Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  “Some of us are finer than others, O’Donoghue.” Too late to take the words back, he could only hope she didn’t interpret them the way he’d been thinking them. Her form may have been hidden by layers of winter gear and little more than her eyes and nose showing between hat and scarf, but she was indeed very fine. Half a head shorter and half the weight of any of the men, she was still moving lightly despite the hard work and heavy pack.

  “Fine, huh?”

  Of course she hadn’t missed it. As they’d been crossing the snowfield, she’d shifted a long way in his thoughts as well. That final image on the helo, Patty O’Donoghue asleep on his shoulder, was causing him definite problems.

  “You gonna elaborate on that, Quinn, or just leave me to speculate?”

  With Patty, an elaboration could lead to a hundred more banters and ripostes, which he didn’t really have the air for. “Speculate away.”

  They began ascending a ridge which robbed them of what little breath they had. Before they hit the really steep section, they had a gear break to tighten their crampons.

  A two-minute task in the training room became a ten-minute ordeal at altitude. The strap to tighten the spikes to his boots couldn’t be easily worked because they were now clogged with snow; he had to strip off his thick outer gloves to clear them. Rest a glove on the snow and it disappeared into the powder, making him dig around blindly until he found it.

  When he was done, his ice axe was nowhere to be found, until he remembered the tether that still attached it to his wrist. His thinking was slowing down as well.

  When he finished, Caspar was squatting in the snow in front of him. “Last time you ate and drank something?”

  Mick looked at his watch. Too long. Saving his breath, he answered by digging out an energy bar and his canteen…and almost lost the other glove. He felt less foolish when he saw Patty doing the same.

  “High altitude and dry cold dehydrates you faster than crossing a desert.”

  Mick nodded, he knew that; had heard it in any number of survival lectures. But now he knew it.

  “Now repack your canteen with as much snow as you can. Then tuck it inside your jacket near your chest to melt it. Do that every time you drink. You know not to eat the snow?”

  Mick nodded. It was just asking for lip and mouth blisters, and crashing his core temperature.

  “If you ever fall through ice and have to get dry fast, did you know you can scrub yourself with powdery snow. It’s so dry that it will absorb most of the moisture.”

  He hadn’t known that one.

  Caspar chatted amiably about different uses and conditions of snow for several minutes as if they had nowhere better to be.

  Another five minutes and Caspar saw whatever he’d been waiting for in his and Patty’s faces, “Let’s move before you chill down.”

  Caspar led off again.

  “Still glad you jumped, Boston?”

  “With you, Quinn? Always.”

  She drifted back along the rope lead to leave him to speculate on her meaning.

  # # #

  Tracing the small squawks and radio burps of a weakening signal, they finally located the radio repeater in mid-afternoon.

  Except there wasn’t one victim, there were two, a fact that the “panicked survivor” had failed to mention in her script. Patty stared down at the two life-size mannequins lying in the deep snow. One had a label on its jacket listing symptoms: broken leg, advancing hypothermia, semi-conscious, can’t arouse for over fifteen seconds. The second label was far more grim: DOA. Dead On Arrival.

  The steady-paced PJs exploded into action. In seconds they had an IV running into an artificial vein. Caspar tucked the IV bag deep inside his own clothes to keep it warm.

  “IV is the best way to raise their core temperature quickly,” he explained a piece of information that Patty hoped she never needed to know.

  “No hot packs on the extremities. Her heart is barely maintaining core functionality. If we warm the extremities, it will draw critical blood away from the core and flush ice-cold blood back in its place.”

  Way more than she wanted to know.

  “Build up a pair of stretchers.”

  “A pair?” Patty knew the answer as soon as she asked and turned away to fish the parts out of her pack before they could make an idiot of her by answering. Leave no soldier behind. It was instilled in all Special Ops teams ten times more than standard units. They all still said no man but they’d catch up soon enough if she had anything to do with it.

  Her own reaction to her question was a burning behind her eyes and deep in her heart. It didn’t matter that they were mannequins. They were too late for one and possibly for the other. And she’d hesitated. In combat, that could get both her and her pilot killed. Hesitation had been trained out of her long ago—or so she’d thought. Many lessons up on this goddamn mountain today.

  Maybe she could blame the environment for her momentary lapse.

  During their search, the temperature had dropped below zero. Any hint of sunlight was gone, masked by dark clouds and snow flurries.

  “Gets real awfully fast, doesn’t it?” Mick knelt next to her in the snow and she felt a little better.

  All she could manage was a quick nod.

  In unison they both dug into their packs for the rolled-up stretchers. The thick plastic sheet unrolled reluctantly with the cold.

  “Load the DOA first,” the PJs continued working on the “survivor.”

  Mick helped her lay the dead mannequin on the first plastic sheet. Pre-attached straps pulled the sides and ends together until the mannequin was cocooned in a toboggan with fore and aft towing harnesses.

  When Mick covered its face by cinching down the parka’s hood, it was a little too final for her.

  Patty pulled both gloves off one hand and rested it on the mannequin’s heart. She wasn’t the praying sort, so she simply rested her hand there for a long moment and tried to give thanks that this wasn’t a real person.

  Mick was watching her closely while she pulled her gloves back on.

  “What?” It came out harsher than she intended.

  “You’ve got a soft spot in you, O’Donoghue.”

  “So?” Her defenses were cranked up way too high.

  “So, it’s both unexpected and sweet.” Then Mick kissed her on the exposed tip of her nose before turning to prepare the second stretcher.

  She didn’t want to wipe it off, but the moisture was cold. The moisture coming out of her eyes was hot and didn’t wipe away so easily.

  Chapter 4

  “We’ve got to make camp,” Caspar declared and Mick couldn’t agree more.

  The snow was falling hard and visibility was rarely more than a fifty feet. They’d made it down from thirteen- to ten-thousand feet before daylight failed them, but there was no chance of a helo evac.

  The two other climbing teams were still too far below them to connect up. The mid-level climbing team had been stopped by a bad icefall and forced to break trail wide around it. The lower team had reached the starting point of the mid-level team but that was all.

  Command deemed the “survivor” to be sufficiently stabilized that it wasn’t worth the risk of a nighttime descent. Everyone would be spending the night on the mountain and they’d all link up in morning.

  There wasn’t any such thing as a level spot at ten thousand feet up the side of Mount Hayes, so they dug platforms deep into the snow. The two tents ended up fifty feet apart, too far to shout in the rising storm, but they all had spare batteries for their radios, making communications a non-issue. With the “corpse” parked on the far side of the PJs tent and the “survivor” in the tent with the two men, Mick and Patty might as well be on an entirely different mountain when they slipped into their own tent.

  “Cozy,” Mick observed after flicking on a headlamp. The t
ent was big enough for two sleeping bags and their packs, as long as they were very close together. It was tall enough to sit up along the midline…barely.

  “Sure,” Patty agreed readily. “Way better than a Bahamian beach and a piña colada. I thought we left this storm in the Aleutians.” He wasn’t going to think about Patty in a bikini with a tropical drink in her hand—an image he was finding way too easy to imagine…especially one of those skimpy ones with a red floral print and...

  “Yeah,” he forced the image to the background of his thoughts, because it certainly wasn’t going away. “You think raining on Anchorage would have tired the storm out.” Instead it appeared to have riled it up. Despite the deep snow shelf that protected their tent and being on the lee side of the mountain, the wind still slapped the plastic of the tiny tent with sharp snaps and the rattle of ice crystal clouds blown like gunfire against the nylon.

  By the light of his headlamp, they jostled and bumped each other constantly as they lay out insulating pads and sleeping bags. Shedding boots was easy, but getting out of the winter gear was far more difficult in the tiny space. They had to help each other and stripping clothes off Patty O’Donoghue was suddenly something Mick didn’t want to stop.

  With a deep breath and more control than he knew he had, he managed to stop when he reached the “Bag.” Even in a shapeless green flight suit that was a couple sizes too big for her, he found a sudden and surprising need to drag her down onto the sleeping bags and try out that kiss again. Topped off by the ridiculously cute red, orange, and gold hat only made the image harder to resist.

  Instead, he slid down deep into his own sleeping bag. The tent was warmer than outside, but it was still icy enough to see his own breath. He propped his headlamp in the corner, shining upward. It was disconcerting to watch the thin tent fabric slap so violently above them, but it made for a softer light. He began sorting through their dinner options that had been stuffed in his pack.

  “Shredded Beef in Barbeque Sauce, Brisket Entrée, Mexican Style Chicken Stew, or Pork Rib,” he read off while flipping through the Meals-Ready-to-Eat packets.

  “Vegetarian Cheese Tortellini, Vegetarian Taco Pasta, Vegetarian Ratatouille, or Lemon Pepper Tuna,” Patty sounded thoroughly disgusted. “I’m going to kill the Two-Twelve’s quartermaster when I get back to Anchorage. If I get back to Anchorage.” She buried her face in her parka that she’d fluffed into place as a pillow. “I can’t remember the last time I was this tired.”

  “Here,” he fanned his selection, “take your pick.”

  If it was a rug, he’d definitely have gotten a burn from how fast she yanked the shredded beef out of his hand. Well, it was the best choice, which would teach him not to make his own selection first. He went for the chicken stew as a close second.

  They talked about the day for the ten minutes that the heaters bubbled away warming up their meals.

  Silence, other than the roaring wind and snap of the tent, descended as they packed away the calories.

  It was comfortable and Mick was slowly relaxing, glad to finally be mostly warm and out of the unrelenting wind.

  He was most of the way through his entrée when he noticed that Patty was watching him. Side by side in their bags they were closer together than in their Little Bird helicopter cockpit. It was easy to see that some question was bugging her.

  “So ask already.”

  She shook her head and the ends of her hair where they stuck past the knit cap slipped down to hide her face.

  “You’ve never been a coy one, Patty. Doesn’t work for you, so what are you wondering?”

  “Not my place.”

  What wouldn’t be her place to ask?

  “Christ, Mick. Are all men so thick-headed?”

  He shrugged a maybe and munched on a few cheese-filled pretzels to buy himself some time.

  “Sofia?”

  “What about her?”

  Patty put her face back down in her crumpled parka and released a loud scream of frustration.

  “I already told you I wasn’t interested in her.” Though he did recall that moment in the hall when she’d been so close, so warm, and so kind.

  “You talked together for three straight hours last night.”

  “Three hours? Really?” He’d lost complete track of the time.

  “You still insist you’re not interested in her. What kind of an idiot are you?” Patty threw one of her peanuts at him, which bounced off his forehead. She picked it up from where it fell on his sleeping bag and ate it.

  “Based on the tone of your voice, apparently a complete one.”

  She cleaned up the remnants of her meal and slipped deeper into her sleeping bag until little showed other than her blue eyes and her orange pom-pom.

  He let the silence stretch.

  “Fine! I’ll kill myself with embarrassment later. What did you two talk about for so long?”

  “Oh, ice and snow.”

  “Ice?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And snow?”

  “Yep.”

  “You sat with a gorgeous woman for three hours and all you discussed was ice and snow? What’s next? Water? Or were you going to jump straight to steam? And why didn’t you jump straight to steam?”

  “She’s never been exposed to either snow or ice before. Sofia didn’t know the first thing about survival in winter conditions. No mountain training for RPA pilots.”

  Patty whistled and her unreadable expression shifted to one of surprise. Then something that might have been respect. “And still she came along on the exercise. Brave woman. Another thing to like about her.”

  “Uh-huh,” he wasn’t going to get back into the conversation with Patty about why he didn’t want Sofia.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  She mumbled it to herself so he decided that silence was the safest policy. He finished the last of his Wet Pack Fruits side dish and slid deeper into his own bag once the trash was stowed.

  “What else did you talk about?”

  “The way we apparently look at each other.”

  “You and Sofia?”

  He shook his head and wondered why he’d said it out loud. He tried to speak his answer, but wasn’t sure he wanted to have such a clear gauge of his own reaction. So he pointed from his face to hers and back.

  “You and me?”

  He nodded.

  “And then?”

  “And then she booted me down the hall.”

  # # #

  Patty pulled the sleeping bag over her head. It was hard to think when Mick was watching her with those big, dark eyes from so close beside her.

  Maybe this was her moment to die from embarrassment. She’d thought…suspected…conjured so many stupid-ass scenarios of those two that even for her it was pretty spectacularly bad. Maybe—Patty was just an idiot beyond belief.

  Mick had talked with the beautiful Sofia about ice and snow?

  And how he and she looked at each other? But there wasn’t anything between them. Well, nothing except one rockin’ kiss.

  “Hello in there,” Mick pulled up a corner of her sleeping bag.

  She grabbed the edge and pulled it back down.

  Patty could feel him toying with the pom-pom that must be sticking out, but she’d have to scoot farther down in the bag to pull it inside with the rest of her. That was actively running away from the problem rather than just hiding from it and she couldn’t stomach doing that.

  How had she ended up in a tiny tent alone with Mick Quinn on top of an Alaskan mountain? It wasn’t like she could go down to the weight room and pump iron for an hour the way she had while trying to burn off the aftereffects of that first kiss.

  The way she and Mick looked at each other?

  If she was going to be honest with herself—and she hated to do that under normal circumst
ances, which these definitely weren’t so she’d give herself a break this one time—she certainly had been looking at Mick that way.

  He was still playing with the pom-pom.

  So what if she had? A girl was allowed to look, wasn’t she?

  She stuck her head back out of the bag.

  “What’s wrong with me looking at you? It’s not like you’re grotesque or anything.”

  That’s when he kissed her.

  Unlike her own kiss that had been about heat and anger and men being such total and absolute idiots, Mick’s was soft and gentle.

  Not testing.

  Not demanding.

  Just a kiss designed to blow her pulse rate off the charts. A kiss that simply forced her to slither one arm out of the sleeping bag so that she could wrap it around his neck.

  He didn’t break off, didn’t check in with her, didn’t have a goddamn doubt in the world. How freakin’ male was that? Her thoughts were trying to scurry off and scatter in a thousand directions and Mick Quinn had them anchored solidly in place with a kiss that had already forced her to scrap any nav charts she’d ever built about men. This was way better.

  When he did finally move, it was to kiss her eyelids closed, a motion so gentle it was like a whisper.

  And then a peck on the tip of her nose.

  The sigh that slipped out of her was wholly un-Patty-like.

  Her thoughts again tried to coalesce, but they only managed to offer up one lucid thought.

  “Don’t stop now, Quinn. You’re on a roll.”

  When he at long last shifted down to nuzzle her neck they ran into problems with sleeping bags and flight suits. There was definitely too much fabric between them.

  “You know,” she whispered as she toyed with his longish black hair. “These sleeping bags are designed to zip together. In case one of us has hypothermia or something.”

  After a few chilly moments, the sleeping bags were zipped together, their flight suits and long johns were down by their feet to keep them warm, and it was the last time she was able to speak coherently. After a while, she didn’t even try. Instead she concentrated on keeping the joined sleeping bags up over their heads and Mick as close as she could.