The Company We Keep (7 page)

“You may dry-fire before you qualify,” Jeff shouts.

I’ve never drawn a gun from a holster, and for a few seconds I watch the others draw their pistols, cup them in their hands, aim, and squeeze the trigger. They do it all in one smooth, even motion,
and all very quickly. I try to imitate them, only a lot more slowly. Thank God no one is looking at me.

“Load and make ready,” Jeff yells. “One round, two seconds. On the whistle.”

Please, please, please
, I tell myself.
Just get them all on the paper
. My hand shakes, and my heart pounds. What if I do something really, really stupid—like hit someone else’s target.

Jeff blows the whistle, and loud pops fill the range. I force myself not to close my eyes, and concentrate on squeezing the trigger rather than jerking it. It’s the one basic I can’t forget. The Glock bucks up when I fire, but I bring it back down, and then holster it. I look at my silhouette, but it’s too far to see what I hit.

We do this five more times and then move back ten feet and do it again. We shoot from behind a barricade, on both the right and the left. The last thing we do is shoot with our weak hand.

“Unload and show clear!” Jeff yells. We take out the magazines, pull back the slides, and hold our Glocks up in the air for Jeff to see. “Downrange!” he yells.

I walk toward my silhouette with my eyes on the ground. When the time comes for Jeff to count the holes in my target, I hold my breath and stare at his back.

“All there,” he finally says.

I look up and count them. I can’t believe it. They’re all there on the paper! Who cares if half are outside the man’s silhouette.

“Next time put them here.” Jeff makes a fist and puts it in the middle of the man’s torso. “Center mass.”

Cheri walks over. “You’ll get there, Sunshine. Just a little practice.”

And practice is just what we get for the rest of the day, the next day, and the day after that. For a few minutes each morning we start by drawing our unloaded Glocks from our holsters. It’s to get
a feel for the weapon. Jeff watches, prodding us to move faster and faster. “It’s either you or them,” he says.

Then there’s a live qualification on the silhouette targets. Almost everyone passes on the first day, except for me and a couple of others. “We don’t move on to higher-speed stuff until everyone qualifies,” Jeff says.

We settle into a routine. Mornings are “live fire” on the paper silhouette targets, and afternoons are on the “pop-up” range—metal targets that only go down when you hit the figure’s torso or head. We shoot standing, kneeling, and on our stomachs. One afternoon it rains, but we keep at it. By day three, the Glock starts to feel like an extension of my arm, and I finally qualify, the last to do so.

On Friday morning the Glocks are gone, and 12-gauge shotguns are waiting on our worktables. “One chance to qualify, people,” Jeff says. “You won’t need more than that anyway.” I have no idea why we only get one chance, but from the way everyone stands around joking, planning their weekends, I can tell they all agree this is going to be easy.

I’ve never picked up a shotgun before, and the moment I fire it, I hate it. It’s heavy, loud, and obviously determined to dislocate my shoulder when I pull the trigger. I don’t have the strength to hold up the shotgun with my left hand while I fumble in my pocket for shells to reload. It’s not like you can set it on the ground to do it.

Jeff tells us we will shoot three rounds (slugs) at twenty-five yards. We then reload three more shells while holding the shotgun pointed at the target, a “combat load,” and then fire them. Finally, we will move up to “cover the threat,” firing a final three shells at fifteen yards.

Jeff blows the whistle, and I pull the trigger. But the gun doesn’t fire. I realize too late that I didn’t flick off the safety. My first shot
goes way wide, missing the target altogether. I get off the next two shots and then try to reload, but drop a shell on the ground. When Jeff blows the whistle to change position, I haven’t even finished loading the third shell. I move forward with everyone else to the fifteen-yard line and shoot three shells. But now I have to combat-load four to make up for the one I dropped. I don’t even have time to aim, and can’t see if I hit the target. When the whistle blows to fire the last three rounds, I realize too late that I’ve miscounted, leaving one unfired.

Jeff comes over and takes the shotgun from me. I follow him as he walks up to my target. All my slugs went wide except one. Jeff doesn’t need to tell me that I didn’t qualify. Or that everyone else has. I already know there’s no half-passing this class, and I walk back to my room thinking about the prospect of being sent back to Los Angeles.

There’s a knock at my door. It has to be Jeff. I don’t answer, and there’s another knock, then a girl’s voice. It’s Cheri.

“I heard,” she says, sitting down, one leg over the chair’s arm. “Can I tell you a story?”

Two years ago Cheri was in Kuwait on a protection detail. The VIP she was protecting was in a meeting, and she asked a local policeman where the bathroom was. He pointed her down the hall. Rather than a toilet, it was a “Turkish bomb sight”—a hole in the floor with two ribbed places for your feet. When she finished, she pulled the chain hanging from the tank to flush, but instead of flushing, it dumped a gallon of water on her! It was a shower. Her new Ann Taylor suit dripping wet, Cheri was mortified, unsure of what to do. There wasn’t even toilet paper to dry off. So she did the only thing she could: she went back and pretended nothing had happened.

“Everyone was too polite to say anything,” Cheri says. “And
the moral of the story, Sunshine, is never let them see you sweat. Pretend it never happened.”

It’s pretty clear by the next week that the idea is to turn up the heat, see who cracks and who doesn’t. Today it’s high-speed driving.

As I watch the speedometer edge over seventy, the Jamaican instructor, George, says, “Go, girl.” George is short with thick glasses and a floating eye—I wonder where the CIA found him. When I hit eighty, he gives me the thumbs-up. “Now we’re cooking with gas!”

The car, an old government Crown Vic, loses its footing as we make the first bend. It just wasn’t meant for high-speed driving on a racetrack. At the straightaway I pick up speed again, noticing out of the corner of my eye George pulling something out from under his seat. I concentrate on the road, preparing for the next turn, when the windshield goes blank—George has thrust a piece of cardboard in front of me so I can’t see the track!

When I hit the brakes, George yells, “Keep your speed, girl.” I take it back over seventy, George watching the speedometer. Without warning he pulls the cardboard away, and in front of me is a stack of baled hay. I hit the brakes hard, sending the car sliding sideways into the hay. The Crown Vic comes to a stop in a cloud of straw and dust. “Next time, drive around, girl,” George says. “One day there will be a car there.”

George then teaches us to run a moving car off the road by driving up alongside it and swerving into its rear quarter panel. At sixty miles an hour, the other car instantly loses traction and spins down the road in a 360-degree circle, the tires smoking. We do that four or five times, and then we take our turn in the car getting run off the road.

There’s a week of bailing out of a moving car, rolling across the
ground, coming to a stop on your stomach, drawing your Glock, and firing at metal pop-up targets. We learn how to ram cars to smash them out of the way, and drive backward at sixty miles per hour before cranking the wheel over and slamming the car into forward. By the end of two weeks we must have gone through a dozen cars. I wonder what the salvage yard thinks about them when they arrive.

While almost everyone drives back to Washington for the weekends, I stay on base. So does Cheri, and it’s not long before we’re friends. We spend Friday nights in the Jacuzzi singing country songs at the top of our lungs. Sunday morning we play football with a couple of the guys. My spiral pass isn’t bad and wins me points. Cheri and I go off base Sunday afternoons to go shopping.

Sometimes I look at Cheri and wonder if one day that’s going to be me. For the last three years she’s been traveling around the world teaching foreigners to shoot, sometimes working with the Secret Service, sometimes with the CIA’s paramilitary group. She tells me she loves it and can’t imagine what else she’d do in life that would interest her as much. Part of it is that she’s good, a better shot than many of the guys. She’s modest about it, though, trying to convince me that video games honed her hand-eye coordination. Maybe. But what I really admire about Cheri is her raw confidence. “I’m not afraid of shit,” as she puts it.

One Monday morning, three bosses from Langley come down to see how the class is doing. Over breakfast, the rumor starts flying that they’re here to select a couple of us for an assignment at the end of training. They want to see who can shoot and who can’t.

After we run through a quick requalification on the Glock, Jeff and the bosses walk down the silhouettes examining our groupings, the tightness of our shots. When they get to mine, Jeff says
something to them, and they look over at me. I know my groupings are now pretty good, but I’m sure he’s just told them I didn’t qualify on the shotgun.

Jeff then takes us to the pop-up range, where one of the instructors can’t make a metal target go down. Jeff walks downrange to help, bends down to take a look, but he can’t fix it, either. He looks up and asks if someone would drive back for a toolbox.

I hesitate a moment and then take my dumb Leatherman off my belt and hold it up. “Will this help?”

Jeff looks at me with my silly drooping cargo pants, my Leatherman held high, then motions for me to bring it to him. It takes him two minutes to fix the target with the fold-out pliers and screwdriver.

At lunch in the cafeteria, one of the bosses comes by our table. “Hey, girl with the multitool, hope one day we get to work together.”

It all comes back to guns, who can shoot and who can’t. But the ability to put a round in a paper target’s bull’s-eye doesn’t necessarily make you good with a weapon. The only way to find that out is by mixing it up. Some nights it’s live fire where we have to reload our magazines in pitch blackness, by feel. Just as we start to feel comfortable, they start throwing flash-bang grenades and shooting blanks above our heads. Other nights we simulate a fire-fight with paintball guns from moving cars. One night they send us solo out on the track to practice high-speed turns in the dark. As I’m driving a straightaway I see a guy on the side of the road frantically waving his arms for me to stop. As soon as I slow down and pull off to the shoulder, four instructors with paintball guns ambush me before I can even draw my weapon. Point taken: Don’t stop for anyone or anything.

They leave the hardest for the last—“the shoothouse.” A shoothouse
is a one-story structure built of stacked old tires filled with sand, thick enough to stop a bullet. Plywood inner walls give the sense of a real house. There are even windows and doors, furniture and appliances.

Jeff stands at the front door. “We’re going through one by one. Take down the bad guy and don’t shoot any women or children unless they have a weapon.”

We put on our bulletproof vests and load our Glocks. Jeff follows the first guy through the door. The rest of us wait outside, trying to imagine what’s going on inside. After a couple of seconds there’s a muffled yell, followed by two gunshots. It’s silent for a couple of minutes, and then two more shots.

One of the guys in the class walks up to me. He’s a DEA agent on loan to the CIA, a nice guy who’s helped me with my shooting. He’s six-four, and standing next to him I feel like his little sister.

“Lookit, I’ve worked with petite girls like you before. The only way they can do this is if they go completely out of character.”

I’m not sure what he means.

“Scream as loud as you possibly can, use every swear word you know. Coming out of someone like you, it’ll throw them off guard. Trust me, it gives you an edge.”

When it’s my turn, I walk in trying to ignore the Glock shaking in my hands and Jeff right behind me. I crouch low at the first door, listening. When I don’t hear anything, I swivel into it, my Glock sweeping the room. No one’s there. At the kitchen door I do the same thing. There’s a paper mom in a blue ruffled apron standing at the sink and a little girl in a pink jumper behind the table. I whisper at them to get in the closet and stay there. I continue down a hall and wait at the door of the back bedroom. I listen. There’s no noise. I swivel into the room. I don’t see anything, but then a paper man with a gun in his hand swings out from behind a cupboard.

I don’t pause even a beat, and yell at the top of my lungs, “Drop
the
fucking
gun and get your
fucking
hands in the air, or I’ll blow your
fucking
head off!”

The silhouette doesn’t move and I put two rounds into its forehead, less than an inch apart.

When I come out of the shoothouse, everyone’s laughing—I could be heard swearing as clear as a bell. Several of them come up and pat me on the back. Later I learn that a few of the guys took out both the mom and the little girl.

As with the rest of the course, they constantly raise the shoothouse ante. They move furniture around to confuse us, leaving toys and junk in the darkened halls to make us trip. Sometimes we do it after running an obstacle course, our heart rates up over 140, sometimes to deafening music, sometimes in the dark with night-vision goggles. Cameras mounted on the wall record our every mistake. But at the end of three weeks I feel pretty good and move a lot faster than when I started. I can almost sense in which room they have a paper bad guy.

One day it’s a dry-fire exercise—pulling the trigger with no bullets in the weapon. I stand outside with a couple of the guys, laughing. I’ve almost managed to put it out of my mind that I haven’t qualified on the shotgun. At least they know I’m as good as everyone else in the shoothouse.

It’s my turn. I crouch in the first door, listen for a beat, and peek in. Mom isn’t in the kitchen today. I back out, turn, and cross the hall to the next room. I crouch and listen again. There’s not a sound. I swivel into the room crouching. I’m just about through the door when I sense something behind me. It’s too late. It’s a man. He hits me with the full force of his body, hurling me to the floor, knocking the air out of me. He pins me to the ground with his knee. He’s big, heavy, and I can’t move or breathe. He yanks my left arm behind my back, the one without the Glock. Then he grabs at the gun. I pull my arm free, stick two fingers through the trigger, and wrap both hands around the barrel of the pistol and
hang on. We roll across the floor, with him yanking at the barrel of the gun. I manage to pull it away and shove the gun between my legs, my hands locked around it. He gives my right arm a hard yank, but can’t pull it away. He jumps up and runs out of the room. “Fantastic!” a voice exclaims over the intercom.