Outsourced - Softcover

Hillhouse, Raelynn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765354810 ISBN 13: 9780765354815

Verlag: Forge, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In "Outsourced", Camille Black, a former CIA counterterrorism officer, has left the Agency to create Black Management, a private corporation that specializes in providing former Special Forces operators and CIA case officers for covert operations. Active in the volatile Middle East, it competes heavily in the cutthroat counterterrorism business.One day, the CIA contracts Camille to track down and eliminate her ex-fiance Hunter Stone, a Pentagon spy accused of selling arms to terrorist cells. Battling her old feelings, but fuelled by Stone's disloyalty to both his country and to her, Camille slips into the shadows of the War on Terror to track him down. Dodging death with each step, she finds herself in the crossfire of the Pentagon and the CIA, where good and evil blur and trust is bought and sold."Outsourced" exposes the headlines of tomorrow. Impeccably researched and masterfully crafted, "Outsourced" is an edge-of-your seat thriller with a rare glimpse behind the scenes into how private corporations conduct and profit from the multi-billion dollar War on Terror.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R J HILLHOUSE lived for over six years in Central and Eastern Europe and is fluent in several languages. She earned her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Michigan. A former professor and Fulbright fellow, Hillhouse has lectured at such institutions as Harvard, the Smithsonian and the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

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Chapter One

Camp Tornado Point, Anbar Province, Iraq

Two months later

Her nose burned as she inhaled the dry air, heavy with diesel fumes that barely masked the stench of the burn pit and the overpowering fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. To Camille Black it was the sweet scent of life on the edge, the smell of money, the perfume of Iraq. She coughed dust and smiled as she circled her new mine-protected personnel carrier, a six-hundred-thousand-dollar Cougar, admiring it as if it were a Ferrari. In this part of Iraq, it was her Ferrari. Its V-shaped underbelly made it look more like a boxy boat than a small troop transport, but it could channel away blasts that would rip open an armored Humvee. As she watched several troops saying short prayers and kissing pictures of loved ones, she ran her hand along the vehicle’s side and sent off her own lonely prayer. She felt a blister in the desert-tan paint and she pretended to care.

Without warning, Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” blared over the Cougar’s sound system, heavy metal shifting the mood. All at once, the men put away their photos and got in each other’s faces, shouting the song’s angry words about letting bodies hit the floor. “Three! Four!” They counted with the lyrics, laughing and smiling, pumping themselves up for the night’s combat mission, a mission that she, too, was supposed to be part of, even though at the moment it didn’t feel that way to her. When the song was over, the operators slapped each other on the back in a bravado of brotherhood—a brotherhood that Camille had grown up with.

She admired the men. Some of the operators wore the short beards and moustaches favored by Force Zulu and Delta Force and others sported shaved heads typical of Navy SEALs. All but one had more wrinkles than their active-duty counterparts and they all had fatter paychecks, Black Management paychecks that she had signed. They were the rock stars of the Iraq War. And they were hers.

The men’s bodies moved with the heavy metal rhythm of combat as they groomed one another, inspecting each other’s equipment, cinching their buddies’ gear and slapping duct tape over loose straps. None of them seemed to notice as she walked into the shadows on the other side of the Cougar, smiling. There she quietly sang “Bodies” to herself as she felt for her extra magazines of ammo to make sure everything was there and accessible. She touched her USP Tactical pistol, then her knife to confirm positions and she tightened her webbing. After she checked her XM8 assault rifle, she was geared up, ready for action. And she was amped.

She circled back around the vehicle. By then the men had already crammed themselves and their war gear into the back of the Cougar, ready for a preemptive raid on what Black Management intelligence suspected was an insurgent safe house. As Camille approached the crew door, one by one each man stopped inspecting his weapon and stared.

But no one spoke to her.

She grabbed a rung and started to climb aboard. Her body armor and gear weighed her down, but she was determined to board without assistance—not that any was offered to her. It stung. All of her life she had trained with Special Forces operators and she knew what they thought about women accompanying them into combat. No matter how many times she had proven herself in battle, they never quite trusted her. She remained an interloper in their shadowy male world, the very one that she was raised to inhabit. She hoisted herself up, barely able to get her center of gravity far enough inside.

The men were tightly packed on benches along the side walls and they seemed to spread out a little more as she searched for space.

“Like it or not, boys, you need to make room for me.”

“Put yourself down right here, sweetie.” An operator grinned at her as he patted his thigh.

“You really want a lap dance from a woman with a Ka-Bar knife strapped to her ankle?” Camille smiled as she pointed to the Marine combat knife her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday. “I’m game if you are.”

He elbowed his buddy and they scooted aside. Camille Black took her place among the operators, pleased with herself.

In the twenty minutes since they’d left the base, no one had spoken to Camille. The Cougar’s air conditioning was fighting the summer heat, but it was a losing battle. The air was warm and stale and the ride hard. A man with a scar the entire length of his right forearm sat across from her, staring at her, calculating something. She looked him in the eyes and he wouldn’t look away or even blink.

His dark eyes looked intelligent, the wrinkles around them, experienced. He was bald and most of his face was clean-shaven, but taunting the Black Management dress code by several inches was a long narrow moustache and a thin veil of a beard that outlined his jawbone and came to a point well below his chin. As she studied him, she realized he could only be the operator known as Genghis.

Genghis studied her weapon. The lightweight assault rifle was a next generation kinetic energy system that the Army had hoped would replace the Vietnam-era M4 and M16 carbines until Pentagon politics killed the program. Camille loved its sleek design, molded polymer casing and clear plastic magazine. To her the XM8 seemed more like something used to blast space aliens rather than Iraqi insurgents. It had outperformed her expectations on the firing range and she couldn’t wait to field test it, but more importantly, it was cool, jock-cool and it made her feel that way, too.

Genghis cleared his throat. “That’s one sexy kit. Haven’t seen that before here in the sandbox.”

The men stopped talking among themselves and watched. Camille handed him the rifle. He weighed it in his right hand.

“Light enough for a girl, I see. So what’s a little lady doing all dolled up with an XM8?”

“Accessorizing.”

“I know who you are.” His teeth were stained from chewing tobacco. He tossed her the carbine. “There’s never been a finer warrior than your daddy. Everyone agrees the Malacca incident never would’ve happened if Charlie had still been with his team where he belonged. It was a helluva blow to the unit when your mommy died and he chose to leave the Corps to raise his little princess.”

“He raised a warrior, not a princess.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” Genghis reached for an empty plastic water bottle and spat tobacco juice into it. Brown sludge oozed down the side of the container and she turned away.

A few kilometers ahead on the potholed highway through Ramadi, Hunter’s body moved with the beat of Metallica’s “One” blasting through the Ford Expedition. The country sucked. His employer sucked. The mission sucked. Expecting high-stakes action, Hunter had left his beloved Marine Corps and faked his death to join Force Zulu, the Pentagon’s new elite espionage and counterterrorism unit, but instead of daring raids with the latest high-tech equipment, he was sitting in an up-armored Ford Expedition, a spy undercover as a common mercenary working for Rubicon. He was one of the government’s most highly trained operators, now crammed into a SUV with a bunch of bomb guys on his way to do a job that a bunch of first-year grunts could’ve accomplished. He’d stepped on enough toes over the years that military politics had to catch up with him sooner or later and damn him to this crappy assignment, spying on a military...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Forge
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765354810
• ISBN 13: 9780765354815
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Procter & Gamble Service GmbH, Braun; https://in.pg.com/contact-us/; ; Sulzbacher Str. 40-50; Schwalbach/Ts.; 65824; Deutschland