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do is tap out.”
    Rapp shook his head.
    “Fair enough.” Hurley caught his first glimmer of something he didn’t like. There was no sign of tension on the kid’s face. He looked as relaxed as a schmuck who was about to play a round of golf. Two possibilities presented themselves and Hurley liked neither. The first was that the recruit might not be the little mama’s boy that he thought, and the second was that he might be too stupid to know he wasn’t cut out for this line of work. Either way, he might have to waste more than one day of his valuable time trying to drum him out. Hurley was shaking his head and muttering to himself when he realized there was a third possibility—that the kid actually might have the goods.
    The potential hazard made Hurley pause. He glanced at the young college kid and realized he knew surprisingly little about the man standing in the middle of the mat. The jacket he’d received from Stansfield was so sanitized that the pertinent details would have fit onto one page. Beyond the general physical description and test scores, every other piece of information had been redacted. The man was a blank slate. Hurley had no sense of his physical abilities and general bearing. He didn’t even know if he was left- or right-handed. A frown creased Hurley’s well-lined brow as he ran through some more scenarios.
    Normally, when Hurley stepped onto the mat with a recruit, he already had the advantage of having read an extensive personnel file, as well as having watched them for several days. You could tell a lot about a man by observing him for a few days. He silently called himself a dumb-ass for not thinking of this sooner. There was no calling it off at this point. His bare feet were on the mat. If he called it off it would be a sign of weakness.
    Hurley set his apprehension aside and reminded himself that he’d bested every man he’d run through here. He moved forward with his normal swagger and a lopsided grin on his face. He stopped ten feet away and said, “Ready when you are.”
    Rapp nodded, dropped into a crouch, and made a slow move to his left.
    Hurley began sliding to his right, looking for an angle of attack. He glimpsed his opening when his opponent made an aggressive head fake that was an obvious tell of what would follow. In that moment, Hurley decided to dispatch the kid quickly. He wasn’t going to waste time with defensive blocks and holds. He was going to make this kid feel some real pain. Maybe bust a couple of his ribs. That way, even if he proved to be a stubborn fool, there’d be no hope of his keeping up with the others.
    Hurley anticipated the punch, ducked into a crouch, and came in to deliver a blow to the kid’s midsection. Right about the time he pivoted off his back foot and let loose his strike he realized something wasn’t right. The kid was a lot faster than he had anticipated. The little shit had doubled back on his own weak fake and was now a good two feet to the right of where Hurley had thought he would be. It looked like he had been suckered. Hurley knew he was horribly out of position, and exposed, but he wasn’t the least bit alarmed. He pulled back his punch and prepared to go back in again on a different angle of attack. He was in the process of delivering his second blow when he realized again that something was wrong. Hurley sensed more than saw the big left hook bearing down on his face. In the final split second before impact he braced himself by pulling in his chin and dropping his hips. The crushing blow landed just above Hurley’s right eye.
    Punches are funny things in that each one is different. You’ve got uppercuts, hooks, jabs, roundhouses, haymakers, and rabbit punches, to name a few. If you’ve sparred enough, you’ve felt all of them, and you learn to recognize each one by feel almost the instant it lands. A little scorecard in your head quickly analyzes the blow, and there’s a brief conversation that takes place between the