Target Engaged

Chapter 11

11

Kyle was deep in a splendid dream of being gently teased awake. Of being so aroused that he could take a woman forever and ever, as long as that woman was Carla Anderson.

He could—

He opened one eye. Then the other. Or he could lie here, alone in a steel bunk bed on a ship of war and feel like a teenage i***t once again at summer camp and fantasizing about the head lifeguard—so awesome in her white one-piece and long blonde hair, and at least half again his own daydreamy twelve. She’d been between him and the wall, so damn stealthy that he’d slept through her departure.

He scrabbled around in the darkness for his watch, but his stomach told him clearly what time it was.

The CIA hadn’t been big on food during debriefing, which had accounted for both breakfast and lunch chow times. Making love to Carla had been a wise choice over dinner, but now his body was insisting that man did not live by s*x alone. Too bad. When it was the best s*x of his life with the woman he loved—

That woke him up the rest of the way. He sat up and clipped his head sharply enough on the upper bunk that the dark room was now alight with bright stars.

He held on to the top of his head, cursing, but now glad that he’d woken alone so that Carla wouldn’t know what a complete dolt her lover was. He switched on a light, which clashed brutally with the stars already swimming before him.

He shut his eyes and waited for everything to calm down. In love?

How the hell had that happened? He’d made it this long and never fallen in love before. This was nuts. Wasn’t that something that women did? Half his lovers had said they were in love with him, not that he’d actually believed a one of them.

But about Carla Anderson he was definitely…an i***t. She’d welcome a declaration of love about the same way she’d welcome incoming gunfire. As an excuse to shoot back.

Then what the hell was he supposed to do? The tiny bunkroom held no answers.

His stomach was so mundane that it began to growl in alarm at his continued inaction. He tested one eye against the light; it had calmed down to merely painful.

He found his watch. Oh-six-hundred. First time he’d slept twelve in a row in forever, probably since submitting his application for Delta. At least it felt that way. Best sleep he’d had in a long time.

A quick shower washed off the last of his haziness and made him think about sudsing up a woman who wasn’t out cold on her feet. He spotted a small nightlight and flicked it on to spare his head any other unexpected affronts when he came back to the room. He made the bunk then wandered out looking for the rest of his team.

They were grouped in a corner of the mess hall. There was a chow line and enough tables to seat half the hundred-person crew at a sitting; thirty were eating right now.

Carla, Richie, and Duane were there. Chad showed up in the chow line close behind him.

“How’d y’all sleep, buddy?” Chad slapped him on the shoulder in a friendly way designed to make Kyle eat his still-empty tray.

“Like we kicked a piece of drug-lord ass.”

“Damn straight. How long did they keep you?” No question who they were. The CIA had ganged up on them all last night.

“Don’t know.” Kyle hadn’t been thinking about his watch when he crawled out of the debrief, then into Carla’s bunk. “Long damn time.”

Chad nodded and started grabbing calories at random. Guy didn’t have any taste buds, at least not ones that were connected to each other: deep-fried fish, a burger, hash browns, apple pie topped with a dog-poop-sized plop of soft-serve chocolate ice cream, and breakfast sausage. He put a puddle of ketchup on one side of his plate and tartar sauce on the other.

Kyle went with breakfast: eggs, sausage, bacon, and trimmings. A cup of coffee and he headed to the table.

Chad then hit the soda machine and was making a graveyard: an inch of soda from each tap. He also liked to chew his ice, loudly.

“If you break a tooth, dude, I’m not doing any goddamn oral surgery in the field. Just so you know.”

Chad grinned at him.

They arrived at the table together. Carla sat in the corner with Richie beside her and Duane across, which left Kyle to grab the diagonal, forcing Chad to perch at the end.

“Hey, beautiful!” Chad called out.

“Go to hell, Chadwick,” Carla said without much heat. Oddly, she looked as if she’d hardly slept a wink.

She sure didn’t offer him a coy smile, not that she ever had when they were together as a team. Or alone for that matter. Avaricious? Yes. Insatiable? Oh yeah. But coy wasn’t her style. So why was he being disappointed all of a sudden? Dumb as a thumb? Definitely.

“You’re cute, Sugar, but I was talking to Duane. He’s so pretty.”

Duane didn’t bother looking up from his mixed stack of pancakes with waffles. He never woke up fast unless there was a mission. He flipped a finger at Chad and kept eating.

“Wait a minute.” Richie looked up. “If she’s cute and he’s beautiful. What am—”

“Pathetic,” Chad offered. “I heard you left a half mil in good American cash on the table.”

“Two million-five if they used standard bundling. And it wasn’t me, it was him.” Richie pointed at Kyle with a French fry. “What we left is burned up now anyway.”

Right. Once again, Kyle had forgotten about the money he’d pocketed. Maybe he could use part of it to bribe someone else to turn it in to the CIA’s grill squad. It was an actionable offense to have kept it.

He didn’t think he could sucker Chad into fronting with the CIA for him, but Richie was a distinct possibility. Actually, he had an uncomfortable itch that he wasn’t done with the need for bribe money yet. He’d turn it in at end of mission—via slow and anonymous post.

“Hey, hotshot,” Kyle called across the table.

Carla looked up at him. Definite dark smudges under those lovely eyes. She cradled a mug of coffee between both hands like it was gold, no sign of a tray anywhere. She didn’t meet his eyes, which he didn’t like one bit. Kyle dropped his plate and fork in front of her.

“I don’t—”

“Eat.” To cut off any argument, he rose and went back to load up a fresh plate.

By the time he returned, she’d started eating, which he took as a good sign. Her body knew what to do if her brain didn’t. The mess hall was holding steady at over half-full, but not packed. There was an odd perimeter of empty tables near theirs, as if all the slack in the room had been gathered to isolate them.

“What’s with the empty tables? One of you idiots forget to shower?” He pretended to sniff around the table.

“You’ve crossed over, Kyle.” Carla already looked better for the calories. “Delta eats alone. No one knows what to do with us, so they leave a wide space.”

“How—”

By her look, he knew that the source of information was once again the deceased brother. What the hell had he been into? Whatever it was had screwed Carla up but good. Somehow her brother was at the core of it each time she went strange. Not something to drag out in front of the team.

“It’s still weird.” Maybe something about her experiences in last night’s operation had brought the brother up, bugging her the same way shooting the girl had been bothering him. Still did, but he did his best to ignore that—the long-barrel S&W 686 she’d been digging for went a long way toward appeasing his angst. So, he’d give Carla a break and not push.

Richie looked around the room. “Yeah, it is kind of weird. Surprised I didn’t notice before. It is far beyond random probabilities, isn’t it?”

As if to prove them wrong, a long, leggy woman with mahogany hair spilling down past her shoulders walked across the invisible line as if it didn’t exist. She grabbed a chair and pulled it up between Kyle and Chad. She had one of those fashion magazine smiles, which was appropriate because her face went right along with it.

He’d definitely crossed over into a world of hot military women. What the hell? If he’d known about them, he’d have signed up for Delta long before now.

“You shot jocks conscious yet?”

“I am now. Chad Hawkins.” Chad held out his hand and offered that deceptively sweet smile that he pulled out for the ladies. Yet another reason the Reaper tag had stuck—if Chad was in the bar and on the prowl, no one stood a chance until he’d picked his choice from the crowd.

“Chief Warrant 4 Lola Maloney, that’s Mrs. by the way.” She shook his hand, but he didn’t let go.

“Damn. Too late, huh?”

“Unless y’all want him to shoot up your ass. He’s a crew chief gunner on a DAP Hawk.”

“Okay.” Chad grinned his retreat but released her hand quickly enough at that.

“You the one who hauled us out last night?” Kyle figured two female crew chiefs, maybe female pilot.

“Got it in one.”

“Nice flying.”

“Thanks.” That lit up her smile. “You’ll be glad to know we dropped your prisoners and the spook squad onto a handy neighborhood aircraft carrier about an hour ago, so they’re out of your hair. At least for now.”

A round of prayer circled about the table, mostly in the form of “Thank you, Jesus!”

“Yeah, they get annoying. But you must have done good for them to keep you so long, so count that as a job well done.”

Kyle nodded his thanks and ate his eggs. “You wouldn’t by any chance know what we’re supposed to be doing next. We were sent out without a whole lot of direction.”

“A little. Mine says to be at your disposal until otherwise directed.” She pulled out two sheets of paper, one folded up, the other tucked in an envelope. She waved the folded one but handed him the envelope. “What does yours say?”

Kyle glanced around the table; no one was paying any attention to their food. Carla was watching the envelope with a hungry look, still hungry though her plate was clean.

He peeled it open. And glanced at the two lines. “We’re going back in is my guess. Mission briefing at sixteen hundred. That’s all it says.”

Carla started to rise with the others to leave the mess hall, but Kyle sent her a field Stay! signal with a pointed finger, then a closed fist.

She fooled around with her empty coffee cup and tried not to be pissed. There was no way she was going to discuss their goddamn s*x life in the USS Freedom’s mess hall, whether or not it was solely the two of them inside the table buffer.

The only thing that was going to clear her head was some action, action involving another on-the-edge mission. Otherwise she’d start thinking and, as she’d proved through a long sleepless night, that was a dead-end road to f*****g nowhere.

The other guys didn’t offer any looks of sympathy. Well, screw them. She didn’t need any sympathy.

“Carla. Hey. Talking to you.” Kyle’s voice was soft and kind. He had that smile that said he was amused by her not paying attention faster.

“So talk.” She didn’t want soft and kind.

Kyle scrubbed at his face for a moment, then looked at his watch.

She obviously wasn’t gonna be helping him out here. It was only at that thought that she wondered why she was being such a consummate b***h. Kyle didn’t deserve any of this. She was bringing her own s**t to the table and that wasn’t fair. Carla opened her mouth to apologize but Kyle cut her off.

“Look, Anderson.” His voice had turned that strange harsh again.

Not as harsh as he’d used on Major Asshole Gonzalez last night, but it wasn’t a voice she was used to hearing from Kyle, especially not aimed at her.

“I don’t know what bug crawled up your ass, but if you don’t sleep eight of the next ten hours, I’m leaving it and you right here on this ship tonight. We clear?”

He didn’t wait for her answer. Instead, in one of those fluid Kyle moves that normally fired up her more carnal instincts, he was up from the table and gone across the mess hall before she had a chance to think about a response.

Oh yeah? didn’t really cut it.

She staggered to her feet but had to keep a hand on the table while the room did a quick tilt and whirl. Once that settled, she managed to drop her empty mug and plate at the scrub tubs.

It seemed as if every single person on the ship was in motion. Next shift leaving their meals and heading for stations. Prior shift heading in for their breakfast. The corridors were about a person and a half wide, and by the time she rediscovered her berth, she’d managed to ram her shoulder into the wall repeatedly while trying to avoid being run down by every last one of them.

She wanted…what?

She wanted to take back last night. Erase it. She wanted Kyle to undo what he’d done to her.

Carla Lesson Sixteen: Can’t change the past. She’d learned that one many times, especially as she held the folded flag and watched her brother being lowered into the ground.

Her last ever words to him had been a teasing promise to steal his brand-new motorcycle while he was overseas.

He’d smiled and called back over his shoulder as he walked away, “Over my dead body.” She hadn’t touched it while he was gone, but that hadn’t kept him alive. Now she’d ride it as long as she survived.

That was the problem. There was no place in her world for what Kyle had made her feel.

Death awaited. Simple as that.

It was easy to do the impossible when you knew death was coming. It didn’t matter anyway. She was ready.

What’s the worst that could happen? You die.

Old joke. Old truth.

Since she already knew the future, it meant she could try harder than anyone and it didn’t matter much. No stupid risks; that was a waste. But she could run at maximum effort all the time because there was no need to hold back for a future that didn’t exist. End result was the same, but she got something good done in the meantime.

So how much of a joke was it that Kyle had made her feel so…some damn word?

She closed the berthing space door, and the dim room wavered along the edges of her vision.

…so alive?

She pitched facedown onto the bunk and was asleep before her face hit the pillow.

Kyle found his way to the Freedom’s missile deck. The big RAM surface-to-air missile launcher dominated the space. It was a massive piece of hardware swinging twenty-one missiles on a rolling armature. Fifty-caliber machine guns were perched at the corners, complete with curved shields to protect the gunner from return fire. But there was still space for him to lean against the stern rail and stare out at the sea rolling lazily off the stern.

As his pulse slowed, as the haze of anger at Carla that he hadn’t been able to control cooled, he became aware of the rising heat of the early morning air. Despite being on the sea off Venezuela, they were too close to the equator for the temperatures to be reasonable. They were far enough offshore that no birds swirled above hoping for scraps. The only sounds were the rumble and vibration of the big Rolls-Royce gas turbines as the ship idled slowly toward the rising sun across the endless liquid plain.

Looking down at the afterdeck, Kyle could see that the rear third of the ship was a big helicopter landing platform marked out in broad white lines that would show up even in a raging storm. Under the stern was a pickup ramp for cargo and small watercraft. And under his skin was Sergeant First Class Carla Anderson.

Damn her for making him lose his control. He should go find her and apologize. He’d never spoken that way to another soldier, the asshole ones included. So why had he done it to her?

He knew why.

Which only made it worse.

“Going to be a warm one.”

He hadn’t heard or felt Chief Warrant Lola Maloney approaching as he leaned there.

She was dressed in standard greenish MultiCam-camouflage ACU trousers and plain t-shirt. Woman’s body went fine with that smile and that face.

She stared out over the stern at the rolling wake of the Freedom as she worked through the seas, but not hurrying on her way. No other ships were around. A smudge to the north might have been an aircraft carrier or destroyer, somebody big, but he couldn’t tell more from here.

“Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?” The Night Stalkers, like Delta, did most of their work at night. He’d slept too long last night and now had to stay up for a few hours and then find somewhere other than with Carla to take a nap before mission briefing.

“Thought you might need a shoulder.”

“Am I that obvious?”

“Not to most, no. Met my husband, Tim, on my first full mission with the Night Stalkers. I qualify that because I did a partial mission while still in training. I hauled back your girlfriend’s brother.”

“No s**t? I met the Colonel.”

“Gibson? Yeah, you know for sure that if he was in on it, it was way bad and seriously major on the priority scale.”

Kyle nodded. He’d figured that one out himself.

“I made sure her brother had a flag over him after I brought him home. And no, I don’t know what happened, and no, I can’t talk about the bit that I do know.”

“Uh, thanks for doing that.”

“We give them honor in death.” Lola shrugged at how that was not nearly enough, but it was something. “Anyway, Tim was a handful. Of course, so was I. Looks like you have a dose of that on your hands.”

“Maybe.” And maybe Carla wasn’t reacting to something that had happened on the mission. Maybe it was a reaction to him. But for the life of him, he couldn’t think of what he’d done—other than falling in love with her.

Not that he’d said a word about it.

And her look this morning clearly said that, at least for now, the feeling was not at all mutual.

Kyle stared out at the stern waves, then up at the blue sky, then back down at the helideck.

“Wait a sec. Where’s your helo?”

Chief Maloney stamped her heel against the deck. “You’re standing on the roof of a two-bird hangar. You don’t think we leave stealth gear out in the daylight if we don’t have to? And you’re avoiding the topic.”

Stealth? What the… But then he remembered the way that the helicopters had sort of showed up out of nowhere. It was as if they arrived overhead in the jungle before their sound did. Well, that would certainly explain it. An i***t knew there were other stealth birds besides the one that went down in bin Laden’s compound, but he’d never expected to meet one. Welcome to Delta, boy.

Now that he actually had, it had serious implications. It meant that last night’s and tonight’s missions were important enough to call for the release of those special assets.

“Gather round, folks. He’s starting to put the pieces together.”

He eyed Chief Maloney, but she was grinning at him.

She was lead pilot, flying the most advanced equipment of a high-powered outfit like the Night Stalkers. Which meant…what?

“Still not getting it, Chief.”

She clapped him on the shoulder. “Then do like Mama Rici always say: ‘Fry up the next chucklehead, girl!’” She said it in a thick Creole roll.

“Chucklehead?”

“Where you from, boy?”

“Washington. The state, not the capital.”

“What do you call a catfish up there?”

“Uh, we call them catfish.”

“Heathens! It means stop worrying at what you can’t fix.” With that, the Chief offered him a smile and strolled off. “Got to go get me some shut-eye and dream o’ my man.” Then she laughed a crazy-woman cackle that sent chills up his spine and made him wonder if someone had pricked a pin into a voodoo doll of him.

If that’s what had happened, he hoped to hell Carla wasn’t doing the pinning.

However, she might be.

For reasons he couldn’t fathom, Kyle guessed that his waking-up dreaming of Carla was what had caused the trouble in the first place.