Heart Strike

Chapter 1-3

They didn’t find him. But he found them.

None of them even saw a teammate go down.

And none of them had seen the man who took down all six of them. To drive the lesson home, he hadn’t been gentle. With their due humbling and numerous bruises handed out, he’d spent a week showing them how to do the same. After that, Delta training had shifted—no longer about honing what they knew, it had become about discovering what they didn’t know.

Now, a quartermaster was waiting for them in the corridor. While the recruits’ voices slowly came back to life in the shoot-room, her team turned in their weapons, signing everything back in.

She felt practically naked without the HK rifle over her shoulder and the Glock handgun strapped below her solar plexus.

Been through a lot of changes, girl. And she’d bet there were a whole lot more to come.

Sunrise was less than an hour off when Chad jostled his shoulder.

Richie hadn’t been asleep and barely managed to suppress an oath as Chad shook him hard enough to wake the dead—his idea of humor. Richie noticed that he was somewhat more cautious with Duane, who often woke with his knife half-drawn. Kyle and Carla were already at the hut’s entrance.

Kyle had taken one look at the order and, in minutes, outlined a plan of how they were going to exit the farm with hopefully minimal exposure and risk. The guards they were anticipating would be off duty and the patrol timing would be wrong, but Kyle’s plan was as solid as they could get with what they knew.

No way would Richie be missing this place. Dirt floor, woven grass mat, and a thatched roof that needed thatch repairs before the next rainstorm but wasn’t going to get it.

He felt sorry for the laborers. A lot of the farmers were about to have a worse season than the last one. At a big site like this, they were little better than slaves. Once the coca was gone, they’d be free, but with no assets and no working farm crop because they’d been imprisoned here. In the coca business, locals weren’t part of the profit equation.

Rolando and the drug lord’s other armed guards Richie liked well enough, but had less sympathy for.

The Delta team slipped out into the darkness, only a hint of the blue in the sky that was already washing out the fainter stars. They passed the farmers’ huts and moved to the road leading out of the camp.

“Where are you going, amigos?” Rolando, his AK-47 no longer over his shoulder but now in his hands.

“Hey, buddy.” Chad started forward, but stopped and tried to look stupid when Rolando flicked off the safety.

Carla stepped forward with an easy sway of her hips. Her dirty blue work shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal that her assets weren’t all that much less impressive than the fabled Mayra’s.

Rolando’s eyes dropped to her cleavage.

She moved a hand up to his chest. With a flick of her wrist, she revealed the long KA-BAR military knife she was holding and rammed it up under his chin and into his brain.

Rolando twitched once.

“That’s for trying to ram it up my backside without asking.”

“He what?” Kyle snarled, but Carla didn’t waste any time answering. If there was ever a woman able to defend herself, Richie knew it was Carla Anderson.

Then Rolando collapsed to the ground and his finger must have snagged on the trigger. A single 7.62 mm round gave a loud crack and zinged off into the trees.

“s**t!” the whole team said pretty much in unison.

With their clandestine departure blown, Chad swept up the AK-47. He’d didn’t waste time or the ammo firing a security round into Rolando’s forehead—with Carla doing the knife work, there was no doubt the man was never moving again.

In seconds, they were fifty meters away and moving fast. Kyle had Rolando’s sidearm and Carla had a subcompact Glock 27 that she’d produced from somewhere—where was one of the questions Richie suspected he’d be better off not asking. Still, it was an interesting problem because they’d all been checked on arrival as being unarmed.

Richie had pre-buried his GPS and satellite gear in the jungle, carefully crossing then recrossing the mined perimeter before they’d come into the camp so that he could retrieve them once the team had been accepted.

The two guards at the inner gate were half awake when they stumbled to their feet. They went back down fast and Richie and Duane now had AK-47s as well. Chad stripped them of a pair of Makarov handguns, tossing one to Richie that he caught midair.

There was an old Jeep parked by the gate, but neither of the guards had a key. It was probably back in the open, on Rolando’s body. Chad started hot-wiring it while the rest of them stood watch.

Then Richie heard it. Distant at first, but building fast. The four-engine gut-thumping roar of a loaded 747.

There were also the shouts of the guards farther back in the camp who would find Rolando’s body in short order.

“Come on, Chad,” Carla pleaded. “Get us out of here. Don’t want to spend a week smelling like what that plane is delivering.”

The Jeep’s engine roared to life and they piled in. Duane tossed his AK-47 to Chad and dove into the driver’s seat—he was the best driver they had. He’d been working up the sprint-car circuit toward NASCAR when he’d taken his detour into the military.

Kyle and Richie dropped two more armed guards who came rushing from the huts, half-dressed and scared awake.

Duane raced the Jeep out of camp along the road, praying for no booby traps.

Then the largest tanker plane in the world descended and began its run.

The 747, converted for wildland firefighting, had been put into deep storage in the Tucson desert when its owners went out of business. The CIA had found another use for the massive plane that now began its dump of twenty thousand gallons—over eighty tons—of defoliant across the exact coordinates that Richie had sent to them six hours ago.

His Delta team had been to twelve coca farms in the last five months. And the 747 tanker had visited each in turn. Twelve farms that wouldn’t produce a single leaf of coca anytime soon.

“Down,” Chad shouted.

They all ducked and hung on as Duane rammed the heavy wooden outer barrier of the inbound checkpoint at thirty miles an hour. It blew apart. A four-by-four shattered the windshield and Carla knocked the remains of the glass clear with the butt of a Chinese QBB machine gun she’d acquired somewhere along the way before turning it around to shoot a guard who’d been standing well clear of the outer gate.

Richie kept an eye out to the rear, but no one was following. If they were, they’d have a long way to go. The team had been pulled out of Bolivia. They were being tasked to a new assignment.

That was fine.

After six months training together and another six in the field, it was the last line of the message that had him worried. Others would be deeply offended, and majorly pissed.

Proceed to Maracaibo, Venezuela. Acquire new team member.

Colonel Gibson led Melissa and her team down the dark central corridor of the hostage rescue training building. She could still hear the amazed voices of the newest class as they continued reconstructing the shoot-room attack. They wouldn’t get it right any more than her class had.

The building had six doors along this concrete hallway—six doors of hell.

The doors had started out as a bewildering array of challenges that she would never understand. Over the last six months she’d been sent through each one of the six so many times that it no longer mattered which one they entered, or how marginal the preparation; there would be no surprises that she couldn’t take in stride.

An airliner, a cave-and-tunnel system, an elaborate multistory shoot-house in which the walls and stairs were never in the same place twice, and the one where Gibson was now leading them, the bridge of a ship.

Through the last door on the right stood an airplane-hangar-sized space with the upper three stories of an oceangoing vessel standing in its center, complete with a flybridge sticking out to either side like wings.

The white steel tower had given her endless hours of trouble; big ships were designed with far too many sharp corners and narrow ladderways for the bad guys to use to their advantage. The training cadre had helped them beat it, but it had been so much harder than it looked, actually tougher to take down cleanly than an airplane filled with passengers.

As a former museum technician, she had to admire each of the sets that The Unit’s training cadre provided. When she was in the scenarios, they were incredibly believable. Radar scopes swept, instruments lit, televisions displayed—everything authentic right down to the questionable fashion sense of the mannequins.

To add to the authenticity, they often did the raids with Simunitions not live ammo. In those situations, armored training cadre shot back.

Melissa had worked at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, for three years before she’d decided to use her dual citizenship to sign up for the US military. At the museum she’d helped build elaborate sets that had to stand up to millions of visitors a year yet still be interactive and intriguing. The cadre’s set dressers were of an equally high caliber.

In moments Gibson and their team were all seated in thoroughly believable command chairs of a cruise ship’s main bridge. Last time she’d fought her way aboard, it had been configured as a container ship. The set was battered, but the training cadre did a fine job of putting it back together despite stray gunfire and the occasional application of explosives. Thankfully the museum’s tourists hadn’t been quite that aggressive.

Colonel Gibson sat in the helmsman’s seat, looking greyhound fit, his dark hair and light eyes a startling contrast when he wasn’t being invisible. He was dressed in the same ACUs they were—Army Combat Uniform and boots—nothing to distinguish his superior rank or vastly superior skill.

She’d always felt a bit uncomfortable around him and could never quite be still when he watched her. She realized that she was fooling around with the switches on the communications officer’s panel and pulled her hands into her lap.

A smile quirked at the corner of Gibson’s lips, which was wholly impossible, and then it was gone, so she knew she’d imagined it.

“Well done,” Gibson began. “Three Delta against seven terrorists, well done indeed.”

And suddenly Melissa felt about three meters tall and, like Alice in Wonderland, wondered how she still fit into the room. She reached out to slap a high five with Mutt, who sat in the radar tech’s chair beside her.

“Gosh, Colonel. You sure know how to make a girl’s head spin.”

His smile was wintry.

Then she pointed at Mutt and Jeff. “I mean, look at them.” They were clearly feeling the same effects she was from the rare compliment.

That earned her the first laugh she’d ever heard from the Colonel. Mutt stuck his tongue out at her. When she was foolish enough to turn her back on him, he tugged on her short French braid. Jeff merely sighed.

The three of them had plagued each other from the first day. They’d tried to tag her as M&M because, Melissa Moore, you gotta know you’re total eye candy. She might be, but she’d walked more than a hundred other top soldiers into the ground to get here.

Most men who’d tried to bed her called her The Ice Queen because she froze them out. She had a dream of finding someone who brought the heat and the heart, not solely for fun but someone who would be a keeper. She had that dream as a young girl. Of course, she’d had a lot of stupidly naive dreams back then.