Incriminating Evidence by Rachel Grant Page B

are mountains. And I don’t know how they do it, but damn if some of the houses in the simulated village don’t smell like that shithole place. I think they pump in the smell to mess with our minds.
Some of the newbies are so damn jumpy, as if they really believe the Taliban is in the foothills, ready to blow us away. Thank God we don’t have live rounds—a rookie shot me today when we ran an Afghan military trainee/traitor scenario. He thought I was the enemy.
Alec Ravissant is one cool dude. Since I was dead, my team had to recover my body. Surreal, let me tell you. But after my body was safely returned to the field HQ, I got to hang with Rav in the control booth and watch my team continue to screw up.
Everyone calls the control booth God’s Eye, because there are about a hundred monitors that show the action in the training areas. You can see everything—it’s like something out of a futuristic movie.
Rav said I’d been doing a good job—until I got dead—and asked why I never applied for Ranger school. I told him I had a bratty little sister who would have freaked if I did. I told him how I’d been your guardian since you were fourteen, and that you’re all grown up and working on your PhD but are still a handful and I won’t stop worrying about you until I marry you off.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Alec Ravissant (Rav to the troops), but he’s like, legendary. He’s apparently from some snotty, rich family back east. Dude went to Harvard. He’s got like a genius IQ and was being groomed for politics. When he was twenty-one, he’d been accepted at Harvard Law, but he ditched it and joined the Army. His family tried to pull strings to keep him out of combat. His response was to apply for Ranger school. He served with the Rangers for years, deployed on lots of special ops missions. After he left the service, he bought Raptor with pocket change.
Knowing the guy is rich, smart, and can hold his own in a firefight, I asked Rav if he was in the market for a wife. He laughed and said he had enough on his plate and couldn’t handle the troublemaker I’d described. Sorry, sis. I tried. But then he surprised me by asking if I was planning to reenlist. He said he liked the way I worked with the soldiers, and—holy shit—he offered me a job.
I’m stunned. I’ve always figured I’d be a career enlisted man. Without college, what else am I good for? I know. I know. You’ve nagged me about the GI bill often enough—but I don’t want to go back to school. Shit. Can you see me in a classroom full of nineteen-year-olds? After two tours of duty in Iraq and three in Afghanistan, I don’t think I could handle being in a classroom again. Honestly, I don’t understand how you put up with the academic bullshit.
I’m thinking about the offer. I like Rav and the work Raptor is doing now that he’s running the place—although I have to admit, some of the training is a bit too damn real. Everything here is done to simulate the real thing, to trick us into panic mode, so those who shut down will learn how to pull out of it. It’s scary and intense, but valuable, especially for the kids fresh out of boot camp who’ve never seen combat.
I hope the meeting with your shithead advisor went well and your dissertation flies through all the hoops they throw at you. I can’t wait to start calling you Doc Izzy.
Love,
Vin
P.S. Email me a photo of you. If I end up dead in God’s Eye again with Rav, I’ll check email and make sure he sees your picture. If I have to, I could throw myself on a dummy grenade... I’m looking out for you, Sis.
    Alec couldn’t help but smile. If Vin had flashed Isabel’s picture his way, he wondered if he’d have asked for her number. Maybe. Probably. Superficial, sure, but also, Alec remembered the pride in Sergeant Vincent Dawson’s voice as he described his little sister. Alec had been intrigued.
    Vin had told Alec how he became Isabel’s guardian. He’d been a freshman in college