The Company We Keep by Robert Baer Read Free Book Online Page B

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 theground, 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 sayssomething 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