Target Engaged

Chapter 9-3

“Wild Woman’s Lesson of the Day: Never do anything by halves.”

They slapped high fives all around.

Duane grabbed her shoulder and gave it a hard shake of congratulations. “The teacher is so proud.” She punched his Rock-hard arm in thanks, and they began their walk deeper into Yacambú Park.

The General cooperated, though he was out of shape and it slowed them down, but Kyle was unwilling to remove the gag to give him more air. The Major needed the occasional rifle butt to the kidneys to remind him who was in charge, which Kyle meted out with atypical severity. Knowing they’d have at least one hostage, Carla had planned a slower, easier hike out.

Five kilometers and ninety minutes later they arrived at a different section of the park, at the head of a large waterfall that stair-stepped downward in cascades for several stories. It was ten meters wide and simply gorgeous. Each tier was so square that it looked hand carved. She’d bet at another time—that wasn’t 0400 in the middle of an exfiltration—it would be a beautiful and idyllic getaway.

An image of her yanking down Kyle’s shorts as they splashed about in the lower pool sizzled nicely through her nervous system, and Carla filed it away for future reference.

They put lifting harnesses on their two captives and rebound their feet. Carla could see the Major eyeing the jump down into the lower pool. It was marginally possible, if he weren’t bound.

She moved close to whisper in his ear. “Try it, Señor Mayor. Take the dive. Please. I’ll gladly put two rounds up your ass before you hit the water. Bet I can get both to go swish, right in the old butthole.”

“And I’ll shoot off your f*****g balls while she’s at it,” Kyle snarled close in the man’s face. Then, though the Major was taller than Kyle and overweight as well, Kyle lifted the guy by the throat with one hand and slammed him onto the ground hard enough to knock all the air out of him.

Carla had never heard such a sound from Kyle or seen him so angry. There was a livid fury there that the Major recognized as mortally dangerous. He stopped eyeing possible getaways and lay there gasping for air through his gag.

She led Kyle aside. “What was that about?”

He shook his head.

“Don’t shake me off, Kyle. Others, okay, but not me.” Now where the hell inside her had that come from? Since when did she care?

He walked away from her, and she felt like she was the one who’d gotten a rifle butt in the kidneys.

Well, she was only sleeping with him, she wasn’t his keeper. His choice.

Still…it hurt.

No goddamn way was Kyle going to take that nasty image from the Major’s bedroom and give it to Carla.

He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, so no need to signal their arrival.

Chad and Duane put fresh batteries in their night-vision goggles and moved into the trees to set up a perimeter. The Major and General had made so much noise that the silence of the jungle about them had been complete. They continued crunching branches and grunting at each other through their gags.

Apparently tired of their fussing, Carla nudged the General from sitting to his side. When he rolled onto his stomach, she sat down on him and aimed her rifle lazily at the Major’s crotch. That seemed to calm them both down.

A parrot squawked questioningly from the trees. Richie swung down his backpack, pulled out the satchel of intel they’d dragged out of the hacienda’s offices, and began sorting through it.

Yeah, they might as well.

Kyle squatted beside him, clicked on a small flashlight, and began scanning the folders.

He hoped someone cared about the content of these files, because he sure didn’t. Long sheets of payments to coded entries, a couple of old appointment books…assorted crap. Nothing that looked immediately actionable, which was all he cared about. If he found something that said, Drug shipment tonight leaving from… But he didn’t, so he could leave it all to the analysts.

Richie didn’t have any better luck. The laptops both had passwords.

Kyle turned to force their prisoners to key them in, but Richie stopped him.

“Nope. They could have a second code that destroys everything on the drive. I could crack it, but I don’t have the tools with me. Leave it for the CIA.”

First Kyle had heard of that trick, but he wasn’t Q. They dumped it all back in the bags.

He checked his watch: one minute to exfil.

That would be good. Get in the air and get the hell out of this country. Maybe then he could figure out what the hell was going on in his head. He was such a mess right now because of that young girl that if he’d tried to explain anything to Carla when she’d pushed, he’d probably have wound up leaning into her shoulder for support or another stupid-ass move.

That would actually be stupid in a whole lot of ways. Not the least was that he’d bet that Carla would have less of an idea of what to do with that than he did when a woman wept on him.

Get it done. Get out of here.

Eleven seconds before scheduled pickup was the first moment he heard the helicopters. They came out of nowhere, fast, and one slid to a hover thirty meters up, barely clear of the treetops. A line snaked down three seconds early as the other bird set up a circling patrol. The US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment was banging it out like usual. He’d only ridden with them a couple of times as a Green Beret and two days of training that were intense even by The Unit’s standards. They were always there within a thirty-second window.

He went down the line checking that each person was snapped in. The SPIES rope—Special Patrol Insertion-Extraction System—included a series of embedded D-rings separated by a few meters each.

He moved to the last ring in the line, hesitating a moment at Carla’s second-to-last position to brush a hand of thanks over her shoulder for not pushing. She looked at him like she was pissed or hurt, hard to read in night-vision green. Not the time to ask.

At the last position he snapped the D-ring onto the lift point of his vest’s harness and held both arms out to his sides with his thumbs up. The others were doing the same, except for the two with bound hands.

A spotter high above them noted they were all ready and took them aloft.

Before they cleared the trees, SOAR was reeling them up and moving out—fast. Kyle, in lowermost position, kept pulling up his feet as they approached treetops at over a hundred and fifty miles per hour. The more they reeled the group in, the more his bare clearance over the trees remained unchanged. As the SOAR pilot bobbed and dodged above the terrain, they were also descending by exactly the amount he was being reeled in. It was freaky how good these guys were. With each slow spin, he had a clear view of the smaller Little Bird attack helicopter flying rear guard.

He was last aboard as they swooped down into the countryside of the coastal lowlands.

The outside of the helo had looked strange as he came aboard and he’d been unable to identify the helo by sound, which was odd; he’d had a lot of training in that. Carla helped pull him in as the helicopter actually climbed to clear a pile of hay in a field and then descended once more.

From the inside, he could see it was a Black Hawk. Kyle could fly a Black Hawk, but only if he was desperate. SOAR made the machines dance and sing.

A final glance out the open cargo-bay door; he watched a house go by at eye level, a one-story house. He looked inside quickly as the helo bobbed upward, then back down—probably avoiding a gopher hole mound at this altitude.

“These guys are cool,” he shouted to Carla as one of the crew chiefs snapped a safety line to the D-ring on his chest and then demonstrated with a yank that it was well attached to the helicopter’s frame before she released him from the SPIES harness.

Then the crew chief leaned in and shouted loud enough for him to hear over the pounding of the rotors and the wind rushing by the open cargo-bay door: “We’re especially cool because we’re…not-guys.”

Well, if that didn’t beat all.

A Black Hawk flown by not-guys.

Carla decided that was beyond especially cool.

A SOAR Black Hawk flown by women. There was only one of those that she knew of. Clay had flown with these women and couldn’t stop talking about them. And here they were.

Carla sat with her back against the cargo netting and contemplated how small a community Special Operations Forces was. Delta operators numbered in the low hundreds, and SOAR wasn’t much bigger. There weren’t that many soldiers at this level. She’d always felt awkward about how Kyle seemed to know the background of most candidates in Delta Selection.

Served with him in Bolivia.

Spends a lot of lead, but real steady in a firefight.

We did Airborne together. He squealed like a pig on his first jump.

But she was starting to see how it happened. Because her brother had died flying with SOAR, she actually knew about them even if she didn’t know them.

Kyle was close beside her. Shoulders bumping lightly with the helicopter’s rollicking flight as if they were at the end of the Forty-Miler around the fire. So, whatever had been bugging him on the ground must not have anything to do with her. She started to ask him, What the hell? but then thought better of it.

Focus on the mission, that’s what mattered. Their relationship—damn, there was too heavy a word to tote around for everyday use—would take care of itself.

The General and the Major were tied back-to-back in the middle of the helicopter’s cargo bay and attached to a couple of tie-down points. The other three Deltas were doing exactly the same thing she and Kyle were, restocking their ammo from their packs.

The female crew chief who’d latched them in had the name Davis on her gear. So this was Connie Davis. She offered them a box of cartridges.

“No thanks. We hand load our own rounds.”

“So does she.” Connie pointed at the other crew chief. “At least for match shooting.”

“She do a lot of that?” Kyle asked.

“Yes, she has been President’s Hundred four years running. Twice number one.” No sound of pride in her crewmate, merely a simple fact stated as such. The woman drifted away. The President’s Hundred was the premier shooting competition of the year.

Carla turned to Kyle. “You know who that is?”

“No. I had no idea a woman had ever placed number one, though I remember an unlikely story about a serious babe of a shooter.”

“The one just talking to us is considered the number one mechanic in all of SOAR, so the other one has to be Kee Stevenson. Top five sniper in the US military four years running. And I’ve heard that they’re both serious babes.”

“Top five only ’cause Delta never shoots in that competition.”

“Right, tough guy. And you’re welcome to outshoot Kee Stevenson anytime you want.”

“How do you know this, Anderson? It’s like with that colonel. You seem to know everybody.”

She kept her mouth shut.

“Damn! Sorry.” Kyle kept his voice down. “I’m dumber than Richie.”

Which wasn’t saying much, considering that Richie was the genius of the crowd. Though he could be pretty inept at times, especially around her when they were off duty. He didn’t have a clue about women. He got tangled up trying to memorize everything when she was trying to give him social skills, as if women could be approached using a rote list of techniques. Telling Richie to be himself snarled him up ten times worse, so she saved that for when she wanted to watch the show.

“Your brother, right?” Kyle said softly.

She’d rather bite off her tongue than try to speak. It wouldn’t come out well, not at all. This was the kind of thing Clay had done, flying into foreign countries at night with no one the wiser. Until it went to s**t and he ended up in a sealed box in a hole in the ground.

Kyle was waiting on her, so she managed a nod. It had been her big brother.

He left a respectful pause before continuing.

“So, these women are hot s**t?” Somehow, Kyle knew she needed the subject change and he made it funny, bless him.

It helped her get control back. She nodded again and then whispered, “It was his stories of these women that made me go for Delta. That and Colonel Gibson. The perfect soldier. It’s so what a man should be.”

Kyle grunted as if she’d kicked him.

“You truly are a dumbass, Reeves.”

“Why’s that? Because I don’t like the woman I’m sleeping with lusting after a colonel? He’s way older than you, you know.”

She smiled at him. “Because you don’t see that you’re the younger version of him. You’re that damn good.”

Their flight abruptly leveled out and steadied. They must finally have been over the water and headed for whatever craft was awaiting them offshore.

“Am I good?” Kyle asked, clearly going for the joke to avoid letting the compliment in. Typical. “Or am I, you know, goood?” There was no doubting his second meaning, not with that low, seductive voice of his.

Well, she wasn’t going to stroke his ego that much. “You’ll do.” She came close to adding for now, but a part of her bit it off. A part of her that she was becoming very suspicious of.

He acted like he’d been shot in the chest. Clamping his hands over his heart, he gasped out, “The wound. ’Tis mortal.” Then he collapsed to the deck and spasmed once or twice.

The other three guys looked over at him and shook their heads.

She hated when he got all cute like that.

Guys weren’t supposed to charm the s**t out of her.