09-16-2018, 04:25 PM
No one was telling her anything about her training. Not really. The group of priests that served as her handlers had been particularly tight-lipped before a lengthy eight week-long scout sniper course they’d dropped her off at in the United States. It had started with a grueling physical fitness test followed by daily shooting instruction, then lessons in stalking and organic camouflage and progressed into a three day long game of hide and seek after a ‘kill.’ There was a caveat though. Apparently in this test she’d had a spotter, even if the course taught students to operate singly. Her objective post-kill had been to move a 200 pound dummy, her ‘partner’ she assumed, over a distance of roughly 23 miles.
She was fourteen years old and weighed about ninety pounds dripping wet. It hadn’t take her long at all to recognize the futility of trying to do it their way. Was this part of the test designed to make her fail on purpose? The Marines had explained the parameters; make the shot and exfiltrate with ‘package-to-be-recovered-at-said-coordinates’ then traverse to the designated rendezvous point. 23 miles. She’d be damned if this made her fail. Of the six Atharim sent to train she was the only one left.
They’d grilled her on her thought processes afterward. She’d dragged her partner into a nearby stream, plunged her knife into the dummy and ‘severed’ the abdominal aorta. 23 seconds to bleed out. The girl then cut the dummy in half, rolled the halves onto the bank, tightly wrapped the legs in an emergency poncho she then secured with duct tape. The leg bundle was tied off under water to a slimy downed tree. The top half was stuffed into a body bag and carried back to the rendezvous point 23 miles away. She’d hiked back to the legs and repeated the evasion game to make it back to camp.
The instructors had been stunned to say the least upon her presentation of two pieces and not one. She’d been up for 51 or so hours, nearly covered 70 miles over difficult terrain carrying more than her own bodyweight in gear and dead weight. Having reached a new understanding of the word’s meaning, Nika was exhausted. She had melted to the ground and remained so in a slouch supported only by her pack, post-debriefing. Famished, she had almost been too tired to open the tan pouch of trail mix she’d taken for fuel. Her body needed it though and between sips of electrolytes from her Hydration pack, mouthfuls of nuts, berries, chunks of chocolate and whatever else the US military deemed necessary for their men, she choked it down.
The men clustered tightly in heated discussion just out of earshot. She watched them through heavy eyelids, catching herself nodding off several times. Naturally the priests were there, this being her final test. There were three, only one of whom had passed this course himself. They were suddenly standing over her. She’d nodded off again. A gruff bark of her ‘name’ ie student number during the course snapped her from the clutches of sleep.
"THREE.”
“Sir?” Nika’s answer was automatic by now.
“How did you know your spotter was already dead?”
“Sir, I checked for a pulse and found none.”
The big man grabbed her by the straps of her pack and lifted to her feet like she weighed nothing. A pang of fear snapped the haze from her vision. Failure. She wanted so desperately to have passed. She couldn’t have failed, not now. Her parents had been avenged but there were so many of those murderers in the world. The injustice of it all resonated within her young soul, it drove her onward and fueled her when she thought she could go no further. The little Atharim bit her lip hard in the stretching silence as the Captain regarded her. She would not cry.
“Congratulations...” He smirked. “...Asset.”
Nika’s blue eyes blazed with pride. A refreshed sense of purpose swelled within her chest. Now...finally, now she could mete justice.
She was fourteen years old and weighed about ninety pounds dripping wet. It hadn’t take her long at all to recognize the futility of trying to do it their way. Was this part of the test designed to make her fail on purpose? The Marines had explained the parameters; make the shot and exfiltrate with ‘package-to-be-recovered-at-said-coordinates’ then traverse to the designated rendezvous point. 23 miles. She’d be damned if this made her fail. Of the six Atharim sent to train she was the only one left.
They’d grilled her on her thought processes afterward. She’d dragged her partner into a nearby stream, plunged her knife into the dummy and ‘severed’ the abdominal aorta. 23 seconds to bleed out. The girl then cut the dummy in half, rolled the halves onto the bank, tightly wrapped the legs in an emergency poncho she then secured with duct tape. The leg bundle was tied off under water to a slimy downed tree. The top half was stuffed into a body bag and carried back to the rendezvous point 23 miles away. She’d hiked back to the legs and repeated the evasion game to make it back to camp.
The instructors had been stunned to say the least upon her presentation of two pieces and not one. She’d been up for 51 or so hours, nearly covered 70 miles over difficult terrain carrying more than her own bodyweight in gear and dead weight. Having reached a new understanding of the word’s meaning, Nika was exhausted. She had melted to the ground and remained so in a slouch supported only by her pack, post-debriefing. Famished, she had almost been too tired to open the tan pouch of trail mix she’d taken for fuel. Her body needed it though and between sips of electrolytes from her Hydration pack, mouthfuls of nuts, berries, chunks of chocolate and whatever else the US military deemed necessary for their men, she choked it down.
The men clustered tightly in heated discussion just out of earshot. She watched them through heavy eyelids, catching herself nodding off several times. Naturally the priests were there, this being her final test. There were three, only one of whom had passed this course himself. They were suddenly standing over her. She’d nodded off again. A gruff bark of her ‘name’ ie student number during the course snapped her from the clutches of sleep.
"THREE.”
“Sir?” Nika’s answer was automatic by now.
“How did you know your spotter was already dead?”
“Sir, I checked for a pulse and found none.”
The big man grabbed her by the straps of her pack and lifted to her feet like she weighed nothing. A pang of fear snapped the haze from her vision. Failure. She wanted so desperately to have passed. She couldn’t have failed, not now. Her parents had been avenged but there were so many of those murderers in the world. The injustice of it all resonated within her young soul, it drove her onward and fueled her when she thought she could go no further. The little Atharim bit her lip hard in the stretching silence as the Captain regarded her. She would not cry.
“Congratulations...” He smirked. “...Asset.”
Nika’s blue eyes blazed with pride. A refreshed sense of purpose swelled within her chest. Now...finally, now she could mete justice.