Target of the Heart

Chapter 2-3

Pete tramped past the rookies as if they weren’t there, not even looking directly at them.

A few reacted, most didn’t.

Someone sent a Frisbee winging by just feet in front of his nose. He considered pulling out his sidearm and shooting it out of the air. Instead he slapped it and left it where it rattled to a stop against the concrete pavement of the landing apron. The field was suddenly silent except for the distant roar of a C-130 taking off down the main Fort Campbell runway.

One of them, the one standing off to the side, had spotted him even as he rounded the hangar as if he’d been waiting for Pete’s arrival.

Pete assessed the situation as he moved past them. One Black Hawk helicopter, squat and heavily armed with training rounds. One massive twin-rotor Chinook heavy-transport assault helo. Two Little Birds, both mission-enhanced as attack craft rather than for delivery or extraction. It was an odd mix, as were the puppy-panting hopefuls.

Pete continued to the Black Hawk, jerked open the massive side door. As it slid toward the rear of the helo, an oven-blast of trapped solar heat rolled over him. The remote Himalayas that he’d escaped just twenty-seven hours ago kept looking better and better.

While they waited or worried or whatever, he stripped down to his skivvies then dug out and donned his flightsuit that still reeked of too many hours spent squatting on the Tibetan soil with its foreign smells and dangerous feel. He grabbed his helmet and chucked the rest of the mess behind the rear cargo net.

When he turned back he noticed that the loner still watched him. Cool behind dark shades despite the failing light, narrow face, well-defined features…and dark brunette hair down to his shoulders.

Shit!

Her shoulders.

And it fell in one of those slightly disarrayed cascades women never understood was a hundred times sexier than the fanciest hairdo. Or maybe they did.

He scanned the others. The redhead, also clearly female, also watched him closely, though she had a wide and saucy grin. He must be even more exhausted than he’d thought, to miss them.

Women. Two.

He knew the 160th’s 5th Battalion D Company had women, both crew chiefs and pilots, and he wouldn’t wish that hell on anyone. He’d lost good fliers, ones he thought were good men, to r**e charges because they couldn’t keep their d**k in their pants, fraternization courts-martial, or simply falling in goddamn love and losing their edge as they worried more about “home and family” than the person trying to shoot them out of the sky. Good men turned into “lovesick bull calves” like whatever that old movie was.

Now he was probably going to get his a*s hauled in by one of them because he’d changed clothes right out in the open. Well, to hell with them. And he’d kept his underwear on, hadn’t he? He was too tired to be sure. Or to care.

Thank god this assignment was only temporary.

“You! Specialty?” he snapped out as he moved over to the loner. There was always one in every group.

“Civility, sir,” she answered with a light French accent and a deadpan tone that almost made him smile. That was pretty unexpected given his current frame of mind. But it wasn’t your average soldier who could tell a superior officer he was being an a*s so graciously.

“Civil Sybil? Woman of many personalities?”