Target Engaged

Chapter 2-2

Kyle talked about how to learn those passages, to see the patterns that let locals walk straight through the middle of a city block and show up behind your front lines.

Carla knew the terror of those passageways, had run through them never knowing from one twist to the next if she’d spook a woman grinding flour by hand or stumble into a circle of men wound up in a warped religious right-wing fervor and clutching AK-47s like their firstborns.

Kyle talked about how he’d followed and learned. And that was only one of a hundred conversations.

When the trucks lurched to a stop and killed their engines, the trainees jumped down to the ground. They were out at a Fort Bragg–ugly shooting range. Safety berms of mounded dirt were riddled with tons of lead driven four grams at a time at supersonic speeds. There wasn’t a single shade tree. Nothing blocked the dusty wind. It looked like the apocalypse had happened here but there’d been no one left to care.

This wasn’t a prettied-up officers’ range with floating targets, shooting benches, and watered grass. This was dirt, dust, and sun-faded distance markers. Carla liked the authenticity of it. Nothing between her and the shot.

A Humvee sat there with cases of rifles. Not the disabled and awkwardly heavy M16s they’d been carting along on every hike, but rather the Heckler & Koch HK416 specifically designed for Delta.

She lifted one and it simply felt right in her hands. The weight, balance, the handgrip. Her hands were smaller and her fingers definitely thinner than everyone else’s here, but still the weapon fit. In seconds she had the buttstock adjusted to fit comfortably against her shoulder.

Carla caught Kyle looking at her. He did that a lot.

All of the guys did. After all, she was the only female here for them to all pool their i***t staring needs toward. She did her best to ignore all of it. Easily done with most of these dim bulbs because the regard was so not mutual.

But she’d felt that look of pure heat from Kyle since the moment of her arrival when he’d stood ready to take out the 75th Ranger meathead.

It was sweet of him, though wholly unnecessary. She’d learned Carla Lesson Number One ages ago: You’re on your own, girl.

No question of that long before the day she’d hit Basic Training. On her first day in the Army, a drill instructor had tried to grope her and ended up eating dirt in front of a passing major, which hadn’t gone over so well. The other drills weren’t too pleased about their buddy spending a month in the stockade and losing two grades, but no one else had messed with her, other than making her eight weeks with them a living hell.

Still, it had been thoughtful of Kyle. The applause had been a nice gesture too, though she’d noted it wasn’t exactly a popular one.

Now his look was a questioning one—she could read his face so easily. She didn’t wait for him to ask.

“I know what to do with one of these, tough guy. Do you?”

He looked down at her hands and how she held the weapon and then back up at her face. “Loser buys the first round of drinks once we’re through selection.”

“Deal!”

Then the words registered.

Damn! She found herself liking him despite her better judgment. He’d said that he fully expected her to be one of those still standing at the end of the thirty days of Delta Selection.

Compliments never went to her head because they were always about her being female. “You did that quite well…for a woman.”

Yet Kyle was looking right past that as if he could actually see her. It was pretty damned sexy.

He turned to receive his magazines from the training cadre.

“Five rounds to zero your scope.” The Delta trainer handed Kyle a short magazine.

Carla felt that was pretty damn stingy. Ten to fifteen rounds would be more appropriate for an unfamiliar weapon.

The trainer also handed out three long magazines—fully loaded by the way Kyle was holding them. “Ninety rounds for thirty targets. You must hit twenty-eight of the targets to complete Assessment Phase of the selection process and continue on to the Stress Phase.”

Kyle glanced her way and winked. Then he slipped two of the magazines into a thigh pouch, which left him holding the zeroing rounds and only one magazine.

Thirty rounds, thirty targets. Mister Show-Off, huh? She’d take that challenge.

He grinned at her when she did the same with her rounds.

A number of guys had been watching them. A few laughed at her in derision, which didn’t bother her any. If they wanted to underestimate her, they were welcome to; it gave her the advantage. More than a few looked thoughtful. About a third of the men took the challenge of tucking away two of their magazines. That bravado so wasn’t going to last.

Green Three was the first one called forward to zero her weapon.

She took a quick look at the range. There were targets that were posted pretty damn far away from the shooting positions. She normally zeroed at thirty meters. This time she went for fifty.

Kyle tried not to keep watch. He should be entirely in his own head and worrying about his own shooting, but he couldn’t resist assessing the others. At the first distance, at the close-in ten-meter targets, there were still several guys out of the fifty shooters who missed at least one of the five targets and had to expend an extra round.

He’d thought that the men they’d left on the ground back at the Delta compound had thinned the herd, but the day wasn’t over yet. Didn’t these guys know how to zero their weapons?

At thirty meters, five more targets and the number of misses increased.

At fifty, they were down to twenty shooters maintaining the one-round-per-target ratio.

After a hundred meters, there were ten. They had also added an extra target—a sixth one. Four shooters who’d been counting targets instead of looking at all available objectives safetied and aimed their weapons at the ground signaling they were done. The extra target was marked as a miss. The training cadre never said a word until after each new candidate had come up the line and done his shooting.

Kyle liked shooting. He’d never been one of those guys who got sexually charged up while firing a weapon. There was something primal about it, but it had never affected him that way. He simply enjoyed the precision and control.

Watching Carla Anderson fire a weapon was a whole different matter. It was a vision that sure as hell fired up his juices.

The guys who’d been teasing her had shut up by now. They were no longer shooting at paper targets. At this distance, there was a hand-wide circle of steel suspended at the middle of a wooden target. It gave out a bright plink sound and a puff of reluctant dust no matter how many times it was struck.

Carla’s time as she shifted her fire from target to target was also damned good, especially using an unfamiliar weapon.

When they went from standing to prone positions for the six targets at three hundred meters, he swallowed and had to look away. Through the bulk of her Army combat uniform she still looked amazing. ACUs were baggy and hid shape. Except when she was lying flat in the dirt and they clung around her buttocks.

She was a fellow soldier and clearly a good one. So what did it say about him that he wanted to tackle her right there on the ground—their fellow soldiers and the training cadre be damned—and see where it led?

Get the woman out of your head, Kyle! Yeah, like that was going to happen anytime soon. He’d given up on that after the first day of Delta Selection. No amount of his father’s martial-arts training about controlling chi and finding his center was helping either.

She’d come into the mess hall after check-in—out of her leathers, wearing camo pants and a black t-shirt. She was now dressed like every other jock in the room yet looking like none of them. But that wasn’t what had gotten him. It was the juxtaposition of the babe on a bike and the total soldier who’d strode into a room of a hundred men with her head high and her stride sure.

If the positions were reversed, Kyle didn’t know if he’d have that much nerve.

Face it, dude. You walk into a room of a hundred women, you’re gonna be happier than a pig in s**t. Okay, he’d grant the truth of that statement, but it didn’t make her one bit less impressive.

Especially when she was one of only five still maintaining a single shot per target. The hot winds and inevitable swirling dust devils of the North Carolina heat didn’t deter her one bit.

At three hundred meters, a thousand feet, they permanently left behind four shooters who had already run through their ninety rounds.

The training cadre directed them to skip the five-hundred-meter targets. Three more targets remained—at eight-hundred meters, a half mile. It was the practical limit of the 5.56 x 45 mm NATO round they were firing.

They had to hit at least one to get their twenty-eight. Four guys were starting the final set with only a single round still left in their chamber.

At this distance, Kyle was the second one up. Three targets, three rounds left in his magazine. Twice he waited out hard gusts, but he managed to hit all three on his first try.

A Green Beret named Chad also made thirty for thirty. A SEAL and a Ranger cursed and had to pull out a second magazine to nail all thirty targets, but easily qualified with two nearly full magazines remaining.

Eight hundred meters was a world different from three hundred. Out here a shooter had to have perfect control of their heartbeat and breathing and know what to do with both them and the environment. Wind, temperature, humidity, and the Coriolis Effect from the Earth’s spin all had to be compensated for.

Two guys spent a whole magazine, thirty rounds, before managing that crucial qualifying twenty-eighth target. Ten more were told that if they wanted to take the next six months or more to improve their shooting skills, they were welcome to reapply to a future selection process, a courtesy not extended to the four guys they’d already carted away from the three-hundred-meter position.

Starting at three hundred meters, the attitude had changed as well. The training cadre wasn’t merely sitting back quietly and announcing hit or miss in deadpan voices. They started telling the shooter what they were doing wrong—shooting on the breath but not the pulse beat or the wrong part of the pulse beat.

Green Three was called up last. Carla was the only one besides himself and Chad with a chance at a single round per target.

The day’s heat had continued to rise throughout the shooting, especially as shooters took longer and longer between shots out at this range. The sun had shifted from behind to a quarter off the targets, genuinely irritating. The winds across the range were chaotic, gusting as high as fifteen knots, which could knock a round completely sideways as it traveled for a full second to cross to the target.

Everyone, including those who had failed but not been simply carted away, gathered around to watch Carla. She snagged her hair back into a rough ponytail, teased and snarled by the wind. Kyle’s hands itched with the desire to comb her hair out between his fingers and find out if it was as soft as it looked.

She settled and waited. A few of the guys were still dense enough to be nudging each other and trading knowing nods. No girl could shoot reliably at this distance.

Kyle knew full well that the top sniper in Russia’s history had been Lyudmila Pavlichenko, with over three hundred confirmed German kills during World War II—and that was with a weapon that was so much less than the HK416. These weren’t sniper distances yet. Those didn’t come into their own until they were out past a kilometer.

Someone had told Kyle about a hotshot b***h flying with the Night Stalkers who was unbeatable in competition. It didn’t sound right. A helicopter was a crappy sniper platform, but that’s what the guy had said before going on to describe each of her fine physical attributes: pint-sized, Asian, and built like a brick shithouse. As if that was more important than how she did what she did when she outshot him. Yep! Brush that bit of bruised ego under the carpet, buddy. You stick with your story.

Kyle willed the winds to die for Carla, but they weren’t cooperating.

Everyone jolted when she unexpectedly fired. She must have detected a cosmic wormhole through the wind that he’d missed.

There was no bright plink sound, but she was already swinging her weapon to the next target with a calm assuredness before the bullet could possibly arrive.

Then the spotter called out, “Hit.” A second called, “Confirm hit,” from behind his scope.

The wind had carried the sound away.

Carla’s world had narrowed to an arrow point. There were only weapon, range, and target. There were only her pulse and the beat of the wind. When everything aligned, she nailed the second target and moved on to the third.

Her brother had taught her the basics after she’d not quite become mountain lion food on a hike. He’d bought her a used Remington 597 WMR with a scope and a hundred rounds of ammo. The next time, she’d taken a thousand rounds and hiked deep into the Colorado Rockies to practice. Not only did she sleep better after that, but she also ate better out in the wilderness. The .22 Mag rounds killed smaller game up through fox and coyote and scared off most big game.

The Army had taken those skills and honed them with too much experience. She’d never be a true sniper, waiting for days to take a single shot at two kilometers out, before sliding away as quietly, wasn’t her gig. But she knew what to do with the weapon in her hands. The shorter distances had familiarized her with the HK416’s quirks, or rather, lack of them. It was a finely honed shooting machine, and she was now as integral with it as her heart was with the winds. Fort Bragg’s winds had nothing on the howlers that shot through the deep canyons of the Colorado Rockies.

She took the final shot with reluctance, knowing she’d have to leave this perfect, quiet space when she did.

The bolt rang empty as she spent the last round in the magazine and rested her cheeks against the sun- and powder-warmed weapon. She closed her eyes and waited.

“Hit,” her spotter announced. “Confirm hit,” the second one agreed.

Then another sound came at her, battering her senses that had been so wrapped in the quiet.

She rolled over and sat up.

There was Kyle Reeves front and center, applauding. And, so different from her arrival reception a week ago, they were all doing so, every last man jack of them.

A rolling wave of noise. Applauding her.

The faces blurred. She’d often won praise from her immediate fireteam, but this was a circle of fifty of the best soldiers there were, and they were applauding her.

She didn’t know what to do with it.

Overwhelm slapped at her. Carla wanted to curl up until they went away, go back to the peace of her shooting space.

But she couldn’t or she’d never live it down.

So instead she unbuttoned her thigh pocket, pulled out the two still-full magazines, and tossed them to Kyle. At least he had to stop applauding to catch them. Once he had them, he tapped the two against the pair he still had buttoned up in his thigh pocket.

Not panicking, she sat there like the village i***t, grinning up at the man who looked at her like she was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen.

No, the heat still burned there, deep in those dark eyes.

He looked at her like the most amazing woman he’d ever seen…

Carla had to admit it felt pretty damn good. And that it was totally mutual.