“So how do we go about this… unofficial… examination?”

“I’ve paired you up to go into the Ghost House with him tomorrow morning. Put him into some unexpected pressure situations that go beyond the fixed scenario and parameters. He will be expecting it just to be another training exercise that he can coast through on sheer physical ability. You make it something else. Force him. Press him hard.”

Swanson thought a bit, then nodded. “You can dial up any scenario you want in the Ghost House, right?”

Rockhead smiled. “Almost any exterior or interior except your sister’s bedroom, and they may have that, too.”

One thing that Kyle Swanson really enjoyed about training with SEAL Team Six was its seemingly limitless budget. The squids always got first crack at the experimental stuff that was way out on the edge of the combat curve, and they burned money faster than a Wall Street banker figuring his annual bonus. Trying to determine how best to fight tomorrow’s wars was what the Special Warfare Development Group was all about.

The Ghost House represented a quantum leap in close quarters battle training. Usually, CQB houses were crude mockups in a desolate environment so the SEALs could regularly blow them apart with bullets to practice moving through a tight, hostile environment. Those were static environments, except for pop-up targets. The Ghost House, by contrast, was almost alive. It sat inside a weathered airplane hangar in an area generally used for storage, out of sight to everyone but those directly involved with it, and it bloomed with electronics and computerized graphics.

Stacks of tires and other retardants were still used to soak up the spent rounds, but instead of just plywood, the interior walls were green screens on which different worlds were projected.