At the Slightest Sound

Chapter 1-3

Jesse held his breath and wondered how much it hurt to die. He could hear the crunch of leaves beneath the guerrillas’ boots. Whispered Spanish. Animals still screaming up in the trees…a whole world away.

At a soft sound to the right, the flashlight beam—which had been arcing toward him—slashed away even as it lit his hand. There was nothing over there that Jesse could see, but it definitely held the guerrilla’s attention.

The NERCs flowed around them to both sides. The two of them were horribly exposed; no ghillie suits that snipers used for hiding themselves, not even leaves and branches piled over them. All he could do was lie still and pray.

Somehow, in all his years of service, the enemy had never been so close he could touch them. Could smell them going past—from both the long sweaty day and the highly spiced meal that he must have so rudely interrupted by getting shot down.

Jesse’s stomach had the temerity to growl—he really needed to remember to eat before a mission—but thankfully his Little Bird bonfire chose that moment to find something else to blow up as the helicopter continued through the stages of its immolation. The guerrillas were far more intent on what was going on in the clearing than right at their feet.

Another light swung in from the left, but again veered aside to track a soft click barely loud enough to hear. Each time a light came toward their wholly exposed position, there was always some sound to distract them away.

Their accents were so thick as they shouted above the ongoing explosions—both mechanical and arboreal—that he could only catch a word here and there. That, and his Spanish was much worse than his Farsi. Regrettably his Farsi sucked almost as badly as his Arabic. Helicopter pilots weren’t usually worried about blending in down on the ground and his last three deployments had been in Afghanistan.

The Delta operator shoved her rifle down into the leaves accumulated around the tree they were lying beneath. He did the same. It hid the potentially reflective metal, though they both kept their safeties off and their grips on the handles. The rough polymer and the cool metal of the trigger lent absolutely no comfort at all.

Once it was obvious that the guerrillas were all in the clearing and cautiously searching the far tree line for “the pilot’s escape route,” he risked a whisper.

“The ghosts are definitely on our side tonight.”

“Ghosts?” She didn’t take her attention off the guerrillas. There was now a full platoon-strength force of thirty bad-asses in the clearing. About a quarter of them were some of the bad-assedest—most bad-assed? baddest-assed?—women he’d ever seen, if he didn’t count the Tennessean Delta operator standing in for Reese Witherspoon at his side. Even with the sarcastic boots on their side, taking on the NERC would definitely be a no-win scenario.

“Do you have a better explanation?”

“For what?”

“For the sounds that kept distracting their attention sideways every time they came close.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“They weren’t loud, but I heard them just fine.” Jesse puzzled at that. Delta operators weren’t known for missing details. He still felt disoriented by the events of the last fifteen minutes, but he wasn’t concussed. No headache. No blurred vision. The sounds that had distracted the guerrillas’ attention to either side of their not-so-much-a-hiding-place position had definitely been real.

“There are a lot of strange sounds in the jungle,” she dismissed his concerns with a whispered shrug. The noises from the burning helicopter were diminishing and he could start making out more of the Spanish being bandied about the field. They kept yelling to find the shooter, but their attention was still on the far side of the clearing. Mostly.

Because the fire was dying back from bomb to bonfire, he pulled his NVGs back down and spotted two nasty-looking NERC easing around the clearing perimeter, circumnavigating it just inside the tree line. On their present course, they were going to walk right over his and the Delta’s butts, which was going to be uncomfortable on several levels.

He pointed them out to her and she pulled down her goggles as well.

This time he was listening for it and heard the “ghost” distinctly—it sounded like a cross between a voice and a cracking tree branch. It was farther into the jungle and drew the search team deeper into the trees, circling behind their own position before continuing out the other side.

“Surely you heard that,” he whispered when they were well clear. “Cracking branch, definitely. Maybe even a voice.”

“Not a thing. You trying to freak me out?”

“Hey, I’m not the one being protected by ghosts.” Except he was, because he was lying in the dirt next to her. He tried to figure out how to unwind and repair that last sentence but finally decided that keeping his mouth shut was the best bolster to his argument.

She turned to him. Maybe light brown eyes rather than blue hid behind the NVGs…though they still didn’t feel any less sarcastic than the boots.

“I’m not imagining things. Seriously, there are a lot of very convenient sounds in this jungle tonight.”

She turned back to watching the others. “I’ve always had good luck hiding on patrol. I was just hoping that you didn’t jinx that.”

“Bet you were top of your SERE class.”

Her silence didn’t deny the charge. Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training was a brutal course designed to humble Special Operations soldiers about how poor their survival skills actually were if stuck behind enemy lines. The thing he’d hated most was the Resistance phase—not giving away critical information under interrogation. The instructors weren’t paid to be kind, but he’d bet that the guerrillas would be much worse.

“How do you do it?”

“What?” She kept her attention on the NERC who were fanning out to move off into the jungle on the far, eastern side of the clearing.

“Create your ghosts?” Their whispered conversation was definitely getting surreal. Do you believe in ghosts? was a question for starry-night campfire storytelling, not life-and-death jungle encounters. And the rest of his night wasn’t shaping up much better. The patrol that wanted to kill or capture him—thankfully headed in the wrong direction. The sounds. The female Delta operator who still hadn’t said her name—which might be because he hadn’t asked—thinking he was insane.

The first of the guerrillas shifted into the far trees. Damn those things were big. Unlike anything he’d ever seen before, though Texas wasn’t known for its thick jungle.

Of course she hadn’t asked his name either. “I’m Jesse Johnson. Most folks call me Outlaw. And you’re?”

“Pissed.”

“Hi, Pissed. Pleased to meet you. I’m guessing that your parents either had it in for you at the start or that they were drunken Brits—that’s what they call getting drunk over there, you know.”

She snarled as quietly as one of her ghosts. Apparently she already knew that.

Jesse kept an eye on the departing guerrillas. The clearing was slowly emptying as they fanned out to the far side of the clearing. Exactly as “Pissed” had said they would.

One circled the helicopter as the flames died down. He squatted down to peer into the cabin before shouting to his comrades, “Sin piloto!”—No pilot. Even Jesse could translate that. Then he picked up something from the ground. Nothing valuable should have survived.

“Mirame!”—look at me! He shouted it out.

The guerrillas not quite into the trees turned to do so as he lifted Jesse’s cowboy hat out of the grass and tucked it onto his head.

Nobody, but nobody put on another cowboy’s hat.

Jesse shot him.

The guerrilla screamed before he collapsed and died beside Jesse’s equally dead helicopter.

“What the hell!” Now the female Delta operator lying beside him wasn’t pissed anymore; she was livid. The guerrillas poured back into the clearing. “What were you thinking? You i***t. We were almost in the clear.”

“Dang!” He hadn’t been thinking. They’d already wrecked his helicopter, one that had been the best ride a cowboy could wish for. They’d killed his “horse.”

His hat—that Daddy had given him and his Momma had made the hatband for while she was pregnant with him—had been one violation too many.

“Any other bright ideas?” She sounded bitter and he couldn’t blame her. Any sweet teasing while she’d been hanging from her boots clinging to a dirt-y sky was gone.

“Well, we could use a really, really loud ghost right about now. Over there,” he pointed toward the north side of the jungle.

“s**t!”