Target Engaged

by M. L. Buchman

  HALO jumps were fine. Jumping out of a speeding jetliner at thirty-five thousand feet was almost as much of a rush as having sex with Kyle. Well, no, it wasn’t that good, but it could sure make a girl feel happy in a lot of ways.

  Her problem was that she hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours and they were headed into their first live op on no notice. Well, technically on twenty-three minutes notice, which didn’t help a whole lot.

  Carla had been unable to sleep the night before their OTC graduation exercise; she’d been too wound up about it. At least that’s what she thought it had been. The more she’d lain there inside the curl of Kyle’s sleeping arms, the less she believed her first assessment.

  Was she worried about the exercise itself? No. They’d practiced a hundred variations on the living room scenario. Delta had started them off with learning to shoot while walking, then at a target behind them while they walked. Then an elevated target, then an elevated target behind them while they were running. Despite being a thousandth the size, Delta fired more training rounds than the entire Marine Corps, and she had the calluses between her thumb and forefinger to prove it.

  Was she worried about disappointing Kyle or the team? Wasn’t gonna happen.

  Was she worried about disappointing the Delta leaders who had let her in? No.

  She had slid from Kyle’s arms, leaving her pillow in her place for him to wrap himself around, and gone to sit in a chair by the bedroom window streaming with moonlight and look out at their crap view of the apartment’s parking lot where their motorcycles sat side by side.

  She’d wanted to wake Kyle and slip down the road in the moonlight. Go back into the Uwharrie to their idyll in the wilderness…which had been so rudely interrupted by a thunderstorm that had sent them scrambling to a motel, laughing like lunatics all the way.

  Carla wanted to run away from…nothing! It wasn’t her style. She faced every problem head-on. So she’d ignored the moonlight and focused back on the night before OTC graduation.

  Had she been worried about what would happen to the team after graduating from OTC?

  Desperately.

  Crap! There it had been.

  In the past, Carla had shifted fireteams as easily as changing her billet; it just wasn’t that big a deal. But Delta had forced her to new levels in team integration, and she’d hate to lose any of these jokers.

  And Kyle. She’d really, really hate to lose Kyle. She never got attached; it just didn’t happen. Having Mom gone when Carla was fourteen and Clay gone when she hit eighteen had taught her the danger of that.

  But if she and Kyle were separated, she’d just…

  She shouldn’t be attached, but she was…and hated it. And at the same time loved it. Damn it! She wasn’t making any sense to herself. She’d barely managed to suppress the scream of frustration that would have had Kyle leaping from the bed and grabbing for a weapon before he was fully conscious.

  By sunrise she’d found no answer, not by the start of the final exercise.

  Afterward, Carla had frozen up solid waiting for the hammer fall; everyone pretending to be so casual as they sat there in the simulated aircraft waiting for their first orders.

  Then she’d looked at Kyle and wondered if she’d ever see him again.

  Memorize his face! Memorize this moment! So casual, so excellent, sitting in an aircraft’s first class lounge, armed against the world’s evil. She stored that image deep and hated her weakness. She didn’t need anyone, but she needed Kyle as badly as she needed air to breathe.

  Then Colonel Gibson had said they’d continue to fight together and the world had come back to life like a hard slap.

  She was so happy that she’d wanted to jump up, scream, do a dance. Instead, she’d mimicked Kyle’s salute, adding all the respect she could into it, and followed her team out the door.

  They’d flown commercial to LAX, and they were now squatting in the cramped tail section of a 757 and she was no closer to understanding why she was so happy.

  The CIA had come up with a plane that had a jump gate buried in her tail. They’d done a last-minute substitution for a Delta airlines flight with a jet labeled “Air Leasing—Delta.” She’d bet the paint job would be scrubbed and gone in hours. Meanwhile, regular passengers rode on her, stewards did their steward thing, and five Delta operators crouched beneath them, waiting in a small separately pressurized space in the tail and reviewing the mission profile.

  At three minutes to jump: they pulled on their breathers, which held ten minutes of air, and checked each other’s gear.

  At two minutes: the lights went red, the pressure began dropping, and everyone began holding their noses to pop their ears.

  At one minute: the CIA pilot opened the pressure door and they were exposed to the air at altitude—too thin to breathe and cold enough to create instant frostbite at minus sixty centigrade, an average South Pole midnight. They were about to add another hundred degrees of windchill factor, so Carla triple-checked that there was no exposed skin.

  At zero: they stepped into space and were slapped with a hammer blow. The plane had slowed to four hundred miles per hour from its normal five fifty, but it was still like being kicked by a Jack the Giant Killer–sized boot. The trick was not to spit out your air supply during the kick. The other option was to pass out as you fell. You’d regain consciousness when you hit thicker air, but it was not a fun ride.

  Once she’d decelerated below two hundred miles per hour and could breathe again, she switched on her night-vision goggles and did a slow somersault. The plane was an apple-green trace of heat already fading into the distance. The rest of the team flew along with her.

  HAHO was more fun, a High-Altitude jump followed by a High Opening of your chute. With the right winds, it was easy to fly twenty, even thirty miles to a chosen landing. The problem with HAHO was that in countries possessing better radar systems, if someone was being sharp, they could see you coming and might send a fighter jet to investigate. Then you’d be dangling there under your parachute like so much target practice.

  In situations like this, the solution became HALO—High-Altitude jump and Low-Opening parachute. Basically jump and don’t pull the cord until the moment before you cratered in. You plummeted through the sky fast and small, and even if someone noticed you, you were long gone.

  All well and good.

  The only drawback this time was that it was 2200 local time—pitch bloody black—and what lay below them were the particularly rugged Sierra de Portuguesa mountains of northern Venezuela. Every bit of which was blanketed by the dense trees of Yacambú National Park. A lot of them twenty stories tall. About the worst jump conditions there were… She supposed she should be thankful their first operation wasn’t in a hurricane or a whiteout blizzard.

  Chad was the best jumper, so he took the flight lead. The blond, round-faced tech sergeant always sported an easy smile. He could have been mistaken for a big, simpleton fourteen-year-old unless you looked carefully at his bright blue eyes. There was absolutely nothing easygoing about his eyes.

  So they formed up and aligned on Chad. Carla ended up fourth in the flight, with Kyle bringing up the rear. They fell at near terminal velocity of two hundred miles per hour from seven miles up. Two full minutes of roaring free fall. Nothing on the ground to see where they were. Caracas was a long way to the north and there were no lights in the national park. All she could do was keep her head pointed straight down, fall, and think.

  Couldn’t she have gotten her thinking done during the long flight to LAX to catch the flight to Rio de Janeiro? Nooo. She’d been seated beside Richie, who was dense enough to be a Dallas Cowboys fan despite growing up in New York. The man had been in serious need of a reeducation. Denver Broncos ruled without question. Neither of them had slept, nor convinced the other they were an idiot, but it had made the time pass while they were sitting on a civilian flight an
d couldn’t discuss anything important.

  Then at LAX, a CIA spook had handed them a mission file on a USB for their tablet computers. Once they’d uploaded it, he’d locked them into the cargo bay of the CIA 757. She wound up sitting shoulder to shoulder with Kyle Reeves. There was so little room that there was no way to not be—leaving not a chance of sleep, considering how his mere presence raised her pulse rate.

  Part of her thought really clearly around him. Like the vent in the training shoot room. She only had to indicate that there was something of interest high up in the darkness, and he’d practically done telepathy on her, offering perfect positioning and assistance to boost her up. They took each other to a higher level in combat.

  When they had sex, her thinking was both clearer and foggier. He was far and away the best lover she’d ever had. She could never predict what was going on behind those dark brown eyes. Sometimes a friendly wrestle was just that—sweaty sheets and groans and happy smiles. Other times what had started as a quiet dinner left her prostrate under the dining room table, wondering if she’d ever move again. And that thing with the chocolate sauce… Damn!

  She wanted to look over her shoulder at Kyle as they plummeted through the third mile down, but if she did, she would catch the wind, side-tumble, and break the formation.

  Then there were the moments like now, when there was a little distance between them—even if it was only the fifty meters of free fall, about a half second apart—and he was as confusing as hell.

  They were more than fuck buddies. She’d finally figured that out on her own during the long, sleepless night. But she didn’t want a lover. Hell, she didn’t even want a boyfriend, especially not now. So, how had she acquired one in the middle of Delta Selection and the Operator Training Course?

  The whole boyfriend thing never worked well for her anyway. She’d lived with guys before; one back in high school had made it almost six months. But none of them had been serious. They’d just been convenient and compatible. When Jeremy got the terminal hots for some fiddle-playing singer chick and wanted to go on the road with her, Carla had kissed him good-bye and wished him luck, though she’d passed on his sweet offer of a farewell tumble. That’s what a girl did, wasn’t it?

  In the Army, she’d kept her relationships short, hot, and almost exclusively civilian.

  So what the hell was up with fricking Sergeant Kyle Reeves? He fought like a god and made love like a demon, and she wanted both more than she’d ever wanted anything other than Delta or to see her big brother walk through the door again.

  They were entering the last mile, so she shifted from her head-down “bullet” position into a skydiver’s belly-down spread. That slowed her from two hundred miles per hour down to one twenty; fifteen seconds to chute deployment.

  Couldn’t she just have that: happy sex and nothing more?

  She saw those sly looks of his. He’d talk about his mom and dad or a chick he’d dated for two years of high school—no normal person did that—and she’d see that look creeping into his eyes to peer out at her. He never said anything, he was a smart man, but she could see it there. Some psychotic desire for more.

  She liked living with him. He was an easy guy to live with, right down to the position of the toilet seat, about which she didn’t really give a damn. It was convenient too. They got a place of their own rather than on base, saved money together, and there was no one looking over her shoulder when she felt the sudden urge to jump him in the shower.

  Damn, she was no closer to solving her relationship with Kyle Reeves at a thousand feet than she’d been at thirty-five thousand or before the graduation exercise.

  Chad flashed his infrared strobe three times and popped his chute on the third. The black ram chutes blossomed below her: Chad, Duane, Richie, her own slamming her in the crotch, and Kyle above her, though he was now hidden by her own canopy.

  They stacked up, each slipping forward and down barely in front of the one below until Kyle’s feet were just above her hands and his riser lines lay against the leading edge of her chute. Her feet were just above Richie’s hands. Chad’s chute was the lowest and hence farthest back—like the base of a stack of blocks about to topple forward.

  Chad steered them in and, just like they’d practiced, they thumped down into the forty-meter clearing in the jungle, each landing a half second and five meters apart.

  She gave Chad a high five as they gathered and buried their chutes in the soft, loamy earth of the jungle floor. A small flask of acid that ate nylon, much like Kyle liquidated a package of chocolate-chip cookies, ensured that there’d be nothing much left to identify but a clump of metal buckles if anyone chanced to dig them up.

  They unslung their rifles and spent a moment huddled together to verify that their GPS trackers were working and showed their location. The nearest trail was two kilometers to their east, but they were going north. Fifteen kilometers from their target. Eight hours of darkness remaining.

  The jungle was thick with smells and sounds she didn’t recognize. The uncertain chirps of birds that might have included parrots settling after the disturbance of the team’s abrupt arrival. In moments, the unique flutter of zipping bats returned as they hunted back and forth across the clearing, occasionally silhouetted by the bright stars visible directly overhead. All around them, nothing but the blackness of towering trees marked the thick jungle.

  No “Hoo-ah!” No command to move out. A shared nod, a swallow of water, an energy bar, and she took the lead. She was best at deep and rough country; Kyle was best in towns and cities. You’d think the guy had been born a second-story cat burglar the way he moved through a building, not some kid who used to fish with his mom and dad in Washington State.

  Fifteen kilometers, and they’d need some time once they were at their target. So, now she needed to focus. Carla shoved “lover Kyle” out of her brain. When that didn’t work so well, she mentally patted him on the head and nudged him into a back corner pocket. Damn him!

  She smelled the air and listened. There was a rich loaminess so different from Colorado Rocky Mountain high (thank you, John Denver, for making that sound stupid in perpetuity) country. That meant stuff had rotted: fallen trees that could collapse under your weight, trail holes washed out between arched roots.

  The wildlife night sounds, silenced by their landing, continued to build. Small bugs making large noises. Somewhere a bullfrog setting up a bass rhythm section. Soon it was active enough that if they stayed soft in their passage, it might continue. Also, once they were in position, the animals’ silence would make a good alarm system for roving bad-guy guards so it was worth paying attention to.

  Then she pictured the terrain she’d studied for much of their flight down from LAX, twisted her mental compass to match the real one on her wrist, and set out at a fast stride with the others falling in close behind her. Three hours if it went well, four if it didn’t.

  * * *

  The jungle practically flew by. One thing Kyle had learned about Carla: she took pity on no man. He counted on her for that. She moved at an unvarying five kilometers an hour no matter what hell the terrain unleashed. He’d followed her through canyons, waterfalls, and dense jungle foliage—all on this hike alone—and still didn’t know how she did it. The same way she’d made up fifty-seven minutes on the Forty-Miler.

  The same way she made love. Kyle had counted himself very fortunate in women, until he’d made love to Carla. His lovers were generally more passive, letting the man take control. Some participated more actively than others, but there was a softness and gentleness about them he’d always enjoyed.

  That so wasn’t Carla.

  She was a constant revelation in a hundred ways. She inspired him to constantly find new and creative ways to sate them both; except they’d both proven that satiation was but a brief moment between the storms for them.

  They’d avoided the shoot rooms, as the
re was no way to tell if the monitor cameras were on or not. Neither of them was interested in putting on a show for others. But taking her inside an M2 Bradley after a day spent learning to drive and fire the tank had certainly been memorable. As she remained strapped in the driver’s seat, taking them back to the base from the shooting range, he’d fed on her until the rumbling engines had masked her cries. Twenty thousand feet of free fall had proven quite how much you could do in two minutes despite a jumpsuit and a full parachute harness—the unexpected catching air and the resulting tumble only adding to the fun.

  Carla shared her body and joined in the initiation of sexual play unlike any lover he’d ever had before. Kyle sometimes found himself wishing that they could slow down and just talk a bit, be together. But when they did, every conversation slid into the current stage of the OTC coursework or devolved rapidly into a glorious wrestling match that he would never refuse.

  The woman did everything full tilt, whether they were going down on each other until they both nearly wept with the pleasure of it or covering fifteen klicks of impossible terrain through a dense Venezuelan jungle.

  Even now, headed into their first mission deep in the heart of a “friendly” country, he wanted her. Wanted to bury himself in her and never come back. She was a drug he would overdose on if he could and count himself a happy man.

  But there was a reserve, a remoteness inside her that he’d yet to breach. Sometimes he could imagine her as wife, mother to their children, the two of them as happy together in later life as his parents. At others, it was hard to imagine her as more than the soldier by his side.

  Until he could solve that conundrum, he’d keep his mouth shut. At times he wanted to shake the answer out of her, but if he tried, he knew that those shields of Delta steel would come slamming into place. For a man who daily walked the edge of risk on the thin line between life and death, Carla’s occasionally blistering temper represented a line he didn’t dare cross just yet. But if he didn’t solve it soon, he’d grab the bull by the horns and take the risk. That or he might go stark raving mad.