This is a scene I pulled from a later chapter wherein Tab is upstaged by a character who (I think) will not appear again. I like the idea because I tried to demonstrate that no matter where the emphasis lies in our lives, we must consider that everyone's point of view matters, that because we may be right in our world we are not right in everyone's world.

Tab unlocked the door of her office. Pushing it open with her hip she swung at the light switch three times before the garish brightness snapped her into work mode. She had to start getting more than five hours sleep a night, but that probably wouldn’t happen until she returned to NSA. Her initial assessment upon arriving at JTF6 was upbeat despite her reservations about the drug war and its use as a vehicle for cooperation between Department of Defense and Department of Justice. She thought she may just cut her TDY short until she met the analysts she would train on RAPTOR. Except Andrea, they weren’t analysts at all but a collection of morse intercept operators, direction finders and linguists who’d passed themselves off as analysts to cash in on the beltway bonanza. So now she was training people to be analysts, training them on a new analytical system and analyzing a new pattern she’d found that was almost identical to the other drug shipment patterns. She wasn’t going back to NSA early. She was beginning to believe her intuition that she wasn’t going back.

She sat in her chair and yawned, her early morning run already wearing off, then hit the switch on the power strip turning on her computer. Early yesterday Tom had said he was training agents familiar with the cartel and would ask their opinion. She hadn’t heard back from him, so she began the tedious task of searching her database for whatever she missed.

An hour hadn’t gone by when two guys in dirty, worn out fatigues knocked on her door before walking in.

“Hi, uh, you’re master sergeant Gray?”

The older one, about Tab’s age, was looking at her like she was the daughter he didn’t know he had. He had the wrinkles around his eyes and the hollow look of a man who knew too much about the wrong things. The other was in his mid-twenties and had a look Tab had become too familiar with: tough and self important because he thought he should be.

“Uh, yeah, I sure am. Tab, actually.”

They walked over to her desk and the older one extended his hand introducing himself, followed by the younger one.

“CPT Rolland said you had some questions about drug areas. He also said that if we were nice you might show us your new intelligence system.”

“Your new intelligence system, and I’d love to.”

Tab stood up and moved next to her chair. Looking at the older agent, she pointed to sit there.

“What I want to show you is on the database. I’ll show you how the system works, then show you what I have for a problem.”

After about forty minutes the older agent sat back in the chair and gave a long, low whistle.

“When will this be on-line and pumping information to us?”

“I don’t know,” Tab half smiled, “if everything goes perfectly it’ll be another month before your analysts are up to speed. Up to you guys after that. I’m just a temp here. So why the calls to Chechnya and Ireland?”

The older agent leaned back in the chair and turned to face her, crinkling his right eye more than his left.

“I don’t know. After talking to CPT Rolland we did some checking with our office and some of our analysts. You’re right about the similarity, the patterns certainly match. But we don’t know of any drug activity in those places that would attract this cartel.” He looked at the younger agent whose reaction was a quick shake of his head and an almost imperceptible shrug. “You might look at weapons. Chechnya is an open arms bazaar. The IRA is not only exporting weapons but also their expertise.”

She looked at her charts, then back to the agent who just shrugged and gave her a half smile.

He stood, pulling out his wallet and gave her his business card.

“I’ve been doing this job for seventeen years now and I’ve never seen so much of this information so well organized, or so definitive. Want a full-time job?”

“No, thanks, I’m a signals intelligence analyst on loan from NSA. I’ll finish here and go back to the real war.”

The agent shook his head and for the first time looked directly at her.

“My fourteen year old son’s best friend was a great kid – good grades, good athlete, Boy Scout. He was walking home from baseball practice one evening when he was shot and killed because a drug deal was going down and they thought he’d seen them. And it happens every day. Believe me, this is a war by anybody’s definition. If you change your mind about that job, call me. We’re losing.”

Tab watched them turn and head for the door. She caught the younger agent looking at her but he held her gaze for only a moment. She took a couple of steps after them, then stopped.

“Why would the cartel transport weapons?”

“Because someone is paying them a lot of money to do it. They don’t really care how they make money.”

“But who?”

He stopped and turned.

“I don’t know. Gangs. Militia groups. Terrorists. Find out who those people in Idaho and Wyoming are.”

“Not that easy. It never occurred to me that these people were so inter-connected.”

He smiled and turned for the door tossing his next remark over his shoulder.

“Welcome to my world.”

She tried to stifle the goosebumps running up her shoulders and neck.

“Well, thanks for your help. Can you come back when you have some time?”

He just raised a hand as he turned down the hallway.

Tab

If, for a career, you had to choose between something for which you were considered the best in the field, or something you loved from the deepest parts of your being, which would you choose? What if what you deeply loved, except in rare circumstances, wouldn’t provide you with a secure or even viable income? People make these choices every day and, in our ‘enlightened society’ the results of those choices are more than evident. Also evident is how much easier it is to sit with our friends and espouse our loves and beliefs that it is to actually live them.

Tab is Master Sergeant Linda Taborra Gray who is, possibly, the finest signals intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army. She is also a woman who, when much younger, promised her Irish mother she was only doing one tour in the Army to get the GI Bill. She didn’t want to be one of these students working two jobs and carrying a full load but missing her education because she was too tired to pay attention. So she did her one tour and was ready to get out, to not be a ‘lifer,’ when her commander almost begged her to reenlist. He was head of a new project and her skills would round out the team perfectly. Wouldn’t she reconsider? Just three more years? And soon you looked on these people as family, you trusted them. And there was always another project, another mission for which desperately needed your skills. It became easier to put off your dream, or in Tab’s case harbor it, nurture it privately, give it just enough space to grow a little. Someday the time would come.

So how, exactly, do you just exchange identities in the middle of your life? How do you stand in a field of buffalo one day, then step over a fence the next and say ‘now I am a lamb?’ For that’s what it is, a decision to step into a new world, wear a different skin, learn a new language, new customs, and learn how to translate useful information from your old life to your new one. How do you convince everyone (a necessary step in convincing yourself) that you are becoming who you really are and shedding the façade that has been your life?