18
“Tell me about the last time you near-as-done got your squad killed. What did you do wrong?”
Connie watched as John drilled his question at the guy on the left of the line standing at parade rest. She and John sat behind a bare steel table facing them in a gray concrete room with no leavening decoration other than the US flag.
She hadn’t known that Day Three was unscripted. She remembered the round robin of SOAR fliers who had pounded her with questions, she hadn’t known they were making it up as they went along. It made sense. Yesterday had been the scripted psychological profile questions. Today was twenty hours of unscripted real-world tests.
The four applicants looked ragged. They’d probably been on their feet since midnight, and lunchtime was long gone with no break. Two were a
