Rising Tiger: A Thriller (17)

When they got to the hand-to-hand portion of the training, however, things got considerably rougher. The instructor appeared to take a perverse pleasure in making an example of Asha, embarrassing her and causing her pain.

Asha had wanted to strike back, to really kick the woman’s ass, but she had pushed her anger down and had summoned every ounce of patience she could muster. But then her patience ran out.

It was an oppressive, exceptionally humid afternoon. Everyone was dripping with sweat. They had been given very little sleep for the past several nights. The food had been terrible, the coffee and tea little more than brown water. Not that any of that justified what she did. She should have better controlled her emotions.

They were working on how to take a weapon away from an opponent. As always, the instructor called Asha forward to help demonstrate the process.

The instructor walked the group through it slowly a couple of times, then racked the pistol’s slide. Looking at Asha, she told her that they’d now be doing it for real.

Asha’s eyes widened. Doing it for real? Right here? With a loaded weapon? The instructor had to be insane.

Drying her palms on her BDU pants, Asha made ready. When the instructor moved in and presented the pistol, Asha went through the steps, just as she had been taught. That was when everything had gone wrong.

The instructor changed up her approach. Instead of allowing Asha to step off the line of attack and get out of the way of the muzzle, she had shifted her weight and had driven right at her, taking Asha totally by surprise.

Asha went for the gun, but her hands were still slick with perspiration and they slipped while trying to take control of the weapon. It was at that moment that the instructor fired.

The crack of the round was so loud that it felt like someone had hammered spikes into each of her ears. But that wasn’t the worst of it. As the weapon attempted to cycle, the web of her left hand, between her thumb and forefinger, was bitten into as the slide came racing forward. The white-hot pain was excruciating.

Instead of trying to help extricate her student, the instructor fought to maintain control of the pistol. That was the point at which Asha absolutely lost it.

Bringing her free hand up, she used it to twist the weapon and create a massive amount of torque and subsequent pain in her instructor’s wrist.

She then pulled down, causing her instructor to stumble forward. That was when she let go of the weapon and punched the woman in the jaw, following it up with an elbow to her nose.

Bone and cartilage cracked. Blood sprayed. A fellow student rushed over to help Asha apply enough pressure to retract the slide and reclaim her hand. Another grabbed a towel to help stanch the bleeding. No one moved to assist the instructor, who had fallen, unconscious, onto the ground.

They ran lots and lots of laps after that and conducted lots and lots of forced marches with backpacks loaded down with BFR (big fucking rocks), but no one complained to Asha about it. She had become a rock star to her fellow cadets.

More important, she never had a problem with her drill instructor—or any instructor, for that matter—again. In fact, she graduated at the top of her class.

The reputation she had developed in training as a smart operative able to take care of herself was what had made her so attractive to the Division. Their agents were expected to perform with little to no support in a constantly changing battlespace. They needed to function as their own cavalry and rapidly adapt as circumstances dictated. They were the best that India put into the field.

Hanging up the phone, Asha sent a quick text to the friends she was supposed to have met for lunch, picked up the leather-bound notepad her parents had given her as a graduation gift, and headed toward the secretary’s conference room.

Unlike other agents in the Special Operations Division, she had never let her boss’s brusque style get to her. Onkar Raj—an average-looking man in his late fifties with thinning hair, a pencil-thin mustache, and boxy eyeglasses—was short with people because he needed to be. India had countless knives to its throat and more popping up daily, if not hourly. It was Raj who was responsible for handling the most serious among them. The stress of his job was said to be akin to juggling bottles covered in razor blades. Asha wouldn’t have traded places with him for all the money in the world.

While many saw him as a colossal prick, he was their prick and she appreciated that he got things done. No matter what his people needed, they always received it.

Even more important, he stood behind them one hundred percent and would go toe-to-toe with the prime minister himself if ever need be. Raj was a good man and India’s foreign intelligence service was lucky to have him.

“Close the door,” he said as she entered the conference room.

Asha did a quick scan as she obeyed his command. No one else was present. It was just the two of them. “Are we waiting for anyone else?”

“No,” the man replied, gesturing for her to sit. “It’s just you and me.”

“Then why didn’t we meet in my office or at least in—”

He held up his hand and cut her off. “Because our offices are no longer safe. In fact, this is the last meeting you and I are going to have in this building.”

“What are you talking about?”

Removing a piece of paper from the folder in front of him, he slid it across the table to her.

She looked at it in disbelief.

“Asha Raveena Patel,” he stated, “you are hereby terminated. Effectively immediately.”