When I Was a Spy

It was a dark and stormy night. The coasts of Tunisia were covered by huge gusts of wind carrying bits of sand and broken glass. I stood on the cliff with my Sig in hand and a parachute compacted and strapped against my back. I had one shot to get this right: after I passed off this mission, I would be an official spy. Sweat trickled down my partner's face. "You okay, Red Baron?" a voice asked him through our earpieces. "The sooner this is over, the better," he answered as the wind whipped his stawberry-blond hair as if it were a professional in a Parisian salon. That was my partner: sweating in the 115% humidity, hair tousseled by particles of dirt and still looking like a model. I turned away and checked my watch: 15 minutes until the drop.

Red Baron took one look at me. "One last kiss, my dear. Before the plunge. In case...." He fell forbodingly silent. That pleading look in his tinted goggles was all it took for me to firmly grasp his head in my palms and let him kiss me once. Then twice. Then three times. Then, everywhere.

Our delicious moment of passion was disrupted by the sound of machine gun fire. "Duck!" he screamed. He fell on top of me in a protective stance, but I felt his body rock as bullets racked his body.

"I love y..."

His last word was cut off as a .50 caliber bullet ripped through his insides. He screamed and his blood created a miasma in the atmosphere around us. He gasped. I cried. I pressed my hands to his wound in an attempt to keep his life from slipping away. Small sounds escaped his lips, and his blood soaked hand came to rest upon my face. His body jerked and his hand fell away leaving a lingering pictograph of human viscera.

I picked up his body, and rushed his attackers. The look of absolute terror in their fiendish eyes spelled delight to me. There was nothing that could stop me from destroying them one by one.

"WHIPPPUHH-WHIPPUUHH-WHIPPPUUUH...."

I turned my head with a jerk. It was a chopper. And from the pulpit smiled....

"Madmoselle Juliette Hatch. We meet again!" cried Lumier Terriblle.

And then I knew: this would be harder than I thought.

I grabbed the Sig and fired twice at the small silver control box on the bottom of the helicopter. One shot was all it took - my two year training in the mountains of Western China enabled me to make any shot, dead-on, from 50 feet away, depending on the weapon - but the second shot blasted through the controls into the cockpit. A bullet blazed past my ear - I had to take control: the loss of Red Baron was taking its emotional toll on me. I ducked down and fired one more shot, this time into the open door of the helicopter, straight at Terriblle. Unfortunately, the damage to the control box caused the helicopter to shake and shut down as sparks flew from its underside. My shot missed Terriblle but hit another mark - it was Canyon Suite, the team's techie.

It seemed incredible that, moments before, Canyon Suite had been asking Red Baron if he was okay. His were the last words that Red Baron had ever heard, and now he was bound and gagged - and perhaps fatally wounded - in the enemy's helicopter that was starting to go down.

"No!" I screamed, frantically, trying to figure out how I was going to save Canyon Suite even as I jumped off the cliff and leaped for the helicopter. If I was shot, fine - Red Baron was dead, what point would there be to go on anyway? I missed the helicopter by inches, and as it fell away from me towards the Meditteranean below, I pulled on my parachute cord and was immediately thrashed away from the cliffs on the turbulence.

I allowed myself a moment to stare in disbelief at the ocean that was I was descending to meet. In a matter of minutes, I had lost two people I loved dearly ... Canyon Suite had been my technical support since I had joined OPS, a covert government operation funded by the department of defense. OPS, or the Operational Pursuit of Security, was the group that hunted down terrorists and assassins before they followed through with their plans. In the 72 years that OPS had been in existence, it had thwarted countless military and assassin attacks on American soil, and even more abroad before the killers had even made the final touches to their plans. Canyon Suite had been a part of OPS for seven years, and was one of the best in his business. He was so good, in fact, that the CIA, NSA, and numbers of other less reputable groups had offered him up to thirty times his current salaryto leave OPS. Only one thing had kept him there: our team.

Now there were only two of us left. I had to get to our makeshift headquarters before Terriblle sent someone after me. Red Baron and I had been on a reconnaisance mission to take pictures and gather evidence. Terriblle and his cohorts had supposedly been trading illegal arms with the D'yamunda, the Tunisian version of the Mafia, named for their diamond tattoos on their necks. Our recon team leader, Green Owl, had most likely heard the entire operation fall apart on his earpiece. The headquarters for this operation were in an abandoned warehouse five miles inland. As I drifted to the water, I cut my parachute lines and splashed into the water, swimming out from under the parachute. I had to get to the warehouse.