Target Engaged

Chapter 3-2

In the regular Army, the guys were always offering to press her uniforms, teaching her how to use a heat gun to expand her boot’s leather to take the polish better, or hiding chocolates and mash notes in her bunk. Scanty lace undergarments were also a common gift. The next time she saw them, she would thank them, return the note or the underwear—though she ate the chocolate—then walk away. Didn’t matter if it was in front of the guy’s buddies, a drill sergeant, or a bird colonel. Confused the s**t out of most of them and made it stop pretty quickly.

Sergeant Kyle Reeves had done none of that. He’d simply been steady. She felt the heat every time his eyes lingered, but otherwise he treated her no differently than any other candidate. Perhaps friendlier, but he was one of those naturally friendly guys who seemed to know everyone’s life story within minutes of meeting them. Not something she’d ever been good at, not even close.

“Also per usual,” the Sergeant Major continued, “you may not speak to or assist another candidate unless they are critically injured and unable to help themselves.” That was the rule that had weeded out over twenty candidates in the second week. They didn’t know how to be self-reliant, how to function outside the structure of a military team.

Delta Lesson Number Kajillion Four: You gotta be able to do it alone against all odds.

“Remember, create a small fire in an open area if you’re hopelessly lost and voluntarily withdrawing. Do not use your radio unless it is a matter of imminent death and we need to get a medevac extract team to you. You’re good to go.”

Delta Lesson Kajillion Four and a Half: You gotta do it exactly by their rules. You wanna quit and you use the radio, then no nice-nice letter when they kicked your ass back down to the regular units.

That was the problem with Delta rules. The trainers were Delta themselves. They never got upset and they never explained. They tell you to go for a brutal hike, you go. They tell you to go sit under a tree with your ruck, you go and sit under a tree with your ruck. They tell you to go take yet another psychological questionnaire, you take it—and they did that a lot. Weirdly, it wasn’t about blind obedience, though that’s how Carla had taken it at first. Instead, it was about doing what was needed without hesitation—right now.

Only once in the last month did the day’s orders have anything to do with hygiene—a daily harangue in regular Army. They’d had a half day off, only one, after the shooting assessment. They’d been advised to clean up before going into town. That was it.

She’d gotten a pizza and a soda and then spent the rest of her half day asleep, knowing they were far from done. Three guys had dropped because the next day’s march hadn’t mixed well with a crashing hangover. Good. She didn’t want any grunts with the play-hard, fight-hard mindset beside her during trouble anyway.

“Have a good ’un.” Sergeant Major Maxwell offered the standard Delta end-of-instructions. Every trainer said it with an easy Southern accent, whether they were Yankee, Texan, or inner-city LA. She’d asked one of the training cadre about that after he’d cleared her to continue through an RV in the middle stage of a brutal hike—it had crisscrossed a mountain six different ways in a pattern like Jewish star high on drugs. Seems the saying traced back to the sergeant major who’d helped form the unit.

“Have a good ’un.”

And with that much ceremony, they were ready. They were released at three-minute intervals. They had five RV points to hit on the hike, but how they got there was up to them. Shortest possible route was forty miles. Longest route? Depended on how lost you got.

Kyle’s number was called first out. Figured.

“Kiss ass,” she called out to him as he hauled on his ruck and headed out.

“Whatever works…girlie.” Then he was gone before she could nail his cute ass to the trail.

Later, she promised his retreating form.

“Blue Five.” The number she wore today was nineteenth of twenty off the line.

Fifty-four minutes cooling her heels. If she’d known, she could have taken a nap.

Carla hated it, but that was something she’d learned to do early on. Cooling her heels was definitely Army Lesson Number One.

Kyle Reeves followed his first heading easily. The opening six kilometers of tonight’s hike was along a trail—which in Delta-speak meant something a Humvee could force its way down if it was being chased by a rabid horde of zombified Chinese about to eat your face off.

He was allowed to follow the trail, if possible, but he couldn’t get within fifteen meters of it. Fifteen meters through the thick Carolina brush, then six klicks in a straight line. After the first week of brutal road hikes and then three more of orienteering, this leg was a piece of cake.

He’d faced a lot of grueling workouts; Green Berets were good at that. His dad had been one too. A tae kwon do, kung fu, and weapons sensei who didn’t hesitate for a second to knock you down if your defenses were weak, not if you were his son and not even if you were a teenage girl. He wasn’t brutal—he’d never hurt you more than a hard block and a tumble, maybe leaving a black-and-blue mark or two—but he wore you down until you learned.

Mom had a full-time office gig, so after school the bus dropped Kyle at Dad’s dojo. There he got a snack, did his homework, and then hit the mats right through until the evening classes were done. Didn’t matter what the class was, he was in it. Advanced weapons at the age of six, white-belt introduction for first graders when he was fifteen and wearing black himself.

Saturdays were in the dojo until two, then as often as not, they were out the back door and headed up into the fishing streams of Washington State. Mostly car camping, with tent and campfire. Those were the times he loved the most. He, Mom, and Dad standing in a glacier-fed stream together and pretty much doing nothing.

The hard discipline of Delta was so familiar to him, between martial arts and Green Berets, that it seemed to make sense when he bothered to think about it.

It was a shock when he reached his first marker of the hike, a sharp bend in a narrow but fast stream. He crossed it, getting wet to the thighs in the strangely warm water. He’d never get used to that—mountain streams were supposed to be so cold that merely thinking about them made your balls shrivel.

No training cadre member was waiting at the RV. For a moment he wondered if he was in the wrong place. They were always there to make sure you were on track and coherent enough to keep reading your map. Also to dispense their constant offers to quit.

Not tonight. Tonight he and the others were on their own, though a trainer probably sat nearby watching him through night-vision gear. Might as well be alone, which was fine with him. No way to spot a Delta operator who didn’t want to be seen, though he’d bet on the snarled clump of bushes about ten paces out.

He took a moment to drink water and check his map and compass. He refilled his canteen from the stream, dropped in purification tablets, and hung it back on his harness. It would get plenty of shaking as he walked.

The next leg was three kilometers…if he was an eagle. Being merely human, it was a four-kilometer-long, brutal-looking ridge ascent then descent on a nearly direct line—or an eight-kilometer walk around. Only the RVs mattered—you couldn’t miss those. How to get there was completely up to each hapless grunt.

He’d been moving well so far, but he wouldn’t be able to count on that at the other end of sixty-five kilometers. The shorter route would be faster, but riskier. He was used to risk.

He resettled his ruck, checked his watch.

Fifty-three minutes. He was already sore, sweaty, and barely a tenth of the way done, at least in distance. Looking at the map, that first section was definitely going to be his fastest stretch of the night. Well, he wasn’t covering ground standing still.

He wondered how Carla was doing. He’d make a small bet that the trainers had released her last just to make her crazy. No, second to last. That way she couldn’t quite claim gender bias, not that she’d mentioned it even once.

But for the hell of it, he kept his eye on his watch, letting his body rest another forty-five seconds.

There.

Fifty-four minutes.

He strode out at exactly the same moment Carla Anderson was probably taking her first step. He liked the feel of that, as if they were walking along together, though they were six kilometers apart.

Keep blowing wind up your own backside, Reeves.

They weren’t walking together, as nice as that sounded, but apart. She’d be coming for his ass on this hike. Well, that only made it all the better. He dug in. She’d have to run to catch him, despite those amazingly long legs of hers.

That woman did something to him. Well, she did something to every one of the guys. The way she looked, it was impossible not to. But the other guys mostly left off at the s****l fantasies.

In addition to her poster-soldier-of-the-month looks, Kyle also liked her no-nonsense attitude. Guys would spend evenings in the mess hall or around the campfire if they were out in the wilderness, reliving the brutal day or the stupid psych test or griping about only getting a half-day shooting course.

Didn’t they get that this wasn’t training? This was selection testing. Delta only let them shoot a half day because that was all it took to make sure he could at least handle and use a weapon without killing himself or the guy beside him. They’d train them in their own way once the testing was done and they were into the Operator Training Course. That was the next prize, getting into OTC, but most guys didn’t seem to be looking much past today and maybe tomorrow.

Carla Anderson did. She didn’t waste time with griping or complaining; she got it done. One of only three to shoot thirty out of thirty—it didn’t get any better than that.

Though it was hard to imagine her as a regular-forces soldier. There was a core feistiness that he bet ran right over anyone in her way, which would be as ugly as it was fun to watch—if he wasn’t the target.

However, to his best guess, that’s what made her perfect Delta material. Go walk thirty klicks across impossible terrain with marginally sufficient information. She’d be the second one into the RV—hot on his heels despite his gender advantages.

Now he was walking with her—though not with her—in the dark of the Uwharrie. He fought his way up the ridge, steeper than it looked by the map’s contour lines. More than once he unintentionally kicked a rock loose and listened to it bound down the hillside. He hoped no one was directly below, the sharp clack and clatter of each rebound the only sound other than his own harsh breathing.

He made a bet with himself; Carla would also choose this shorter route over the ridge. He wanted to stop here, wait for her, make love on the hillside beneath the starlit sky.

Yeah, and he’d end up with boot prints right over his back as she raced toward the goal.