Brand crawled up beside Borman, three more Rangers were hunkered down covering his six (making sure no one snuck up behind him while he was focusing on bagging the sniper out there). Brand started to roll Jimmy over.
“Too late for him.” Deek tucked Cindy’s photo into his own pocket and ignored Brand’s watchful gaze. He and Jimmy went way back, as far as Deek ever cared to remember, but there was no time to feel now. That was for later. Focus.
“Get his helmet and his rifle. Pop it up over that.” He nodded at a stretch of stone banister along the far end of the rooftop. “Duck and weave. Make it look quick but not too smart.”
When the helmet came free they both looked away to avoid seeing the bloody mess their friend had become. Borman had been tasked as Deek’s close-quarters protection while Deek was doing his countersniper gig and concentrating farther afield. Deek had been looking forward to recommending him for the next Delta testing cycle because the kid had made himself just that damn good. Not so much now.
Deek went back to the scope of his TAC-50 rifle and watched. A slow sweep of the general area. Still no movement. If he were an ISIS shooter— No! Don’t stereotype. If his opponent was a smart sniper instead of some dumb kid with a gun, the shooter would be headed…west. Get under the setting sun to blind Deek. It might work, if the sun were half an hour lower, but it wasn’t.
Valuing his fingers, Brand had jammed a knife into the bloody padding at the back of Borman’s helmet. He eased the helmet up, until barely visible over the wall, then pulled it back down.
Deek shifted his attention west. Maybe behind the tall planter…or the elephant statue. Libya was thick with ornate rooftop ornamentation, much of it riddled with bullet holes from Gaddafi’s fall and the disaster that had wracked the country ever since. Rooftop gardens, once the private sanctuaries of the rich and powerful, were now shredded sniper havens.
In his peripheral vision he could see Brand shifting Borman’s helmet sideways instead of ducking back down before moving. Then he eased the barrel of Borman’s M4 rifle up over the wall.
The sniper’s muzzle flash was less than two meters from where Deek had finally centered his scope. He shifted right, compensated an extra half mil mark for the afternoon breeze. Nine hundred meters. His sniper scope was zeroed at a thousand, close enough. In less than half a second, he had the first of three planned shots winging toward the sniper: round one if he stayed put…
Deek heard the crack of the sniper’s bullet passing by him—farther away this time—as he unleashed his second round.
Round two if the sniper stood up from his shot…
The incoming missed the decoy helmet and splatted on the wall of the building behind them, now just another new divot in the concrete. Get sloppy when you rush, Mr. Shooter. Also not smart enough to send two bullets.
Deek stayed steady, waited an extra heartbeat, and fired the last one.
…and round three if the sniper continued moving to the west.
The sniper rose to a low crouch, Deek’s first shot—after point-four seconds of travel time—caught him in the abdomen. The second in the jaw. And he must have been tensed to jump to the west, because he managed a single stumbling step forward. His spotter rose to steady him and instead caught the slightly delayed third shot in the head—the two of them collapsed out of sight. The TAC-50’s half-inch rounds delivered enough energy, even at nine hundred meters, that neither of them were getting up ever again. Just like Borman.
He and Brand waited fifteen minutes, but no one else took the helmet bait that they tried twice more. The sniper had been potshotting the Parliamentary Building all day yesterday, taking out two representatives and a guard, as if the new government didn’t have enough problems in this clusterfuck of a country. Now at least this bastard was done with that shit, forever.
Between them they carried Borman (Borman, not Jimmy, getting that wall back up) down the three flights, letting the Rangers take the lead. Normally the Rangers would carry their own and Deek would have let them. But even if they hadn’t seen each other in eight years, this was Jimmy Borman and they had a history. He’d been there for Jimmy when he was a screwed up teen, and he was here for him now. Deek sat beside him when they piled into the pair of battered Kia Cerato sedans that had brought them here.
They hauled Jimmy into the safe house and slid him into a body bag. No embedded reporters here, so at least his death would have that much peace. He’d go down as a “training accident” in some other theater, because it was a public “fact” that Delta was not currently operating in Libya.
Now, finally, Deek could let himself feel. Could take time to remember. He’d liked Jimmy, ever since he was the obnoxious kid down the block always tagging after his big sister. He’d had “feisty little shit” down cold then. Eight years later, when he showed up as six-one of badass Army Ranger, he still had it down cold.
Somewhere along the way, he’d taken to tagging after Deek, two lost loners in teenage hell. And again this last month when their units joined up for a little housecleaning in one of the worst countries on the globe. Jimmy had eaten up everything Deek could tell him about Delta. He’d gone from scrawny shit to one tough dude; he said it came from following in Deek’s tracks, which was kind of cool.
They’d taken to exchanging hard punches and shouting, “Kick-ass bros!” whenever they headed out on a mission. Damn! Never again.
They slid Jimmy into the cool cellar until they could move him out under cover of darkness. When had little shit Jimmy Borman gotten so damn heavy?
And why did the one thin photograph in his pocket weigh ten times more?
2
Cindy felt the man standing at the door to her office before she saw him. She instantly hit a hotkey to secure the military data and lock her screen before she turned. And then wished she hadn’t looked—wished she wasn’t in Africa at all.
Sergeant Derek Kyle Davies stood exactly on the threshold of her doorway, looking just as upset to be here as she was to have him here. The eight years since she’d last seen him had barely changed him at all. He was a little broader of shoulder and a little darker of expression, but she’d know him anywhere. She suspected that his years in Delta Force had done nothing to improve his limited range of expressive grunts.
Perfect.
That meant it was up to her. As usual.
“Hey, Deek.” She was the one who’d tagged him back in high school. The silent shadow boy who’d moved in with his drunk of a dad for the last two years of school after his drug-addict mom had walked in front of a train somewhere out west. Welcome to the South Bronx, sucker. Welcome to hell. Her first words to him, her only words for a long time. He’d said nothing back, just watched her with that same unwavering scrutiny that he watched her with now.
He took a step over the threshold, then stepped back.
“Goddamn it, Deek. Get your ass in here and sit down,” she waved at the folding steel chair beside her desk. Her office was just one in a long line of six-by-eight windowless plywood boxes each with an air vent. Hers was distinguished by a Xeroxed picture of the President the prior tenant had pinned up, complete with an evil Snidely Whiplash handlebar mustache and top hat, that she hadn’t bothered to take down.
He finally cleared the threshold, inspected the four walls as if it was a trap about to spring shut on him, then stepped to the chair. He spun it around with a kick and sat on it backwards, resting his crossed arms on the seat back. His presence in her doorway had filled the small room. Now the geometry was placing him much too close to her.
She wondered if waiting him out was worth the effort. He looked like hell, in both meanings. He’d always been handsome as hell, which was all the more powerful because he never leveraged it. The closer girls flocked, the more he retreated. If there’d been a Loners Club back in school, she, Deek, and her brother would have ruled it.
He also looked sadder than she’d ever seen him. Which—
“Oh no! You’re here about my Jimmy, aren’t
you?”
Deek nodded once but didn’t speak.
“He’s been dead two months. I saw the action report,” she snapped a close-bitten nail against her computer screen, “before my commander brought the damned Chaplin in. What the hell took you so long? I’m not that hard to find.”
She was a forward operations controller for North Africa Special Operations. Her posting at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, Horn of Africa—the only permanent US military base on the whole continent—made her damned easy to find. Deek must have been through here a half dozen times since that operation.
That operation. Her job was coordinating information flow for Special Operations teams assigned to AFRICOM—the US military’s unified combatant command for all of Africa. She was the one who had placed the team on that roof. She hadn’t issued the order, but she’d chosen the roof, mapped the access points, even arranged for their cars. Though she hadn’t known which specific people went until the KIA list showed up at the end of the action report.
Sergeant James Borman. Killed in action (classified).
She hadn’t even known until this moment that Deek had been there. In retrospect she supposed that it made perfect sense. Jimmy had been so excited the last time she saw him, assigned to work with Derek Davies after not seeing him once in the years since graduation—Deek had taken his diploma down to the Times Square recruiting station and signed up that day.
And now he must be hurting as badly as she was. Maybe that explained the two months.
He fished into the left breast pocket of his camo jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. No, a photograph. He held it out by a corner trapped between the tips of two fingers. The office was so small that neither of them had to reach far for her to take it.
It was a picture of her, one that had been folded in half. She unfolded the other half though she already knew what she’d see.
Derek.
Making a goofy smile for the camera. No, for Jimmy, who was taking the photo. It was the only time that she’d ever seen him smile happily, and she’d only seen this one in the photo—not in real life.
She closed her eyes to block out Deek’s bright smile of ten years ago and the dark and steady gaze of the top Delta Force sniper sitting across from her today. She hadn’t cried at the news. She’d refused to cry. It was enough of a surprise that he hadn’t died in high school—the South Bronx was a dangerous as hell place to grow up. Even more for a boy like Jimmy. He’d made it out, mostly due to Deek. And done well, until—
A hand took hers, shocking her into opening her eyes and staring at Deek.
“He didn’t do anything wrong. Not one damned thing,” Deek’s voice was no more than a soft growl.
Cindy searched for something neutral to say, some way through the pain that ripped at her heart—an organ she’d carefully isolated and buried long ago. Especially around Deek.
“He was my guard. Sniper caught him. Single round from an unexpected angle. Damned good shot.” He grunted the last as a grudging compliment.
Cindy clawed for a breath and managed to gasp out, “Did you get him?” Even though she knew it from the action report, she needed to know, to hear it. Now. From Deek’s own mouth.
Deek nodded. “Him. And his spotter.”
“Good!” It was all she could manage. She wished Deek would let go of her hand because she didn’t have enough willpower to remove it on her own. The warm comfort was both sustaining her and battering down the walls of defense that an abusive father had helped her build. Abuse that she’d accepted in order to protect her little brother from further humiliation. It had continued all through her childhood and teens until one day it had suddenly stopped and he’d never touched her again. Nor had he gone back to abusing Jimmy. Somehow, they were suddenly free.
“That photo,” he nodded down toward her other hand. “It’s all he had on him.”
“Never was much for writing letters or even e-mails,” she managed, then looked down at the photo to look away from Deek. “That was a good day.”
And it had been. The three of them had taken the D-train all the way down to Central Park and spent the day pretending they were high-rollers. Riding the carousel. Eating ice cream as they walked through the Central Park Zoo. Watching the rich people race their model sailboats on the “Conservatory Water”—that name had made them all laugh, as if it was too important to be called a pond.
Jimmy had gotten the camera so close in their faces that she and Deek had to crowd together and there was no room for the background around the edges. She could still remember how Deek’s hand had felt tight around her waist. He was still the only man ever whose touch didn’t give her at least a brief jolt of the creeps. Nobody was as safe to be around as Derek Davies.
“I remember every single minute,” Deek’s dark eyes studied her closely. Then he raised a hand and brushed her hair back in a soft caress.
For a moment she was lost in it, the breathtaking gentleness from such a hard man. The warm brush of his fingertips as he tucked her hair around the back of her ear. She could—
3
“Don’t!” Cindy’s snapped command had Deek jerking back his fingers as if they’d been burned.
“What? What did I do?”
“Nothing,” but her arms were clenched so tightly about her chest he was afraid she would shatter. “Just don’t touch me like that.”
“Okay.” But he’d always wanted to touch her like that. He’d only ever held her once, that single moment captured in Jimmy’s damned photograph. It was the day he’d taken them to Central Park to celebrate—the day after he’d convinced their father that there were worse things than dying if he ever touched either of his children again.
All the women he’d ever been with, he’d ended up wishing they were Cindy Borman instead. Not one of them had been able to purge her wholly from his thoughts.
She was the standard that no one could ever live up to.
When he’d learned the strength she’d had, what she’d done to protect her brother, he’d been utterly humbled. That was the moment he’d fallen in love. Dopey-ass word, but it was the only one that fit. She’d gone from being the only girl he was friends with, to his personal definition of righteous strength.
Ever since then, he’d done his best to match her standard, though no way was he ever going to pull that off.
Sitting here in her plywood cube in boots, camo pants, and tan t-shirt, he’d never seen anything so incredible. He’d watched her work for five, maybe ten minutes before she’d noticed him. He had barely been able to breathe during that entire time. Her blond hair, no longer in a Jennifer Aniston shoulder-length style, was breathtaking chopped off at jaw-level. It was more…her. Her blue eyes now watched him, wide with…fear?
“What is it?”
She just shook her head, leaving him no guide signs for what to say next. He reached out and took her hand again, peeling it free from where it clenched her other arm. She wasn’t fighting him, it was just as if she couldn’t let go. He clamped her fine fingers between his two hands. He could feel her pulse racing where his finger lay against the inside of her wrist.
“Breathe, Cind.”
“Can’t!” It was a hard gasp.
“C’mon,” he coaxed her. “You pass out on me and we’re going to have a situation on our hands. I’m a shooter not a medic. I was so crappy I barely made it through the training.” Combat first aid was a part of every Delta’s training. He didn’t need to have gone for the extra year of medic training to see that she was panicking. Even if he didn’t have a damned clue why.
She nodded in agreement but didn’t relax. Had she been holding the hurt of Jimmy’s loss inside her all this time? Closest thing he’d ever had to a little brother; it hurt like hell. She must be feeling it times ten.
At a loss, he just held onto her hand, imagining he was driving heat into it, though how her fingers could be so cold in the scorching summer of Djibouti he didn’t know. It was over a hundred outside and the air-con vent w
as a joke.
“I really miss the little shit.”
She barked out a laugh which was closer to a breath. “He really loved you.”
Deek nodded, at a loss for what else to do. The big brother worship had been clear and he’d ended up liking it despite himself. He’d protected both of them when they were kids, and had been cool playing Delta Big Brother to Little Brother Ranger for that month before Jimmy went down. They never talked about the past—except one mention that Cindy was with AFRICOM at Camp Lemonnier—but Jimmy was an easy guy to be around. Deek had liked keeping a protective eye on him—right until the moment he’d fucked up and let Jimmy die.
He knew that wasn’t true. The sniper had been well trained. Good enough that they’d sent in a Delta team to clear him out.
So it only felt like it was his fault that Jimmy had gone down, even though he knew—and the mission review team agreed—that it wasn’t.
He closed his eyes and raised Cindy’s hand to press his cheek against the back of it. Even if it was just for a moment, he had to feel her touching him. For one little instant, he’d believe that it was somehow possible that—
“What are you doing?” She yanked her hand free.
She’d never let him touch her, except that one fine day.
He stood up. Right. Nothing here for him.
He braced himself in the doorway, but didn’t turn to look at her when he spoke.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect him better.”
“If he died with you at his side, at least he was happy.”
“Uh-huh,” he couldn’t make the next step off the threshold. He knew if he walked away from Cindy now, he’d never be able to face her again.
The Complete Delta Force Shooters Page 8