Heart Strike

Chapter 1-4

In vengeance for M&M, Tom Maxwell and Sem Jaffe became Mutt and Jeff.

Worse for them, she’d made sure that M&M didn’t stick and that Mutt and Jeff did.

She’d left behind Charli from her middle name Charlene, because that had been her brother’s nickname for her. The name had died with him. Her middle initial was turned into Cat because she could sneak up on anyone, except Gibson. And just as cats sometimes had too many toes, she had too few. She’d lost two toes and her brother to an ice storm during a winter climb up Washington State’s Mount Rainier.

Shut it out. Shut it out.

Though it had been five years, the memory still hurt like a knife.

“Mutt and Jeff.”

Melissa The Cat wanted to purr when Gibson called them that.

“We need you on fireteams based out of Saudi Arabia. Are you ready for that?”

“Sure,” they chimed in together. They were always doing that, which is why her tag for them had stuck so well.

She’d be up for that too. Her Arabic was poor—okay, dismal—but she knew from experience how fast she could fix that. There wasn’t anyone in The Unit with less than three languages fluent and several more at least serviceable.

“Good.” Gibson nodded. “Your flight leaves in forty-five minutes. You have time to shower, pack your gear, and get to Hangar Seventeen. Go.”

There was a stunned second or two as they realized that they wouldn’t all be deploying together. They’d known that was unlikely of course, had talked about it, but it was still a shock. For six months of OTC plus the preceding month of Delta Selection with Jeff, the three of them had rarely been apart. They’d become her friends. Her team. They had, as the saying went, gone through hell and hell together.

There wasn’t a third second of hesitation—The Unit’s operators were trained to adapt rapidly.

Maxwell and Jaffe offered her high fives; instead she gave each of them a hug.

“Now she lays some flesh on us,” Mutt quipped. Jeff was quiet as usual, but gave her a good hug and a high five. Then he whispered quietly to her, “Kick ass, sister.” Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded and they were gone.

The shock of their departure left her in the lurch, like she’d been leaning up against a wall that had always been there and suddenly it wasn’t.

Colonel Gibson was silent, waiting patiently in his helmsman’s chair.

She did her best to school her nerves into a calm state…wasn’t working, so she shot for a calmer state and made it only partway there…before sitting down. Not quite sure how, she’d landed in the captain’s seat. Now that she was in it, the chair felt odd, wrong. Too big and too important. Hell, she’d only graduated OTC a couple minutes ago and already her two closest friends were up and gone out of her life. The military was like that, but it didn’t make it any easier.

Melissa forced her attention back to Gibson and shot for casual to hide the lack of calm. “So, what’s the deal, Boss?”

He glanced at his watch uncertainly.

Nervous? The most highly trained soldier in any military in any country was nervous? Oh man, this was going to be so bad.

“I have—” He cleared his throat and started again. “You are fluent in Spanish?”

He must know that she was from her file. “Ja, ich spreche Spanisch. Auch, Italienisch und Französisch,” she answered in flawless German.

No smile. Not a hint that he could. He had laughed with her not a moment before; Melissa was sure he had…fairly sure. She knew he wasn’t about to confess to being her father, because Mom and Dad were living happily on their houseboat in Victoria Harbour on Vancouver Island in Canada.

“And you can fly planes.”

“Small ones, sure. I can also take off in a helicopter without crashing, if I have an instructor beside me.” Melissa and her brother had gotten their private pilot licenses together, and she’d had rotorcraft lessons for the fun of it. She’d kept her private pilot’s license current more in his memory than anything else.

So what the hell was going on? Why was he asking her things he must already know? And she could still read the nerves on him. She tinkered with the captain’s command board, wondering what it would take to navigate out of this moment. That switch there? Or the darkened map display? Key in a new GPS coordinate and go, full throttle outta here.

“Based on your skill set, I have recommended that you be assigned to our top South American team.”

“Sounds muy bueno,” she agreed cautiously.

“Good. Your transport is in one hour, Hangar Three.” He rose to his feet and headed for the door.

She took a deep breath and jumped in. “What’s the other shoe, sir? The one you don’t want to drop.”

He stopped with his back to her, hands braced on the door.

Melissa held her breath, could feel the fear squeezing in on her—a place dark and bitterly cold. A feeling she had struggled with often on particularly long and lonely nights.

“I’m sorry.” Gibson turned to face her, his face carefully controlled, then whispered, “I’m sorry that I couldn’t save your brother.”

Though he looked at her for a long time, Colonel Michael Gibson was gone long before she could recover from the shock.

At least now she knew why she both had and hadn’t recognized him. On a bitterly cold and cruel mountain five years ago, Colonel Michael Gibson—as unrecognizably swathed in as much mountain gear as she had been—had saved her life. Saved it and completely changed it.

“I didn’t ask for anyone else on our team.” Carla Wild Woman Anderson was on a roll. The same roll she’d been on fairly continuously since they’d slowed down enough for Richie to reveal the last line of the new orders.

Experience had taught them all that while Carla was utterly reliable in the field, she was a major hazard when forced to chill. They’d been installed in a luxury hotel suite in Maracaibo, one they hadn’t been in during their first visit to the city, while they waited for their new team member. But even by Carla standards, her current state was above and beyond her norm, so everyone was keeping their head down.

Richie pretended to concentrate on sorting out their radio gear. They’d cleaned up and resupplied from a stash arranged for them in Maracaibo. Anyone who might recognize them from the last time they were operating from this city was dead, in the CIA’s hands, or friendly—at least bribe-level friendly.

Richie had spread his new gear across one of the hotel suite living room’s rosewood coffee tables and then propped up the tablet computer to catch up on the news. The remains of his chili-laced hot chocolate had long since cooled from breakfast. But he sipped at it anyway to try and appear thoughtful.

It must have worked, as she headed over to the window to stare south once more as if she could divine who was flying in from five miles away—their distance to the airport.

The room was something of a shock to his body with its broad clean windows, luxurious furnishings, and stunning view of Maracaibo, Venezuela. Hot showers and efficient room service only made it all the stranger.

The suite had five bedrooms, but as Carla and Kyle shared one, there was a spare.

An ominous spare, as they knew someone was inbound to occupy it. Kyle had gone out to the airport to meet him, and his buffering effect on Carla’s temper was much missed.

Richie was hoping they were done with their five months posing as itinerant American laborers on Bolivian coca plantations. If so, they’d be done with nothing to connect their team to the large, unmarked CIA and Colombian planes that flew low overhead in the middle of the night and blanketed the plantations with defoliant. They’d destroyed over four thousand hectares of coca that would never be processed into cocaine, though that ten percent felt like such a small dent in the estimated sixteen thousand hectares in cultivation.

Thankfully, one farm didn’t talk much with the next, so no one in the camps knew to ask how the intel for the planes was so perfect despite rough terrain, camouflage nets, and remote locations.

His problem, and he suspected half of Carla’s—as she stormed into Richie’s bedroom again because he had the best view of the airport—was that he was sick of the Bolivian fields. So much of it had been scout work. It was time for action.

But whatever the other half of Carla’s issue was, it had cranked her up into full tilt frustration. And if it wasn’t a frustration she could knife or shoot, it drove her crazy.

Now the team had been directed to a quiet hotel suite along the waterfront in Maracaibo. Then they’d been told to plant their asses and wait.

Carla simply wasn’t good at waiting, except when on a mission, and then she had the patience of a sphinx. But now, in a room that she insisted was too beige, looking out at a city that was too crowded, and a lake that was too wide and too polluted, and a sky that was…

Richie didn’t mind the waiting. With most of the last five months out deep in the field, he was behind on several fronts of his normal news gathering.

The Russians were testing a new microwave gun that could fry a drone’s electronics from ten kilometers away.

The Air Force had retired the A-10 Thunderbolt…again—though they still had nothing to replace it. He doubted that would stick any better than the last couple times.

Heckler & Koch had a new modification for the HK416 rifle, a softer bolt return that should make it noticeably quieter. He couldn’t wait to try it. Richie looked up the mod but couldn’t see any way to fabricate one in the field.

There was a cool article about DEVGRU on one of the military blogs intended for veterans and their families. It was impressive how few facts they had right; half of the images were merely standard SEAL teams and two clearly showed Marines. SEAL Team Six, as DEVGRU was still incorrectly known despite shedding that name thirty years before, continued to be a media sensation—which left The Unit to continue operating nicely in the dark. Of course the rare articles about The Unit were farther off the mark than this one about ST6, which was also satisfying.

“Did you ask for someone new?”

He’d missed Carla’s return. She now stood close beside the dining table where Duane and Chad had an intense game of Truco going over the last dregs of breakfast. The card game truly needed four players, but having no one else willing to join in didn’t stop them. The Colombian forty-card version of contract rummy was cutthroat and anything but quiet—a skill they’d all honed on the coca farms.

She broke their concentration, which was hard to do. Chad and Duane always played with an intense mano-a-mano combativeness—especially when they were trying to ignore one of Carla’s rants.

“Huh?” “What?”

Carla snarled at them.

Richie watched out of the corner of his eye. Duane didn’t look like he came from a well-to-do household like Richie’s—though he seriously did, top-tier Atlanta. Instead he looked like he came from a boxing ring. He was a good-looking guy, at least the ladies all seemed to think so, but he looked distinctly tough. And he was leveraging that with a dark scowl of concentration at the moment.

Chad was the opposite. He wasn’t called The Reaper for his charming Iowan personality and farmboy looks, which he’d somehow retained despite the but rather for the hundred-percent thoroughness he wrought on any who crossed him—a survival skill honed by the Special Forces Green Berets.