauled out of a sound sleep that night and dragged off to the tribunal again.

One of the trainees I had confided in was a snitch, planted among the trainees for just this purpose. He must have been one of the trainees I had confided in, I guess.

It was clear, the tribunal said, that I was the one who had betrayed the country (although they still didn’t say which NATO country). Now they demanded to know who I reported to, and how I contacted them.

When I remained silent, they ordered me taken away, and I resigned myself to more sleep deprivation, but I was wrong. This time it was straight torture.

Waterboarding.

If you want to know more about it, Google it. I don’t want to relive it.

But it made me mad. They were trying to break me, and I knew it. So they were putting me through the wringer as an exercise? Well, fuck them. I wasn’t going to give them so much as a murmur. And I didn’t.

When they finally gave up, I was left handcuffed, upside down, on a board, after they had finished pouring water over a cloth that covered my mouth and nose. They just stopped and walked away, leaving me there. I shook the water from my head, coughing and trying to catch my breath.

When two guys finally came for me, they uncuffed me, then frog-marched me outside, soaking wet, and strung me up in the cold, spread-eagled, to hang outside the mess hall, just in time for the rest of the trainees to come in for lunch.

I took it as a mark of respect that none of the others whistled or made crude remarks about seeing me hanging there.

One or two of them started to come over to speak to me but were shoved back in line.

I hung there, shivering for what seemed like forever until finally, someone sprung the lines, and I collapsed on the ground. My arms and legs ached, and I desperately wanted to sleep – until I saw boots in front of my face.

I looked up and saw the head instructor, leering down at me.

Fuck him, I thought and pushed myself up until I was standing, then stood toe-to-toe, glaring up at him.

Finally, he sighed and waved me towards the mess tent.

Still shivering, I stumbled slowly into the mess, appreciating the warmth and the food smells as I walked in, and stood in line.

Two of the trainees came over and respectfully asked if they could help me to a seat – that they’d get food for me. I nodded, and they virtually carried me to a bench, where I slumped over. Shortly after that, I heard something clatter down by my head and felt the weight of someone sitting down on the bench next to me.

I sat up and stared at the food, then grabbed a fork and started to push food into my mouth. I started slowly, but soon was wolfing it down, and when it was finished, thought about asking for more.

Instead, I passed out. They tell me I face-planted onto the tin tray. They apparently carried me to my bunk and covered me with not only my blanket, but a second one as well.

When I woke up the next morning, we were called to assemble in line, which I did, swaying, but there. The head instructor strode in and told the eighteen of us that remained that we had passed this stage of the training, that the whole charade had been to give us a taste of what would happen to us if we were captured in the field – except that the other side wouldn’t be as polite about it.

His gaze lingered on me. I held his eye, glaring at him. He nodded slightly to me, then told us we would be shipping out for Norway after lunch for the next stage of our training, and that we should pack, clean up, and be ready.

I didn’t see him again but hoped I would one day.

Preferably in a dark alley.