Heart Strike

Chapter 1-2

The second type of occupants in the room remained paralyzed with shock. They were the five members of the most recent group to make it through the Delta Force Selection Process and had played the role of being hostages. They still sat in their chairs as if they’d been bolted there. Melissa barely managed to suppress an un-Delta-like giggle.

She knew from personal experience that despite being trained soldiers, getting over that shock would take them at least a minute—more than long enough for her to complete her tasks and clear out. For that amount of time, her team could do practically anything they wanted, perhaps pick the new recruits’ pockets. She recalled that she’d certainly been in that level of shock when it had been her turn half a year before.

It had taken her team under three seconds to neutralize the room.

The shock of the hostages had many sources, the amazing speed and brutal application of force by the rescue team being the worst of it. Nothing in military training, including an actual combat tour in a war zone, could prepare a soldier for the ferocity a Delta team could unleash.

Mutt had breached the room’s steel door with a large explosive charge and Jeff had killed the lights in the same moment.

Melissa then slid in a flashbang. It had done exactly as its name implied, releasing a blinding flash and an explosive percussion as loud as that of an M33 frag grenade but causing none of the damage.

Then their lightning attack with suppressed, night-vision-scoped rifles had capped off the mayhem.

Live ammo, fired at much closer quarters to live personnel than any other Army shooter would dare, had riddled the bad-guy mannequins. Rounds passed so close by the hostages’ heads that it all but trimmed their hair.

That was the ultimate shocker to soldiers who thought they were already good but hadn’t faced a Delta-style room clearing before. There was a whole other world of better that these new recruits had never encountered, despite a minimum of four years of military service.

There were only the five hostages in the room. The month-long test of the Selection Process to apply for admission to the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta training was brutal. This class had started with ninety-eight applicants.

Her own Delta Selection class had shrunk from a hundred and twenty-two applicants down to six who had passed. Only three of them had made it through the six months of the Delta Force’s Operator Training Course, and Mutt had been from the prior class but torn out a knee halfway through his first try at OTC. Of her own class, only she and Jeff had made it through from the group of six who’d passed—two injury drops who would be back next time and two couldn’t-hack-it drops.

That was the third group in the room—she and her two classmates. With the completion of this exercise, the three of them were the newest graduates of the OTC and full members of The Unit.

With a quick hand signal, she had Mutt and Jeff sweeping the room for hidden explosives and booby traps.

Melissa The Cat circled the couch and used her silenced Glock 23 handgun to drop an extra security shot into the forehead of each terrorist mannequin. Never presume they were dead—she’d been trained to make sure they were never getting up again, no matter what help arrived how fast. A .40 S&W round into the brainpan guaranteed these mannequins were never going to sell trendy, overpriced clothes again.

She considered dropping two shots into the MP5-wielding female lying among the shat2tered dishes. She was wearing a horridly clashing blue miniskirt and an orange blouse—which now had two neat holes in it where their rifles’ 5.56 mm NATO rounds had punched into her chest.

But the extra shot was against protocol—save the ammo; you never know what is coming next.

Maybe save the round for whatever member of the training cadre had dressed her that way. Melissa sent the standard single round into the Styrofoam brainpan—a silenced spit from the weapon and a sharp thwap from the mannequin’s plastic skull.

Once she’d done the last of the security rounds and Mutt and Jeff had signaled an all clear, they began clearing the weapons that had been in the terrorists’ possession.

Six months ago, when her own class had been the ones on the couches and chairs, she’d been nearly catatonic with shock—and desperate with need. In those intense and blazing seconds, the arriving Deltas had shot every terrorist and not harmed a single recruit. No prior intel on the number of terrorists, hostages, or their positions.

Now she knew how they did it. The Unit—though it was easier to think of herself as Delta—trained exhaustively to deal with the unknown. Hostage rescue was but one of a hundred skills they practiced endlessly.

Half a year of brutal training, learning how to walk, then run, then run backward, all while becoming absolutely lethal shots. The Unit didn’t waste rounds during training.

Unlike most outfits, they never delivered a hail of bullets—except when it was called for. Instead, every single shot counted, was aimed and placed with an accuracy practiced until it was instinctive. But while doing that, the fewer than a thousand operators of The Unit’s entire combat personnel still shot more training rounds than the two hundred thousand jarheads of the Marine Corps.

Of the five hostages who had survived this round of Delta Selection, there was one woman—only the third to ever qualify for The Unit. She was the first to recover; spotting Melissa, the woman shot her a cheeky grin of Oh yeah, sister!

Melissa offered an infinitesimal nod in return before gathering the last of the weapons and heading for the door. She wondered what the first woman of Delta had felt when she’d spotted Melissa on the couch. She certainly hadn’t smiled back. Or nodded. Or even blinked.

Carla Effing Anderson. The first woman of Delta.

She’d been too chill to offer the tiniest bit of encouragement to Melissa. Pure Delta chill. Carla hadn’t seen her as a fellow woman, or anything else. Melissa suspected that Carla had seen her as just another trainee hoping to make the grade some day.

Of course Melissa had been in near-terminal shock. She’d thought that she was the first woman to make it into The Unit—right until the moment Carla led in the room-clearing strike team.

One moment her class had been having a tactics discussion with Colonel Michael Gibson.

Then the room had gone dark, the door blown, the flashbang, and twenty-four shots went into eight terrorist dummies.

In less than four seconds, the terrorists were dead, and Carla Anderson had simply materialized a meter in front of Melissa. Star Trek transporters didn’t work that quickly. Melissa still had no idea how she’d done it.

And all through OTC, Melissa had heard nothing but “Carla always this…” and “Carla always that…” Crap! She was sick of it.

What was worse, Melissa didn’t hear it only from the training cadre. Mutt, real name Tom Maxwell, had gone through Delta Selection and half of OTC with the famed Carla Anderson before blowing out a knee and having to drop back to Melissa’s class. He’d been impressed as could be by the woman and had been real slow about learning when the heck to shut up.

He’d finally backed off when Melissa had threatened to kneecap him in the other knee.

In answer, he’d shot her a grin and said, “Exactly what Carla would have done. Except she wouldn’t have warned me first.”

Melissa had always lived up to only one standard since her brother’s death—her own. Granted, following in the footsteps of Carla Effing Anderson had pushed her harder, but it had also ticked her off. She dreaded ever meeting the woman when a thousand more comparisons were inevitable.

Last out the door behind Mutt and Jeff, she paused for one final glance back into the room.

Actually, there was a fourth type of person in the room, exactly one.

Colonel Michael Gibson, the most senior and scariest operator of them all. He’d stood unflinching during their entire raid as rounds flew close by either side of him. He was a bird colonel, yet he still fought out on the front lines. There wasn’t anyone else like him—definitely not in the room, probably not anywhere in The Unit. Which meant he was the top warrior anywhere in any military.

No matter how many were in the room, he would always need a category of his own, commanding absolute respect by the simple act of his presence.

“These are the graduates of the class before yours,” Gibson informed the latest selectees/freed hostages in his surprisingly quiet voice. His words earned him the same gasps of surprise it had elicited from her own class six months earlier. “Operator Training Course will begin the day after tomorrow at oh-six-hundred. Get some sleep.”

The exact same words too.

And they’d need that sleep. Fresh from the single most harrowing part of the entire month of Delta Selection, the Commander’s Review Board, she’d been hammered and desperately wanted to let loose a bit. But her body had been wiser and she’d slept most of the thirty-six hours between the end of Selection and the start of OTC.

That oh-six-hundred formation, after only one day’s break, had been the start of a twelve-hour day of shooting skills requiring immense concentration.

The newbie woman recovered enough for a question to cross her face, though it was another ten seconds before it connected to her body and her hand shot up. Unlike Melissa’s own fair, blonde, and built, she was a sleek-figured brunette with skin dark enough that it wouldn’t peel at the first exposure to sunlight each spring like Melissa’s.

Gibson nodded at the newbie in that slow, this-had-better-be-good way of his.

“How many women in The Unit?”

More than Melissa had been able to articulate six months ago when Carla Anderson had magically materialized a single meter in front of her.

“Two, now. You will make three if you succeed. Feel free to inspect the results of this team’s attack,” he addressed the rest of the group. Then the Colonel did one of his fade things that was so fascinating to watch.

As the five new graduates of the Selection Process rose to inspect the c*****e that she, Mutt, and Jeff had wrought on the seven terrorist mannequins, Gibson moved at exactly the same speed they did, using gestures common to them and nothing like his own daunting self.

To them it would feel as if he was one of them, milling about the room, trying to understand how the attack had been executed; except he wasn’t.

He moved across the room without drawing their attention, then shooed Melissa out the doorway and into the corridor beyond, with no recruit the wiser to his seemingly magical disappearance.

Gibson always reminded her of someone, but she could never pin down who. They’d seen him only rarely during OTC; typically he was still forward deployed despite his age and rank. But he’d been there for her Commander’s Review Board, her graduation, and now her achieving full operator status.

It wasn’t his face; she had an exceptional memory for faces. But still he was irritatingly familiar, irritating because she couldn’t pin it down and there was no way they could have possibly met before.

He had showed up one other time, during the fourth month of their training. By that point her class was totally down with the basic Delta skills. They were convinced that it was just a matter of honing them from that point on.

They’d shared a pretty cocky, we got this attitude…until the silent Colonel had arrived. Their class, still six people at that point, had been sent to track Gibson in a tiny five-acre plot of woods. Not overgrown, clear understory, it should have been a cakewalk.