Target of the Heart

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

By the time the C-130 transport jet he’d hitched a ride in across the country smacked down at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Major Pete Napier still didn’t know what to make of his orders. Command had clearly lost their marbles. And sending him out looking for them was just pissing him off.

But, when the orders had pulled him off of forward deployment and sent him stateside to test trainees, it had probably been a good career move not to call the Commodore who delivered the orders an ignorant a*s. Navy Commodores didn’t take any more kindly to such things than Army Brigadier Generals—no matter how richly the compliment might be deserved in both cases.

He hit the main desk at Fort Campbell with a severe dose of jet leg and a lethal dose of foul mood.

The desk orderly gave him a room key for the transient quarters in the Richardson Complex, informing him that it was for a maximum three-day occupancy so alternate arrangements should be made rapidly. As if base transient quarters were such a luxury. He managed not to execute the man on the spot, mostly because his sidearm was stowed in his duffle.

Pete didn’t plan on being here longer than it took to track down his commander and talk his way back up to forward deployment. The trick was to do it without earning a court-martial for punching out a superior officer.

The guard also gave him a pass for the gate to the Night Stalkers compound and instructions to report immediately upon arrival to Colonel Cassius McDermott, the commander of the entire U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Perfect. Exactly the man he needed to tackle.

Pete found a corporal to give him a lift, but was dumped unceremoniously outside the 160th’s front gate with his gear. “Sorry, sir. I’m not authorized inside the compound.”

The midday heat had baked into the pavement and was re-radiating with a vengeance as evening threatened to exceed a hundred-percent humidity even if it had to make up numbers to do it.

His body and his clothes were still oriented for the summer chill of Tibet and the not much warmer temperature of Air Force transports at altitude. He’d only been so much cargo to them: pressurized air was provided begrudgingly, heat not at all.

Pete thought wistfully of flying over the cool Himalayas as he slung on his pack and trudged through the heat, the blazing idiocy of security, and the long dusty stretch to the Colonel’s on-base office—a bolthole for when he wasn’t at the Pentagon doing whatever useless crap they performed there.

At least when Pete reported he was ushered straight into “the presence.”

Colonel Cassius McDermott answered his salute with, “Pete, sit your sorry a*s down. You look whipped, boy.” He would have remained standing, but his legs didn’t think that was really advisable at the moment and he collapsed into a chair.

“What the hell am I doing mingling with the recruits, Cass? And what’s a One-Star doing messing with Night Stalker assignments?”

Cass McDermott had always been there for him: when Pete was a fresh-faced i***t Army National Guard pilot, when climbing the career ladder, even through an ugly marriage that led to an uglier divorce—all of it.

McDermott’s field office was so plain that it might have belonged to a clerk, except for the photos of the Colonel shaking hands with each of the last three Presidents. The three photos and the American flag were the only relief to the colorlessness of the room; beige and khaki.

Cass leaned back in his chair and studied Pete through narrowed eyes like he was looking at a bug. Friend or not, the Colonel was like that. He wasn’t just the commander of SOAR, he was SOAR. The man had flown every ugly mission there was for thirty years. But he didn’t flaunt it. The only evidence of who this man really was appeared in the ever-expanding array of medals in the three progressive photos.

Rumor was they’d tried to promote him to JSOC half a dozen times and he’d refused. Well, Joint Special Operations Command’s loss was definitely SOAR’s gain. Pete respected few people beyond the cockpit, but McDermott was one of them.

“The Commodore was handy. They’re actually my orders, but I figured I needed a bit of rank to deliver them so that you didn’t spit in the messenger’s face.”

“Thought about doing more than spitting, but he’d already ducked and run.”

“You don’t rise to command an entire aircraft carrier group by being stupid.”

Pete grimaced. He knew his reputation was bad, but that bad? He preferred being in the field, that was all. He didn’t suffer fools lightly. That was a skill that a good trainer needed and he totally lacked.

McDermott looked at his watch and then back at Pete.

Pete had a sudden bad feeling about what was going to happen next, but the look on McDermott’s face shifted as if he’d thought better of something.

“Tell you what. You go look the crew over and then we’ll talk. I even provided you with a pair of ringers.”

Pete waited, but the Colonel wasn’t doing any explaining. Instead he rose to his feet, forcing Pete to struggle to his own.

“Here are the night’s orders,” McDermott handed over a single sheet of paper. He didn’t give Pete time to look at them, instead offering a sharp salute. “I’ll see you in eight hours. Dismissed.”

Once in the outer office, Pete looked at the sheet. It would have been cryptography to anyone other than a Night Stalker.

To his trained eye, it read like only one thing.

He decided that Cass McDermott wasn’t the only man who was wise enough to know when to duck. Cass had done it by making sure that Pete had been neatly ushered out of the Colonel’s office before Pete had had a chance to look at the orders and heave them back in the Colonel’s face.

He’d been awake for three days now and in ten minutes he was scheduled to face rookies.

Rookies!

Shit!