The Ides of Matt 2017

by M. L. Buchman

  Garret swung free his AK-47 and between them they dropped the other unloaders. The engine roared to life. Then Garret emptied his magazine through the back window of the pickup killing the driver and another guard seated there. The truck lurched halfway out of the bay, then stalled to a stop.

  The other two truck engines racketed to life.

  “Let the lead driver go,” Baxter called out.

  There was a harsh blast from the big DShK mounted on the second truck. Stone exploded over her head as rounds from the heavy machine gun pummeled into the warehouse bay. It fired ten, half-inch rounds every second. Rock dust, machine parts, everything seemed to be flying into the air at once.

  Then the big gun cut off abruptly as Jeff declared, “Got him!” Thank god for snipers.

  Liza risked looking up from where she’d cowered during the fusillade.

  “Feh! That’s nothing, dude,” Mutt transmitted just moments before all hell broke loose.

  The Toyota pickup, along with its driver, the DShK, and its dead gunner lifted upward in a massive explosion. BB had planted IEDs out in the yard on just such a chance. Mutt must have triggered one that happened to be directly under the pickup.

  The truck shattered. Shrapnel blew into the warehouse bay. Everything that wasn’t nailed down blew in her direction.

  Once again, flat on the floor, she just prayed that the recently delivered explosives didn’t trigger as well.

  “Whoops!” Mutt muttered when the explosion had cleared. The entire bay was brightly lit by the truck burning just outside the door. Scorch marks ran halfway down the length of both walls from the tongue of flame that had shot at them. Afghanistan was hot, but the space was now as hot as an oven and for a moment it hurt to breathe.

  Garret had rolled under the partially disassembled SUV during the worst of it. Now he rolled back out and turned to look at her. He wore a boy-happy grin on a man’s face. There was not even a hint of the dour, glowering boy who had haunted the high school’s hallways.

  The third truck engine ground gears and raced its engine as it tried to make good its escape. Garret grabbed the AK-47 from the leader’s body and was scrambling toward the door.

  “No!” She shouted, remembering that he didn’t have a radio. “Baxter said to let it go.”

  Garret skidded to a halt and looked at her down the length of the bay.

  She might have expected confusion, understanding, or surprise on his face. She never expected to see horror.

  In that instant, not two feet behind her, she heard the unholy snarl of an enraged Malinois and the scream of a man the moment before his throat was ripped out. She spun just in time to see the steel pipe that Hukam had raised high to smash down on her head fall from nerveless fingers as he tumbled backward under Sergey’s onslaught and died.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Check it out,” Baxter climbed up onto the safehouse roof and came over with his laptop.

  He held it so that Garret and Liza could see it from where they were sitting side-by-side, leaning back against the roof’s balustrade and watching the sunset.

  “It worked.”

  Baxter had dropped down from the roof and ducked out into the open to attach a radio bug under the lead pickup before the firefight had begun—that’s why he’d said to let it go. But knowing the Taliban would check for any stray signals, Baxter had set it to turn on after six hours, then deliver only a one-second pulse every ten minutes. Essentially undetectable unless someone was specifically listening for it. The US military had a drone up at forty-thousand feet doing just that.

  “Hasn’t moved in the last nine hours. Based on the imaging from the drone, I think we have our explosives supplier located.”

  Garret held up his hand and they traded high-fives. Baxter headed back down the ladder whistling.

  Now it was just the three of them, sitting together on the roof of the safehouse—him, Liza, and Sergey with his head happily in her lap. They were just above the line of the protective barriers. High enough to see the great bowl of the Afghan sky, but not high enough to be exposed to any distant snipers on the ground.

  Hukam’s widow had been very forthcoming on the other caches and local bombmakers she knew around town. She’d hated her husband’s fanaticism and had just wanted to live quietly and have a family. With her guidance, Afghan regular forces were going in and clearing out Hukam’s former associates.

  He wanted to put his arm around Liza. Hold her, pull her in tight. He’d like to—

  “Is there a reason you haven’t kissed me?” Liza asked the question completely matter-of-factly. She was so his kind of woman. Ten years of abandoned, mostly, fantasies and she kept exceeding them at every turn.

  “Well, I have to admit, there are a couple.”

  “What? Do you want your own Kong dog toy and crunchy biscuit?”

  “Not so much.” He risked putting his arm around her shoulders, because if her question wasn’t an invitation to enjoy himself at least that much, he didn’t know what was.

  Sergey’s eyes followed him closely, but he didn’t raise his head from her thigh.

  Liza leaned into his side and he upgraded to tightening his arm into a one-armed side embrace. Still no squirm.

  “First, that world-class kiss you laid on me was enough to give a man performance anxiety. Could I ever return that one appropriately?”

  “That’s crap, Garret. You were never a man to not trust himself around women. Remember I saw you in the high school halls all those years.”

  “Maybe I changed.”

  “Ehhhh!” Liza made a harsh buzzer sound of “total fail.”

  “Okay, caught me. Two, I know that kiss was in the heat of the moment right before a battle and—”

  “Had a lot of experience with pre-battle kisses, have you?”

  He couldn’t help laughing. “Can’t say I have.”

  “Should I check that with Mutt, or Jeff?”

  Garret offered a fake shudder in response. “Both have beards. Ick!”

  “So do you.”

  “But it looks good on me.”

  “It does,” she agreed then continued before he could do more than be surprised. “So what’s the real reason?”

  “Got two actually. First, this mission is over for us. Out team is moving out tomorrow. Going after that explosives supplier.”

  “Maybe you should take me there.”

  “It’s way into the worst country you can imagine. Through the heart of Kandahar Province into Lashkar Gah. We did three months there and it makes this place look like a Caribbean resort.”

  “Maybe you should take me there too.”

  Garret opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He began to wonder if he’d ever keep up with this woman.

  “Bet you could use a good dog team in Kandahar.”

  “Bet we could,” he said it slowly and carefully to give himself time to think fast. “You were a huge asset here. We’d have still been checking the first couple warehouse rows when that truck bomb was rebuilt and had crossed the border if it wasn’t been for you two.” He scratched Sergey’s head. His hand came back unmangled, which he’d take as a good sign. In all his years he’d never seen anything like Sergey taking down a man three times his size.

  “Bet we could think of something to do together at a Caribbean resort too.”

  The air whooshed out of him. There was no answer possible to that one. The Minnow in a bikini on a tropical beach—no Baltimore boy could be that lucky, but he could sure hope.

  “What’s the real reason you haven’t kissed me?”

  Garret smiled at her. He just couldn’t help himself. As easily as he could imagine Minnow in a beach bikini, he could imagine Liza Minot in a beach wedding dress. The craziest and best part was that he could imagine himself standing right there beside her, feet planted in the sand, with a dog for a ringbearer.

  “The real reason…” he trailed it out.

  “Uh-huh,” she looked up at him with those perfect blue ey
es that he never wanted to look away from.

  “I don’t think Sergey would like it much.”

  Liza leaned down and tickled the dog’s ears. “What do you think? After all, he’s not quite the arrogant master sergeant we thought he was. Maybe we need to come up with a command past ‘Friend’.”

  Sergey inspected him balefully for a long moment before heaving one of his dog sighs as if giving in to the inevitable. He shifted his position so that his back lay along her thigh, but he was now looking out at the desert. Apparently it was okay with him, but he’d rather not watch.

  “Well,” Liza looked up at him and Garret could feel his heart pick up the pace. “I guess Sergey doesn’t really mind. And I most certainly don’t.”

  As he leaned in to kiss her, Garret still kept one eye on the dog.

  If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy:

  First Day, Every Day

  The heart-warming sequel to The Ghost of Willow’s Past.

  Helicopter pilot Amy Patterson-James attacked the future love of her life the day she met him, but those had been special circumstances. She’d punched him out over the remains of a willow tree in the Portland, Oregon rose garden.

  Two years later, on their first day in combat together, she’s shot down deep in enemy territory. Wounded and on the run. She banks it all on her love Chief Warrant Dusty James and another old willow tree just as she did that First Day, Every Day.

  Introduction

  Ghost of Willow’s Past was my first-ever short story, my first-ever short story sale, and one of the bestselling ones I’ve ever had. It was first published in Fiction River: Christmas Ghosts and was critically acclaimed by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the highlights of the collection. It is the story that launched my short-story career.

  That story had been a challenge because I like connecting my characters to each other—in case you hadn’t noticed. And at the time I wrote Ghost, I was only on my third Night Stalkers novel and had very few characters to spare. So I grabbed Dusty James while he was on vacation in the middle of the novel, gave him a love story, then—if you were to follow the timeline between short story and novel—I wounded him grievously in battle the moment he returned from that vacation.

  I always felt bad about that. In later novels, we see him in the background, so we know he has recovered. We even see him with Amy a time or two.

  However, following the timeline and what we know of her career from Ghost, she has been mostly separated from Dusty and in training since that time.

  First Day, Every Day is about her first mission as a fully qualified Night Stalker—a two-plus year process. It is her life coming full circle to when she almost lost Dusty so soon after finding him. This time it is Dusty who must face that horror. And only that way does he discover the true depth of his love for his wife.

  This story first appeared, like its prequel, in Fiction River: Editor’s Choice.

  Chapter One

  Chief Warrant Officer Amelia Patterson-James felt the jarring impact before she spotted its origin. Standard 9mm rifle rounds would ping off her helicopter’s windshield and armor with little effect. The only thing heavy enough to make the Menace jerk like this were anti-aircraft rounds, perhaps 23mm. Anything less wouldn’t have jarred the helo; anything heavier and they wouldn’t still be flying.

  The Menace was an MH-6M Little Bird helicopter loaded for bear. Twin mini-guns and two seven-rocket tubes mounted outside on stub wings—the coolest office a girl could have. Inside there was room enough for only the pilot and co-pilot, and barely that. The cabin was so tight that the Little Birds were flown without doors, only the large front windshield offering any forward protection and not much of that.

  Pilot? Amy felt the controls go loose in her hand. She’d been mirroring Bernie on her set of controls, and learning quite how good he was. It was her first sortie as co-pilot for the 5th Battalion D Company of the U.S. Army’s 160th SOAR, day one on the job after two years of training and five prior years of flying for lesser outfits.

  Bernie, the pilot, wasn’t reacting, which was a bad sign—no time to think about that.

  Amy slammed the cyclic joystick that rose between her knees hard to the left and let Menace tumble into a sideways roll to get clear of the attack. It would make her harder to hit again; she just hoped that the helicopter was undamaged enough to recover from this roll or she was a dead woman. Her body alternately floated off the seat and slammed back onto it as the helo exchanged right side up for upside down and continued over.

  Bernie flopped against her.

  A very bad sign.

  Pinning the cyclic between her thighs for a moment, she reached up and flicked the setting on his seatbelt harness that attached to the back of his vest. Now it was set to retract-only, like a car seatbelt, locking up during an emergency stop.

  Grabbing the cyclic again in her right hand, she gave it a twist during the next tumble. Bernie flopped back against his seat, the harness retracted, and pinned him in place.

  A quick glance revealed a hole punched through the left center of his visor. By the size of the hole, her estimate of the 23mm round was right on the money. The ultimate bad news for her pilot.

  On your own, girl.

  She didn’t even have time to add a heartfelt, Shit! for Bernie’s epitaph.

  Amy returned her attention to the sharp granite mountains leading to the narrow mountain pass between Soran, Iraq and Piranshahr, Iran.

  U.S. military forces weren’t even supposed to be here. This was a classic mission for the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment: Get in, hit the target, get the hell out.

  Don’t be seen.

  Something the Night Stalkers of the 160th specialized in…usually.

  The don’t be seen part was easy. It was straight up midnight, two hours before moonrise. The anti-aircraft had caught them as much by chance as anything, firing wildly aloft after the two other helos ahead of her in the flight had roared by. They’d stirred up the hornet’s nest and she and Bernie had walked right into it.

  The three-bird flight had been flying down the gut of a river canyon. Now Amy was falling out of the sky into a river canyon and the rock walls were impossibly close through her night-vision goggles, glowing in a dozen shades of dull green in her infrared view.

  She stomped on the left rudder and dragged the cyclic back to the right to break the roll.

  The roll lashed back the other way and—once her eyes uncrossed from the g-force that drove her against her harness—she was able to focus on the fast-approaching rock of the steep canyon wall.

  Menace groaned in protest, but responded.

  Her baby wasn’t supposed to groan.

  Up on the collective with her left hand, craving a right turn through the sky with the cyclic in her right, she managed to skim along the wall with her skids barely a half-rotor diameter above the ground. Ripping along at a hundred-and-thirty knots—with rotor blades only twenty-seven feet in diameter—half a rotor was far too close for comfort.

  That’s when she spotted the attacker.

  Her attacker.

  The bastard nasty enough to think shooting her was a good idea.

  Guess again, Jerkwad. You messed with the wrong girl.

  Racing down the center of the narrow two-lane Iraq Route 3 that followed close beside the river was a white Toyota HiLux, the favorite vehicle of the world’s rebels and terrorists. It was reliable as a rock and plenty powerful to carry the ton of weight of the twin-barrel, Russian ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft gun—that was even now trying to get a bead on her as the driver bounced and careened over the rough-paved road. There were two other gunmen in the back of the vehicle firing rifles in her direction. Bright sparks flashed before her as their bullets bounced off her windshield.

  Without thought, courtesy of long training, Amy unleashed a pair of 70mm Hydra rockets up their tailpipe.

  The first one creased the side of their truck and punched a hole in the hillside above the next curve in the road.


  The second one delivered eight-point-seven pounds of high explosive as a direct hit on the tailgate. The rocket punched through the thin metal and delivered its full charge against the substantial anti-aircraft gun.

  A fireball bloomed in a blinding green-white flash on her night vision gear, completely overloading the electronics and her optic nerves and obliterating all visibility.

  Pull back on the cyclic.

  Still dazzled by the explosion, she climbed to clear the aftermath and tried to recall if the thin power lines were on the north side of the road, or south.

  North, she hoped, but wasn’t sure. After the tumble she wasn’t even sure whether she was flying east or west.

  Toss the coin.

  She pulled up and to the right. South.

  Everything came apart at once.

  Amy’s vision came back in time to see and avoid the telephone pole and line. It was also in time to witness one of her shot-up rotor blades break off at the midpoint. Instead of breaking away free, and giving the other five-and-a-half blades even a slim chance of survival, the titanium leading edge hung on long enough to slam the broken piece into her rear rotor.

  With the rear rotor gone and her main rotor compromised, the helicopter whirled into an uncontrollable spin. On the third loop around, catching the power line with one of her skids was the least of her worries as her helmet slammed against a support strut. Knocked silly, Amy’s head cleared while the helicopter was still swinging above the ground—upside down. She was dangling a dozen feet above the roadway, bobbing lightly up and down like some inverted carnival ride. The rotor blades, at least what remained of them, still spun below and were now blocking her escape. There’d be no jumping to get clear.

  Chapter Two