Road Tripped (Satan's Devils MC Utah #1) - Manda Mellett Page 0,24

but he doesn’t know the half of it as yet. “You’ve heard of the SAS, the Special Air Service?” It appears that he has, but I want to make sure he understands it. “It’s the equivalent of your Delta Force.”

His eyes narrow. “You were in the SAS?” He sounds disbelieving.

“I applied when they opened it up to females just a few years back,” I tell him, not answering his question immediately. “I was selected to be part of an intake of about a hundred and twenty soldiers. It’s hard, gruelling, and out of the number initially selected, only ten were expected to make the grade. The odds against succeeding are so high, there’s no shame if you don’t get through it. But you don’t go in expecting to fail, you go in with the thought you’re going to be one of the few percent who pass. You go in knowing people have died during the hardest training there is. You go in knowing you’ll be challenged in ways you could never dream of.”

He stares at me as if re-evaluating his opinion of me, but needing more information to complete his new picture. “Tell me more about this training.”

As he appears interested, I explain. “First of all, they test physical fitness and your mental stamina. It’s tough and demanding, nothing else compares. As a soldier, you’re used to superiors barking orders, but during this training you have to make your own decisions. Making a mistake can have dire consequences. As I said, it’s not unknown for people to die.” My eyes glaze slightly thinking back to my time in the Brecon Beacons, and the long gruelling hikes in difficult, nigh impossible, conditions. But fuck me, I enjoyed the challenge. “The final part of that first stage is a forty-mile hike carrying fifty-five pounds in weight. Not with people beside you encouraging you on, but on your own with no support.” He tilts his head, his eyes widening fractionally. “If you don’t make the grade at any time, you can be sent back to your unit. It’s no disgrace when more than ninety percent don’t make it. But if you get through that stage, then they send you to the jungle.” I grimace. “There, there an no adequate words to describe the conditions—harsh and testing don’t say the half of it. You have to survive behind enemy lines for weeks, living only on your wits and the rations you have with you. You know they want you to fail, because they’d rather you break then, than on a real mission.”

My bare descriptions don’t really do it justice, living in hell is more like it. “Then the final stage is escape and evasion, which is just what it sounds like. You’re held captive and have to get away. Finally…” I pause and sigh. “The last test is learning to withstand interrogation. The methods used are designed to break you. They do everything and anything to you, employ the methods a real enemy might use.” By that time you’re hanging on by your fingernails, knowing what you can do to make it stop, but determined not to give in as the goal is so close in sight. “If someone’s passed all the other stages, this can be where they fail. They pull out every dirty trick in the book, and I mean everything, Road.” I shudder slightly. There had been times I wanted to yell out to make it stop. It hadn’t been polite, the gloves were off, just as if I’d been taken by the Taliban. Indignity piled on after indignity, the words, the threats, including graphic details of how they’d rape me. In the case of a man, they’d describe exactly what they’d do to the females in his life.

It had been bad, I remember, but I’d rather find out I could withstand it during training, than discover I’d fail when faced with the real thing. In the end, though, it got so you couldn’t tell the difference, until, hungry, thirsty, desperate for sleep or for death to take you, mercifully, it stopped.

“Did they?” he asks, a slight catch to his voice. “Did they break you?”

I let him think on it for a moment, then shake my head and grin broadly as I share the proudest achievement of my whole life. “No. They didn’t break me. I made it. I was not only one of the few of that intake who were accepted, I was going to be one of the first