Hidden Order: A Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page B

Support. It was a “Fixed Base Operator” facility where he’d have a chance to clean up before one of his Carlton Group colleagues drove him into D.C. for his meeting with the Old Man.
    As he arrived at the FBO, he saw that it was one of Carlton’s protégés, Sloane Ashby, who had been sent there to pick him up.
    Leaning against her car, with her high cheekbones, smoky gray eyes, and hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like the country club wife of some handsome young banker. It would be a mistake, though, to judge this book by its cover.
    Sloane was not only brilliant, having graduated at the top of her class from Northwestern University with a dual major in math and chemistry; she was also highly skilled as a winter athlete, having competed in both figure skating and snowboarding. She was also one hell of an operator.
    As a former member of the U.S. Freestyle Ski Team, Harvath told his colleagues that what he liked most about her was her prowess in winter sports, but none of them believed him. They all assumed that what he “liked”about her was that she was hot. In other words, even people trained to know better still fell prey to the mistake of judging her solely by what they saw on the surface.
    Carlton, on the other hand, had very different reasons for liking her. In addition to admiring her academic and athletic abilities, he respected her because, despite her family’s ability to cover all of her college expenses, she had insisted on paying her own way and had rocketed through the ROTC program. She had signed up insisting that she be promised combat duty. She went on to complete two tours in Afghanistan, killing more enemy combatants than all the women in the theater combined (not to mention many of the men). But when some glossy magazine ran an unauthorized cover story on her, it placed a huge bull’s-eye on her back and brought her combat career to a screeching halt.
    The Taliban and Al-Qaeda were both offering big rewards for her head on a pike and the Department of Defense had no other choice but to deny her request for a third tour. Without missing a beat, and as bold as brass, she requested to be sent immediately to Iraq before all the action ended there. She was turned down, though, once again.
    She ended up being detailed to North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, where she worked with the all-female Delta detachment known as the Athena Project. Despite her young age, she was an excellent instructor. Everyone knew, though, that her heart and her talent lay in being an operator. She was quite vocal about the fact that if it weren’t for the Islamic bounty on her head and the subsequent PR nightmare her capture or killing would cause, she’d still be out whacking and stacking Muslim terrorists like cordwood. Neither political correctness, nor empathy for the risk aversion of her commanders, was part of her DNA.
    Because of that, the United States Army had a love/hate relationship with Sloane Ashby. They loved the fact that they could push a super-attractive, athletic, young American woman as an Army success story, but they hated that she repeatedly suggested, in public, that the Army had no balls and was caving to the terrorists by not letting her return to the fight.
    She was definitely a headache for the Department of Defense, butthere were many other people in D.C. who absolutely loved her. To the chagrin of her superiors, Ashby was invited to lots of powerful, insider cocktail parties where she freely spoke her mind. It was at one such party where she had met Reed Carlton.
    They chatted for over an hour about world events, politics, and the military. The next day they then met for a three-hour lunch. By the end of the month, the Old Man had worked his magic. Ashby was honorably discharged from the military and forty-eight hours later she had been hired on at the Carlton Group.
    Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have been relegated to doing airport pickups, but these weren’t normal