Tamara Sultanovich

Layla Sultanovich (Sister)

Shadow Force (Currently)

Shadow Force member (Currently)

## General information

### Weapon(s)

Double Barrel Shotgun, AK-74, M4A1, P226, Glock 17, Glock 19, SIG Sauer SP2009, SIG Pro SP 2022, SIG-Sauer P225, Beretta 92FS, Walther P5 Compact and any weapon at her disposal

### Equipment

Fists, Balisong, Karambit, Combat knife, throwing knife, and any melee weapon at her disposal

### Real life counterpart/Model

Irina Antonenko

**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 her sister Layla Sultanovich. Eventually, the family moves to New Rome/Greater American Republic, 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 kidnapped by the Islamic State of New Palestine.

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 superhuman 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 a particular mission, Tamara and her friend Svetlana Karpova, alongside several other CIA operatives, 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. Meanwhile, the CIA initiated a manhunt, intending to find and kill the traitors before they could tell the public the truth behind Blackfish.

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

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

Tamara and her friend Svetlana Karpova surface in Hadford under the names Lacey Price and Louise Knight. However, the CIA tracks them to Hadford and sends operatives to discreetly assassinate the two.

First, CIA agent Blackfish-3 (under alias Clyde Walcott) had been seen spying on Lacey and Louse (though Emmett mistakenly believed he was spying on Jill Powell). The next day, he was found dead.

The CIA, mistakenly believing Jill had something to do with it, sent agents to tail Jill and her friends, which culmilated with two assets attacking Jill, only to be stopped by the arrival of an all-female fighting force known as Shadow Force.

Eventually, word got out that the CIA was experimenting on people illegally in Montana and Emmett put together the Covert Crusaders as a result (NOTE: He didn't officially name the team yet) in order to shut the CIA program down and protect Jill Powell at the same time.

He first investigated Lacey and Louise, but they refused to say anything about their involvement.

It was only after another CIA attack on the Powells that Emmett finally found the truth behind Louise and Lacey and Operation Blackfish in the process.

He then worked with the two of them, as well as his own team of fighters, the Covert Crusaders, to go on the offensive: acting on intelligence from neighbor and friend Audrey Adams, Emmett and his friends launched an assault on a CIA safehouse outside Hadford and stole documents pertaining to the project and exposed them to the public, leading to the end of Blackfish and the permanent end of the manhunt for Tamara and her allies.

### Geena Westbrook's Campaign

Tamara participated in Geena Westbrook's Campaign against the Santa Muerta Cartel in the summer of 2020, after learning that her younger sister Layla had been kidnapped by the cartel, alongside Brooke Poole, a mutual friend of Geena's.

## Personal details

### Political and religious views

Tamara is a self-proclaimed Anarchist of sorts: she believes the government is untrustworthy because of its flawed legal system (which she blames as the reason why Operation Blackfish was able to exist for so long despite its illegality).
She was raised Muslim, but later eventually lost faith in Islam and became an atheist by her freshman year of college, while the rest of her family became Christians. She is convinced that religions have no truthful basis and all religions are just "baseless ideas" concoted by humans to get away with "irrational occurrences" (her term for the supernatural miracles in the Bible). She believes that science is better at explaining the world, while God is nothing more than a baseless idea concocted by "madmen".

## Skills and abilities

### Skills

* **Master spy**: Thanks to her Blackfish training, Tamara is a master at disguise, able to sneak anywhere and infiltrate any place undetected.
* **Master firearms handling**: Being a former CIA agent, Tamara has extensive knowledge in the use and functionality of any firearm, having been known to fire both a shotgun and a submachine gun one-handed. In some occasions, she has been seen dual wielding two different guns. She has also demonstrated that she can both disassemble and reassemble a pistol in seconds.
* **Master combatant**: As a former Blackfish agent and a former (brainwashed) disciple of the Islamic State, Tamara is skilled in hand-to-hand combat. She has been trained to use virtually any object as a weapon. She possesses a fighting style that incorporates elements of Savate, Systema (taught to her by Islamic State militants of Russian ethnicity during her time as a brainwashed sleeper agent), Vale Tudo, Wing Chun, and many others.
* **Tactician:**Tamara excels at adapting to changing situations on the fly, thanks to her training in Blackfish, which emphasizes quick thinking in fluid situations.

## Tamara on a talk show concerning Operation BlackfishQuotes

> "*"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 concerning pessimistic views that she used to have
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