Big Sky Dog Whisperer

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

All Jodie could do was clutch the steering wheel and hang her head. It had taken everything she had to navigate the last thirty miles of washboard that Montana called a road. Of course, doing the whole trip in one pull from Brooklyn had taken its toll, too.

Brandy had hated leaving Jodie’s room. Hated Jodie packing her bag before that—had tried to unpack it for her until Jodie shoved her off the bed. Hated getting in the truck even more. Jodie had spent her own share of time drugged out of her mind after she’d been shot four years ago in Mosul, Iraq, and couldn’t face doing that to her dog even though she had the bottle of doggie-Valium in her pocket. Instead, Brandy’d sat quivering in the passenger seat for the whole trip across.

So, like any good SEAL, Jodie had simply leaned into it. Get going and get it done. They’d both suffered plenty over the last thirty-six hours, but they were here.

A sharp metal clank against her window made her jump. Brandy cried out, as she had a thousand times during the trip. Every semi-truck that had roared by them had nearly given the poor thing fits.

Not even having the energy to look up, Jodie punched the down button on the window, then returned to clutching the wheel with both hands.

“Where the hell is Altman?” The man’s snarl sounded junkyard mean.

“How the hell should I know? Naval Air Station Oceania, Virginia? Bumfuck, Somalia?” At least, if the guy knew Altman, it meant she was in the right place. For the last thousand miles she’d been dreading that she’d somehow gotten the directions wrong and would have to turn back and drive over the endless damn Plains states again. Who knew that so much of the country was flatter than a week-old root beer?

The guy unleashed a string of curses as foul as any seasoned sailor.

The first thing she saw when she looked up was a pair of metal hooks where he ought to have a hand. Beyond that and the metal arm attached to them, the whole left side of his face—where it wasn’t hidden by the curling fall of deep brown hair—was scar tissue. Burns. Long healed, but seriously bad ones.

He glared at her with eyes as dark as a dog’s.

No, he glared past her.

“That the dog?”

“No. It’s a camel. What do you think? That I drove thirty-six hours straight for my health?”

“Thirty-six hours,” Hooks grumbled. He turned to the cowboy.

She didn’t know there still were such things, but he had a saddled horse, a cowboy hat, even a plaid flannel shirt, so he must be one. Did they still wear spurs? She was too tired to look.

“Altman signaled me less than an hour ago. He is such dog meat.” The scarred guy turned back to face her. “Who are you?”

“Who the hell are you? I’m looking for Stan somebody. Commander Altman said there was someone here who would know this was a dog and not a camel.”

“My CO sent you?”

She just rolled her eyes at him and could feel them like sandpaper against the insides of her eyelids.

“You look like s**t, sister.”

“Thanks. And not your sister. You going to help me or are you just gonna stand there and use your hooks to keep playing with yourself?”

The cowboy snorted out a laugh. “Always wondered how you did that, buddy.”

Brandy wormed her way under Jodie’s elbow to bury her face against Jodie’s belly.

Hooks looked in at them for a long moment. “Your dog?”

“No. She’s just a total slut who does that to every truck driver she can find.” Then she just gave up. “Six years together, four of that forward-deployed. In service with SEAL Team 8, technically on loan from— Aw, screw it.”

Again the long silence that forced her to look up from comforting Brandy.

He no longer looked gruff. Instead he looked impossibly sad.

“Senior Chief Petty Officer Stan Corman, retired,” he raised his hooks to explain why he’d retired. “I was a dog handler for SEAL Team…uh, 3. I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll try.”

The cowboy didn’t appear to notice Stan’s overlong hesitation about being in SEAL Team 3, but even one-eared Jodie heard it loud and clear. A hesitation long enough to think about what teams were stationed with hers at Virginia Beach and then to pick one of the other ones, based in Coronado, California. No SEAL ever admitted to being a part of the top-secret DEVGRU, commonly known as SEAL Team 6. But if Altman was his former CO, that meant Stan had also been Team 6. Hard not to respect that.

The cowboy actually punched him in the arm, well above where the armature strapped in. “First thing you can do is get her some food and somewhere to sleep, you doofus.”

“Uh, right. Patrick, can you handle that for me?” Then Corman walked away as if she and Brandy no longer existed.

“He’s a sweet guy,” the seriously tall cowboy leaned down to explain through the open window.

She gave him her best deadpan expression.

“Okay. Maybe he doesn’t show it or even know it, but he really is.”

At this point, all Jodie cared about was shower, food, and sleep—with sleep being her top priority. If Brandy’s nightmares would let her.

Stan stood in the dog kennel building and looked down the line.

Twelve cages all down one side so that the dogs didn’t face each other. This way he didn’t have to worry about some dog that was in a foul mood ticking off another dog just because he could see him. The eastern wall had generous windows so that the morning sun could help warm up the place quickly on cold winter mornings, but not overheat it on hot summer afternoon. The heaters were off for the spring and it wasn’t yet hot enough for AC, so the windows all down the side were open wide to let the fresh morning air flow through.

Each gate opened into a generous six-by-eight-foot cell. Comfy dog bed, water bowl, and a chew toy. Seven of the cages were still occupied. This class, his first class, had started with ten dogs. There’d been five drops and two late starts.

Of the five failures, one had gone to a local rancher, three had enough potential for regular forces and he’d shipped them down to Lackland Air Force Base for training, and one had attached himself to Lauren—Patrick’s intended. It was strange, Rip acted as if he barely knew Stan anymore. Instead, from the first day, he went everywhere with Lauren like it was love at first sight. He’d been on the verge of flunking out anyway—well-behaved, but he just didn’t have that essential hard-driven nature of a good military war dog—so his weird fascination had solved a placement problem before it became one.

Of the seven remaining, all were set to graduate. He had a group of Spec Ops handlers coming out for final evaluation and pairing next week.

The various teams had promised at least ten candidates, because sometimes there just wasn’t a good match for a dog so you needed more handlers than dogs.

Only Bertram, his very first dog here at the ranch, had noticed his arrival in the kennel. Bertram lay with all the perfection of a canine sphinx—front paws together, head up, rabbit-sized ears perfectly erect. The ears were smaller than a German Shepherd’s, but so was the head, making the ears just as ridiculously oversized. He was as fine an example of a Malinois as Stan had ever seen. He was the only animal that ticked all five boxes with top scores: obedience, tracking, agility, herding, and physical conformation.

War dogs were all about the first two boxes.

To qualify for Spec Ops Forces with Delta or ST6, they had to tick the first three with top marks.

Herders went to ranchers. Physical conformation went to show dogs.

Bertram could round up stray cattle as easily as he could dive between the slats on a fence line at a full sprint.

“You know how beautiful you are, don’t you?” He whispered to the dog.

An ear twitch acknowledged his speech.

Damn, he was going to miss that dog. But he knew what was needed out past the line, that place in hell where SEAL teams lived. Exceptional wasn’t good enough; it was just the starting point.

He trained young, healthy dogs to get ready for war. Wasn’t a dog in the room who couldn’t pick out all of the most common explosives and a lot of the rarer ones. Not a one who’d do more than glance aside when a machine gun fired from ten paces away. None of them would hesitate for an instant to take down a two-hundred-pound aggressor in a massive bite suit.

Stan moved down the line, popping open the cages. He went in and greeted each dog, gave them a good morning scritch and rubdown. Timmy had already come through, brushing and then feeding them. The old man had been around horses for all of his seventy-plus years, but was glad to help him with the dogs after a bad fall last year had limited his ability to ride. The guy was game and a great help. Though even that was becoming a strain for him.

After Stan greeted the last of them—Tiger, whose coloring had formed rough stripes down his flanks—he slapped his thigh and called, “Strecke.” He’d shortened it because Hindernisstrecke (obstacle course) was just too much of a mouthful in German, the dogs’ training language.

The seven dogs leapt from their cages and raced out the door headed for the obstacle course. He’d built it up over the last couple of years and he and Timmy had made even more improvements this spring. What had started as a few planks, a fence line, and an abandoned pickup truck, would now match any training setup short of Lackland Air Force Base. He’d been out to visit the Secret Service’s course at the James J. Rowley Training Center near DC. They had a big simulated urban center, the body of an airplane, and a few other things he didn’t, but their primary dog course had nothing on his.

Of course JJRTC was in a carefully wooded compound so that no one could observe Secret Service training methods. Out here, with only five other ranches within ten miles, crowds coming to watch wasn’t an issue. Sometimes ranch guests lined up along the fence, but as long as they left him alone, he didn’t care. The area had only one decent shade tree—a thirty-foot Ponderosa pine—which four of the dogs lay under awaiting their turn.

He began running the first trio through their paces, just loosening them up. Up the steep ramp to the narrow plank five meters in the air. Run along it, then jump off the far end into a water tank to simulate an ocean deployment out of a helicopter. Climb out and, after a good shake to clear the water, duck low and race through a twenty-meter twisting black-plastic sewer tube that was half the height of the dog.

Out the far end and up to a split in possible paths.

He’d done that to teach them to listen for his commands or watch for his hand signs. Sent to the right, they’d slalom through vertical slats. To the left, jump down into a grave-deep hole, then climb out through another section of sewer pipe that he’d buried at an angle. If signaled to proceed straight ahead, they’d launch themselves in through the open passenger’s window of an old pickup and place a hard bite on the mannequin driver until told to release.

The dogs never knew the order of the obstacles and he’d made several of them so that he could change their configuration quickly. They’d learned to always look to him for guidance.

After two years of training, they were to the point where he could have three at a time in the course, each watching for their separate commands from him. The ones under the tree watched their teammates attentively, eager for their chance to run. He no longer needed to leash them to a stake. Once told to Blieb, they stayed like rocks until he issued any number of release commands: Go, Come here, Attack, and so on.

He signaled the first group over to the sidelines and turned for the second group.

The woman was standing there. She was leaning against the fence that had once made this a horse paddock. The fence wouldn’t keep his dogs in, especially not these dogs. But it did keep any dumb horses from wandering into his training course and falling down a hole.

She leaned on the top rail with a fat burrito in her hand. No sign of the dog that wasn’t a camel. Damn woman cracked him up.

Out of the truck, she wasn’t much of a thing: five-six, maybe one-twenty. Camo pants, black t-shirt, and lace-up boots said that she was fresh out of the military. Plenty of muscle and no padding looked good on her. Her light-brown hair—or did they call it dark-blonde…dishwater…who knew with women—fell from her Navy ball cap to her shoulders in a tousled disarray that said she didn’t care how much of a mess she looked. It hid much of her face from view.

He waved the second trio forward. The first trio lined up to watch—panting heavily with their tongues lolling out. After any workout, Malinois always made it look as if they’d done some massive task and could never be bothered to move again. Given the least chance though, they’d happily bound back in for as long as he was willing to run them. During training, they’d been through a whole series of twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour hikes together, ending with an explosives test. Every dog in this class had massive endurance, they just liked pretending they didn’t. Maybe it was the ever-so-casual attitude of a seasoned SEAL warrior.

Once they were fully involved in the course, he signaled Bertram forward. On a whim, he sent his prize dog to run the course counter-direction. It only took knocking one of his classmates unexpectedly into the water tank for Bertram to get the idea.

He glanced back at Stan.

Stan sliced a flat hand twice—once at each of the other two dogs on the course. In moments, Bertram was giving them a hard lesson in surprises from unexpected quarters. The best comedy show he’d seen in a while, he couldn’t help laughing.

Something made him glance over his shoulder.

The woman was walking away, just turned and on the move. Half of her burrito lay in the dirt. What the hell was up with that?