Target of One's Own

by M. L. Buchman

  “Please tell me you didn’t screw her.”

  “Never even considered it.”

  “Good!” At least that tiny thing had gone right with her sex life.

  She cut south, hoping to get back in view of the media helicopters. Except there weren’t any in the air. For twelve days they’d buzzed along the course like a pack of gigantic mosquitos and now when she needed one, they were nowhere to be found.

  “Where are all the damn helos?”

  “Grounded.” Luke seemed sublimely calm. Too calm. What did he know that he wasn’t telling her? With the amount the man didn’t speak, that could be a very long list.

  “Grounded? Why?”

  “There are several hobby drones flying along the course at the moment.”

  Zoe knew that the small hobby drones could down a helo—turbine engines spinning at three thousand rpm didn’t like it when they ingested the heavy lithium batteries inside hobby drones. So if someone had launched some small drones, all of the usual helos would have been told to clear out for safety until the perpetrator had been found.

  As she slewed down a graveled slope at the lowest point between two dunes, with Tammy still hot on her tail, Zoe wondered how Luke could possibly know that. They weren’t allowed a radio or any other messaging device except for the emergency satellite phone.

  Unless of course he’d arranged for them to be launched beforehand.

  But launched by whom? And why?

  The answer to the second question was obvious once she thought about it. Sofia, far aloft, would have tracked the truck ever since it had beat on them in the fesh fesh. And when they ended up far off the course together, she’d have known the final confrontation was coming and signaled the release of the hobby drones.

  Then the answer to the first question flew by close over her head. Even at the speed she was racing, the downdraft of the Black Hawk made the Citroën shudder.

  And it wasn’t any standard Black Hawk. It had the stealth configuration that only the 5E flew. She recognized the piloting from the hundreds of missions she’d watched over them—Rafe and Julian. Funny, wild, and fantastic pilots.

  Suddenly Tammy had other things to worry about.

  “If he shoots her, I’m going to get arrested for it,” Zoe didn’t like that at all. “And if they decide that it was a military operation, I’m going to end up in a National Directorate of Intelligence dungeon and I’ll never be seen again. I don’t want to end up in a Peruvian jail, but I really don’t want to end up in a dungeon.”

  “He’s not that foolish.”

  Then what?

  “Get some distance on her.”

  Easier said than done. Zoe decided to slow down, slow until Tammy was so close that all her rearview mirror showed was bent radiator grill.

  Then she shoved in the clutch and dropped down a gear. Tammy’s blow, while the Citroën was in neutral, shoved the car ahead whiplash hard.

  Zoe responded by popping the clutch and hammering down on the gas. It wasn’t much, but it was a gap.

  And into that gap, Julian dropped a pair of gas cylinders. Knock-out gas.

  It was brilliant. They were far off course from the other racers, there were no other helos in the air because of the drones that they’d launched from the Black Hawk, and they’d just sleepy bombed Tammy and her crew.

  Except it didn’t work at all.

  Tammy blew through the cloud and kept right on coming. She must have guessed what was happening at the last moment and closed the outside air intake just as she would if driving through fesh fesh.

  Luke grunted unhappily.

  The valley between the dunes was narrowing rapidly.

  In a desperate move, Julian eased down until his skids were beside the top of Tammy’s truck. Zoe watched in the rearview as he tried to flip her onto her side, but she was too canny for that. Instead, she counter-steered sharply into the helo’s skids at the last moment, catching him by surprise.

  For five seconds, ten tons of elite military helicopter and ten tons of Dakar racing truck shoved against each other. But Julian’s traction was only air and Tammy had four big tires on the ground. With a sudden twist of the wheel, she almost flipped Julian onto his side. How he managed to recover without plunging a rotor blade into the side of a dune and crashing was one of the most impressive pieces of flying she’d ever seen.

  As he moved up and back to recover and think of something new, Zoe focused ahead.

  The dune to her left was the obvious escape route. The face was climbable to a low pass. She might even be able to outpace Tammy, at least to the crest.

  To her right…

  37

  Zoe recognized the dune’s shape and prayed she could pull off the maneuver a second time. This dune was a monster, a Mother of All Dunes that rose for hundreds of meters above them.

  No time to ask Luke. No time to pray. No time to even think.

  Zoe kept her foot down to the floor and cranked the wheel to the right. Five hundred horsepower responded with all the heart she’d come to expect from the Citroën.

  Tammy was hot on her trail. Any respectable, legally configured truck would have petered out around the halfway mark. Tammy just kept climbing, so close to Zoe’s tail that she could feel the blonde breathing down her neck.

  The race to the top was going to be close. A sand slip threatened her advantage. Then some hard-pack gave it back.

  Back at the Huckfest, by flying with all those overeager boys and men, she’d seen dozens of attack methods for an up-dune climb.

  Some thought it was all about raw power.

  Well, neither she nor Tammy had a real power advantage.

  More advanced jumpers thought about the angle of their attack on the dune’s slope, sometimes angling slightly to the left or right to use the edge of their tires like the edge of a water-skier’s skis. They carved their way to more traction as they climbed.

  The very best, who consistently achieved the best jumps after the long run-up ramp, made constant little adjustments. They trusted to their instinct and the instant-to-instant feel of the sand communicated through the steering wheel.

  By each moment a patch of sand was giving way, she was already turning the other direction.

  The tiniest flattening of slope was met with eased acceleration, which let her spin less and gain another shred of speed with improved traction.

  Steeper? Hit it with raw power.

  “Holy shit!” Luke muttered softly and she could see him brace himself against the handles. He didn’t call her off. He didn’t tell her she couldn’t do it.

  Luke understood what was about to happen. And he trusted her to do it.

  This had better work. There were a lot of things she still wanted to say to the man beside her. Because whoever the hell Zoe DeMille was, she knew one thing about herself. She was totally in love with Luke Altman.

  It wasn’t just because he trusted her.

  He knew her better than anyone—far better than she knew herself.

  And still he believed in her. She didn’t know how that was possible, but she wanted more of that like she wanted air to breathe.

  Tammy was too far back. The truck was hitting its limits.

  Zoe needed her to be too close to hesitate when they reached the dune crest.

  She didn’t ease off on the gas, instead she let a small sideslip bleed off a tiny bit of the Citroën’s speed.

  The gap closed.

  The crest came nearer.

  Five car lengths away.

  “Luke, grab the handbrake. Pull when I tell you.”

  He reached out one of those big wonderful hands and wrapped it around the tall handle.

  Two car lengths.

  Tammy was positioned perfectly.

  Zoe hit the crest but didn’t let the car fly. Instead, she threw it into a sideways drift.

  “Now!” She screamed it out as she fought the wheel while dropping a gear.

  For just an instant, she was staring out her door’s
window straight into the truck’s enormous bumper. Roll cage or not, the truck was going to shred her.

  She looked up into Tammy’s eyes.

  Tammy had the big steering wheel clenched in her hands and was leaning forward to look down at her. Zoe offered her own best feral smile in response, then popped the clutch and jammed down on the gas.

  Without needing to be told, Luke released the handbrake.

  The Citroën hesitated for a long moment, spewing a twin rooster tail of sand out the back. Then it caught and jolted forward.

  The MAN SE clipped the rear of the Citroën, knocking both rear wheels across the crest.

  Zoe managed to keep one front tire hooked over the edge of the crest exactly as she had the first time. The instant she was clear, she stopped and both she and Luke turned to watch.

  The MAN SE didn’t pause at the crest. Even over the Citroën’s engine, Zoe could hear the roar of the truck’s engine. It never decelerated.

  Just like that dune in Stage Two, the back was a carved bowl that was impossibly steep. The sand, in some form of hyper-stability, was close to vertical.

  The truck leapt out into that void.

  It was a humongous jump. This was the Mother of All Dunes. The truck continued its long arcing flight with its nose to the sky. The front wheels twisted one way. Impossible to fix now. The truck seemed to hang forever as it fell.

  The record jump at Huckfest had been after she left for the Army. Mike “Hollywood” Higgins had jumped 169 feet with a hang time of well over a second. He’d done it in a highly-modified pickup truck engineered to be as light as possible.

  Tammy blew that away in a lipstick-red ten-ton racing truck.

  For six full seconds, Truck #507 fell fifty stories out of the sky.

  It didn’t crash on impact, it disintegrated.

  The impact also destabilized the slip face. The dune avalanched over the wreckage. A thousand, a million tons of sand spilling over the shredded scrap metal.

  38

  “Zoe!” Luke screamed.

  She saw what had alarmed him and didn’t waste time responding. Zoe herself skipped right over alarmed and went straight to terrified.

  She could feel the rear end of their car sagging downward.

  Despite gunning the Citroën, she couldn’t crawl back to the other side of the dune. Everything she and the car had weren’t enough to escape the crumbling of the Mother Dune’s crest from under her wheels.

  But she was on top of the dune’s collapse, not under it.

  Giving in to the slip, she aimed downslope and fought for high ground. She really wished she’d surfed as a kid because some practice would really help right about now. Every moment of the gigantic sand slide, the surface shifted. To hesitate was to be buried forever—or at least until the winds rolled the dunes aside, which could be centuries.

  Dodging from spot to spot on the back of the ongoing slip, she was sometimes on top and sometimes wheel-deep.

  The slip couldn’t have lasted more than another twenty seconds, but all she knew was that it was the longest drive of her life.

  She came to in darkness, gripping the wheel with both hands. The silence broken only by her own desperate breath and the creaking of the car’s metal.

  The engine was dead.

  And so were they. Buried under a million tons of sand. She’d almost rather have died like Tammy, in one great pyrrhic leap—the victory of the beautiful jump somehow worth the horrific cost. To die of suffocation beneath the sands of Peru didn’t have quite the same panache to it.

  “Now that,” Luke spoke softly from beside her, “was most excellent.”

  Zoe turned to look at him by the faint glow of the dashboard lights.

  “Are you nuts?”

  “No, I’m absolutely serious. If we get out of this alive, I’m so adding a sand course to SEAL driver training. And what you just did? I hope that Julian or Sofia got video of it just to show what’s really possible.”

  “You are nuts. I’ve killed both of us.” She hadn’t saved anything.

  “Ain’t dead yet.”

  He had a point, but she wouldn’t be placing any bets. “Let’s see. There’s no way to open the doors. The moment we smash one of the windows, it would end us. The sand would pour in and bury us before we could climb out. This is sand, not even fesh fesh.”

  “Too bad this isn’t Dune, the desert planet,” Luke sounded…cheerful. When had he started doing that?

  “You’re being unusually happy, Luke. What’s up with that? We might as well have been eaten by a sandworm.”

  “I’m always happy at the successful end of a mission.”

  “You’ve got a weird definition of success.”

  He cocked an ear to one side, “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  She listened too. Somewhere outside the car was a low muffled thud like a heavy heartbeat. No, like a Black Hawk helicopter.

  Less than thirty seconds later, a clear clank sounded along the car’s frame from the rear. And moments later they were hauled from the sand, dangling butt first from a Black Hawk helicopter’s lifting cable. In the whole world-ending sand avalanche, she’d managed to keep them near the surface.

  The sunlight was a shock as thorough as being born anew. Like…huh! Like someone finally opening the garage doors wide enough to purge all the shadows. She liked the sound of that, the feel of that, a lot.

  Luke just grinned at her as they dangled from their harnesses while the Black Hawk lowered them to the flat area at the bottom of the dune.

  “You were right.”

  “I was?” Luke pretended to sound shocked.

  “Most excellent.”

  And their shared laugh—only a little bit laced with hysteria—might well be the best sound she’d ever heard.

  “Got the whole thing on video,” Rafe bubbled as the four of them met on the sand.

  Luke high-fived him.

  “Seriously, girl,” Julian agreed. “That’s some wicked-cool moves you got there.” He mimicked driving a car half like a racer and half like a bronc rider.

  “You landed ass up, so we were able to snap on a cargo hook.”

  “Told you that you had a cute ass,” Luke whispered in Zoe’s ear and enjoyed seeing the bright blush.

  “Whoa!” Rafe remarked. “When did that happen?”

  “What happen?” Zoe asked but blushed harder.

  Julian waved his index finger between them, “Seriously? Okay, totally getting the cutest couple of the year award.”

  “Better shut up, you two,” Luke grinned at them. “Or next time Zoe may guide you straight into the side of a mountain from her RPA.”

  “Oh, I’d never do that,” she said sweetly. “I’d send them right over an enemy’s gun emplacement instead. Then no one could say it was my fault.”

  Rafe and Julian groaned.

  The crew chiefs who’d been working in the back of the Black Hawk stepped out onto the sand with small remote control boxes. In moments, they were landing hobby drones on the sand and packing them into padded cases.

  “Time’s short,” Julian checked his watch, then clicked on his radio. “Sofia? Did we get them?”

  “Roger that. Drake and Nikita have the other four members of Truck #507’s team in captivity. We told the officials they were needed for questioning over an illegal customs issue. They’ve handed them over to the CIA, who’ll have them airborne back to the States within the next twenty minutes. And the team’s leader has a Pakistani passport, as well as several others. We think he’s American, but we don’t know. All of the others have Pakistani stamps in their various passports, including the truck’s three crew members.”

  “Thankfully not our problem. Thanks and out,” he clicked off the radio.

  “That’s your cue,” Rafe tossed him the satellite phone from the unearthed Citroën. “We’re out of here.”

  Luke wrapped his arms around Zoe and turned his back to the sand kicked up by the helicopter’s down-blast. In moments, it had slipped
away along the valley and even the echoes were dying. Silence.

  To hold Zoe for even that second was such a joy. But it was also a liberty he should never have assumed so he let her go before she could complain.

  He turned his back on her so that she couldn’t see how badly he wanted her and how badly he wished he could undo what he’d done.

  Luke punched the speed dial on the phone. When the safety officer answered, Luke spoke.

  “I’d like to report an accident.”

  And he hoped like he’d never hoped for anything in his life that Zoe would forgive him for the accident he’d made with her father.

  39

  He almost didn’t recognize her; wouldn’t have except that he’d memorized everything about Zoe DeMille during those long days they were apart. She couldn’t hide her walk as she strolled past the massed members of The Soldier of Style Brigade without any of them noticing, but everything else was so changed it was hard to believe.

  She’d erased the buoyant Tweety Bird—completely.

  It also didn’t hurt that the party at the Lima, Peru, finish line had been in full swing for hours and sobriety had gone south long before the final riders made it to the Dakar Rally’s finish line. Christian was thrilled to take the accolades for the highest finish his car had ever achieved. They’d held on for fifth despite their long sidetrack and delay waiting for the race officials to arrive once they’d overcome their fear of the tiny hobbyist drones and dared fly their helos again.

  It was doubtful that anyone would pay for the operation to unearth Truck #507 or the remains of its three-person crew—it would cost a fortune.

  After the race, Zoe had simply disappeared.

  Now she was back, but she was no longer The Soldier of Style.

  Her blonde hair with the black part was now all the same jet black as her father’s. It made her deeply blue eyes shine forth. She’d shed her yellow sunglasses as well, a pair of mirrored shades just like his were pushed up into her hair holding back the straight glorious fall. In fact, there wasn’t a single thing about her that was yellow. Blue jeans, red tennies with pink shoelaces, a matching red Dakar t-shirt, and a lightweight black leather jacket that made her look terribly sleek and urban in the dusk of the cool Peruvian evening.