Tamara Sultanovich

"I lived my whole life believing that hope was actually the worst thing someone could have. You can be alone, broken, beaten or dying, but it forces its way to your head, keeps you hanging on. Eventually, reality sets in and overpowers it, and shows you that it was either unnecessary or that it was some delusion you dreamt up in your foggy little mind and that it wasn’t even there to begin with. When a girl loses her hope and sees her fate for what it truly is, only then can she accept death and treat it as an equal. When Layla became a Christian and I began to hear other people tell their stories about Jesus promising them hope and a future in life, and then living up to that promise, my pessimistic view of hope was forever shattered."
- Tamara Sultanovich commenting on her history regarding a pessimistic view of hope in life and how it changed when she came to know the Christian faith
Tamara Sultanovich is a Shadow Force member, a former CIA agent, and a character in the TACITUS series. She is of a Chechen-Russian-Croatian mix, having both Chechen, Russian and Croatian blood. 
==Biography==
===Early life===
Tamara Sultanovich was born in a Chechen family, raised a Muslim alongside his sister Layla. Eventually, the family moves to the United States of America, where all except Tamara converted to Christianity. She still attends church religiously, but never actually comes into a real saving relationship with Jesus.
===Captivity and escape===
In 2014, during a missions trip, Tamara Sultanovich was abducted by the Islamic State of New Palestine, then known as ISIS. They used extreme methods to brainwash Sultanovich into serving their cause, then trained her as an Islamic State militant in the arts of bomb-making and firearms handling, in addition to hand-to-hand combat, in the hopes of turning her into the next female terrorist. However, the brainwashing was only temporarily, and at one point, she came back to her senses, snaps, turned against the Islamic State and engineered a rather brutal escape from ISIS captivity. However, she was later found and arrested by American special ops soldiers, mistaking her for an actual Islamic State militant. 
Upon being discovered, the American operatives were surprised at Tamara's combat techniques, and agility. They also learned that she was forcibly subjugated to brainwashing and indoctrination by the Islamic State. 
===Release===
While she is incarcerated, she offers intelligence on terrorist cells and intelligence from her days as a brainwashed Islamic State militant in order to be released. Her offer is granted and she is soon recruited into a top secret elite special forces unit within the CIA known as Operation Blackfish, an unofficial group of outlaws and killers, controlled by the U.S Government, whose sole purpose was to disrupt and harm the enemy.
===CIA career and defection===
Sultanovich, under the CIA codename Blackfish 0-1, soon became very ruthless, being the star operative from day one.  She became well known for her ruthlessness, blatant disregard for orders, and her disturbing success rate on his missions. She began to become the Islamic State's most feared enemy, a rather ironic twist considering that the Islamic State intended to turn her into the most feared militant in their ranks. From 2014 to 2016 (two years), Tamara became one of the biggest and deadliest agents in CIA history.
During one particular mission, Sultanovich and her partner Svetlana Karpova and a small team of agents uncovered damaging information revealing the CIA as corrupt, specifically uncovering evidence that the CIA was using an illegal behavior-modification program to break down the assassins' morality and essentially brainwash them into becoming effective nearly unstoppable living weapons, in addition to evidence of targeted killings against US citizens that may have gotten wind of Blackfish's true nature. Upon hearing about this, the CIA decided that Sultanovich and her comrades needed to be silenced to ensure that the project stayed a secret. The CIA leadership placed a kill order on Sultanovich's entire team and called them over to a black station to be assassinated. However, Sultanovich caught wind of their plans and slaughtered the operatives dispatched to kill them. Sultanovich and Karpova both decided to go into hiding, faking their own deaths and laying low. 
In 2016, Tamara, alongside Svetlana, abruptly resurfaced as students at New York City's Columbia Univeristy, where they joined the sorority group Alpha Xi Delta, AKA Shadow Force. Sometime later, the two of them transferred to the Univerisity of St. Louis.
===Vapor in the Wind===
Main article: Vapor in the Wind
Tamara Sultanovich is involved in investigating the attempted murder of a mentally troubled young woman. Later in the story, she is kidnapped by a murder cult that worships Slenderman, alongside French policewoman Laurette Sorel, Theresa Derossett, Joyce Briggs and Natalya Fashkova, along with many others.
Following a long manhunt for the perpetrators, TACITUS and Task Force Reaper, along with the New York Police Department, found that kidnapping victims Helen Moore and some of her friends had managed to escape on their own, thanks to Tamara Sultanovich's escape-and-evasion techniques she learned as a CIA agent, leading them in a race against the clock to find the girls before they could be recaptured. The girls were found, but were recaptured before Derek Westbrook and his friends could reach them first.
Sorel, determined to save Helen and her friends, chose to abandon her comrades temporarily, instead obtaining a helicopter and embarking on a hectic helicopter chase through the mountains. She was able to able to destroy the helicopter the Children of Slender planned to use to escape from the TACITUS rescue squad. Following this, Sorel and her friends engaged in a brutal hand-to-hand fight against the surviving cult members and rescued Sultanovich and her friends. 
===The Mack Coalition===
Main article: The Mack Coalition
==Powers and abilities==
===Powers===
"Gee, what are you?!?"
- Helen Moore marveling at Tamara Sultanovich
*Artificially Enhanced Physiology: Blackfish's genetic enhancements enhanced her body far beyond that of a normal human, effectively turning her into a superhuman soldier-assassin with formidable intelligence, strength, speed, senses, durability, agility, stamina, reflexes, and accelerated healing superior to any normal human beings. The genetic enhancement also left her with increased muscle efficiency, reflexes, strength, and the ability to suppress extreme pain. 
*Enhanced Intelligence: Blackfish left Tamara with the mental capacity to operate as a field operative. She is quite good at problem solving and improvisation, able to find solutions to various issues in a linear tactical fashion. She can also process multiple information streams (e.g., threat assessment) and rapidly respond to any changing tactical situations by creating perfect winning strategies rapidly, as well as remember things with precise detail, even to the point where she surprised her friends and family members. 
*Enhanced Strength: Much like Agnes Peterson and Libby Collins, Tamara possesses superhuman strength beyond the peak of human potential, able to take on people twice her size. She can also climb pipes, move, drag and dispose of bodies, snap necks, knock opponents unconscious, and jump from balcony to balcony with minimum effort. She has also been known to pick up people ten times her size, and even throw people through walls with little to no effort.
*Heightened Speed: Thanks to her Blackfish training and enhanced body, Tamara Sultanovich can 
*run faster and longer distances than normal humans. She also has heightened reflexes that allow her to sense attacks faster.
*Heightened Endurance: Thanks to her genetically enhanced body, Tamara can survive things that would normally kill a person, including (but not limited to) plane crashes, gunshot wounds to normally-sensitive parts of the body, and even being electrocuted.
*Enhanced Durability: Tamara's bones and muscles are far stronger than a normal human's thanks to the enhancements. They can also heal faster and in shorter periods of time. She can jump from significant heights onto hard surfaces and land without any apparent injury. However, she is not totally immune to pain, as she has been known to break an arm or two during her time as a Shadow Force operative. However, due to her genetically enhanced body, she can heal far faster than a normal human.
*Enhanced Speed & Agility: Tamara's speed is tremendously enhanced beyond the peak of human potential, moving into the early levels of superhuman condition. She can outrun a car, a motorcycle, or a speeboat on foot. Her agility is akin to a Gold Olympic medalist. 
*Enhanced Stamina: Tamara's body produces far less fatigue toxins during physical activity than a normal human being. That is not to say that she isn't tired-she can just last longer during physical exercise before tiring. 
*Enhanced Reflexes: The genetic enhancements also left Tamara with heightened reflexes, allowing her to sense incoming objects flying at her more quickly. For example, she can sense a knife being thrown at her and dodge it in seconds. She can also jump onto moving vehicles with near-superb accuracy.
*Regenerative Healing Factor: Tamara's body can heal at a remarkable rate. Injuries that usually take weeks, months, or years to heal can now heal in a matter of days, leaving little to no scarring.
*Heightened Senses: Tamara's senses are strengthened to the point where she can sense people through walls.
*Driving intuition: Tamara is a master at tactical driving. She has also been known to use vehicles as offensive weapons (ex: turning cars and trucks into battering rams).
*Martial Artist: Operation Blackfish trained her extensively and thoroughly in armed and unarmed combat and in the use of improvised weapons. She is also trained in numerous forms of martial arts. In fights, Tamara uses a rather unorthodox fighting style incorporating a wide variety of martial arts styles, including, but not limited to, Jeet Kune Do, Kali Martial Arts, Krav Maga, boxing, and Systema. As a Blackfish agent, she was a dangerous assassin who can slaughter dozens of enemies alone. One notable incident that has earned Tamara much notoriety occurred in East Asia in the summer of 2018, where she took on an entire army of enemy fighters with only a hammer and her fists and won. 
*Marksmanship/Weaponry Usage: Tamara Sultanovich is insanely good when it comes to marksmanship, nearly alway hitting a target. She has also displayed extensive use of firearms knowledge and usage, able to disassemble a gun in seconds. 
*Knife Mastery: Tamara is also well trained in knife fighting, with her main martial art of choice here being the Kali Fighting Method. 
*Master Assassin: With the exposure of Blackfish and the declassification of millions of documents pertaining to Blackfish agents and their career record, it became known to the world that Tamara was considered the "ultimate killer." As a Blackfish operative, she had lived in complete anonymity, with foreign intelligence agents the world over even questioning whether she existed in the first place. During her short two-year CIA career, she had been attributed to at least two dozen assassination missions.
*Master Acrobat: Tamara is skilled in acrobatics (mostly because she was a gymnast for much of her childhood and early teens), a trait she incorporated into her fighting style. She can pull off complex backflips to evade enemy gunfire.
*Multilingualism: Blackfish also transformed Tamara Sultanovich into a polyglot, able to speak (or understand) Greek, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese (though she isn't super-fluent), Russian, Latin, German, French, Italian, and (to a certain extent), Latin.
*Resourcefulness: Tamara is quite resourceful, able to easily manipulate technology to solve problems. She can kill an enemy and get out while being very careful not leave any forensic evidence behind. This has made her kills nearly untraceable. She has an extensive knowledge of the human body, knowing where to hit someone in a fight or knowing where to shoot someone to either kill them outright or subject them to a painful death.
*Indomitable Willpower: Tamara can think calmly through critical situations, which has built her a reputation of being the only calm and composed person amongst a gang of panicked people-except for instances where she is trapped in narrow spaces (as she is claustrophobic).
*Engineering: Tamara is an expert lock-picker.
==Trivia==
*The character of Tamara Sultanovich was inspired by a real life student at the University of Missouri St. Louis (who has wished to remain anonymous).
*Her backstory is partially inspired by that of Jason Bourne .
*She is also considered a female Mitch Rapp .
*She is similar to Agnes Peterson in that she was also kidnapped and brainwashed by an enemy organization but escaped and ended up in the CIA.
*She has a habit of shooting her enemies in the throat.
==Gallery==
Irina Antonenko as Tamara Sultanovich.png
Tamara Sultanovich.jpg
Irina Antonenko as Tamara Sultanovich.jpg
Tamara Sultanovich-Irina Antonenko.jpg
==Quotes==
"I lived my whole life believing that hope was actually the worst thing someone could have. You can be alone, broken, beaten or dying, but it forces its way to your head, keeps you hanging on. Eventually, reality sets in and overpowers it, and shows you that it was either unnecessary or that it was some delusion you dreamt up in your foggy little mind and that it wasn’t even there to begin with. When a girl loses her hope and sees her fate for what it truly is, only then can she accept death and treat it as an equal. When Layla became a Christian and I began to hear other people tell their stories about Jesus promising them hope and a future in life, and then living up to that promise, my pessimistic view of hope was forever shattered."
- Tamara Sultanovich commenting on her past as a former pessimist
"We were soldiers of America, not mentally deranged murderers. But in their eyes, this marked us as the enemy."
- Tamara Sultanovich explaining why both she and Svetlana Karpova defected from the CIA.
"Damn you, Emmett!"
- Tamara Sultanovich while arguing with Emmett Mack
===Dialog with others===
"Trebamo razgovarati (Eng: We need to talk)."
(There is a beat; Layla Sultanovich finishes packing up)
"(In English) There's nothing left to say, Tamara. The CIA changed you. It's like I don't even know you anymore."
"(In English) I know, and I get it. The CIA robbed me of something I will never get back. But hey: you went through the same thing when you decided to follow Jesus Christ. We both changed, Layla. Everybody goes through this, some of us against our will."
- Layla Sultanovich and Tamara Sultanovich
"Back in the CIA, they called us 'sin eaters.' Do you know what a sin eater is?"
"I'm familiar with what a sin-eater is. Why?"
"That's what we were. We basically made other people do what Jesus did, we placed the burden of our sins on someone else so they'd take the fall for them''. 'It means that we take the moral excrement we find in this equation and we bury it down deep inside of us, so that the rest of our case can stay pure. That is the job. We are morally indefensible, and absolutely necessary."
- Layla Sultanovich and a street preacher
Category:Characters in the TACITUS series