Target Engaged

Chapter 7

7

Carla trotted silently down the darkened hallway. The four other trainees were clustered around her as they moved.

They’d lost Harry and Max in the last six months of the Operator Training Course. Harry decided he couldn’t hack the mental side. Delta wasn’t for your average Joe, not even when a grunt was exceptional enough to qualify.

Max had dropped out with a torn knee courtesy of a bad nighttime parachute jump into the high Rockies—though he’d successfully completed the five-day mountain-survival exercise wearing a splint and swore he’d be back in the next class. The Unit had given him a pass on Delta Selection; he’d go straight into OTC with the next group.

They learned everything from how to attack a helicopter to how to fly one. Comm gear, rifles, medicine, languages; the list grew as they started redesigning it themselves to address their own strengths and weaknesses.

They were expected to pick up at least one new language on top of the training time.

Carla already had Spanish and parts of Russian, so she’d gone for Mandarin. Kyle already spoke Mandarin, chunks of French, and gutter Spanish; he’d opted for Russian. Their lovemaking, when they could steal a moment, had become a strange mash-up of polyglot exercises. It was easy to be sexy in Spanish or sly in Mandarin, but for seriously raunchy, Russian kicked ass.

They approached their target. The door in the hallway had no exterior hinges, no obvious dead-bolt lock, merely a flat sheet of metal. Training cadre never duplicated a single exercise, always creating something new.

Duane had shown a real skill with blowing s**t up and was now their chief breacher. His smile was bright in his dark face as he started prepping the door. Richie and Chad were rigging a haulback to snatch the door out of the way as soon as Duane had it blown. The trainers had put a sign on the far wall that said, “This wall isn’t here. Don’t use it.”

Fine. They appropriated a handy forklift to act as the counterbalance. If it got dinged up by the flying steel door, that was training’s issue, not theirs.

Carla spotted a shadow high on the wall. She stepped back to squint up at it, lost in the darkness beyond the hanging light fixtures. She flashed a signal to Kyle, pointing upward.

He looked up over his shoulder, assessing what she’d found. In answer to her question, he dropped his back against the wall and cupped his hands. The man was good at risk assessment and instant decisions, way faster than she was.

Three running steps, a foot planted in his palms, and in a moment she was standing on his shoulders, his hands bracing her ankles. He held her there easily on those strong shoulders of his.

His grip was as solid and assured as when he was driving her body to new extremes of release—she hoped that he never tired of that particular avenue of exploration as he’d proven to be awe-inspiringly creative—or holding her while they slept. What man actually held you in his sleep? Kyle Reeves. That she’d grown to like it, that was the weirdest part.

Focus!

A quick glance through the vent she’d spotted proved her right.

She slid an electric screwdriver out of her thigh pocket and in moments had the grill removed from the heating duct. She set it atop a nearby light fixture and leveraged herself into the ventilation system.

One minute and two turns later she was looking down into the shoot room through a ceiling ventilation-intake grate. Once again, Colonel Gibson was doing the spiel to the crop of new trainees who had recently survived the selection process. Her team hadn’t seen him more than once or twice since their own graduation.

Not daring to make a noise—including a whispered radio report—she pulled out a cell phone, snapped four images, and texted them to the rest of the crew. She loved going low-tech.

Stay high or drop in? She decided on high, mostly. No need to explain; her team would be looking for her.

Her cell texted back, Three.

Carla counted in her head, Two. One.

And the door blew.

Under cover of the blast, she flipped the ceiling grate vent cover aside and quickly slid forward headfirst until her hips hit the edge of the vent before jamming her feet to the sides of the duct to brace herself.

Hanging upside down, dangling halfway down from the center of the ceiling, she closed her eyes for an instant to avoid being blinded by the flash-bang.

Then firing from her position like an inverted swivel-gun turret, she took out three of the terrorists with double-taps to the head. By the time she finished, the four guys were in through the door and had taken down the five other terrorists—eight dummies in the room this time, two dressed as housewives, but still armed.

As she did a drop-and-roll into the room—long before the hostage trainees had a chance to recover enough to see how she entered—she saw the smile flicker across Colonel Gibson’s lips. Impossibly, he’d known she was there above him, damn the man. Someday she’d surprise him.

Right. That was about as likely as surprising Kyle Reeves. Wasn’t gonna happen… Wouldn’t keep her from trying though.

She reached up with her rifle to knock the vent back into place. To the trainees, it would appear that she’d been teleported magically into the center of the room. In a way she had. When she’d had her first turn sitting on the couch, she’d sat there thinking she knew s**t. Now Carla had the sneaking suspicion that maybe, at long last, she finally did know some s**t. At least a bit.

They finished the weapons strip and security shots before turning toward the door. Six trainees had made it through the selection process this time and were starting to tune in to what had happened around them. Five guys and another woman.

Saddle up, girl. It’s gonna be fun. Of course, there’s only one Kyle Reeves, and she had him. So, the woman was going to have less fun than Carla, for that fact alone.

Carla didn’t speak to her, of course, or acknowledge her existence, but the woman’s blue eyes were certainly tracking her. Carla could feel the want, the deep-rooted need to conquer this. It was a look that Carla had seen in the mirror every single day, which she figured gave the woman good odds of making it.

Out in the hall, they repacked their gear while the trainees did their inspect and wonder. After his pronouncement about OTC graduates, Colonel Gibson left the trainees behind while he led Carla’s five-person team to the airplane mock-up.

Over the last six months, they’d run through the six doorways off this hallway a bust-ass number of times—each. And it felt like more. At first, moving step by step with lights on and firing Simunitions that merely stung and left a red-colored dot. Then in pairs, finally as a full team. One terrorist, two, five. Then the same progression but with live ammo. Living room, airplane, ship’s bridge, tunnel-and-cave system—they’d done them until the scenarios had oddly all become the same.

The environment controlled what was possible, but not what was required. Each scenario became simply another integrated layer of possible actions, practiced until the varying terrain could be addressed without thought and thus the targets could receive her full attention.

The colonel led them to the far end of the concrete hallway, where they could still hear the echoes of the surprised murmurs of the recent graduates. Last door on the right led them into the nose of a 747. The front hundred feet of an old 747-100 had been put here. They climbed the stairway to the First-Class lounge.

Duane dug water bottles out of the steward’s station and began tossing them around. They all dropped into a group of deep leather airplane seats facing one another.

Kyle rolled the water bottle across his forehead. The action phase was measured in seconds and the overall operation itself in mere minutes, but that didn’t make it one bit less of a workout. He knocked back half the bottle and inspected his team.

He wasn’t the leader, not really. They were five individuals who were exceptionally good at working together. Drop in another operator or take two away, which they often did during training, and it didn’t matter. Delta was flexibility. Not about flexibility, rather something they simply were. Yet he’d be sorry if this team split up. Not only he and Carla—which was a horrifying possibility that they’d only been able to tolerate discussing once—but this whole team hummed.

Chad was their hammer. His blond good looks and cherubic smile hid a Detroit street fighter who’d clawed his way out of the gangs and would have your back until hell froze over. He was almost as sharp as Kyle on tactics. Kyle often used him to lead the other group when they split the team; Chad always knew what to do with them. They tried tagging him with Farm Boy for his Midwestern Scandinavian looks, among others. Nothing had stuck until the day Kyle had watched him during a rapid-fire practice and tagged him The Reaper.

In contrast, his best buddy, Duane, came from a privileged Atlanta background. He was milder, funny, but no less dangerous when cornered. Carla had called him rock solid once, and he’d been called The Rock ever since because it fit him so well. Duane Jenkins wasn’t huge or nearly as dark-skinned as Dwayne The Rock Johnson in movies, but it stuck. Duane was a straight-ahead thinker, but he consistently got it done once you had him aimed in the right direction.

Richie was their boy genius. He was Kyle’s age, but it was as if he was walking the planet for the first time. He overanalyzed the s**t out of everything, served up exactly the information you needed, and then threw himself full tilt into any situation. Knowing his own shortcoming of overthinking, he let himself be guided into action easily when needed. He was a huge James Bond fan, so that tag of Q had been inevitable.

There’d been an early tendency to put Carla on a pedestal, but she’d slammed down on that in typical Carla fashion. Kyle had managed to compartmentalize and only worship her in the bedroom. The rest of the time he simply respected the hell out of her.

Over the months, the team had eventually looked to him.

He didn’t literally take command, but he could see from an overview level what was needed and lay it out for them. By the time OTC was over, he could do it with three words and a couple gestures. He knew exactly how best to deploy the team’s strengths. He’d often assign someone to their weakest skill to get practice in it; they never questioned him about that. It was a giddy feeling, being able to shape such an elite force to the mission at hand.

Richie had tried to tag him with Bond. Chad had shot for Superman based on Kyle’s last name, which Duane had immediately rejected along with a suggestion of Clark Kent because ain’t Kyle so purty?

Carla was the one who finally tagged him with the simple Mister Kyle, as if he were in the Avengers TV show and she was his pretty and dangerous sidekick. She’d rejected Ms. Peel by knocking Chad hard on his ass when he suggested it. Instead, his prone epithet of Wild Woman had been what stuck, because she could unleash wild big-time when that’s what was needed.

For all her attitude, Carla never questioned Kyle either. She was simply a fantastically creative weapon that he could aim and fire with no question of her ability to deliver every time. In planning, in operations, and in bed.

They’d been sleeping together for half a year—sharing a place off base when they were here at Fort Bragg—and oddly, he knew her less well than most women he’d slept with.

She had proven herself as capable as Kyle or any of the guys. Any lack in upper body strength was more than compensated for with sheer tenacity. And in bed she always packed a s****l fire that burned him up in the most intense ways.

He studied her sidelong, but nothing stood out, other than being an exceptionally beautiful woman. But despite giving selflessly to the team and to him personally, it felt as if she wasn’t there.

Then she turned and caught his inspection, and he knew he was being an i***t. Her frank look showed a woman who was one hundred percent present and accounted for. It must be the jags of coming off the live shoot that were confusing him.

Yet he’d had such thoughts before. Or he was losing his mind, which was always a possibility.

They were done with the Operator Training Course.

There would be plenty of specialty training, on top of the never-ending general training of Delta. But none of them knew what came next.

And they certainly looked out of place here, every one of them.

The airplane’s First Class shoot room was somewhat the worse for wear, but the maintenance guys were pretty good at putting it back together each time the trainees tore it apart. So here they sat in a room that could have been comfortably cruising at thirty thousand feet, dressed in tight-fitting black and wearing enough live ammo to take down multiple shoot rooms. They sat as comfortably in vests loaded with magazines and with HK416 suppressor-equipped, night-vision-scoped rifles across their laps as real First-Class fliers did with their whisky miniatures and tablet computers.

“You’re only the second one ever to notice the vent system.” Colonel Gibson opened the conversation.

Carla hesitated and then nodded. “And you were the first. I was wondering how you guessed I was there. As we walked the hallway, I found myself wondering how smoke is cleared out of the rooms without any windows.”

“I spotted the vents clearing the smoke during the initial demonstration. Happened to have blinked my eyes closed and turned away when the flash-bang went off. Spent six months waiting for a chance to use that fact.”

She stuck her tongue out at the Colonel, who laughed softly. Colonel Gibson didn’t look as if he was someone who did that often.

Kyle could see the others exchanging looks. He agreed with them. Wild Woman was the most out-of-the-box thinker they had. None of them had thought about how the room itself functioned.

“As you are no doubt aware,” Gibson resumed, “the operational tempo at Delta has never been higher. After twenty years of mostly being called to the point of launch and then receiving mission aborts, The Unit has been on continuous deployment for over a decade. For the last four years we have often run four or five operations a night in one theater or another. Over six thousand Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and Al-Shabaab high-level assets are no longer on the line because of Delta and DEVGRU.”

There were low whistles around the room. Kyle had heard rumors of that; it was one of the reasons he’d joined. But to hear it confirmed was another thing entirely.

The Colonel nodded. “The large-scale military served their role, but the Tier One assets are why those three are mostly off the map—at least at present. New recruits and groups are cropping up, of course, and we’ll be the ones sent in to deal with them as well.”

Kyle looked about the room. This was the team he’d want to be with when they went in.

“Typically it starts with a single piece of intel that leads to an engagement with unfriendly forces, which leads to immediate new intel and continues in a rapid cascade of target opportunities. We can frequently roll up entire cells leading straight to a high-value target in a single night. While that would be a normal first assignment for a new team, which is split up and integrated with other operatives in the field, this team has not been selected for that type of operation.”

“Excuse me, sir.” Kyle sat forward. “Did you say ‘not’?”

“That’s correct, Sergeant Reeves. This team has performed exceptionally and will be held together as a unit for the time being. You have”—he checked his watch—“twenty-three minutes to gather any items from the quartermaster that you wish to add to your full kit. Showers are recommended as well. A vehicle will be in the compound to take you to Pope Field for immediate departure.”

Kyle checked his watch and spun the outer dial to twenty-two minutes from now, then he waited.

Nothing.

Carla and then, one by one, the rest of the team smiled.

Classic Delta.

No instructions you didn’t need, like where the hell they were going. Which also meant they should be prepared for anything.

“Will you be leading us, sir?”

Colonel Gibson looked at him steadily for a long moment before answering, “You’re inside The Unit now.”

Right.

Yet another readjustment to his thinking. If they needed a leader, they wouldn’t be here. Every one of them had been a squad or section leader in their old units, and that was before OTC. They weren’t qualified to command a company or a battalion, but they’d certainly know how to have those commanders place and use their team to best advantage in a situation.

They rose to their feet and were about to file out when Kyle stopped and turned. The others drifted to a halt to see what he was up to.

He shifted to smart attention and then formally saluted the Colonel. “Have a good ’un, sir.” As if the Colonel were the one being dismissed back to training.

His whole team snapped to and mirrored his salute.

“Roger that, Sergeant.” Colonel Gibson saluted back.

It didn’t get Kyle a laugh, as Carla had, but it did get him a pretty good smile. Made Kyle feel like he was ready.