Target Engaged

Chapter 5

5

“My name is Colonel Michael Gibson. Your group has the third highest passing rate in the history of Delta. Congratulations. Follow me.”

Apparently that and a group photo made up their graduation ceremony—a hundred and four soldiers down to seven.

Kyle had tried another kiss after they’d both gotten up off the dirt, but it hadn’t worked. Turnabout being fair, he’d driven her back against the wall and feasted greedily. He’d taken and she’d given, groaning with animal need as he grabbed her perfect handful of a breast and her leg wrapped around his waist.

But it was too forceful, too sparky, and he could only tolerate it so long. They ended up like two gladiators held at bay by the emperor’s command—a pace apart and panting hard.

“Maybe it would be better if we don’t try that again until we’re alone somewhere.” But he was sure as hell going to make certain that was real damn soon.

She reached out a hand, but jerked it back after she’d left a searing palm print on his chest with this lightest touch.

“Yeah.” Her nod of agreement tumbled her hair over her face. “Good idea.”

He risked brushing aside her hair and tucking it behind her ear. The warrior looked at him from her one uncovered eye. Yep, they’d definitely be doing battle soon.

They’d circled around to the front of the building, carefully a few feet apart—mostly because they couldn’t get any closer without losing it—and received the others’ congratulations. Chad and Duane, Max and Harry.

Once Richie made it through and had been thoroughly thumped on the back, the seven of them had followed the Colonel across the compound toward a set of concrete block buildings they hadn’t approached before.

The final seven.

Kyle couldn’t believe it. The other five who’d sat around the final campfire but not survived Review Board had been damn fine soldiers, tough as hell to have survived Stress Phase then be dismissed.

But when he saw who had made it, Delta Selection somehow made sense. These were not normal soldiers around him, nor merely exceptional ones. Not anymore, because anyone less than exceptional had long since been weeded out.

These were Delta, as different from the average Special Forces Green Beret as Navy from Army. He could see it in how they walked. They weren’t trooping along behind this colonel, or watching him particularly. These soldiers were independent, out-of-the-box thinkers who were chatting with and congratulating each other, already well on their way to being a close-knit team.

Except one.

Carla alone walked near the Colonel.

Colonel? Kyle hadn’t learned who the man was during the Commander’s Review Board, but he’d found that the man’s quiet questions were always the deepest and hardest to answer. This guy had the look of coming fresh in from the field. Who knew there was another colonel in Delta besides the commanding officer? And still on active deployment at his rank? That made the man special in a whole world of ways he couldn’t begin to unravel.

Kyle hadn’t given much thought to The Unit beyond joining it. He liked to set a goal and achieve it before assessing the situation and setting the next one.

He’d been in Delta less than an hour and the new goal was clear. Every man in that review board had looked to this Colonel Gibson, not to Brighton, The Unit’s commander. He was the ultimate Delta warrior. Quiet. Not arrogant. Focused.

Most wouldn’t see him as anything exceptional, but Kyle’s father would appreciate this man. Everything he did—speaking, moving, being still—came from a pure center of awareness that radiated outward.

It might take Kyle five years or fifteen, but he wanted people to look at him that way, to command respect simply by being present. He wanted to become Delta’s Number One warrior.

Kyle moved up close behind the Colonel and Carla to overhear as the Colonel led them toward the largest building on the compound—one they hadn’t entered before. Kyle shifted his position in the group as nonchalantly as he could. Only Carla appeared to notice his move, but she ignored him. He’d wager the Colonel noticed as well.

“My brother spoke highly of you, sir.” She kept her voice low and Kyle almost missed it.

“A good man and an exceptional pilot. Emily Beale flew with only the best.”

It was Kyle’s first clue that Carla Anderson had a past, and that was a surprise. Everybody did, of course.

There were grunts who talked about theirs—a few who wouldn’t shut up about it—and others who didn’t so much, and you learned to accept that.

Carla had always been one of the ones who didn’t—not at all.

It had added to her mystery, as if she’d been manifested on Earth out of pure soldier cloth. She’d talk about the Army and her time in the dust bowl of Southwest Asia, but that was it.

She’d started with Team Lioness, embedded in forward search teams to frisk Muslim women without violating their religious belief that no man other than their husband could touch them. The problem with forward search-and-recon was how often it turned into forward firefight. She’d performed so well in battle that they’d switched her over to a pure combat unit.

Yet here she was, talking to a Delta colonel about people Kyle had never heard of. And the colonel knew exactly who she was.

Because they were in the lead, the two of them reached the building’s double doors first, and they each held one wide for the others to enter ahead of them.

Kyle managed to drift back to being last man through the doors to remain close to the two of them. He overheard the Colonel speaking to Carla once more.

“It may be scant comfort, but it was a blindside takedown in the dead of night. There was nothing your brother could have or should have done differently. I did make sure that the shooter’s life lasted only seconds longer than his.”

Carla’s voice didn’t find its way out until they were inside the building and gathered in the high, dim concrete hallway with six doors spaced down its length.

“Thank you, sir.”

The Colonel merely nodded and led them toward the first door on the right.

Kyle wished circumstances were different and he could hold her for a moment. Not because of all of the heat that thinking about her sent coursing through his body, but to give her a moment of stability. Wasn’t gonna happen here, so he held the door for her and she entered the room blank-faced.

She gave him a nod of thanks, but he didn’t think that she recognized him at the moment.

Carla stumbled to a halt.

This was not what she’d expected. No classroom of desks. No training mats or weapons store. Beyond the heavy steel entry door off the hallway, she and the other trainees now stood in an average American living room.

There were couches, chairs, a desk, and a kitchen at the far end. End tables with knickknacks and bookshelves with books. There were also six dummies. Two were sitting on couches, three on stands like clothing-store mannequins, and the last leaning against a kitchen counter. They were dressed in a variety of clothes, and they were all armed.

“Look at this room,” Colonel Gibson ordered in that deceptively quiet voice of his. “Study it. Think of it as a problem. How would you attack this room and take out the six Tangos”—military speak for targets—“without hurting any of the civilians in it?”

There weren’t any civilian dummies, but there were chairs, sofas, plenty of places they might be.

The seven of them prowled the room. There were no windows, so the only point of entry was the door, and it was heavy steel. They discussed lines of fire and angles of attack. She liked that she didn’t feel too far behind on tactics, despite being the only one who wasn’t Special Forces or Special Operations trained.

One thing they agreed on—it would be a total bear to take this room, and the collateral damage in the form of dead hostages was going to be high.

“Now…” The Colonel called for their attention once more. As he spoke, the trainees were still scanning the living room, creating strategies.

Carla would have to think later as to how she felt about Colonel Gibson. The man who had killed her brother’s killer. She’d never thought to find out anything about her brother’s death. Yet on her first day here, she’d met this senior officer who had been there in the field with Clay as he died. Delta had been there and still called it unavoidable. Was it true, or was there a failure of The Unit’s abilities to protect and react to—

“Rearrange this room to make it more difficult,” the Colonel interrupted her thoughts. “Make it so that every line of attack you have thought of would fail. Make it so that the collateral loss of life would be near a hundred percent, no matter what strategy the attacking rescue force might use. Then have a seat as a hostage and we’ll discuss it.”

So, they were the hostages. That clarified the scenario, made it easier to change it from bad to awful.

They rearranged the furniture. They placed one Tango crouching behind the arm of a couch with his rifle leveled to cover both of its occupants and the only door. They placed two more mannequins behind a table that they flipped onto its edge to act as a shooting barrier. They worked around the room until it truly was a nightmare scenario.

The seven of them sat. Carla ended up on the couch. She shifted the villain’s rifle slightly so that it wasn’t pointed at her left ear, but it was still unnerving.

Kyle flipped the dead bolt on the steel entry door and then chose an armchair that masked a shooter behind him. It was in the corner of the room opposite the door, so there was essentially no way to spot the hidden shooter.

She was turning to see if she could find yet another way to make it harder when the world exploded.

The lights went out.

A massive explosion blew the door off the hinges.

A flash-bang filled the room with a blinding light, and she threw up an arm to protect her eyes.

Silenced gunfire spit around her. She heard a bullet whine so close to her ear that the krak of its supersonic flight hurt. The gust of another moved her hair. The heat of muzzle flash washed across her skin.

The lights came back on. Three seconds.

Four max.

The Tango crouched behind the couch arm was now sprawled on the floor with two holes in its Styrofoam forehead.

Four men were moving through the room with night-vision goggles shoved up on their foreheads, stripping the bad guys of their weapons. Each dummy received a third round in the heart from a silenced revolver as they went.

Ten seconds, it was done. The room was clear and not a hostage was touched.

“I think,” Colonel Gibson said drily from where he stood at ease in the middle of the room, “that concludes the discussion. Please feel free to inspect the results.”

The seven of them rose from their chairs, some steadier than others. She looked up at the corners of the room’s ceiling, but could identify no spy cameras. A glance at the Colonel, and he shook his head. So, no prior intel and they’d somehow done this with live ammo passing inches from her head—despite her being in motion to protect her eyes—without one of the hostages bearing a single scratch.

She went out into the hall and found the electrical panel with the simulated charge placed to blow it, though all they’d done was turn off the breakers.

The door had not been treated so gently. It was definitely blown, but not blown to s**t or it would have sent shrapnel into the room. They’d cut the hinges and the locks with small charges and then jerked the door aside with a heavy rope attached to the door handle on one side and a set of powerful suction cups on the other. It wasn’t rope, but rather heavy bungee line. So the door had flown out of the way the instant the hinges were shattered. It made entry a half second faster.

These guys were all about half-second advantages. Damn cool.

Every Tango, including the one crouched out of sight behind Kyle’s armchair in a corner of the room, was down with the three bullet holes. Not a single stray shot pockmarked a wall. Four attackers, six dead terrorists, eighteen shots total—less than a single standard magazine for only one of the HK416s that the Delta operators were carrying.

“How the hell…?” the class was starting to ask. Carla shared a quick look with Kyle. How is what they were here to learn.

How soon? was what she wanted to know. At least now she truly understood.

If Delta Colonel Michael Gibson said that her brother’s death was wholly unavoidable, she was going to believe him.

“You get tomorrow off. We suggest you sleep. Training begins the day after at 0600, and you can see that you’d better be sharp.” Colonel Gibson and the four Delta shooters started to leave the room.

He stopped at the door and waited until the shooters were clear.

“These four men”—he turned back to face the room—“they’re the graduates of the previous class. Like your class, there were seven of them at the start of OTC out of a hundred and twenty applicants.” Then he was gone.

The Operator Training Course was six months long. Three hadn’t made it, but now she had the answer to how soon she could do this.

“Six months!” she mouthed to Kyle.

“Can’t wait,” he mouthed back.