Target Engaged

by M. L. Buchman

  This was Delta. The Unit was Tier One. A Special Mission Unit. They were supposed to be the one true bastion of male dominance. No one had warned them that a woman was coming in.

  Just one woman, Kyle thought. The first one. How exceptional did that make her? Pretty damn was his guess. Even if she didn’t last the first day, still pretty damn. And damn pretty. He’d bet on dark eyes behind her wraparound shades. She didn’t take them off, so it was a bet he’d have to settle later on.

  A couple corpsmen came over and carted Ralph Something away, even though he was already sitting up—just dazed with a bloody cut on his forehead.

  The Deltas who’d come out to watch the show from a few buildings down didn’t say a word before going back to whatever they’d been doing.

  Kyle made a bet with himself that Ralph Something wouldn’t be showing up at sundown’s first roll call. They’d just lost the first one of the class and the selection process hadn’t even begun. Or maybe it just had.

  “Where’s check-in?” Her voice really was as lush as her hair, and it took Kyle a moment to focus on the actual words.

  He pointed at the next building over and received a nod of thanks.

  That made watching her walk away in those tight leathers strictly a bonus.

  Chapter 2

  Day eight and no formation until 0600 hours. Kyle felt like he’d been lazy and slept in. He did a rough head count. From the first day of 104 candidates, they were down by at least twenty-five.

  Several hadn’t made it through the day-one PT test, which hadn’t even been hard. The only unusual part of the physical training test had been the amount of it. Most of these guys had been in advanced branches of the military—Special Forces, Special Ops, 82nd Airborne. How could these guys not have been prepared for a round of hard-core PT?

  Sergeant Carla was one of only three regular Army. All three of them were still in. You had to be tough to think you could jump straight from Army to Delta without spending a couple tours in Special Operations or as a Special Forces Green Beret first.

  He’d won his first-day bet with himself when he watched the Hostage Rescue Team dude nearly drown halfway through the hundred-meter swim in full clothes and boots toward the end of day one—without even a rifle in his hands. He’d panicked, grabbed for the boat moving along beside him, and voluntarily quit.

  This was real, not a game. He should have known that before he walked through the gate. Sympathy level: zero.

  The first day had cut six; the first week had cut about twenty more. Half of those couldn’t deal with the brutal physical workouts, and the other half couldn’t deal with the rules. He could pick out another twenty he didn’t think would survive much longer for that second reason. Sympathy level: same.

  Delta Selection rules were oddly too simple for most. Life in other units of the U.S. military was about explicit orders that told you exactly what to wear, how to make your bed, where to be, and what to do.

  Delta rules rarely lasted more than three sentences—for an entire day’s exercise. Last night’s bulletin board had said simply, “0600. No rucks.” That meant no brutal hike with a heavy rucksack, at least not to start the day.

  A lot of the guys had cheered when they’d seen that. Assessment Phase had been a week of escalating workouts, lots of PT, and lots of heavy-duty hikes. First day had been an 0200 start, a full ruck, and eighteen miles along the roads of Fort Bragg. They’d also been told that there was an unspecified time limit to each hike, so they shouldn’t dawdle.

  Any drill sergeant worth his salt would have added something more. “…Dawdle like a little old ladies’ knitting circle.” Or “…like the lame weaklings we expect from the other services.”

  Not Delta. Just, “Don’t dawdle.”

  Not real helpful.

  Unlike Green Beret assessment and training, no instructor was hovering beside you, yelling at you to dig in and keep up. In Delta, if you lagged, a member of the testing cadre slipped up quietly beside you and asked if you wanted to voluntarily drop out. If not, they let you grind it out against a hidden clock that they never revealed. At times he wondered if the training cadre even knew what the time limits were or if only the sergeant major in charge knew the required maximums.

  Whatever was coming, Kyle already knew it would be harder than the day before, heavy rucks on their shoulders or not. No cause to cheer or be depressed. Steady. Just like Dad had taught him.

  Without preface, the cadre started calling roll as the sun cracked the horizon, and most guys pulled down their sunglasses. As each man was called, he stepped forward. Per standard practice, they were given a swatch of colored cloth with a number to pin to their uniform and then told to climb into truck number such-and-so.

  Today his swatch was “Red 4,” and that’s all any instructor would call him by for the rest of the day. Truck 2 looked no different than the other two. Only three trucks. They were going to be sardined in by the time everyone was called.

  He had looked for a pattern to their numbering but found none. That bothered several of the guys; made others a bit paranoid as they were certain it was a reflection on their prior day’s success or failure. Kyle saw no pattern, decided it was a mind game, and stopped thinking about it. They clearly didn’t need him to know, so he didn’t worry about it.

  He admitted to being pretty pleased when “Green 3” climbed into Truck 2 as well. The trainees filled the side benches of the truck as they climbed in, and Carla Anderson ended up directly across from him. She had kept to herself, ignored the subtle harassments, and put down the more obnoxious ones. In whatever direction the candidates would be dispersed through the day, he’d account starting out across from her as a good beginning.

  It had become clear to him after day two that she could handle herself just fine. A brain-dead grunt had grabbed her ass and found himself head down in a toilet—not the flush kind, the slit-trench latrine kind. The aggressor hadn’t been in the barracks that night; she had. No one said a word and everyone left her pretty much alone after that.

  Kyle had been pleasantly surprised as Carla continued to survive each day. Woman was damn tough. She might keep to herself, but she gave a hundred percent. As often as not, she’d be on his heels at the end of each hike or exercise. He sure as hell knew where she was at all times, close and moving at full tilt. She pushed him hard and he appreciated the extra motivation.

  Also, in this sea of guys, she was a sweet relief to look at, even if the “Don’t Touch” sign was glowing bright above her head.

  “Check it out,” she said and nodded toward the rear of the truck. They were the first words she’d spoken directly to him since asking where to check in.

  He turned to look. Damn, he’d been staring at her again. He really had to cut that out. Well, if she wasn’t going to complain, maybe he’d just enjoy it while it lasted.

  Out on the assembly ground, thirty guys were still standing at roll call when the Sergeant Major closed his clipboard.

  The three trucks that the roll-called soldiers had climbed aboard started their engines but didn’t move off. They weren’t packed in any tighter than usual.

  “Men.” The Sergeant Major raised his voice.

  Kyle could hear him clearly despite the rumbling.

  “You have failed to achieve the times necessary on the hikes. We will be sending you back to your units with letters of praise. You are fine soldiers, but regrettably, you aren’t what The Unit is looking for. Thank you all. Pack your gear. Transport arrives in fifteen minutes. Dismissed.” The Sergeant Major snapped a salute that was returned sloppily by the shell-shocked soldiers left standing in the dirt.

  “Shit!” Kyle knew a half dozen of these guys. Three were Green Berets from his own battalion, though none of his own company were here. They were damn fine soldiers.

  The trucks dropped into low gear and moved off as the shock continued to rippl
e through those left behind. Several dropped to sit in the dirt. Others stood and wept openly. Most simply watched the trucks drive away with a look of desperate longing on their face.

  “Harsh,” Carla observed.

  Kyle looked at her. No sign of pity in her face. No sign of fear that it might just as easily have been her left standing in the dirt. A number of the guys on the truck looked aghast at their narrow escape from such a brutal cut, a full third of their forces gone in a single moment.

  Sergeant Carla Anderson wasn’t worrying about being cut. She was facing what was right in front of her. Like a good soldier, she focused on what came next.

  He was starting to learn that whatever it was, she’d hit it full force and be damned good at it. Few soldiers and, up till now, no women, ever truly impressed him.

  Kyle gave her a grin across the jouncing bed of the truck as it slammed into the now-familiar potholes along the road outside Delta’s front gate.

  “On the bright side, at least they’ll be spared an opportunity for you to send more of them swimming in a latrine.”

  She smiled back. It was a good smile, the first one he’d seen cross her face. It was easy and lit her eyes as well. “At least I didn’t break any bones. I guess I was being a little mellow. I was in a good mood that day.”

  He cringed in pretend fear. “Ooo, so scared.”

  “How little you know.”

  That was the most words he’d heard her say since her arrival, the guys seated to either side watching her in surprise.

  Himself, he was under the sway of that hypnotic voice and wouldn’t mind hearing a lot more of it. But it took a more than a pretty face and a bit of training to make Delta. So, show her that there was a deep end of the swimming hole.

  “Will we be seeing you at the end…girlie?”

  Her returned smile was wicked; wicked enough that he wondered if there might be a latrine swim in his own immediate future. If so, he wasn’t going in alone.

  “You’ll be seeing me only if you’re still here, tough guy.”

  Kyle laughed back. It was a good moment.

  And Sergeant Carla Anderson, both the soldier and the woman, impressed the hell out of him.

  * * *

  Carla had set her sights clearly on her target, and he was sitting right across the truck from her. The men who’d been cut hadn’t surprised her at all. They’d always been the slowest or the worst complainers.

  Her target was Special Forces Sergeant First Class Kyle Reeves. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, far too handsome for his own good, and he knew it. He added a deep voice and a shining integrity that threatened to dazzle. Such perfect control of temper was hiding something, and she wanted to dig down to find out what really lay beneath.

  But most importantly, it had been clear from the first moment that he was the very best one here. He totally kicked ass without breaking a metaphorical sweat. Real sweat in the North Carolina heat…no one was avoiding that, not even with a serious investment portfolio in antiperspirants.

  The best was something that Carla always strove for. It drew her like a compass too close to a magnet.

  Kyle made PT workouts look like a warm-up exercise and had been the only one able to simply walk away from her on the long hikes. It took everything she had to chase him down, and still she never quite caught him. There’d never been a grunt who could out-hike her, not in training and not in the hell of the Afghanistan dust bowl, but a full week into testing and she had yet to catch Sergeant Kyle.

  His steady calm was already legendary by the third day.

  The others saw it too. At night in the barracks there’d always be a group around Kyle. Usually the guys sat around jawing about women or motorcycles; she was the former, though she resisted telling them how damn little they knew, and she didn’t really care about the latter, even though she rode one of the fastest machines here. But when Kyle was part of the group, the conversation was all maneuvers and tactics, and that fascinated her.

  When it became clear that her presence in the circle was too disruptive—assholes that most men were—she’d taken to casually sitting close enough to listen.

  Actually, she took some hope. The worst dozen of those assholes weren’t in the trucks rolling to some unknown destination. They were still standing in the dirt back at the compound, looking like stunned chickens. They still had their heads, but they’d sure looked like their balls had been cut off and handed to them. She tried not to snigger, even to herself. After all, they were having a shit-bad day.

  Kyle, always situationally aware, noticed her listening in the evenings. He made a point of speaking loudly enough for her to hear. Sometimes there’d be bragging sessions about hot drop zones and dug-in ragheads.

  But when Kyle spoke, he’d skip the blazing gunfire and the “I was that close to being dead, I swear” routines. Instead, he talked about the enemy’s tactics and strategies.

  It had taken the U.S. military a long time to learn that the fastest and safest way across a rough neighborhood was not along streets and alleys, but rather through the buildings themselves. Locals cut holes between kitchen walls in adjacent structures, knowing where every passage led, and from which second-story window they could jump safely onto an adjoining first-story roof. They could race through a war-torn city better than a professional lab rat in his favorite maze.

  Kyle talked about how to learn those passages, to see the patterns that let locals walk right through the middle of a city block and show up behind your front lines.

  Carla knew the terror of those passageways, had run through them never knowing from one passage to the next if she’d find a startled woman grinding flour by hand or a circle of men wound up in some warped religious right-wing fervor and clutching AK-47s like their firstborns.

  Kyle talked about how he’d followed and learned. And that was just one of a hundred conversations.

  When the trucks lurched to a stop and killed their engines, the trainees jumped down to the ground. They were out at a Fort Bragg–ugly shooting range. Safety berms of mounded dirt were riddled with tons of lead driven four grams at a time at supersonic speeds. There was not a single shade tree. Nothing blocked the dusty wind. It looked like the apocalypse had happened here but there’d been no one to care.

  This wasn’t some prettied-up officers’ range with floating targets, shooting benches, and watered grass. This was dirt, dust, and sun-faded distance markers. Carla preferred the authenticity of it. Nothing between her and the shot.

  A Humvee sat there with cases of rifles. Not the disabled and awkwardly heavy M16s they’d been carting along on every hike, but rather the Heckler & Koch HK416 specifically designed for Delta.

  She lifted one and it simply felt right in her hands. The weight, balance, even the handgrip. Her hands were smaller and her fingers definitely thinner than almost everyone else’s here, but still the weapon fit. In seconds she had the buttstock adjusted to fit comfortably against her shoulder.

  Carla caught Kyle looking at her. He did that a lot. All of the guys did. After all, she was the only female here for them to all pool their idiot staring needs toward. She did her best to ignore all of it. Easily done with most of these dim bulbs because the regard was so not mutual.

  But she’d felt that look of pure heat from Kyle since the moment of her arrival when he’d stood ready to take out the 75th Ranger meathead.

  It was sweet of him, but wholly unnecessary. She’d learned Carla Lesson Number One ages ago: You’re on your own, girl.

  No question of that even long before the day she’d hit Basic Training. On her first day in the Army, a drill instructor had tried to grope her and ended up eating dirt right in front of a passing major, which hadn’t gone over so well. The other drills weren’t too pleased about their buddy spending a month in the stockade and losing two grades, but no one else had messed with her, other than making her eight weeks with
them a living hell.

  Still, it had been thoughtful of Kyle. The applause had been a nice gesture too, though she’d noted it wasn’t exactly a popular one.

  Now his look was a questioning one—she could read his face so easily. She didn’t wait for him to ask.

  “I know what to do with one of these, tough guy. Do you?”

  He looked down at her hands and how she held the weapon and then back up at her face. “Loser buys the first round of drinks once we’re through selection.”

  “Deal!”

  Then the words registered.

  Damn! She found herself liking him despite her better judgment. He’d just said that he fully expected her to be one of those still standing at the end of the thirty days of Delta Selection.

  Compliments never went to her head because they were always about her being female. “You did that really well…for a woman.”

  Yet Kyle was looking right past that as if he could actually see her. It was pretty damned sexy.

  He turned to receive his magazines from the training cadre.

  “Five rounds to zero your scope.” The Delta trainer handed Kyle a short magazine.

  Carla felt that was pretty damn stingy. Ten to fifteen rounds would be more appropriate for an unfamiliar weapon.

  The trainer also handed out three long magazines—fully loaded by the way Kyle was holding them. “Ninety rounds for thirty targets. You must hit twenty-eight of the targets to complete Assessment Phase of the selection process and continue on to the Stress Phase.”

  Kyle glanced her way and winked. Then he slipped two of the magazines into a thigh pouch, which left him holding the zeroing rounds and only one magazine.

  Thirty rounds, thirty targets. Mister Show-Off, huh? She’d take that challenge.

  He grinned at her when she did the same with her rounds.

  A number of guys had been watching them. Some laughed at her in derision, which didn’t bother her any. If they wanted to underestimate her, they were welcome to; it gave her the advantage. Some looked thoughtful. About a third of the men took the challenge of tucking away two of their magazines. That bravado so wasn’t going to last.