Target Engaged

Chapter 3-1

3

“Day Thirty,” Carla muttered to herself as she shouldered her rucksack. “Oh joy.”

She made sure the ends of her hair weren’t pinned under the straps and headed to roll call. Last day of Delta Selection. Though this day was starting at straight-up midnight, it was still the last day.

She’d survived seven days of Assessment: the burn-out series of exercises and hikes. She’d survived the one-week cut and the shooting assessment. And now the twenty-two days of Stress Phase.

“Last day.” She grunted forty-nine pounds of ruck off her shoulders once she reached the assembly point. She dropped the pack in the dirt and offered it an admonitory kick, over a third her body weight. Forty-four pounds—twenty kilos—was the required minimum for this hike. She added the extra two kilos to make sure she was over the minimum at each of the check-in point scales along today’s route.

She hated how easily guys like Kyle could sling on a heavy ruck. Carla could do it, but it took work. It didn’t seem fair that they got all the upper-body strength and didn’t appreciate it while she’d earned every last muscle fiber the hard way.

The last thirty days of testing had leaned them down. Short on calories because they simply couldn’t consume them as fast as they were burning them. Short on sleep and long on physical workouts, especially massively long hikes with heavy loads and difficult orienteering over complex terrain.

The day after the shooting assessment, they’d been loaded into trucks and shipped out to the Uwharrie National Forest for Stress Phase hikes, lots of them.

At least this hike didn’t also require the thirty pounds of her LBE. The load-bearing equipment harness was a soldier’s personal essential crap carrier. In case she ever had to shed the rucksack, her LBE made it so she’d still be fully armed and have water. This hike was rucks only.

She’d grown up hiking the mountains of Colorado, sometimes walking several weeks into the wilderness with only what she could carry; this was no different. Back then, it was either hike or hang out with her drunk dad in Durango—man, that was like eight kinds of suck.

Though deep in the Colorado Rockies she didn’t usually walk with a heavy M16 in her hands. She typically packed her 597 over her shoulder for hunting and a .357 on her hip in case she stumbled on a bear who needed convincing to change direction. She shivered recalling the day she’d learned a black bear hardly cared about a .22 round, even a WMR one. The Winchester Magnum Rimfire rounds—which had been her constant protector until the two days she’d spent clinging high in a slender aspen tree—had only pissed off the bear.

A lot of the guys had griped about not being allowed to sling the M16 so they were forced to carry it. Didn’t bother her a bit. Having a desire to survive her service in dangerous places, she’d always carried her Army-issue for fast access. That habit had saved her life more than once.

It was also useful for rapping the occasional overconfident grunt hard in the balls. If she came up alongside the leg and gave a final twist at the last moment, it slid in under most brands of body armor.

Delta Selection had leaned them down in other ways. First day they’d taken a photo of the squadron of the hundred and four cocky soldiers. Mostly cocky. No sign of the Neanderthal who’d greeted her and then tried to eat a concrete wall. And her face was sober in that photo that had slowly sun-faded during its month on the bulletin board.

Carla didn’t have any hoo-ha in her head about representing the first women to break yet another gender barrier. She’d stood there during that photo and contemplated what it would take to reach the end of this and still be standing. This hadn’t been about anyone else, the way she thought it would be—perhaps her dead mother or brother. This was about her.

She was learning to be down with that and prepared herself for whatever was coming.

Carla would wager that today’s rules would be as simple as usual despite it being Day Thirty, the last day of testing…unless there was another surprise on the far side of the day.

If there was, she’d do that too. Bring it on.

The biggest lean down was that only twenty candidates remained here at the end of Week Four.

Eighty-four were gone. And the departed did not include the little woman or girlie or any of the other names they’d called her. She was still standing despite the betting pools that she knew were running strong against her.

Kyle Reeves was still in too, his dark gaze ready to devour her at the least invitation—which she still hadn’t issued, despite the temptation.

The dude was different. In certain ways he was as whacked as the Delta compound, which she’d become quite used to by now. He looked more handsome with time, which seemed impossible considering where he’d started out. It certainly didn’t hurt that his hair was forest-dark brown and clearly meant for a woman to run her fingers through. Or that his whisky-warm eyes could see right down into her soul.

If she’d had one.

She was only too aware that part of her lay buried with her mom and brother in Arlington Cemetery. Someday she’d wind up beside them, but not yet. She was going to honor them with every heartbeat and every breath she had.

Kyle was also the king grunt here. He was the only one who consistently beat her times on the hikes—every, single goddamned hike. That the bastard also beat everyone else’s times didn’t make her feel any better about him doing that to her.

A wave of unofficial hand-to-hand, mano-a-mano, wrestling competitiveness had swept through the group in Week Three, which was spent around campfires deep in the Uwharrie. Kyle put them all down. Though Chad the Green Beret was stronger, one of the few who was, Kyle was faster.

She’d sat as an unchallenged spectator. At first she’d considered going in and teaching them a thing or two. Then she’d figured that she’d ultimately end up down in the dirt with Sergeant Kyle Reeves, and she wasn’t ready for that…yet.

That in itself was an odd thought. In two ways. One, that she was holding off on taking a s****l partner who tempted her. And two, that she hoped he’d be equally as eager. Normally she didn’t care about the latter one way or the other as long as he said yes.

The final and totally impossible thing that was whacko about Sergeant Kyle Reeves was that he appeared to be content with the world around him. At ease in every situation, which she found more engaging than that first heated look.

Oh, she’d caught him watching her plenty since that first day. No big surprise, as she was the only chick here.

But ever since the shooting assessment, there’d been something more. Gal with a gun gave him a hard-on? Fine. He wound her own fantasies up every time she couldn’t beat him.

Well, turnabout was fair play. If there was anyone she was going to best on this last day of the Delta Force Selection Stress Phase, he was it. She was done fooling around.

She wasn’t a woman hoping tremulously with quivering lip to be let into The Unit. She was gonna kick ass, excelling right past their Number One soldier or run herself into the ground trying.

Now, on Day Thirty, she wasn’t sure it was possible because Kyle was just that damn good. But it was the last day and she’d give it her all.

Yeah. Good goal for the day. Reeves, your tight soldier ass is mine!

She wondered if there was a department of the Army where she should file her claim—they had a department for everything else under the sun. The name would be something obscure that a civilian would never associate with what it was: Department of Acquisition of Rear Echelons.

Dare, girl! Dare to be great and kick his ass.

Sergeant Major Maxwell, the head instructor of the Delta training cadre, called them to order. He had always made the rules of what was expected absolutely clear, if she literally listened without trying to interpret. There wasn’t any deeper level. They told you what they wanted you to know—no more and no less.

“Final day,” he announced once they’d formed up in a ragged line. Delta wasn’t big on formality, and there weren’t enough of them left to call for forming in ranks. “Time for the Forty-Miler.”

It deserved capital letters. There’d been rumors of it, whispers on the outside. It was the only thing in Delta that wasn’t done in metric. Virtually everything else in the US military had converted over to aid interoperability and joint-operations communication with other national forces. Liberia and Myanmar were flipping too, which left US civilians as the only ones still using English units.

But the Forty-Miler was tradition, as Carla’s brain automatically converted it to sixty-five kilometers. Sixty-five klicks with a full ruck. Definitely time to pony up, girl. This wasn’t going to be any cakewalk along a fire road like the early days of Delta Selection. She was going to be chasing Kyle’s ass over rough territory.

“Twenty kilos, forty miles, folks,” in yet another of the brilliantly screwed-up double-unit standards that thrived in so many corners of the US military. “You have your map and compass. No roads or trails except when approaching or departing an RV.”

The training cadre always set up rendezvous points where they could drive in a truck to haul away those who voluntarily quit.

“As usual, there is an unspecified time limit to this exercise, so you don’t want to be strolling. I will mention that the terrain is no more pleasant than usual.” Far more informative than the usual pitch.

They’d spent the last twenty days crisscrossing the Uwharrie National Forest, which nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains thirty klicks northwest of Fort Bragg. She now knew it would be brutal without being told. If there was a single piece of non-ugly terrain in the entire forest, they hadn’t found it. The twenty days of Stress Phase that they’d spent here had intimately introduced them to the worst elements of these rugged hills.

His wry comment earned a weak laugh and several groans from the group. A selection-process hike meant swamps and mountains and brambles and…

Didn’t matter. One day. She could do one more day.

Night.

Whatever.

It was zero-dark-zero now, which meant the first six hours of the hike would be in darkness. No way to scout the route visually; this would start as a pure map-and-compass job from the start.

Kyle shot her a cocky salute.

She gave him the finger and a grin. He absolutely knew that she’d be coming after him this time.

He wasn’t a big man, five-nine; no soldier still remaining was big. Delta didn’t select for towering and broad-chested—though Kyle had the broad-chested part down cold. They selected for tough and more tenacious than a Tasmanian devil.

That was the part she had down cold.

Over the last month, there had been a lot of reactions to her. After feeding that guy the outhouse, the physical crap (pun intended) had stopped.

She never thought she’d be thankful for those last two years of high school spent working nights and weekends as a bouncer in her cousin’s strip club—a job she’d initially chosen because of how much time her father spent there. She’d learned most of her early manhandling skills fending off Dad’s pals and dragging his drunk ass home. It had paid off innumerable times in the military. Who knew.

The more typical reactions to her only continued through the first week. They were split between those trying to harass her and those trying to curry favor. The first group, she was pleased to see, went away because they didn’t survive that heavy first cut at the end of Week One.

The guys who were trying to curry favor through unexpected niceties learned: first, that it made no impression on her, and second, they were soon too tired and sore to think about anything other than themselves.