“Why do you get rid of the candy?” He took one and began futilely tugging at one corner.
Snapping down with her wrist, her Infidel blade dropped into her palm. Hitting the release, the anodized four-inch double-edged dagger snapped out of the front of the handle.
Ewing dropped his MRE pouches in surprise. Civilian.
“Candy is bad luck. Never eat it on a mission.” She slit open his pouches then peeked in. “You’ve got the Mexican Chicken. Not a bad menu, though not great cold.” She slit her own. “I’ve got Spaghetti in Beef Sauce if you’d prefer.”
“Cold spaghetti versus cold Mexican chicken. You really live the highlife. Why ‘Killer Kristine’? I haven’t seen you kill a single person yet.”
“I was in a good mood.”
“Happen much?” He dug into his pouch with a spork and began eating fast. Most civilians weren’t fans of MREs, but he ate it like it was some fancy-kind-of-place good.
“That I have to kill people or that I’m in a good mood?”
“We’ll start with the former,” he’d finished the chicken, fruit pack, cheddar cheese-filled pretzels, and chocolate bar (which didn’t count as candy so it was safe). She slit open and handed over her untouched meal and he started in on that.
Reluctant to answer, she stared up and blinked into the spattering rain that found its way between the shipping containers. Sure! I’ve killed all sorts. Psychotic ragheads at two paces and hell-bent Congolese warlords at a thousand. I’ve taken out narco-runners in Honduras and nacro-manufacturers in Colombia. Civilians didn’t react well to hearing about such things and she’d learned to keep them to herself. So, you’re a killer for the Army? Rather than taking them down, she’d just say, I’m a soldier for the same government that builds your bridges and keeps your food safe. It never seemed to work. Safer to keep her mouth shut.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Ewing said between bites of his Chocolate Chip Toaster Pastry and Italian Bread Sticks.
She shrugged. “And?” Kristine waited for whatever weird reaction was coming her way. She wasn’t real hungry and didn’t bother fishing out another menu.
“Not what you’d expect from a beautiful woman. That’s all. Of course, first impressions don’t lie, I suppose. You looked amazingly good standing there in my door all kitted up for war. I was down here doing research for their oil fields. Then they showed up one day and I became a government slave instead.”
“You mean until you got caught as a spy for the CIA?”
He inspected her carefully.
“It’s the only thing that fits. I’ve worked enough CIA special requests to know the feel of them.”
“What are you?”
“You asked that before.”
“You said Killer Kristine. But that’s when I asked what kind of a person you were.”
“I’m Delta Force. Pleased ta meetcha.”
“Brooklyn! What part?”
She’d worked hard to knock it out of her voice over the years, but it had slipped out in the old pat phrase. “Along the Gowanus.”
“Which side?”
“You know the good parts? Nowhere near those.”
He actually laughed. “Didn’t know the Gowanus had good parts.”
Ewing was right, of course. The mile-long canal in the heart of Brooklyn was still one of the most polluted stretches of water in the entire country. It was a Superfund cleanup site, except no one could figure out how to clean up three centuries of toxic sludge without digging up a whole section of Brooklyn and burying it somewhere that no one cared about, like Queens.
“It doesn’t have any good parts,” as Kristine well knew. “But we lived in the part that killed my little sister when she went swimming in it one day.”
“Oh God! I’m so sorry.” And Ewing simply reached a hand around her shoulder in a sideways hug.
Something cracked inside her like the lightning bolt of the growing storm that briefly revealed a flash of his concerned face.
“I was supposed to take her out for an ice cream; it was so hot. Ran into some of my friends and forgot to keep an eye on her. She got bored and went swimming. Even dove down for something shiny in the mud. The toxins took her out in under a month.”
And never once since had Kristine told anyone about it. Never told a soul how her family had disavowed her. How she did her best to never use her last name unless she had to in order to avoid hurting the family—another reason to not fight back against Killer Kristine. Now, here she sat with a total stranger in a raging storm in Venezuela, spilling her guts.
How the hell had that happened?
But Ewing’s arm around her shoulder felt good. Despite all the gear they both wore and all the pain snarled in her gut.
It felt good.
“I grew up on Carroll Street, just a few blocks up from the canal,” he whispered barely louder than the wind shrieking by overhead. “That’s how I became a chemist. Trying to figure out how to fix that canal.”
“Can you?” The flash of hope hurt almost as much as the cold memory. She’d joined the Army the day of her sister’s funeral—a funeral at which not a soul had sat with her or spoken to her.
“Not yet, sorry. But I still work on it when I can. That’s what I brought from the cell,” he patted the pouches on his MOLLE. “Whenever I could find time, I’d work on finding a reagent that might fix some aspect of the mess without killing everyone who lives near it.”
She didn’t know whether to be sick that there was still nothing that could save others like her sister or feel overwhelming hope that people were still trying. “Are you a good chemist?”
“Good enough that the CIA recruited me and the Venezuelan’s didn’t kill me when they found out.” He offered the first real hope she’d felt in a long time.
She yanked out her radio. “Gotta get your ass out of here.”
8
Mankowski had answered right away. “I’ve got a beauty staked out. Just say go and I’ll be there in ten.”
“Go!” Then she’d gotten Dr. Ray Ewing on the move. She now had another reason to keep him alive, a far more important one than she’d started the night with.
Again, she took his hand to keep exact tabs on him. It felt like more than that, but…something best ignored. Together, they slipped up to the end of the container alley and surveyed the surroundings. Not a soul in sight and even though the yard lights were back on, the visibility sucked beyond about twenty meters. Good.
It took them eight of the ten minutes to scoot across the shipping yard and back to the ferry terminal where she’d left Mankowski.
“We’re good here,” she got Ray tucked out of sight between some big boulders and a support stanchion for the ferry dock overhead that did impressively little to block the slashing storm. “We just— Oh shit!”
“What?”
She slapped her silenced sidearm into his hands. “It’s loaded. There’s no safety. Just aim and pull the trigger. Try not to shoot either of us in the process.” Kristine unslung her HK416, powered up the night sights, and zeroed in on the approaching patrol boat.
It should be out in the middle of the channel right now.
On a foul night like tonight, it should be tied up at the pier.
It definitely shouldn’t be gliding straight toward her position at the ferry landing.
The lights in the ferry terminal above them were off for the night, but there was enough splash from the commercial yard that Kristine knew she wouldn’t be invisible much longer.
Only person that she could see was standing at the helm inside the high, glassed-in bridge of the seventy-five foot long patrol boat. The boat was light blue, with PG-401 painted on either side of the bow. A Gavión-class patrol boat built in the US decades ago, with fore and aft swivel-mounted machine guns. Except there was no one manning the guns.
She zeroed in on the helmsman who was…waving.
9
“Can’t believe you know how to drive this thing. I’m so totally re
naming you, Connie ‘Boatman’ Mankowski.”
“Why thanks, Killer Kristine,” he grinned as he backed them away from the ferry dock. “Beats the shit out of Girlie. Never could seem to shed that one. Did some time as a yacht crew off Martha’s Vineyard. Pilot gave me lessons when we were running the boat empty to fetch the owners somewhere or other.”
“Maybe it’s time you shed Killer, Kristine,” Ray said softly from close beside her, too softly for Boatman to hear.
Boatman nosed them toward the end of the breakwater, almost invisible in the spray now breaking over it.
She could only shake her head. “I’ll take rear gun until we’re clear. Stay in here where it’s dry, Ray. It’s still dumping out there.”
“Ooo, never heard the Captain call any man by his first name. Look out, buddy. She’s gunning for you.”
Kristine considered beating the shit out of Boatman where he stood at the wheel. Not a good choice as she’d never driven anything bigger than the sunken Zodiac. She could figure it out if she had to but it wouldn’t be pretty, especially not in a storm.
The wind tore at her as she stepped out the door and hung onto the rail heading aft.
“That’s a mole, too.” Ray… No, Ewing…no…Ray—she sighed to herself—followed her out onto the deck.
“What is? No brown-furries. No stars with twenty-one zeroes after the one—you said there was six hundred times less stars than atoms in a mole.” She slogged down the three steps to the rear recovery deck, around the launch cradled there, and stepped up to the rear gun. A .50 cal M2 Browning deck gun. Sweet! Nobody had better mess with her tonight.
“Women who know math are very sexy. You realize that?”
“Soldier doesn’t equal stupid,” she did her best to ignore his comment. Though it might be the first time a man had called her that while not talking about her body.
“Mole, noun,” he announced in a professorial tone. “A long pier or breakwater of piled rock. Actually, you get two for one, because a mole is also the harbor protected by a mole. Like a mole squared.”
“A thirty-six with forty-six zeroes after it. Or do you prefer a three-point-six with forty-seven zeroes?”
“Very sexy,” he whispered just a tone above another gust of wind that slashed salt water in their faces. “A mole of moles being discussed in a mole-harbor protected by a mole-breakwater,” Ray sounded very pleased. “Spoken by a smart and lovely soldier lady with a mole on her cheek, who a mole-spy tipped off to my whereabouts—and I now have a belly full of mole sauce—and she’s still wearing her MOLLE harness which—”
“I think we’ve beat that joke to death now, even if you can figure out how to work brown-furries into that sentence.” She snapped safety lines from the boat to their MOLLEs and braced herself. The first storm waves were slipping around the corner of Ray’s breakwater-mole and slamming into the boat. There didn’t appear to be any unwanted attention due to their departure. If anyone on shore did notice, they weren’t doing anything about it that she could see. Not that anyone else was dumb enough to be out in this filthy weather.
“You know you aren’t responsible for her death,” Ray went suddenly serious.
Kristine could only grunt at the stab that had just bypassed all of her lifetime’s defenses.
“You didn’t kill your sister,” he declared as if he knew what the fuck he was talking about.
“So did!”
“No,” his voice stayed dead calm. “There’s a reason that the word ‘accident’ occurs in the English language. Have you been blaming yourself for that for your whole life?”
The lights of the inner harbor were falling behind them as the patrol boat lifted its bow into the first big wave.
“I killed her as surely as if I held the gun to her head myself.”
“Did you? Goddamn it, Kristine!” Ray yanked on the shoulder strap of her MOLLE to spin her to face him. He practically shook her by it though she was definitely the stronger one. “No wonder they call you Killer. You’ve been killing your own soul with that load for how long?”
“My entire life since.” She could taste the tears coming down her cheeks despite the sea salt spray. She hadn’t cried since…since that day.
“Get a clue woman. You made yourself a Delta Force captain. And you just saved my life and the lives of how many others pretty much single-handed. Go ahead, tell me how many women could pull that off. Oh wait, let me guess: one? Maybe two? Gotta rename you Kristine the Incredible or something.”
The first big surf slammed against them. She kept them anchored with one hand on the gun. They each had a hand on the other’s MOLLE and the wave’s force slammed them together.
While the wave disappeared behind them and the patrol boat climbed the next big one, they didn’t ease back. Instead, she pulled him the last inch closer.
Maybe Dr. Ray Ewing was right and it was time to drop that load astern.
She kissed him hard as the next big wave rolled by beneath them and lifted them up.
Yes, she definitely needed a new name. And maybe, just maybe, one was finally coming her way.
Delta Mission: Operation Rudolph
In three days, Betsy retires from a decade as a Delta Force tracker and shooter. But a training mission gone wrong...or perhaps “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
It’s fun to end on a silly note.
I so enjoy writing my Christmas romance stories. Sometimes they’re serious, other times fun, but I’d never written one that was flat-out silly.
And I figured that if I was going for silly, I needed someone who was decidedly not silly.
That was easy…Delta Force.
Range 37, in addition to being the setting for the sniper trials for Cindy Sue in Love in the Drop Zone above, also has an urban battle zone, room-clearing mazes, and more. So I had my starting point.
Then I had the influence of three different books.
Chuck Pfarrer’s memoir of his years as a Navy SEAL, Warrior Soul, gave me my opening. He recounts that even though it was his last full day in the service, the schedule had said he was due for a dangerous training mission, so, of course, he did the training…and was nearly killed the day before he retired.
Perfect. My heroine Betsy is retiring after today, except she has one more training to do, which goes strangely wrong.
This is where two other stories came to my aid. They demonstrate how we can reinterpret something, and make it completely our own.
J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a series of Christmas letters to his nieces and nephews during World War II. They were hand-illustrated and were filled with the latest news from the North Pole. They told of the daily lives of Santa, the elves, a particularly foolish polar bear, gnome invasions, and all of the other challenges that delivering presents around the world entails.
I reached into his collection strictly for the sense of silly.
And from Jan Brett’s lovely The Wild Christmas Reindeer I took the idea of Santa’s chief reindeer herder having trouble.
Ardent fans will find connections between Jeremy, Santa’s lead reindeer, and Henderson’s Ranch #5, Big Sky, Loyal Heart during Lauren’s hunting expedition.
It’s a wonderful, silly romp.
That it also looks at a Delta Force operator’s tenacity, adaptability, and skill at wilderness tracking is completely beside the point.
1
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-Christ
mas 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.
The Complete Delta Force Warriors Page 13