Vince Flynn: American Assassin

RAPP found the cot next to three bunk beds. It was standard military surplus. Not great, but a hell of a lot better than the floor. After stripping to his underwear, he opened his bag and pulled out a pair of shorts and a plain white T-shirt. Kennedy had told him to pack only generic clothing. She didn’t want him wearing anything that could give one of the other men an idea where he came from. They were all under strict orders to not discuss each other’s past. Rapp folded up his clothes, placed them in the footlocker, closed it, and set the bag on top. He would have unpacked the bag, but he heard his instructor approaching. Rapp took up his position in the middle of the well-worn wrestling mat and waited eagerly for his shot.

Hurley stopped near the entrance to the barn, took a long drag off his cigarette, and began to loosen up with a few side stretches and shoulder rolls. He was not expecting much of a fight, so after a quick calf stretch he took one last puff off his cigarette, stubbed it out against the sole of his boot, and entered the barn. The new recruit was standing in the middle of the mat wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Hurley gave him the once-over. He was fit, just like all the others, but there was a certain casual, relaxed posture that he found offputting.

“Shoulders back! Eyes front and center!” Hurley shook his head and mumbled some incoherent words to himself. “I don’t have time to babysit.” He bent over and took off his boots and socks and set them neatly at a ninety-degree angle at the edge of the mat, socks folded on top. He took off his sunglasses and set them on top of the socks. Stepping onto the mat, he asked, “Rules?”

Rapp didn’t flinch. “That’s up to you, sir.”

Hurley bent back, continuing his stretching, and said, “Since no one’s here to monitor this little ass kickin’ I suggest we keep it civilized. Stay away from the balls and the eyes, and no throat strikes.”

“Choke holds?”

“Absolutely,” Hurley grinned. “If you want it to end all you have to do is tap out.”

Rapp shook his head.

“Fair enough.” Hurley caught his first glimmer of something he didn’t like. There was no sign of tension on the kid’s face. He looked as relaxed as a schmuck who was about to play a round of golf. Two possibilities presented themselves and Hurley liked neither. The first was that the recruit might not be the little mama’s boy that he thought, and the second was that he might be too stupid to know he wasn’t cut out for this line of work. Either way, he might have to waste more than one day of his valuable time trying to drum him out. Hurley was shaking his head and muttering to himself when he realized there was a third possibility-that the kid actually might have the goods.

The potential hazard made Hurley pause. He glanced at the young college kid and realized he knew surprisingly little about the man standing in the middle of the mat. The jacket he’d received from Stansfield was so sanitized that the pertinent details would have fit onto one page. Beyond the general physical description and test scores, every other piece of information had been redacted. The man was a blank slate. Hurley had no sense of his physical abilities and general bearing. He didn’t even know if he was left- or right-handed. A frown creased Hurley’s well-lined brow as he ran through some more scenarios.

Normally, when Hurley stepped onto the mat with a recruit, he already had the advantage of having read an extensive personnel file, as well as having watched them for several days. You could tell a lot about a man by observing him for a few days. He silently called himself a dumb-ass for not thinking of this sooner. There was no calling it off at this point. His bare feet were on the mat. If he called it off it would be a sign of weakness.

Hurley set his apprehension aside and reminded himself that he’d bested every man he’d run through here. He moved forward with his normal swagger and a lopsided grin on his face. He stopped ten feet away and said, “Ready when you are.”

Rapp nodded, dropped into a crouch, and made a slow move to his left.

Hurley began sliding to his right, looking for an angle of attack. He glimpsed his opening when his opponent made an aggressive head fake that was an obvious tell of what would follow. In that moment, Hurley decided to dispatch the kid quickly. He wasn’t going to waste time with defensive blocks and holds. He was going to make this kid feel some real pain. Maybe bust a couple of his ribs. That way, even if he proved to be a stubborn fool, there’d be no hope of his keeping up with the others.

Hurley anticipated the punch, ducked into a crouch, and came in to deliver a blow to the kid’s midsection. Right about the time he pivoted off his back foot and let loose his strike he realized something wasn’t right. The kid was a lot faster than he had anticipated. The little shit had doubled back on his own weak fake and was now a good two feet to the right of where Hurley had thought he would be. It looked like he had been suckered. Hurley knew he was horribly out of position, and exposed, but he wasn’t the least bit alarmed. He pulled back his punch and prepared to go back in again on a different angle of attack. He was in the process of delivering his second blow when he realized again that something was wrong. Hurley sensed more than saw the big left hook bearing down on his face. In the final split second before impact he braced himself by pulling in his chin and dropping his hips. The crushing blow landed just above Hurley’s right eye.

Punches are funny things in that each one is different. You’ve got uppercuts, hooks, jabs, roundhouses, haymakers, and rabbit punches, to name a few. If you’ve sparred enough, you’ve felt all of them, and you learn to recognize each one by feel almost the instant it lands. A little scorecard in your head quickly analyzes the blow, and there’s a brief conversation that takes place between the part of the brain that analyzes the thousands of instantaneous signals that come flying in and the part of the brain whose job it is to make sure the brain stays online. Hurley had been doing this for years, and as a man whose job it was to judge talent and teach, he had grown very accustomed to giving instant feedback to the man whose ass he was kicking. On this occasion, however, he was too busy trying to stay on his feet, so he kept his mouth shut.

The punch hit him so squarely that Hurley actually went down to one knee for a split second. The turtle move had saved him from getting KOed. If his head had been exposed any further the force of the blow would have snapped his jaw around so quickly his equilibrium would have gone offline, and he’d be down for a nice long nap. The ringside announcer in Hurley’s brain made him aware of two things in extremely quick succession. The first was that he hadn’t been hit this hard in a long time, the second was that he’d better launch a counterattack, and do it quickly, or he was going to get his ass kicked.

Hurley pivoted from his back to his front foot and launched a flurry of combinations designed more to get this kid to back up than actually hit him. The first two were blocked and the next five found nothing more than air. Hurley realized the kid must have been a boxer and that meant he’d have to get him down on the mat and twist him into submission. No more punches. Before Hurley had a chance to regroup, he felt the leg sweep catch him perfectly in the ankle of his right foot, which happened to be bearing about 90 percent of his weight. What happened next was simple physics. The sweep took him out so cleanly that there was no hope of catching himself with his back leg, so Hurley went with it. He landed on his ass, tucked and rolled back and sprang onto his feet. The fact that the kid had just swept him was not lost on Hurley. Boxers did not know how to use leg sweeps. There was a split-second pause while Hurley looked across the mat at the new recruit and wondered if he’d been lied to about his lack of military training. The respite did not last long.