So she only kicked his calf hard enough to make him flinch. He held up a hand to show that he’d finally gotten the message.
“The way you shoot. The way you look. Both sexy as hell.” He made a point of scanning down her body.
They were both dressed in para-military-civilian-on-holiday mode: well-worn boots, cargo pants with a few too many pockets, black t-shirts, and jeans jackets. She ignored his full-body scan, because she was doing the same. Out of his jacket and frustrated past speech, he looked beyond amazing.
“But it’s the way you think that truly knocks me back. I’ve read your entire record, probably know it better than you do I’ve read it so many times. You don’t just think outside the box—you don’t even see it. I should have known you’d hunt me from behind,” he laughed with delight.
It should be irritating, but she loved the sound of his laugh.
Then he sobered abruptly. “Look. I never meant to say any of this. If you want out, we’ll scrub this mission and I’ll find another way in.”
A sleek, late-model Dodge Viper sports car. Two Deltas posing as an adventure-seeking paramilitary couple who both looked Latino and were fluent enough in Mexican-accented Spanish to sound local. Pretending to be out of work and looking for fun in the heart of Mexico’s drug country.
They were on a kingpin hunt.
Most of the cartels were personality cults run by one or two charismatic individuals. Taking out El Chapo had broken the chokehold of the Sinaloa Cartel. But others had risen in their place to take advantage of the sudden weakness. Time to infiltrate and take down some more kingpins.
It was a fantastic chance for an important and exciting assignment.
And with JD Ramírez, the best soldier she’d never served with. But what if he was more than that?
Cindy liked the way that sounded.
She liked it a lot.
“No. I’ll stay.” But she couldn’t make it too easy on him, or his ego might get out of hand. “I think this mission sounds interesting. I like a challenge.”
Chapter Eight
JD still couldn’t get a read on what Cindy was thinking. She was not a woman who wore her thoughts on her sleeve. Or on those beautiful lips.
Her smile had either said that’s all she thought the op was, an interesting challenge. Or was it some sort of double entendre about himself. He just couldn’t tell. He could hope, but he couldn’t tell.
Once they were seated side-by-side in the Viper—hot lady in hot car inside a combat aircraft, damn but he was doing something right—he reached into the miniscule glove compartment. The car’s cockpit was so tight, he was practically in her lap to do so. He still didn’t know if that was welcome or not, so he pulled back as fast as he could.
“Here’s your ID.” He handed her a battered set of Mexican papers.
She riffled them open, “Gloria Chavez.”
“I thought it would be easy for you to remember to respond to because you’re so freaking glorious.” And he really needed to remember when to shut up.
Cindy— No! Gloria, for the duration of this mission, held the papers to her chest as if they were somehow special.
Before he could ask what she was thinking—not a chance she would tell him but he wanted to ask anyway—the loadmaster tapped on the hood of the car. Then he raised a hand as if pulling up the parking brake.
JD made sure it was raised, then gave a thumbs up.
The loadmaster began knocking loose the tie-down chains on each tire.
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Juan David Ramírez on my papers.”
“What’s your real name?”
The loadmaster lowered the C-17 Globemaster’s rear ramp. It opened to reveal the dark of night and a remote stretch of a gravel road deep in the Sonoran Province south of Nogales.
He tried to find some way to not answer the question, but couldn’t find one.
He stomped down on the brake and started the car’s engine. It thrummed to life. He could feel the vibration, but the redoubled roar from the jet and the open cargo bay door completely drowned the sound out.
“Jimmy Dean.”
“Like the sausage?”
He sighed, “Exactly like the sausage. My parents wanted an American sounding name and didn’t know much English when I was conceived.”
Her laugh sparkled to life. She reached out a hand and rested it on his arm as if to steady herself. It was the first time they’d ever touched, other than that one stolen brush of his finger down her cheek—the softness of her skin had almost undone him there and then. She’d become a thousand times more real in that moment.
Now, with her fingers wrapped lightly around his bare forearm, energy jolted through him like lightning.
“You asked how I was so patient?” The laugh still bubbled in her voice.
“Yes?” JD responded cautiously. Now he wasn’t so sure he wanted to hear her answer.
The loadmaster flashed ten fingers twice. Twenty seconds.
JD slipped the car into third gear, but kept his foot on the clutch. He hit the headlights, and the outside world leaped to visibility. Beyond the open hatch and a dozen meters below, a two-lane unpaved road raced away from them. Off to the side, lay nothing but dirt and scrub brush.
“You kept me at a distance by chapping my ass.”
Cin—Gloria didn’t make it a question, so he didn’t do more than nod.
The loadmaster held up ten fingers. Ten seconds to go. They flew five meters above the road.
“I kept you at a distance with my patience. I made myself learn it so that I wouldn’t just fall into your arms.”
He risked glancing over at her. “Since when?”
Her smile was glowing. The same smile she’d worn after climbing down out of that hawthorn tree with her face all bloodied. The same smile she’d first shown him after acing the marksmanship test all the way back in Delta Selection.
“Since the first time I met you, Master Sergeant JD Ramírez. I pushed like I never had before—to get you to notice me.”
“It worked. Mary Mother of God but it worked.”
The loadmaster thumped on the hood and flashed three fingers at him.
Cindy locked her fingers around his arm.
The surge of joy passed into her as he dumped the brake and the car began to roll down the ramp.
The Dodge Viper gathered speed just as the steel ramp struck sparks and whirled a cloud of dust from the graveled surface.
Cindy braced for the jolt of the combat drop.
Her heart was racing, but not with the adrenaline of the tires hitting the roadway at just over a hundred miles an hour. Nor was it the deep throaty roar of the C-17 battling back aloft the instant they were unloaded to continue its journey south. The American military plane had never actually touched wheels in Mexico.
Glorious? He saw her as glorious.
He was right. It had worked. She was attracted, no, drawn to him like no one else in her life. That he felt the same was indeed a fantastic gift.
JD dropped the car into gear and, without slacking off the speed one bit, they raced off into the night. She could feel his muscles as he found the right gear for swooping over the rough road. She kept her hand on his arm because that’s where it belonged.
Juan David and Gloria.
Maybe they’d just choose their names permanently, as they’d chosen their careers in Delta.
Maybe, after months of playing at being a couple, she’d choose Gloria Ramírez.
As they raced through the night toward a new adventure, she knew there was no doubt about it.
When she leaned over to kiss him on the cheek, he fishtailed hard on the gravel for a moment. Then he grinned over at her and punched it up another gear.
Together they flew down the road.
If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy:
Delta Mission: Operation Rudolph
In three days, Betsy retires from a decade as a Delta Force tracker and shooter. But a t
raining mission gone wrong—or perhaps gone “strange” is a better word—sets her one last challenge.
St. Nick’s lead reindeer, whose name is actually Jeremy, has gone missing. The dangerously handsome chief herder elf, Horatio, needs the best tracker in any world.
Is Betsy hallucinating?
Can Christmas be saved?
Is there enough time left for: Delta Mission: Operation Rudolph?
Introduction
I always try to write my stories with the highest degree of realism I can bring to the page…without ruining the story. For example, I don’t try to pretty up war, but I don’t show the truly dark side of it either.
But every now and then, I just can’t help myself and I get a fit of the sillies
This fit of silliness is actually an homage to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Father Christmas Letters. They were written from Father Christmas to his nieces and nephews during WWII about his problems with an absentminded polar bear, troublesome goblins, and a wide variety of other North Pole adventures. For a number of years I wrote similar letters to my own kid each Christmas following their continued adventures from where Tolkien had left off.
I was also writing this immediately after finishing Big Sky, Loyal Heart set on Henderson’s Ranch. Discovering that reindeer and caribou were the same animal—called by separate names on separate continents—gave me a fun and whimsical idea. Like Since the First Day, this was a chance to overlap two stories and offer strangely different points of view.
And the final twist is simply because I so love having women mess with Mark Henderson’s head. It makes me laugh every single time.
Chapter One
Live-fire training.
She didn’t need any blasted live-fire training. Especially not during a freak snowstorm that was inundating Range 37 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Betsy’s personal thermostat was currently set to Congo jungle, not three-days-before-Christmas blizzard.
Okay, the pretty white flakes fluttering down on the rifle range didn’t count as a blizzard—though she’d grown up in Arkansas and it was more than she was used to—but it was cold enough that they were sticking to everything, including her. And her breath showed in puffs. She focused on breathing only through her nose to cut down on the clouds that might give away her position to the instructors.
The fact that she was out of Delta Force and the Army in three more days didn’t matter to them. She’d done her decade in the field and Christmas Day would mark her release from service. But when command said you did a training, you did one. She was theirs to order about until the moment she walked out the gate.
Betsy kept low behind a stone wall and pondered the enemy’s next move. She’d barely had a glimpse of the artificial town that was the core of the training range’s purpose. The Fort Bragg training squadron was always rearranging it in unexpected ways. She’d been in the field for a full year on her latest deployment, so the hundreds of hours she’d spent here over the years were now irrelevant.
The hundred-plus acres of Range 37 was a 360-degree, live-fire shoothouse. Some parts were modern urban, others Kandahar Province-low-and-crammed-together.
What kind of idiot training scenario sent a solo soldier on a snatch-and-grab mission? Minimum for that type of operation was a four-man team: two to grab, two to guard. Instead, they’d sent her in on her own without any explanation.
The only way out is through. Old axiom.
Of course solo was the story of her life. Dad gone from the beginning. While her high school classmates had been discovering friends and sex, she’d been caring for her mother through a fatal bout of cancer. Delta Force, the true loners of the US military, had been as natural to her as breathing. One of the only women there? Sure. Whatever.
But a one-woman snatch-and-grab operation? She was probably the best they had for that—no matter how stupid an idea it was. Perhaps they were using her to test some crazy scenario just to see how it worked.
Fine! Time to show them just what she could do.
She lay down in the snow and fast-rolled across the gap between the stone wall she’d been crouched behind and the brick building next over. As she rolled, she kept her rifle scope to her eye. Her best moving shot for rooftops was actually on her back, not her stomach—an unlikely trick she’d learned by accident in Mosul. Head tipped back, HK416 at the ready, she spotted two hostiles atop the wall on the far side of a broad courtyard. She hit both from her back, rolled onto her stomach, double-tapped an armed bad guy target crouching by a plywood maple tree, then two more into the mannequins on the roof from her back just to make sure the targets stayed dead.
The six hard clangs of bullets striking metal targets registered only after she was safe behind the red brick.
She held her fire as two children mannequins peeked at her from a nearby window. A dummy woman rushed across the street, her form gliding on a hidden track. A rough-painted man close behind her, using the woman figure as a shield, had an AK-47. Two harsh rings of metal echoed between the buildings as Betsy shot him twice in the face—all she could see of him—and one more as she hit his knee through the fluttering back of the woman’s dress.
A particularly large snowflake plastered itself across the lens of her shooting goggles. It left a wet smear when she brushed it aside.
Betsy had tracked her quarry off the edge of the map somewhere, slipping out of simulated Afghanistan into a quaint French village setting that she didn’t recall ever seeing before.
The next building over, probably just painted plywood, was an exceptional imitation of rose-and-gray stonework, medieval arches, and cobbled streets barely wide enough for two donkeys to pass. It would make a resting place for the Merovingian French kings back before the Dark Ages. With the snow, it looked perfect for finding a little Provençal bistro with a mug of mulled wine and a cozy chair by a stone fireplace.
Of course the best that would be waiting for her after this would be a hot cup of coffee and a burger at the SWCS DFAC—the Special Warfare Center and School Dining Facility. If she didn’t freeze to death first.
A glance back the way she’d come to make sure no one was behind her and—
Betsy blinked hard, as if that would clear away the obscuring snow.
There was no longer an Afghan town behind her, though she knew she’d just been through one. She was at the center of a French village that looked too authentic, even for Range 37. Alleys twisted. Yew trees, so old and gnarled they truly might have been planted by some ancient French king, rose before a two-story, stone, row house. A cluster of dormant rose vines climbed a nearby wall, some of the stems thicker than her arm. They’d been there a while…a long while.
An actual donkey, pulling a tiny cart bearing a large wine barrel, clopped along, his unshod hooves muffled by the fallen snow. The hard rattle of the two ironclad, wooden wheels sounded from the cobbles.
She spun back to look down the street where she’d just shot the target with an AK-47. More people flowed across the courtyard now, but not gliding on any hidden rail. Some carried gigantic woven baskets, others wooden platters of food—all hurrying this way and that as if preparing for some event. Their clothing was loose and broadcloth.
And puffs of breath were coming out of their mouths.
There weren’t supposed to be any real people in a live-fire training except the attackers—in this scenario, just her. If she made a mistake, she could kill an innocent, not that she ever had. She’d always scored perfect marks in target discernment. A man came out a doorway close beside where she lay in the snow and almost stepped on her.
“Excusez-moi.” He definitely spoke before hurrying down the road. Not a mannequin.
She sat up carefully, keeping her eye out for potential shooters. All of the people on the streets—and there were more with each passing moment—were dressed for some form of medieval village reenactment like the Norwegian Folk Museum in Oslo, only more French-Grand-Master-painting-come-to-life than simplistic-Nordic.
Not a one
looked at her. She glanced down at herself to be sure that she hadn’t changed as well. Army boots, camo pants, Kevlar shooter’s vest filled with spare magazines for her rifle and a Glock still in its holster. She indeed still held her HK416 rifle and could feel the helmet on her head. Another blink, and she could feel her eyelashes brushing on the inside of her shooter goggles.
“What the hell?”
Even the air smelled different. Baked breads, wood fires, roasting meat that made her stomach growl.
Only one man was out of place now. He stood in the exact center of the courtyard and was looking directly at her.
Out of place! The alarm went off in her head. Instinct kicked in and she aimed and fired, only at the last moment realizing that he held no weapon. She tried to shift her aim, but knew it wasn’t enough.
The man leaned slightly to one side and the bullet missed his cheek by a hair’s breadth, smacking into a stone arch behind him and releasing a puff of rock dust as it pulverized itself.
Then, as calm as could be, he looked back at her.
Nobody, but nobody dodged a round fired from an HK416.
Chapter Two
Betsy could only stare at him as the villagers continued to mill about without paying any attention to either of them. By now the donkey had drawn even with her position. She reached out to touch it. Though she wore thin gloves, it felt real enough.
The man, however, didn’t look real. Six feet tall, but slender as a willow branch. He didn’t look unfit or misproportioned, just impossibly slender. He had glorious black hair that fell to his waist, whereas her own blonde was short-cropped and barely reached her jawline. He had a long face with high cheekbones, pale skin, and the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. He was dressed in form-fitting black leather that might be appropriate for a chick on a motorcycle calendar. It did look very fine on him, so maybe she finally understood why guys went so ape over those kinds of calendars. A little. Not much really.
The Ides of Matt 2017 Page 25