She held on to his harness and drove into the kiss only to feel every bit of the heat returned tenfold. In moments her only ability was to hang on as Michael overwhelmed her senses.
He’d dug one hand into her hair and fisted it there, not as if he was trapping her, but rather as if he was holding on for all he was worth.
The other hand dragged her against him so powerfully that she might have been naked beneath the moonless night. The strength of his arms was beyond imagining.
She groaned and clung and fought to get closer as if she drank of his essence only to have him take it back and return it tenfold.
Claudia wanted to rend and tear. Toss weapons, armor, and battle clothes aside. To lose herself.
There was neither rending nor a sudden step back to break the heat.
One moment they were going at each other like wildcats, then the next like lovers suddenly gone gentle.
A last, painfully soft brush of lips, and they once again faced the desert as it quieted into full darkness, this time over each other’s shoulders as they kept the embrace.
His hand now cradled her head, hers held on to his powerful arms rather than his harness.
Out there in the dark somewhere lay a question.
A final brief hug and they let go, turning once more to stand side by side.
The question she didn’t dare ask.
She ran her tongue over her swollen lips and relished Michael’s taste.
What if you didn’t have to do it alone?
Chapter 6
Michael could feel the mission building inside him as he listened to the desert. After all of his years in Delta, it was a familiar pattern, one he knew and welcomed.
Though he’d rarely been kissed breathless the moment before a mission began. Oddly, he felt he was somehow more than he really was due to how she saw him, rather than less. As if he was even more ready for this mission than any prior one.
The first layer of a mission-centric mind-set—the goal and mission that was the purpose—formed during the briefing. It didn’t matter if it was training or reality, he treated them exactly the same. If there was a 10k morning run, he gave it the same focus as when they slid into Libya and “helped” the locals track down Muammar Gaddafi. Though, if it hadn’t been for the locals, they could have done it a damn sight faster and the man wouldn’t have been beaten to death, then shot in the head, no matter how much he deserved it.
The next layer—shutting off the outside world—overlaid that base. All that mattered was the moment and the mission. Nothing outside that focus existed. Not the Presidential orders authorizing the action, now in the past. Not the news networks always looking for a juicy “in” but finding out about fewer than one in a hundred Delta operations.
Next layer included the operational aspects that he no longer needed. The Peleliu had no meaning until the end of the operation. Captain Kara Moretti had some relevance still, but he was close to forgetting about her as well. She’d kept the Gray Eagle UAV aloft for most of the last two days, watching their first target deep in the Somali desert. They didn’t want to lose track of the group if they decided to move. They hadn’t. So, her task and usefulness to this night’s mission were almost over. All he needed to know about her right now would be embodied by a clean data feed.
The Gray Eagle was up there now, with a full load of four air-to-surface Hellfire missiles just in case, but they weren’t anticipating any need for that capability tonight, so he let it wash out of his mind.
Some days this task of focusing down was easier and some days harder. Today, the next layer of mental preparation was giving him definite problems.
He’d selected Claudia as his pilot because he liked the way she flew, that perfect steadiness and the creativity he’d seen during her flight test.
But Claudia in the desert silence was a revelation. Michael enjoyed women. They were fun, interesting, and often a challenge—all of which he found to be motivators.
Claudia in the desert throwing herself at him had left him spinning, a feeling he definitely didn’t have much experience with. He was always three steps ahead of the women he was with, could see their plans long before they even became conscious of them. Every time he thought he had Claudia pegged, she slipped quietly to the side.
She was about much more than flight. In the four days they’d known each other, they had yet to say a single word about piloting or past missions. Yet the few things he had told her, no one else knew.
He knew that she smelled of moonlight and new-grown conifer.
And tasted, dear sweet gods. The way that woman could kiss, with her whole heart and her whole body. He…
Focus.
They returned as full darkness settled on the desert. And he thought of their frantic kiss. Until that moment, Claudia had been remote, fascinating, and so beautiful that his heart beat strangely around her, but remote.
He had dismissed her first night’s embrace as an aberration she’d thankfully been too exhausted to recall and he was still too dumb to stop reliving.
But that first kiss on the ship’s deck and the discovery of the softness and warmth of her lips had made the woman instantly, intensely real. Flesh and blood. Not a distant object to be admired and appreciated, but a living, breathing woman.
And now, after… If he were to bed this woman, and he couldn’t wait to do just that, would he even come out the other side alive?
* * *
Claudia wanted to laugh at them. They were both so carefully outwardly sedate and calm. Yet inside she was torn between a desire to grab Michael and try a repeat of their kiss out of sight of their impromptu helibase, and simply ripping his clothes off right here in the middle of everything and not giving a damn who watched.
She wondered if she was really screwing up his mental preparation. Part of her hoped so. To have that kind of power over a man like Colonel Gibson, well, it would certainly be something.
But if it made him even the smallest bit less likely to walk away from this, she was going to kick her own ass but good.
It was comic, their movements in such silent, perfect unison. Climbing into the small helicopter from either side as if choreographed. Seat harnesses clicking loudly at the same moment, both checking their gear.
She should say something, or he should. You didn’t just kiss someone like that and then…nothing.
She lifted off with the other helos, climbing as high as they could into the night sky.
Or maybe “nothing” was the only thing to say after a moment like that.
She watched the night sky outside the bird as they climbed near the upper limits for high-and-hot operation of the fully loaded Little Bird. Much higher and they’d burn fuel at a prodigious rate that tonight’s operation could ill afford and didn’t require.
A glance at the mission clock told her she was out of time for words.
Ten seconds.
Michael released his seat harness and checked his parachute harness.
Five.
He double-checked all of his weapons.
Then he reached out and squeezed her arm briefly before stepping out of the helicopter at fifteen thousand feet.
A moment too late, she knew what she wanted to say.
Michael didn’t reject her or laugh at her. He didn’t see her as a target or as the Ice Queen. As far as she could tell, he looked at her and saw Claudia Jean Casperson.
Which was a first for her.
“Thank you.”
She said it to the dark and hoped that he somehow heard it as he fell through the sky.
* * *
Michael fell until the wind was a full-throated roar in his ears, then pulled his rip cord. His black, night-flying chute deployed with a sharp ka-phump and jerked his body sharply.
It was only then that he realized he never before had done that with a p
ilot. A shared nod or a tap on arm, and he’d be gone. Instead, through her flight suit, he’d felt the strength of Claudia’s forearm as she worked the collective. Been aware of the miniscule flexings of her muscles as she adjusted the controls even in the instant they were in contact. Could feel once more the strength with which she’d grabbed him.
Michael pulled down his night-vision gear and looked about the dark sky. Five others flew their chutes nearby—Bill and four other Deltas. A glance up revealed that the Maven was already far above him, lost in the stars except for the slightest trace of her engine’s heat signature. His team formed up above him in a stack; he was the flight’s primary navigator.
He checked the infrared readout from Moretti’s Gray Eagle on the small screen he wore on the inside of his wrist. The objective was ten miles northeast. An easy flight—the oversized parachute providing plenty of lift above the still-hot desert—as they moved in absolute radio silence. Five minutes from the jump point, a half mile from the landing zone, he scanned the horizon with his own night-vision gear instead of the UAV’s. Exactly where anticipated, he saw a dozen heat signatures a thousand yards past the preselected landing point.
The team hit in unison, spread at fifty-foot intervals across the desert. Thirty seconds later, they’d packed their chutes, unslung their HK416 rifles, and set out at a dead run. Five minutes in, they slowed, spread out, and began scanning for sentries. Moretti had circled her UAV down from four miles up to just one to improve her sensing accuracy. Her tight focus showed his team of six encircling the camp, with no other sentries out in the bushes.
This al-Shabaab group had become complacent because of their remote location. They’d set up camp under the largest tree in the area and scavenged almost everything around them for firewood. The small nightly plume of smoke was how he’d finally located them in the heart of the desert.
While scouting the cities, he’d overheard a mention of periodic food deliveries to a camp out in this direction. He’d traced the Range Rover driver using the local food market and managed to get the general location from him by buying him liberal amounts of the khat drug that seemed to fuel all of Somalia.
This lone remaining tree offered the jailers a wide range of vision and made escape difficult for the prisoners. During the day it would also be the only shade in the area.
However, at night, it offered Michael’s team clear visibility of what was occurring in the camp. The only guard still awake sat by the dwindling fire for warmth, facing the flames so his night vision would be nonexistent. Fifteen bodies slept on the ground, most huddled into themselves against the relative chill of the desert night. All in rags.
Michael waited until he could see the five other Deltas standing around the edge of the clearing. They showed as soft green outlines in the infrared night-vision gear. Even in the NVGs the D-boys were barely visible. Their clothing was heat-reflecting and their faces were only exposed from their goggles to their chin.
He raised his arm and waited. Five arms were raised in answer. Everyone was ready. He swung his arm down and they began walking forward in unison, careful to avoid twig, stone, or shifting sand. The last hundred feet took another three minutes.
By the time the guard noticed them, Michael’s men were standing scattered in and among the sleeping bodies and had already picked their targets.
The guard looked up startled when Michael stepped between him and the fire. He reached for his gun.
The soft double-spit of a silenced HK416 dropped him where he sat.
Two seconds later, before the hostages were even awake, the other four guards were dead, each with a double tap to the head and a “sure shot” to the heart.
Ten seconds more to check off the guards and the hostages versus the gathered intelligence.
Bill informed the hostages that this was a rescue by the U.S. Navy. Which was partially correct; after all, the Peleliu was a Navy ship. Of course, everyone would automatically assume that meant the SEALs. It seemed only fair to burden their brothers-in-arms with yet more unwanted publicity. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
“Stay together. Stay quiet.”
The other four D-boys moved back into the night to watch for stray sentries or unexpected arrivals. It was possible to fool the Gray Eagle’s eye—not easy, but possible. Fooling an operator on the ground with the latest NVGs and desert skills was not something your average Somali nomad-turned-jihadist could manage.
A quick scan assured Michael that the area was secure. There was little chance of any radio transmission being monitored from out here, but radio silence was the protocol. The watching helos above would only break silence if they saw the heat signature of another moving body or an unexpected arrival.
He pulled out his infrared beacon, a trio of LEDs snapped onto the top of a nine-volt battery—that also fit his emergency radio—and set it to a three-second flash. Otherwise invisible, it would paint a distinctive signal for the waiting helicopters.
While the helos were flying in, he gathered up the weapons. The sole radio operator was lying beside his gear, which Michael grabbed. If the man had any codes or contact frequencies other than the latest one tuned into the radio, he had taken them to the grave. Michael noted the frequency; they’d monitor it from the helos just in case.
He mounted a camera in the trees with a microphone and satellite antenna. It took him under three minutes to mount, test, and hide it under a cloth that would look like bark except under the closest examination. Chances were low of it being useful, but someone back in ops wanted to test their cool, new eavesdropping system.
They’d tried this surveillance strategy once before in Mogadishu harbor, sending in a team at night to mount cameras in removed sections of wooden pilings that held the docks. A couple hundred thousand dollars of hardware that he’d told them was stupid, but his team had been ordered to install it anyway. Guess what? It had been stupid. The target had to walk in front of the stationary cameras to be seen. By the time the image was received and interpreted, the target was long gone—assuming that a satellite was even in position to pick up the signal before the batteries died. This at least stood a chance because Kara Moretti’s Gray Eagle would be listening in for the next two days.
Calamity Jane hammered down out of the sky accompanied by the four Little Birds. Lola Maloney aboard the Vengeance, their main Black Hawk gun platform, wasn’t needed for this and remained aloft, keeping a watchful eye.
He and Bill hustled the eleven hostages onto the Chinook. They only had to carry two of them—too weak to walk themselves. They were all frightfully thin but appeared healthy, other than a dazed disbelief that their long nightmare was actually ending. SOAR would have a pair of combat search-and-rescue medics aboard to help them. The CSARs could do anything that didn’t require a fully equipped operating theater.
The Vicious, a transport Black Hawk flown by Chief Warrant Dusty James, arrived and swept the pirates into body bags while his boys cleared the site of weapons and refuse. Hopefully the clean wipe of the site would waste someone’s time when they went looking for what had happened to the group and wondering if they’d moved on of their own accord.
They hadn’t.
And maybe his little camera rig would snap their photo.
He stowed his chute and reserve in the back of Claudia’s helicopter less than twenty-three minutes after he stepped out of it, fifteen thousand feet up and ten miles away.
Eleven hostages recovered, check.
Twenty-seven to go.
The next site would require different tactics.
Chapter 7
Claudia was used to thinking in sorties. When the Marines went in somewhere heavy—where the lines were drawn and the troops engaged—helicopters flew sorties. Load up with ammo, fly in to provide close fire support, cycle back to the airbase or the ship when out of ammo or fuel, then repeat as often as necessary.
SOAR thought in strikes and operations. Need a hostage rescued? A bad guy targeted? Intel gathered? The 160th was your team. She knew her role during the first strike of this operation was to deliver and retrieve, assuming everything went according to plan, which it had.
Now the flying would become more interesting.
“We lost starlight. The storm front is moving in as predicted.” Claudia greeted Michael as he climbed aboard. “A night parachute jump, one kilometer sprint, and sanitizing a hostage site; you’ve had a very busy twenty minutes.”
“Had worse.” Michael began reloading his weapon as she lifted back into the night. As last aloft, her rotor wash erased any final impression of the Little Bird’s skids or the now-rescued hostages. She noticed that Michael didn’t need many rounds to reload his rifle. Generally, a great deal of lead flew through a battle scene for each person who was injured or killed. With Delta, two shots equaled a life almost every time.
Claudia had thought she was inured to it, to the price of battle. With Delta it was very up close and personal. That’s what they were good at and known for. That would take some getting used to on her part.
“Why?” Michael reseated the full magazine into his rifle.
She tried to unravel what question Michael could possibly be asking. The storm front had been part of Michael’s plan, so that wouldn’t be it. Guessing was what Michael wanted her to be doing. So…not. It was probably about why she’d kissed him, but if that was it, he was going to have to ask. And maybe that would give her a little more time to decide why she had. No matter how right it felt, it had been stupid in many, many ways—one of which included a potential court martial and the ending of one or both of their careers.
“Use your words, Michael. Ask me the whole question.”
He leaned forward to look up at the pitch-black of the moonless and starless night as she turned southeast. This time she remained nap-of-earth—her maximum height fifty feet from the ground to the top of her rotor—and only then to clear a line of trees. Power lines in the deep Somali countryside weren’t much of an issue. Mostly she stayed under twenty-five feet, which kept her skids about fifteen off the ground.
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