Target Engaged

Chapter 3-3

What is your goal, Carla?

Funny how rarely they’d actually talked. Some teasing, some Army talk—he was starting to suspect she’d seen a lot of action despite being a female in the regular forces—but nothing more.

He crested the top of the ridge in forty-five minutes and thanked the sudden breakout of moonlight from the high clouds, which was the only thing that stopped him from starting the descent much more abruptly than he’d planned; it was a knife-edge ridge. It would be fifteen more minutes until her footsteps started crossing over his, back at the bend in the stream.

He liked being that much ahead but could feel the pressure of her closing in. He chose his route down from the ridge and pushed ahead. No one had ever caught him yet.

And he had his pride. No one was going to. Especially not a woman who kept tempting his thoughts off his route.

He skittered down a scree slope of broken bits of mountain, moving in a diagonal crossing pattern to minimize the chance of starting a rock avalanche.

Was that intentional, Carla’s constant distraction of him?

No. The woman didn’t flaunt herself one bit, other than frying Ralph’s brain on that first day. Maybe that was the problem. Perhaps his own brain had been partially toasted in the backlash though he’d been an innocent bystander—his eyes drinking her in like a cool splash of water.

Kyle had seen enough women working it in the Green Beret bars to know—women hunting a Special Forces husband knew how to take command of the room.

If anything, Carla understated herself, which was one of her attractions. Take it or leave it, buddy. What you see is what you get.

And he wanted to take it. Bad.

So much so that he practically did a header off a short cliff near the base of the scree slope. He snagged a tree at the last moment and slowed his descent enough to make a clean transition to the lower slope.

Barely. Damn her!

“Get out of my head, woman!” he barked at the night, knowing it wasn’t going to happen.

For one thing, if he was so angry at her, why was he smiling like an i***t eight kilometers into a brutal hike?

Time for a new mindset.

“Bring it!” he told the night. “Just try to catch me, girlie!”

He laughed and broke into a slow trot despite the heavy ruck as he circled to avoid a steep canyon, well worth the extra two kilometers.

By the time she hit the bend in the stream, Carla had passed eight of the eighteen ahead of her. There were those who believed in conserving energy at the start, but come on, dudes! This was The Unit.

She’d driven herself over the first ground and made good time. At the stream she didn’t slow down except to scoop full an empty canteen as she crossed; the cadre observer back in the bushes had to dodge out of her way before she ran him down.

She’d stop after two hours for three minutes max. She’d studied the first three map sections before starting, had chosen and memorized her route.

Carla took a bearing and kept to the shortest travel line. Ignoring the significantly more traversable ridge line to the east, she aimed three kilometers up and over the peak to the next RV. She’d hiked the Continental Divide Trail—far less known than its Appalachian or Pacific Crest brethren—during her last two summers of high school. It required six months of walking over the highest peaks of the country, from the Crazy Cook Monument in the deep desert of New Mexico to Glacier National Park in Montana: three months south from Colorado to Mexico the first summer, and three months north to the Canadian border during the second.

These Appalachian mountains made her feel as if she was merely warming up, no more than that. She had to admit, though she wouldn’t say it aloud, that the Forty-Miler with full ruck and an M16 did add to the challenge.

When Carla crested the peak, Sergeant Major Maxwell was standing there. “Sergeant Major.”

“Blue Five.” Not a single instructor had yet used her name or anyone else’s outside of morning roll call. “Figured you’d be the one batshit crazy enough to follow this route.”

“Yes, sir.” Carla was itching to keep moving, but you didn’t brush off a sergeant major. And she liked that the head of testing had decided to place himself in position to wait especially for her.

“So, you’re done? No shame in it. You’ve destroyed pretty much every betting pool so far. You can walk away proud of what you’ve done. We’ll give you a top letter back to your regular unit. Recommend you to 75th Rangers.”

Carla didn’t know whether to shout at him or laugh in his face. A hundred times she’d been asked that question in the last thirty days, and she’d told them a hundred times no.

Though a recommendation to the 75th was damn high praise, especially coming from The Unit. But she didn’t want to be the first female Ranger or the first female Special Forces Green Beret or anything else. She was going to be Delta.

It took an effort, but she managed to keep her voice steady. “Think I’ll keep walking for a bit, Sergeant Major.”

“Show me that your flashlight works and show me where you are on your map.”

She hadn’t used her flashlight yet, preferring the moonlight, and she was standing on the peak of the mountain. She did both without comment.

He nodded and stepped aside with, “Have a good ’un.”

Carla made it about three steps past him when a sudden thought struck her. Turning back, she studied Maxwell’s face in the moonlight.

“Pretty much every betting pool?”

“Pretty much.”

“Your money still in there, Sergeant Major?”

“I put my money down on the first day. Haven’t seen any reason to place a bet since.”

“Didn’t answer the question, Sarge.”

“Don’t intend to, Blue Five. Have a good ’un.” And with that he melted into the night as if he’d never been there and she was alone on the mountaintop. Fifty-six kilometers to go.

Kyle stood at what he hoped to God was the last intersection. Sixty-five klicks over rough terrain with a twenty-kilo ruck. Eighteen hours.

Was that right? Or was it a twenty-mile hike and an eighteen-kilo ruck? He knew he’d started at midnight. He knew what the time was on his watch, but he was so hammered that he was having trouble connecting the two. Eighteen-hundred hours minus midnight was… still eighteen.

Sunset was stretching the shadows like goblins.

The blistering heat of the day had sapped his strength along with his wits, no matter how much water with electrolytes and how many energy bars he’d consumed. The straps of the ruck cut into his shoulders until his hands were numb and he could barely open a water bottle. He had to look down at his hands every now and then to make sure he was still carrying his rifle. Once he hadn’t been, but he’d found where it went fast enough. It had landed on his throbbing feet and hurt like unholy hell despite the boot.

His feet were long past agony as he forced them into the last turn and began climbing up the stiff hill to the final RV; thank God it was the final one. He crested a low rise and could see the trucks of the check-in point waiting a few hundred meters ahead, like manna from heaven.

“I can do a few hundred meters.” He dug deep and began forcing his body to honor his words. It helped that he could see one of the training cadre standing atop the rise looking down at him.

He’d made it several steps toward the man when there was a heavy crashing sound in the thick brush off to his right.

Kyle had not walked all this way to be surprised and mauled by a bear. He turned and blinked hard to restore his focus. No live ammo, solely this s**t-heavy M16. Too far downslope still for the cadre to make it to him in time.

Then he heard a sharp curse, followed by the appearance of a woman who looked much the worse for wear. Her hair was snarled with branches and leaves. Dried mud smeared up half her body as if she’d dived into a swamp to do the sidestroke. There were scratches on her face that had dribbled blood and dried crusty brown. She stumbled onto the open trail in obvious shock at her abrupt release from the tenacious clutches of the wilderness.

He probably looked much the same.

“Hey, Kyle.” Her smile was a grim acknowledgment of forty miles of pain and strain.

“Hey, Carla.” He’d never seen such a beautiful sight as this woman of the wild. No one had passed him through the night and the scorching day. That she’d made up fifty-four minutes on him should shock the s**t out of him—he hadn’t exactly been loafing along—but it didn’t. Damn she was tough.

“Race you.” Her voice was hoarse with exhaustion.

“Sure,” he grunted back.

They turned shoulder-to-shoulder, a few steps apart so that the cadre could see they were in no way assisting one another, and staggered up the trail, every step stinging his feet like hell, but each one also lighter for having her beside him.

At the RV, the cadre separated them.

His sergeant led him over to a truck. “Show me where you are on your map.”

I’m standing right here, i***t. Had to be the right place because Carla was here too. Of course, that kind of defined the right place no matter what a stupid map said.

What the hell was he thinking?

He fumbled out the folded paper and pointed. No, that was his starting point on this sheet. He moved his finger along the route he’d taken and found the end point as much by luck as coherence.

“Night is falling. Change out your batteries and show me that your flashlight works.”

Shit! s**t! s**t! This wasn’t the end of it. No way did he have another step in him. No, this was the end. They were messing with him. Weren’t they?

He managed to fumble open the light. It hurt like grabbing live voltage to make his hands work.

Kyle ignored the whole you can quit anytime spiel while he struggled with the fresh batteries, which took him several minutes. Somehow he managed it.

“Read these instructions.”

He couldn’t hardly see the instructions. Eight numbers. Map coordinates. It wasn’t over.

It took Kyle a full minute to parse the numbers and more time to make the right notation on his own map. Had to hurry or Carla would get a lead on him. Catching him was one thing; passing him was not acceptable.

Eleven more kilometers. Straight through the worst terrain in the entire Uwharrie Forest. No way in hell.

The cadre member checked his notation on his map, nodded, then stepped aside. “Have a good ’un.”

Carla stared at her cadre in disbelief.

Have a good ’un?

Eleven kilometers over butt-ugly terrain and he was saying, Have a good ’un?

It took everything she had to re-shoulder her ruck. Then it took everything she had to make that first step. And her whole being again to take the next.

When the cadre called out for her to stop, she ignored him.

She’d do this one f*****g step at a time if she had to. Kyle Reeves was never going to beat her again.

A couple of the trainers came up to block her progress; she bulled her way between them. Unable to stop, she actually ran head-on into one of them. It was like walking into a brick wall.