The Ides of Matt 2017
a short story collection
M. L. Buchman
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Contents
Welcome to 2017
Love’s Second Chance
Heart's Refuge
Circle 'Round
Welcome at Henderson's Ranch
Flying Over the Waves
Sound of Her Warrior Heart
Since the First Day
Love in a Copper Light
Her Heart and the "Friend" Command
First Day, Every Day
Love in the Drop Zone
Delta Mission: Operation Rudolph
The Christmas Lights Objective
Thanks for reading along!
Don’t miss these prior great collections!
About the Author
Also by M. L. Buchman
Welcome to 2017
2017 has been a good year for Delta Force and The Night Stalkers in my “Ides of Matt” stories. As a matter of fact, with only one exception out of this baker’s dozen, they’re all Delta Force and Night Stalkers. (The sole exception is Welcome at Henderson’s Ranch. As the ranch is now run by my former Night Stalkers Emily and Mark, I suppose that it too belongs in this world.)
None of this wasn’t planned.
With only rare exceptions, it is typically only the month before that I start thinking about what the next month’s “Ides of Matt” story will be. I look for inspiration in the news, in novels I’m working on, serendipity, or even snippets of a conversation. Sometimes it stems from older novels I happened to pick up when verifying a fact (or simply enjoying some time with favorite characters).
That last of these inspirations is one of the fun yet challenging parts of being a writer who loves working in series. Both of the Delta and Night Stalker worlds have become large and complex. The Night Stalkers alone is now six or seven separate series. And I’m often having to dig back through older books to make sure I get my facts and characters right. Of course, I love these characters. I miss these characters. So I’ll often go to check a fact and end up rereading half a book before I catch myself. A dangerous time trap.
I wasn’t even conscious of this “theme” for 2017 until I began assembling this volume. Out of curiosity, I went back and peeked at 2016. I had: hotshots and lookout towers from my Firehawks world, my first Delta Force short stories, Henderson’s Ranch, Night Stalkers, and even one for my small town Oregon Coast contemporary romances in Eagle Cove.
Then with some trepidation, I looked at this year’s tales again. I feared they might have a sameness, a commonality that might somehow diminish this volume.
Not even close.
I have Delta snipers with hard pasts and surreal missions. I have stories of war dogs and refugees, of combat search-and-rescue teams and drug lords. Settings range from a Montana ranch to Mexican drug wars to riding through ocean storms off Scotland and Panama. One takes us to a swampy river bed in the Ukraine and another into outer space.
Characters ranged from the hardened warrior to the eternal optimist to… Well, you get the idea.
My wife just shakes her head. Yes, the myriad shades of these stories is exactly what it’s like inside my head.
So, in this remarkably divisive year of 2017—both at home (the US for me) and abroad—I looked for what was the common theme of the stories I’ve chosen to tell.
Romance, of course. I love romances. And with only one real exception, these are all pure romances. In Circle ’Round I wanted to check in on how Lola Maloney was doing after she took over command of the 5D from Emily and Mark.
But there are other themes that run deep in these tales and I am encouraged by them. They are themes that give me hope for the future when I’m feeling down and they encourage me to work harder to capture them on the page.
Whether my heroes and heroines are infiltrating deep into foreign countries or chasing after one of Santa’s lost reindeer, there are two things they never lose:
Hope and Optimism.
To me as an author, these are the essential ingredients not only of my stories, but of my life. I always seek the bright side. I firmly believe that we will eventually triumph as people over all of the socio-religious-economic-political-gender turmoil that we face.
Some call me naive, but I don’t think so. Perhaps it is because I have a daughter and I wish a better world for her to live in. But I think the reason is much more rooted in all of the wonderful people I’ve met and all of the ones I have yet to meet. They are the ones who make me feel the way I do.
Meanwhile, my year’s stories are sent out in the sincere desire that they will help spread those three cornerstones of my writing: hope, optimism, and (of course) love.
For you, my readers, with all my heart.
M. L. Buchman
-Oregon Coast, 2018
Love's Second Chance
Delta Force operator Hector Garcia’s mission as scout for the take-down of a Mexican cartel leads him straight into a gun battle.
Hired gun Alejandra Martinez prowls at the heart of it. The woman who told him to leave town five years ago looks and fights even better than back then.
Only together can they hope to find Love’s Second Chance.
Introduction
This story is not about Mexican cartels and Delta Force snipers.
They are setting elements ripped from the news. The Mexican-US border wall was in the headlines as this was written shortly before President Trump’s inauguration. And sex-trafficking is one of the most horrific crimes against women that is still slow to be recognized.
But again, that was setting, and not what the story was about.
For me this was a story about regrets.
Twenty years ago I found my soulmate. Seriously. I could not have asked for the gift of a more amazing woman to walk into my life and, for reasons that continue to mystify me, she’s chosen to stay. There is not a moment of that decision to be together that I have regretted. Even though I didn’t believe in the word soulmate until I met her.
However, there were some incredible women before that as well. Over the years with my wife, I’ve come to understand how a few of those relationships could have ended very differently, or not ended at all, but for a few different words being said. Would those words have made a difference—sometimes on their parts, sometimes on mine? I don’t know, but I’m left to wonder.
I didn’t seek to redeem these characters’ past love for myself. But the writer in me wanted to somehow offer that gift of a second chance at love to the memories of those fine women who agreed to walk the same path with me for a short while.
Chapter One
You really stepped in some shit this time, Alejandra Martinez.” She didn’t even know where to direct her fire. Or if she should fire at all.
Lying prone on the roof of the highest building in the area, a whole two stories, gave her the best vantage of the cesspool that had been her hometown for over twenty-five years. US-Mexican border towns sucked, especially when they were on the Mexican side. But she’d never found a way to leave it.
If she started shooting over the low parapet of aged adobe, they’d know she was up here and that could start to suck really fast. Of course another couple of hours up here in the midday sun baking her butt on an adobe grill and maybe she would be ready to shoot all of the assholes who had conspired to trap her up here. They’d gotten blood on her new jeans and sneakers, which was really pissing her off. At least it
wasn’t hers.
“Next time you’re stuck in a street war and trying to survive, remember to bring milk and cookies. Or at least some water.” Good reminder, if she ever got out of this one. A six of cold beer sounded good too.
Life had been so much simpler twenty-four hours ago. She’d had a lover, a lousy-as-shit job—making it only a little better than her lover—and something that sort of resembled a place to be.
Now she had a cartel war surrounding the building she lay on top of, and her job was dead—her former employer had owned most of the blood she was wearing. Too bad her job had been to protect his stupid ass. He’d not only been stupid enough to piss off the Alvarado cartel that controlled all the contraband traffic through this town, he’d neglected to tell her he was also setting up the street gangs for a hard fall. They’d found out. Everyone wanted him dead and it was hard to blame them.
The steady crack of automatic gunfire and the hard thwaps of bullets impacting on stone and metal echoed up and down the streets below. These guys were using ammo like it was free. As far as she could tell they were either fighting over who got to claim taking the idiot down, or they were having a gunfight just for the hell of it.
“This town is really going down the toilet.”
“Wasn’t all that impressive to begin with,” a deep voice resonated from close behind her.
As she swung around, a big hand grabbed the barrel of her rifle, stopping it halfway to its new target.
There’d been no sound.
No warning. Not a creak or shift of the rotten roof timbers.
A big muchacho knelt close behind her on the roof. He was loaded for action. He held a combat rifle in one hand and her rifle barrel in the other as calmly as if it was the other end of an umbrella or something. Despite his light jacket she could see a pair of Glock 19s in twin shoulder holsters and would wager he had more ammo and another hidden carry or two on him.
A glance past him—the roof access hatch was still closed and latched.
“How the hell did you—” But then she recognized him and knew. “Hector Garcia? Haven’t seen your pretty face since Marina was still a virgin.” Which was close enough to never. Her little sister had probably seduced her first boy from side-by-side bassinets at the hospital and hadn’t slowed down since. At times it was hard to tell if she was a whore or just a slut.
Actually, Hector’s wasn’t a pretty face, not even the part that wasn’t covered by his wrap-around shades and a scruff of three-day beard that looked good on him. He’d broken his nose twice that she knew of, and now maybe a third time by the look of it. She still remembered the knife fight that had earned him the wavering scar from jawline to temple. His dark hair was long, the way he’d worn it ever since he’d lost an ear during a street brawl. He might be a mess, but Hector also looked really good. He used to be one of those slender and dangerous types. Now he was a powerfully wide and dangerous type.
And at the moment…she must look like shit. Just perfect.
She’d been riding guarda on a candidate for congress presently bleeding out in the middle of the plaza. What idiota campaigned in favor of building a wall on the Mexican side of the border to stop drugs and illegal emigration? That was American-style craziness. But he’d paid her more than she could make anywhere else even marginally legal—which meant he was also on the take in a dozen different ways and worried about it. She could have defended him against one or two shooters. But the two gangs duking it out on the streets below had brought them to his speech by the truckload. She’d dropped four before her sense of self-preservation kicked in.
Now Alejandra was really pissed about the blood on her. She’d also crawled through a shattered luncheon buffet on her way up to the roof. Total mess.
Not usual at all for her to think about how she looked in the middle of a gunfight, but she and Hector had a past—even if it was a long-ago past—and her last shred of vanity had been drowned in reeking mole sauce and blood.
He let go of the barrel and she sat up to get a better look at him.
“Shit, woman!” He placed a big hand on top of her head and shoved her back down onto the roof.
Moments later a single bullet cracked by overhead. She’d drawn exactly the kind of attention she hadn’t wanted.
Hector rose quickly onto one knee, then swung his rifle up so fast she could barely follow it. No time to aim. No time for anything. He just fired: two shots, a hesitation with a slight shift upward, then a third. He dropped back down. “That should take care of that.”
She’d been a shooter of one form or another ever since she was little: possum as a kid, armadillos to put meat on the table after Dad had bugged out, and bad guys as a policewoman—until the drug lords made that too dangerous a beat. But she’d never seen anything even close to what Hector had just done. He’d barely even looked for the target. Maybe the sound of the bullet had been enough. Maybe for him. And she knew if she tracked down the corpse—for she had no doubt that’s all it was now—it would have two holes close together in the chest and one more in the head.
There was certainly no return shot whistling aloft from below.
“Sorry,” she should have stayed down.
“De nada! So,” Hector lay on the roof beside her. “You busy much?”
“You saw the body in the plaza?”
“Yeah.”
“That was my meal ticket. No major loss—wasn’t much of a lover either.”
Hector’s face darkened at her second statement.
She swung the butt of her rifle into his gut, aiming between a pouch of ammo and a Glock 19. She caught him hard enough to earn her an angry grunt.
“You been gone, hombre. You don’t get to judge shit.”
He shrugged one shoulder in agreement, but didn’t look much happier about it.
Well, neither was she. Especially not with Hector Garcia lying just inches away to remind her of how good her best lover ever had been.
The gunfire down on the plaza was dying down. Probably running out of ammo at the rate they were using it.
“Why? You got any bright ideas on how to keep me busy?”
“More than few,” his easy leer said plenty. But she still knew him well enough to know that sex wasn’t the only thing he had on his mind.
Chapter Two
Hector had remembered Alejandra Rosa Martinez as a total knock-out, but that was nothing compared to what he’d found up on the roof.
He’d come back to his shithole of a hometown for a mission, not looking for her. Not really. In five years his life had totally changed—no reason to assume that hers had stayed the same. Or that she’d be real interested in seeing him. But a few questions about her had led him to the plaza, just as all hell had broken loose.
He hadn’t expected to walk into a gunfight, though four years in the US Rangers and another year as a Delta Force operator had let him see the patterns quickly. There was an obvious hole in the battle running from door to door.
The policia were wisely hanging back a couple blocks and waiting it out—though they needed a real lesson about how bullets skipped along concrete walls and he hoped they didn’t catch one. It was the reason that war zone photos always showed the US military walking up the center of a street rather than hugging the buildings.
But whatever sides were fighting around the plaza and up on the low roofs, the lack of action from the best vantage point spoke volumes. Somebody held the high ground, which meant they were defending it, but there was no sign they were using it. Someone smart—maybe like Alejandra. He got up to the second story inside the building, leaving only a few broken bones behind him. Not a one of them understood that it would hurt less if they’d just let go of their gun when he was ripping it out of their hands.
At a rear, second-story window, he’d managed to reach up high enough to loop his rifle’s sling over a protruding outside timber and used his rifle as a ladder to haul himself onto the roof. There he’d been confronted by one of the finest asses he’d eve
r seen.
How Alejandra had gotten even better looking in the years he’d been gone, he’d never know. It shouldn’t be possible, but it was true.
“You done here?” he nodded toward the plaza.
“Shit, you think?” her sarcastic tongue hadn’t changed one bit.
“Good. Got a job I could use some help on.”
“You show up out of the blue after five years and you suddenly need help from me? Hector, you’re an asshole. You know that, right?”
“Sure.”
She snarled at him.
“Never argue with a lady when she’s right,” he threw one of her favorite sayings back in her face.
Her growl went deep and feline, but when he belly-crawled to the roof access, she followed.
He unsnapped the latch without making a sound. She had her rifle ready to aim down when he opened the hatch. With a shake of his head, he warned her off.
He flipped the release and threw the hatch wide.
They both rolled away from it. Moments later, a half dozen wild shots cut upward through the hatch. One shooter. Off center to the right.
He aimed through the roof itself and laid down a short line of fire. Crawling across it earlier, it was clear that it wasn’t much of a roof. The rounds punched through easily.
Alejandra did the same from the other side and her angle looked good.
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