The Medusa Project Read online

  A thin, severe, gray-haired secretary stepped out of an interior office and looked down her nose with distaste at Vanessa. “General Wittenauer will see you now.”

  Wittenauer? The JSOC commander? The Joint Special Operations Command itself? Headquarters and operational command center for all interservice special operations units and missions. Except it was based out of North Carolina, not the Pentagon. Her pulse leaped in sudden anticipation. She’d applied to Special Forces school every year for the first ten years of her career, knowing full well that women were not accepted to that elite training. But a girl could always hope. Maybe that’s why she’d been summoned to JSOC’s Washington branch office….

  Nah. Wishful thinking. She’d caused enough waves in those early years that she’d been shuttled off to a series of dead-end desk jobs ever since. The air force steadfastly refused to make use of more than one-tenth of her skills as a computer programmer. She managed last year to wangle an assignment to Pope AFB in North Carolina, right across the airfield from Fort Bragg, home of the army Special Forces. But that was as close as she’d ever gotten to the real thing. Her career had stalled out, and unless a miracle happened, she was never going to see lieutenant colonel in this man’s air force.

  It was a bitter pill to swallow. She’d joined the service with such high hopes of serving her country in a glorious fashion, heck, of at least making a difference. But all she’d managed to do was trap herself into the role of little cog in a big machine.

  Cautiously, she followed Scatalone into the general’s office.

  Hal Wittenauer looked up from his desk. He nodded briefly at her escort and then turned his attention to her. His brittle gaze stabbed her like one of the carbon steel knives made famous by his black ops teams. Nobody’d told her to report in formally, so she mimicked Scatalone and just stood ramrod straight beneath the general’s cold scrutiny.

  The general finally broke the silence and addressed her in a growl. “Am I interrupting you?”

  “Not at all, sir,” she answered smoothly. “I was engaging in a little recreational activity on my leave.”

  “Rolling around in mud?” he asked skeptically.

  “Playing paintball,” she admitted.

  Wittenauer looked over at Scatalone. “Your uniform seems uncharacteristically disheveled. Any problem finding the major?”

  She saw the muscles in Scatalone’s jaw ripple. “No problem, sir.”

  Bull. She blurted, “I killed him.”

  The general’s rapier-sharp gaze snapped to her. If he was amused in the slightest, he hid it well. In fact, his jaw started to ripple, too. He stared at her for an inordinately long time. She held his gaze steadily. She’d waited for ten years to meet the man seated at this desk, and she wasn’t going to go all girlie shy and abashed now.

  Finally the general announced, “Brief her in, Jack. Let’s give her a try.”

  A try at what?

  “And for God’s sake, get her cleaned up,” the general snapped.

  Scatalone led her out of Wittenauer’s office and across the sitting area. “In here,” he barked at her as if she were some raw recruit. Without comment she stepped into another office, much smaller than the general’s but just as plush. These boys in D.C. sure liked their creature comforts.

  “In there.” Scatalone pointed at a door between two tall bookshelves filled with the memorabilia of a distinguished special ops career. A moment’s envy filled her. But then she opened the door. Wow. A private bathroom? Nice. She locked the door loudly just to get Scatalone’s goat and stripped out of her stiff, mud-caked clothes. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Lord, she looked like an alien invader with bright blue eyes.

  She took a quick shower and rinsed out her clothes while she was at it. Wet was better than muddy. She wrung out her fatigue pants and olive-drab T-shirt as best she could and shimmied back into the cold, cloying garments. Ick. No help for it. But at least she didn’t smell like a North Carolina swamp anymore. She opened the medicine cabinet and borrowed a comb she found there to detangle her chin-length chestnut hair. Without a blow-dryer to straighten it, her hair was going to end up a mass of ringlets around her face. No help for that, either. Jack Scatalone would just have to deal with her looking like Shirley Temple.

  She stepped out into his office. Scatalone looked up from his desk, did a double take and glared. What was his problem?

  “Come with me,” he growled.

  She followed him down into the bowels of the Pentagon to a small PX. She had no idea there was anything like this compact department store inside the Pentagon. Like most past exchanges, it carried everything from sporting goods to clothes, from uniforms to children’s toys. Although it was good to note that the Pentagon PX was noticeably shy on toys.

  “Get yourself a uniform and whatever toiletries you need,” Scatalone ordered.

  “For how long?”

  “Couple weeks. I doubt you’ll last any longer than that.”

  “Is this a permanent reassignment?” she asked, surprised.

  “I doubt it,” he bit out.

  What burr was up his butt? Or was he just a jerk naturally?

  Uniform slacks, shirt, shoes, major’s epaulets and an engraved-while-you-wait name tag went in her basket. She tossed in toothpaste, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, and deodorant, as well. But she’d be damned if she was going to buy tampons in front of the guy.

  “That’s it?” he asked in surprise.

  Ha. She’d managed to throw him off balance. Sure, she wore makeup and perfume, and primped like any other woman, but for some reason, she felt compelled to match this guy’s macho. “Whoops. Forgot one thing.”

  She bit her lip to keep from grinning as she hauled him over to the lingerie section of the store and picked up a fire engine-red ensemble of lace panties and push-up bra. Dirty old generals must choose the store’s inventory, she thought.

  “That’s everything,” she announced cheerfully.

  His eyes were dark slits of irritation as he led her to the checkout counter. Excellent. But he turned the tables and surprised her when he pulled out a government credit card and charged it all before she could pull out her own wallet. Her purchases were bagged, and he led her back up to his office. Two minutes in his bathroom—whoa, his own bathroom? Plush assignment—and she was presentable again. She stepped out. And bit back a grin as his eyes dropped immediately to her chest. Thinking about that naughty red bra, was he?

  “What gives?” she demanded. “Why did you and General Wittenauer drag me all the way up here to Washington? Have you got a computer problem you need fixed?”

  “Computer…hell, no.” Scatalone grabbed a thick file off his desk and headed for the door. “Come with me.”

  If he gave her the runaround for too much longer without some sort of explanation, she was going to walk out on him, lieutenant colonel or not. This time, he led her down to one of the deepest sublevels of the Pentagon—The Toilet, as it was fondly called in honor of the sewage that came in when the pipes burst. She’d worked down here before in the Central Computer Processing Center. They called on her occasionally to write programs for them. She was surprised when Scatalone led her past the computer complex, though, and down a darker, narrower hall. It was dry and musty, with exposed pipes overhead and paint reminiscent of the 1940s.

  “In here.” He ducked through an unmarked door.

  He flipped on the lights and she looked around. It was a fairly large space, but every inch of it was crammed with tall filing cabinets. It felt like a tight rat maze. A single table stood in a small space in the center of the room.

  “Okay, Colonel. Spill it or I’m outta here.”

  Amusement glinted in his eyes as he sat down at the table and gestured her into the chair across from him. He made a big deal out of looking at his watch, then he said flatly, “Four hours, nineteen minutes before you lost your patience. Not good enough, Major.”

  For what? What in the hell was he talking about? Of cours
e, after that stinging rebuke, it wasn’t like she’d ask him in this lifetime.

  He opened the file and picked up a sheet of paper. “You went to MIT. Degree with honors in Computer Science. Studied Arabic, Spanish and Chinese. Why those three?”

  “Hot spots in the world,” she answered shortly. “Good languages to know.”

  He gave her an intent, assessing look. Finally he glanced down to the paper and continued. “Made the 1992 Olympic team in swimming, but a shoulder injury kept you from competing.”

  “Yes.” That looked for all the world like her personnel file in front of him. Except it should be in San Antonio at the air force personnel center.

  “Applied to spec ops school ten times,” he read.

  She folded her arms across her chest and pressed her lips together.

  “Why’d you quit applying?” he shot at her.

  “I was ordered to,” she shot back.

  One dark eyebrow went up. “By whom?”

  “General Wittenauer’s predecessor. He told me I was harassing his office, and if I didn’t stop, he’d put a letter of reprimand in my record.”

  “And that stopped you?” Scatalone said scornfully.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Sometimes you have to cut your losses and try again another day. Pursuit of my goal at that time had become counterproductive.”

  He shuffled through the rest of her file and didn’t seem interested in anything else he saw. Not that a series of dead-end desk jobs should blow his skirts up. Without warning, he pinned her with a piercing stare. “Why Special Forces?” he barked.

  His abrupt question startled her. Enough to pop an image into her mind. Of an old color photograph, its tones faded to green and yellow. Marred down the middle by a vertical white line where it had been folded long ago. Two grinning, shirtless young men hammed for the camera, their arms thrown over each other’s shoulders. Young and wild. On top of the world. They died a week after the picture was taken. And one of them was her father, U.S. Navy SEAL Vince Blake.

  She shrugged. “I’ve got the skills. I’ve got the drive. I’ve got the desire. Why not Special Forces?” she threw back at him.

  He betrayed no reaction to her challenge. He asked stonily, “So it’s still your goal to be the first woman to enter the Special Forces?”

  The question made her feel naked. It was her most closely held dream, and she’d privately trained for it for years. It was why she put up with being pushed into a forgotten job. Why she worked out for hours every day. Why she pursued hobbies like skeet shooting and full-combat paintball. But she wasn’t the least bit comfortable sharing her life’s ambition with this gruff stranger. She answered defensively, “I don’t give a flip whether I’m the first woman or the last. I just want a shot at it.”

  He put the typed paper back in the file and closed it deliberately. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her long and hard. Finally he spoke heavily, “Then today’s your lucky day, Major.”

  Chapter 2

  Vanessa’s heart nearly leaped out of her chest. Please God, let this not be some sort of elaborate practical joke. She sat very still, waiting for the colonel to continue.

  He leaned forward and stared at her, his gaze deadly serious. “You’ve been chosen to pull together a team of six women who will be run through Special Forces training and evaluated to see if women are capable of performing the Special Forces mission.”

  Holy Mary, Mother of God. He wasn’t kidding. Damned if her knees hadn’t just started shaking.

  He swept his hand around the room. “These are the personnel files of every female currently serving in the United States armed forces. We had them flown up from San Antonio for you. From them you will need to pick five women to join you on this project.”

  She eyed the rows of cabinets. There must have been a hundred metal, four-drawer stacks in the room. “How long do I have to pick the team?”

  “Two weeks.”

  She stared at him slack-jawed. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’ll take me a year to get through these files. What are the selection criteria?”

  He shrugged. “There aren’t any.”

  “What are we going to be doing? What’s the mission? I need to know if I’m getting the right people.”

  “The Special Forces mission covers a broad array of possible scenarios. Surely you know that, Major.”

  Duh. She’d read everything she could get her hands on about the Special Forces over the years. She knew as well as any outsider what the spec ops guys did. They went into impossible situations against impossible odds and achieved impossible goals. “So you want me to pick five women out of thousands upon thousands, and you’re going to measure the future of all women in special ops based on whoever I come up with. And I have two lousy weeks to find the right five?”

  “If you can’t do it, we’ll find somebody else for the job,” he said silkily.

  “That’s not the point. You’re setting this thing up to fail from the very start if you don’t give me enough time to find the very best women available.”

  He lounged in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not setting you up to fail, darlin’.”

  His implication was clear. Someone else sure as hell was. She could imagine the wrangling that had to have gone on in the chauvinist-laden halls upstairs over this one. “Who shoved it down Wittenauer’s throat?” Because without a doubt someone had, given how pissed off he was to see her. Best to know up front who her enemies were going to be.

  Scatalone shrugged. “That’s above my pay grade to know.”

  Interesting. He didn’t deny the fact that someone had twisted Wittenauer’s arm.

  “When you’re done for the day, come back up to my office. I’ll get you to the quarters I’ve arranged for you while you’re here.” He pushed to his feet. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Two weeks, Major.” And with that, he left.

  Great. He was probably going to stick her in some flop-house nightmare—just to make her feel really welcome.

  She turned to face the maze of metal cabinets. And took a deep breath. She’d done it. She was going to get her shot at the brass ring. An urge to whoop aloud nearly overcame her. Only the thought that Scatalone was probably standing outside waiting for her to lose her cool kept her jubilation in her throat. She did indulge in a heartfelt fist pump, though. And then she stepped up to the nearest filing cabinet, pulled out a file randomly and opened it. An army admin type. Enlisted. No problem. Single mom. No way.

  She pulled out a dozen more files, and the women inside were equally dismally suited for special ops. This was never going to work. It was like looking for five needles in a mile-tall haystack. Surely the armed forces personnel centers wouldn’t release their only copies of all these files to the Pentagon. There had to be some sort of backups. And she’d bet her next paycheck they were electronic.

  She picked up the ancient black rotary phone hanging on the wall beside the door and dialed the Pentagon operator. It took only about four phone calls to track down the guy she needed to talk to in San Antonio. “Hi, Sergeant McAllister. This is Major Blake. I’m sitting in the basement of the Pentagon right now with a whole bunch of personnel files on female soldiers.”

  The sergeant exclaimed, “So you’re who they went to! What in the world are you guys doing with all those files? We’ve been dying to know what’s going on and who had the clout to get them relocated like that.”

  “I don’t really know myself. But I’ve been asked to sort these puppies and select a few women for a test program, and there’s no way I can do it in hard copy.”

  “No kidding,” the sergeant commiserated.

  “Do you happen to have an electronic version of this stuff?”

  “I’ll do you one better than that,” the guy replied. “I can send them formatted for promotion boards.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “All their training and skills are rated on numeric scales and can be compared easily against one another in
a computer sort.”

  Fantastic. “That’s perfect! How soon do you suppose you could e-mail the files to me?”

  “Right now. But it’ll take a couple hours to send. The files are huge. And you’ll need a ton of storage space on your computer.”

  “No problem. Here’s where to send them.” She rattled off an e-mail address she’d set up on one of the Pentagon’s mainframes the last time she was here. The guy agreed to get right on it and she hung up. Now for a decent computer to work on. She headed for the central processing center they’d passed on the way to this dungeon. The guard at the main door stonewalled her, but when several of the computer techs inside recognized her and called out greetings from across the room, the guard let her in.

  A staff sergeant who was one of the best hackers she’d ever known came over to her. “Good to see you, Jerry,” she greeted him. “I can’t believe you’re not in jail yet.”

  The young man grinned. “They have to catch me first.”

  She shook her head. “Hey, I need a favor. General Wittenauer’s given me a project to do, and it’s going to involve running a massive file sort. Any chance I could use a terminal here to write the program?”

  “No prob.”

  “And I could use a little time on one of the supercomputers to run it,” she added.

  He shot her an interested look. “How much time?”

  “A minute ought to do it.”

  He nodded slowly. “I might be able to work you in tomorrow night, late. Let’s go take a look at the schedule.”

  In short order, she was booked for two minutes of run time on the Pentagon’s newest and fastest supercomputer, and she had a temporary badge granting her entrance to the computing center. Now to figure out what qualities she wanted the program to search for and in what order she wanted her candidates ranked. She worked throughout the afternoon, racking her brain for every skill she could think of that might be useful in a female Special Forces soldier.

  Highly intelligent. Foreign-language speaker. Technical skills. Physical fitness. Upper body strength. Stamina. Mental toughness. Team player. A bit of an attitude. Some of the attributes would be hard to measure in the cold, numeric world of a computer, but once she got an initial readout of possible candidates, she’d narrow it down herself from there.