The Complete Delta Force Warriors

by M. L. Buchman

  “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.

  14

  “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 eyes 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.

  Play the Right Cards

  Ramiro dreams a simple dream: become a great chef to capture the heart of the best cook he ever met. Now, in just-next-door restaurants in their old neighborhood—the barrios of Medellín, Colombia—he brings a modern twist to catch her attention.

  Estela’s worries center on the last gasp of the drug cartels that still haunt her neighborhood. When a pair of American Delta operators start a card game in Ramiro’s restaurant, she wonders if she too can Play the Right Cards.

  Introduction

  This story happened because of an escalator.

  No, really!

  The city of Medellín, Colombia had atrocious problems. It had been the center of Pablo Escobar’s drug-running empire, and his terror war against other cartels and the government itself until his death in 1993.

  In the last twenty years, the population has grown from two million to almost four million people. And that massive urbanization has occurred mostly due to the agglomeration of slums around the periphery and the less desirable mountaintops that surround the city.

  The commute for the service personnel from the slums to the prosperous core could easily take an hour or more, despite often being less than a kilometer apart as the crow flies. Roads were indirect, and transit was nearly non-existent. Essentially, commerce didn’t occur across a distance of a few dozen blocks.

  So t
he city installed an escalator.

  A thousand feet long, it connected one of the poorest slums to the city below in a matter of minutes.

  Medellín didn’t stop there. Gondola systems were installed. Libraries were built at the upper end of the anchor points of the system to make them more attractive to visitors and instill pride in the locals. These and other improvements have allowed development capital to flow uphill and services to flow down.

  What happens then?

  Change happens.

  The city has become an international model for innovative urban-interconnection solutions. Is it all perfect? Of course not, but it is a vast amount of progress, especially when compared to Escobar’s personal fiefdom.

  To exemplify this change, I fell back on one of my favorite things—food. I put two restaurants side by side: one deeply traditional, one madly innovative.

  So I had most of a setting.

  Yet I also wanted to show the hard uphill battle (both literally and figuratively) that the city still had ahead of them.

  Escobar’s empire was broken, but seventy percent of the world’s cocaine comes from Colombia. And a legacy as deep and intrusive as Escobar’s doesn’t disappear overnight, or even in the years since his death.

  How convenient that I had just finished my Delta Force romance novel series.

  Chad and Duane, a particularly lethal pair of operators from that series, always brought a sense of fun with them.

  So, in this gloriously messy, mixed-up, changing, dangerous, exciting heart of Medellín, they helped our hero and heroine find a new future.

  1

  The flash of white-gold drew Ramiro’s attention from the mote de queso.

  It was a soup he’d lifted from Colombia’s Caribbean Coast and was adapting to the Medellín palate—with his own modern style of course. The thick hard cheese had been transformed to tiny floating islands that would catch in every spoonful. The sweetness of yam now came from roasted and juiced corn, and the coconut milk base was reconstructed from goat milk and white chocolate.

  It was close. So close. It needed more roasted-corn milk—and, he tried not to sigh, less salt. Nowhere in Colombia was there a love for the salt and sweet together as there was in Medellín, but the balance was wrong. The only way to put less in was to start over and he’d already been nursing this soup along for two days. Any distraction was welcome.

  The flash of white-gold was a man’s pale blond hair. Not exactly common in the heart of the Santo Domingo district of Medellín. It belonged to a big guy. Tall and incredibly broad of shoulder. The man who followed him in was darker, but no smaller. They looked like two tanks rolling into his restaurant. Ramiro didn’t need to be brilliant to spot American drug-war military.

  “Buenos días, amigos. Welcome to my restaurant.” He worked hard on his English hoping for just this moment. American military liked to think they were adventurous, but they rarely were. It had taken three months for one to walk in here. If he could make a good impression, they’d tell their friends and then he’d be made. The barrio’s locals were fine, but money came from the Americans. Also if the Americans came, then the trendy Paisas from lower Medellín would start riding the tram or the escalator up into the barrio and they too had money.

  “Hey there.” The blond man offered one of those odd, meaningless American greetings as they looked around.

  The barrio of Santo Domingo had changed so much since the days when Pablo Escobar’s drug money had ruled here, that the neighborhood of his youth was almost unrecognizable. There were still alleys and streets that even he didn’t walk into, but no longer did everyone spend whole days cowering out of sight as gun battles raged along the Fronteras Invisibles that had divided the drug militias’ territories. With new parks, libraries, civic centers, and even massive outdoor escalators that climbed right up into the hills of the upper comunas, the neighborhoods had slowly quieted and were regaining cohesion, like a fine sauce.

  It wasn’t done yet, but gunfire was now less common than bombs had been the year when six thousand had died in this city alone. The lower city was far safer and the hill neighborhoods were following.

  Ramiro had done his best to make his restaurant fit the modern times. The walls were white, with paintings of local vistas—cheap ones from street artists but with a sharp, modernist eye. The tables were topped with black Formica and dark blue linoleum covered the old wood floors. The chairs he’d selected for comfort over style. This restaurant was his very breath, and his future.

  “Would you like some lunch, my friends?” Please let them be his friends. He moved out to escort them to seats. There were ten tables and only two were occupied, so where they sat didn’t matter; the secret was to get them sitting.

  “Sure. Duane says he’s ready to eat a horse. Me, I’m fine with just a small cow or two.” Their Spanish was very good, though strangely regionless. It didn’t matter, it made his life easier. He still had to concentrate to get English syntax organized in his head before he spoke.

  When he tried to hand over menus, the blond guy waved them away. “You’re the chef, you choose. We’re not picky eaters.”

  “I’m not,” ‘Duane’ grumbled out in a voice that sounded little used. “Chad’s got this thing against aji chombo sauce.”

  “Only because the last time you said ‘Try it, you’ll like it,’ it burned a hole in my tongue that came out through the bottom of my boots. I liked those boots.”

  “He likes wearing ballet slippers.”

  Ramiro knew it was bad form to laugh in a customer’s face—especially one he wanted to turn into a repeat customer—but he couldn’t help himself.

  “That’s ballet dancers. Those girls bring a whole new meaning to flexible. And I won’t mention Duane and his bunny slippers,” blond ‘Chad’s’ smile forgave Ramiro his laugh.

  Ramiro wasn’t sure what “bunny slippers” were. He wondered if they used their real names. Probably. Duane’s tan was dark enough, but Chad would never pass as undercover anything in Colombia. Time to get back to the food.

  “The reason you don’t like the aji chombo is because you eat the Venezuelan sauce.” Venezuela was just another confirmation of who they were as it was a border that was not very comfortable to cross right now. “You must try my aji picante Colombiano. It is hot, but it is not simply hot with peppers. It is hot with flavor. It is hot with the spirit of Colombia.”

  “Bring it on, brother.” Duane turned to his friend, “You got the cards?”

  “You were supposed to— Shit, bro.” He turned to Ramiro. “Do you have any playing cards?”

  Ramiro went to look, but all he found were a pack of My Little Pony cards his niece had left behind on her last visit from Bogota.

  “Sorry, all I could find, my friends.”

  Chad fanned the deck. Ramiro should have told them he couldn’t find anything. They’d take offense at these silly pink cards and walk away.

  Brightly colored cartoon ponies adorned them. The suits were made up of hearts, diamonds, rainbows, and more. A “three of butterflies” flew around the image of Fluttershy, a beige pony with hot pink hair. A “seven of balloons” floated above the wild-eyed party pony Pinkie Pie with her hot pink hair. He and Marie had played the game for endless hours. Those days had gone by far too fast. No little girl of his own to raise. No little boy to follow in his footsteps. Not yet anyway, but Marie made him wish.

  But these military men were not eight-year old Marie.

  It was a disaster before he’d even served the first plate. They’d never come back. He—

  Chad quickly chucked aside the eights, nines, and tens, then began shuffling the deck. Truco? Two American military men were going to play a vicious, cut-throat game like Truco with My Little Pony cards.

  They seemed to forget about his existence, so he slowly eased away and almost landed in Jesús Rivera’s lap, which would have been very bad. He’d known Jesús since they were kids, but his was the last major drug militia still working San
to Domingo. He’d become so hard over the years that Ramiro had barely recognized him when he returned from his apprenticeship and cooking school in Bogotá.

  Ramiro hurried back to the kitchen.

  2

  Estela had watched the Americans stroll past the front of her restaurant without thinking anything of it. But when news had spread—as quickly as everything in the barrio did—of a noisy two-person game of Truco in Ramiro’s Restaurante de Medellín, she had her suspicions. When Marla came in for an order of chicharrón with a side of beans and rice to take to her ailing father—who had made a profession of ailing ever since his daughter had married well enough to support him—and asked how it was possible for hair to be so close to white on a young and handsome man, it only confirmed what Estela already knew.

  The Americans wanted to eat at Ramiro’s? It was their loss. It wasn’t authentic Colombian food. It was barely food according to some of her customers. She didn’t need more customers. Even Ramiro returning from the big city with his big city ideas and moving in next door hadn’t worried her.

  The Paisas of Medellín—the real locals—knew real food. She and Cara could barely keep up with the crowded tables. Those who had to wait were always offered a jugó of iced juice mixed with coconut milk. She knew the feeding and keeping of customers far better than Ramiro with his fancy molecules and espuma that he dropped in frothy little piles as if a person could be satisfied with air and bubbles.

  He knew nothing.

  Then why did the Americans eating there irk her so?

  She paused in the kitchen long enough to drink a lime and coconut jugó herself as the thin-sliced plantain patacones fried for the second time. Her restaurante was warm compared to Ramiro’s chilly moderno nonsense. The wood walls had been placed here by her grandfather. Her grandmother had fed the people of Santo Domingo at these same wooden tables. Even when Pablo Escobar and the other murderous drug scum had ruled the streets, people still had to eat.