Sound of Her Warrior Heart
a Delta Force romance story
M. L. Buchman
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Chapter 1
Purple.
A purple so deep that it made her think of the purest fresh-pressed grape juice.
Purple grapes. Round globes of color so dark that they ate the brilliant sunlight until they were almost black.
Green leaves. Impossibly blue sky.
Katrina knew something was wrong, but it took her a moment to identify what was missing.
Birds. There should be birdsong. Her family’s vineyard was never quiet when the grapes were so close to harvest. This late in the season the bees had moved on to more flowery pastures, but the birds should be singing, arguing, playing.
Funny, she didn’t recognize this row of vines, she thought she knew them all.
It was hard to care, though. She’d always loved to lie on the rich soil between the rows of vines and stare at the deeply blue sky. She rarely spent that time thinking about the future or the past. In her memories it hadn’t been about some boy either. Of course when the boys came along, she’d spent less time alone in the vineyard watching the sky. No, the vineyard was always about the present moment.
A thread of black smoke slid across the blue sky. Burning a slash pile? To early in the season for that. The summer was still hot and dry.
She reached a hand up through the silence to pluck a grape. They looked ripe enough that half the cluster might fall into her palm at the lightest touch.
Except she didn’t recognize the hand. They weren’t her slender teenage fingers. Where was the silver thumb ring that Granny had given her at twelve that had finally moved to her middle finger at fourteen?
This hand was strong, with a shooter’s callus on the webbing between thumb and forefinger. And why was the hand, her hand covered in red, sticky…blood?
A face intervened between her and her view of sky, grape leaves, hand…blood?
It was a hard, male face.
One that needed a shave.
It should have alarmed her that he was so close, but she knew him. Or thought she should. He wore a close-fitting military helmet and anti-glare glasses. She flexed her jaw and could feel the familiar pressure of the strap of her own helmet. Squinching her nose revealed that she too wore sunglasses.
Why did they need helmets to lie in the vineyard to watch the grapes ripen in the sunshine? She didn’t like sunglasses, they changed the color of the blue sky. She tried looking around the edges, but they were wrap-around, just like his.
He was familiar.
Very familiar.
But never from this close. That wasn’t normal.
His lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear a thing.
“What?”
He clamped a hard hand over her mouth and his lips made a “Shh!” shape, but she couldn’t hear anything.
She studied his lips.
Words. They were forming words.
Kat! Are you okay? Not Katrina. Kat wasn’t a family nickname. Always her full name in the Melman family. Miss Katrina to the Mexican field hands as if her family were lords and ladies rather than third-generation Oregon vineyard owners.
Sure she was okay. Though it was weird to have the face asking it silently, especially that face. She associated it with a cold, emotionless tone that could slice concrete.
But why wouldn’t she be okay? She was lying in a lovely vineyard, the sun warming her face while she watched purple grapes, blue sky, and black smoke from a slash pile fire. It was expanding though. Maybe the fire was out of control.
The bloody hand was still bothering her.
And the silence.
Maybe she wasn’t okay.
Maybe she’d been—
The memory slammed in like the blast of a mortar.
Which was exactly what had happened.
Chapter 2
Sergeant Katrina Melman suddenly remembered the feeling of flying.
There had been the high whistle of an incoming mortar round. She and Tomas—who she always teased about abandoning his poor H somewhere along the way, cruelly leaving it to wander the world on its own—had dropped flat in the vineyard and offered up a quick prayer for the round to land somewhere else.
It had partially worked. Rather than a direct hit, the force of the blast had merely thrown her aside, slamming her into a line of grape vines. The burnt sulfur smell of exploded TNT overwhelmed the sweet grapes and rich soil.
Pain was starting to report in. Abused muscles, the nasty gash on her hand, but nothing felt broken.
“I think I’m okay.”
Tomas shushed her again. Again she had to concentrate on his lips to figure out which words he was speaking silently. You’re shouting.
“I am?”
Again the hand clamped over her mouth.
The silence. The echoing silence. The world hadn’t gone quiet. Her hearing had gone instead.
Deaf.
When she nodded her understanding, Tomas eased off his hold on her. He mouthed out some long sentence that she had no hope of unraveling, especially as he kept looking away to scan the vineyard, hiding his mouth in the process.
“I can’t hear you,” she tried to make it a whisper.
Tomas spun back to face her and winced.
Unable to hear herself, she’d lost all calibration of her volume.
You can’t? Tomas’ lips moved, but she heard nothing—not even the proverbial pin. At least she was fairly sure that’s what he’d said. Lipreading was something they taught undercover types. She was a shooter.
Katrina stuck with just shaking her head.
Shit! No problem reading that. With quick rough hands he began inspecting her.
She slapped his hands aside then sat up, and wished she hadn’t. Every muscle screamed—silently—in protest. She began inspecting herself. Everything moved when she tried it. A quick pat-down revealed no sources of blood other than her hand.
Tomas bound that quickly enough, using the medkit that hung from his vest.
Armored vest.
Field.
Mortar.
She looked around and spotted her rifle tangled in one of the grapevines. She slid it out and it appeared none the worse for having been blown up.
“That makes one of us who’s okay,” she whispered to her baby. The MK21 Precision Sniper Rifle was fifty-two inches and eighteen pounds of silent death that let her “reach out and touch someone” over a mile away. It was her reason for being—her role in Delta Force. Her role in—
Moldova. She and her rifle had been blown up in a vineyard in the Eastern European country sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania. Except no one was supposed to know they were here. They—
Tomas slammed her down to the ground and lay on top of her and her rifle. She could feel by the rigidity of his body that he wasn’t dead. He was bracing over her like a human shield. For half a moment she thought she finally saw a bird flying across the sky. A falcon swooping on its prey. An…incoming round!
She felt the ground buck against her back from the explosion. The air blast hit against the far side of the vines, peppering the two of them with hundreds of grapes blown off the vines. The vintner was going to be furious.
Tomas pushed back to kneeling beside her.
We’ve… but Tomas turned away and she missed the rest of his sentence. It was as if he didn’t want to look at her after lying full length upon he
r a moment before. They were both wearing combat vests, making it one of the unsexiest moments ever, but she got the feeling he was still embarrassed by it.
Sitting up, she grabbed the helmet straps on either side of his jaw and turned him back to face her.
“What did you say?” Katrina struggled to keep it soft. Tomas didn’t reprimand her so she must have succeeded. “I’m deaf.”
His eyes widened briefly. Then he grabbed her head, his powerful hands strong but gentle along her cheeks, and turned it to either side to inspect her ears.
No blood, his lips formed the words quickly, but she hoped she got it right.
She heaved out a sigh of relief at his words. Good. That was good. No dribbling blood meant that maybe her eardrums were still intact.
He made a sharp slicing motion to the west with a flat hand. Right. They needed to get moving. He signaled reminders to stay low and go down the center of the path—jostling a vine might give away their changing position.
At her nod, he led off.
Stepping out, she walked straight into a grapevine.
She scooted to the middle of the path and tried again.
This time she plunged into the grapes the next row over.
It wasn’t vertigo, she’d had that induced during training and learned how to fire through it. Besides, vertigo always made you spin in the same direction. With her ears out of operation, her balance was off.
Tomas grabbed her arm and, though it felt like he was pulling her hard to the right, they progressed straight down the aisle of dirt between two rows of green leaves with her weaving like a drunkard.
Fifteen seconds later she felt the air thump against her back as a mortar killed the poor grapevines she’d stumbled into. Whoever was firing at them was good.
Chapter 3
By the end of the row, she began to get a feel for how to counteract her balance problems.
Tomas yanked her down to the soil, scanning the terrain ahead. He might be a hardcore pain in the ass, but she couldn’t ask for a better soldier to be at her side. There was no better man to be in a tight situation with in Delta. She’d tried to talk to him in camp, but he always gave her the cold shoulder, with a voice that could be used to chill a meat locker. However, on assignment, he guarded her like a mother hen or big brother. He was the best soldier, and she’d always been drawn to the best, but for some reason he wouldn’t even give her the time of day once they were back in a green zone.
That green zone felt awfully far away at the moment.
They lay together at the edge of the lush vineyard. Looking back she could see that it swooped down into a valley and up the next hill in neat and orderly rows. She’d never had a Moldovan wine and wondered if they were any good. Simply by the size of the field, they were successful. She plucked a grape. Blue-purple. Thick skin that resisted her bite before it popped, flooding her mouth with a high sugar content. Merlot probably. Or maybe a Zinfandel, they tasted a lot alike while still in the grape. She could be lying in the hills of Oregon’s Willamette Valley…if it weren’t for someone firing a mortar at them. Very few mortars being fired in the Willamette Valley in her experience.
Right! Time to start thinking like a soldier again.
Ahead lay a five-meter strip of rough dirt thick with tractor tire tracks. Beyond it lay a field of thin brown stalks chopped off at one meter high. It was a no-man’s land in which they’d be completely exposed. Past several hundred meters of stalks, a line of trees.
Tomas tapped her arm and pointed to the right.
Katrina had to scoot forward to see around him. A large red combine was parked in the middle of the field, at the edge of the tall stubble. Beyond it stood sunflowers—acres of sunflowers. Their heads were dried to a gray-brown and the combine would soon be harvesting them. Except the cab was empty and the door hung open. The machine still vibrated and smoke swirled up out of its exhaust stack. The farmer had abandoned his vehicle when the shelling had started.
“I hate working with foreign military.”
Tomas nodded his agreement.
That’s what must have happened. Moldova was way down the list on the international index of governmental corruption—their score was in the bottom third and falling fast. You could buy the entire parliament for the price of a Super Bowl commercial. Throw in a signed football and you could probably buy the military as well. The US must have dutifully informed someone of their planned operation on Moldovan soil, who had then reported it directly to the Russians who coveted Moldovan territory. Or perhaps she and Tomas were still alive because some faction of the local military had decided to take care of the problem themselves—it wasn’t like the Russians to miss quite so many times.
Well, killing a pair of Delta Force operators wasn’t all that easy either.
“Where are they?” she asked Tomas quietly. There were two scenarios: the people firing the mortar could see their position, or the mortar crew were hunkered down, out of sight, but had a spotter who could. Either way she and Tomas had to find them.
Tomas pulled out a small radio scanner. In moments he had a lock on the enemy’s frequency. She could see by the indicator light that they were real talkers, either locals or overconfident Russians. He hooked up a small DF loop and began rotating it to get their direction.
She tried to remember how she’d been lying on the ground when she’d seen the incoming round. It had come from…the line of trees to the west.
Tomas pointed in two places: one toward the trees, one…in the direction of the combine.
Katrina slid the caps off the ends of her rifle’s scope. She tapped Tomas’ shoulder. He turned to her and she made as if to press her hand flat against the ground, then repeated the motion on his shoulder.
He lay flat, braced his elbows wide so that he was steadier than the Rock of Gibraltar. Then he rested his head on his folded hands, but turned toward her rather than the combine. Dark eyes. She could feel his dark eyes watching her despite the lenses he wore. They have always watched her, the sole woman on their squad. Every time she turned, Tomas’ eyes were tracking her.
Ignoring that, she unfolded the bipod on the front of her weapon and rested it against the small of his back. The combine was parked a thousand meters away and upslope from them so she needed the extra height to brace her weapon. She lined up with a break in the vines and began inspecting the combine at high magnification.
The main harvester bar was set a meter high and she could see its cutters still working. The high cab was indeed empty. The unloading pipe was swung back out of the way. The…
She swung back to inspect the cab. It was empty. But through the double layer of glass, windshield and side window, she could just make out a man standing behind the cab. It was an almost impossible shot, especially for a single shooter. She would have to break the windshield, then the side window, and then might have a chance of hitting the target if he hadn’t already moved. Two shots minimum, probably three.
Tracking upward, seeking any way in, she spotted just what she needed. Between the top of the cab and some other piece of gear, a pair of binoculars inspected the vineyard. She flipped off the safety, glanced at the grapevines to estimate the wind—it was so strange not to hear it rustling the leaves—and compensated for the bullet’s fall and a thousand meters of windage.
The MK21 had a silencer, but there was always some noise. Now, for her, it was truly silent as it kicked her in the shoulder. A half second later, the binoculars were gone. Between the combine’s tires she could see a body plummet onto the field. She worked the bolt and fed another round into the downed spotter just to be sure, not that a .338 Lapua Magnum round would have left much of his head. Even at over a half-mile out, the body twitched from the massive kinetic impact of the bullet. No question that the spotter for the mortar team was permanently out of commission.
There was a whiff of burnt gunpowder as she chambered another round.
She glanced at Tomas and nodded that it was done, but froze halfway thr
ough.
He was smiling at her. It was gone the moment she’d caught him at it, but she knew she’d seen it. Tomas didn’t smile at anybody for any reason.
No. That wasn’t right. She’d seen his smile before—never directed at her, of course—but she’d seen it. But his face, when he smiled, made it possible to imagine Tomas speaking to her in a warm and gentle tone. That was too strange for words so she kept her silence.
Chapter 4
Clearing out the mortar team didn’t take long. Idiot One sprang up to go check on the shooter. Idiot Two raced away in plain view and earned himself a shot in the back though he was closer to a mile away by the time Tomas pointed him out.
Katrina busted up the mortar tube and defused the remaining ammo while Tomas hid the bodies. He showed her the spotter’s arm tattoo—a black bat hovering over a blue circle meant to represent the Earth. It was a Spetsnaz tat, Russian Special Forces. So, their enemies this morning were one Russian and two locals, because a Spetsnaz would never run from a fight. Spetsnaz. It was a surprise that she and Tomas survived. Definitely time to go.
Her feet were now steady enough that she probably could have navigated on her own, but Tomas showed no inclination to let go of his grip on her upper arm and she wasn’t complaining.
There was a steadiness to him. Not merely his gait, but his reliability. His grip never varied, except to tighten briefly when she stumbled on a particularly gnarly root. He scanned ahead as they moved through the woods.
Last night’s insertion into Moldova had been screwed up in a bazillion different ways. The mortar attack counted as a bazillion-and-one.
First, the transport helo had a mechanical failure. A team of mechanics had raced to fix it deep into the night. So, their launch window at dusk had, well, gone out the window. They’d finally hit the ground in eastern Moldova at two a.m. But their ride had long since given up and vanished into the darkness. No option left but to cover the ground on foot, dressed in full US military gear, with much of the transit in broad daylight.
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