Love in the Drop Zone Read online

  Love in the Drop Zone

  Delta Force romance story #8

  M. L. Buchman

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

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  Wild Justice

  About the Author

  Also by M. L. Buchman

  1

  A shadow loomed over her, blocking out the heat blast of the early morning sun striking across Fort Bragg, North Carolina’s Range 37 training area. No question who it was—he blocked out everything good about the quiet morning. Even the chatty cuckoos and the dive-bomber buzz of passing hummingbirds seemed to go silent in his presence.

  “Staff Sergeant Cindy Sue Chavez.”

  “Yes, Master Sergeant JD Ramírez?” Could the man be a more formal pain in the ass? She hated being called Cindy Sue and he damn well knew it, but it wasn’t a good idea to talk back to a superior rank—not even when he was being a superior asshole.

  Her mother, coming from Guadalajara, had thought Cindy Sue sounded American. But Cindy was Bangor, Maine born-and-buttered and no one in Bangor was named Cindy Sue because it was just too ridiculous—doubly so with her Mexican features and long, dark hair. Her parents had slipped across the border as two starry-eyed sixteen-year-olds seeking the American Dream. They hadn’t known any better, but it still rankled. She sighed. America wasn’t big on giving out guidebooks to help immigrant dreamers along the way. She should damn well write one, at least on how not to name your kids.

  Cindy’s personal mission to eradicate her middle name had been a success with most of her fellow Delta Force operators. Being a woman in Special Operations did have a few perks. Women were a rare commodity inside The Unit, as well as a reminder of home, most grunts were inclined to treat her nicely and drop the “Sue” after the fourth or tenth time she asked. A rifle butt in the gut often helped the slow learners.

  She wasn’t about to try that on Master Sergeant JD Ramírez whose dark eyes followed her every move. He positively relished how much she hated her extended name, but he was far too dangerous to risk attacking, at least directly. She loved Mama, so rather than indulging in a bit of matricide for giving her the name in the first place, she was leaning very strongly toward offing Master Sergeant JD Ramírez—from a safe distance.

  The heat on Range 37 was already climbing toward catastrophic despite the early hour. Low trees struggled upward to either side of this section of the range. Today’s training course lay along the low grassy hillside with scattered scrub and dotted with cheery flowers in yellows, blues, and purples. No hint of real shade anywhere.

  Ramírez wore boots, camos, and a tight black t-shirt that had clearly been thought up for men like him. He wasn’t exactly Mr. Handsome, but if it was what lay under the clothes that counted, he had Mr. Buff down. His skin had the same liquidy perfect genetic tan as hers, blemished by only a few visible battle scars that served to enhance the image. She’d never dated another Latino and—

  Crap!

  Some psychotic, “Cindy Sue” personality needed her head examined if she was thinking that about the master sergeant.

  The fact that he was a Delta Force instructor standing on a Fort Bragg practice range—perfectly in his element—did help the image right along but she wasn’t dumb enough to fall for any girlie, daydreaming trap. Master Sergeant JD Ramírez was magnificent in more than just his looks. He was a hundred percent superior soldier. That was what she aspired to. Which was ridiculous for a woman half his size, but it didn’t matter. She’d known JD almost as long as she’d been in Delta Force and he was the finest warrior she’d never fought with. They had yet to be assigned to an action team together—merely “rubbing shoulders” in situations like this refresher training.

  Ramírez still hadn’t spoken, but she was going to wait him out. She wasn’t even going to give him the satisfaction of looking up at him. Instead, she began preparing for the day.

  His boots took a step away. Hesitated, then took another, unveiling the sunrise’s full glare. None of the birdsong she’d been enjoying returned. His attitude had cleared the entire zone.

  “Do me a favor,” his voice was rough.

  She squinted up at him. All she could see was sun dazzle, but she knew from experience that he never quite looked at her when speaking.

  “What, Master Sergeant?” Not choke you to death for being a personal thorn in my backside? That was almost too big a favor to ask. And why was he haranguing her rather than the other seven operators sitting in the dirt and gearing up to survive today’s test?

  JD had been on her case since the first moment of the course. She didn’t expect him to ease up just because she’d survived her first six months in Delta, hunting Indonesian pirates, but it was way past just being a “thing.” His un-favoritism was so blatant that the other operators had unwound from their arrogant male smugness of innate superiority enough to comment on it. None had offered to protest on her behalf, of course, but that was fine. As a Delta operator she could take care of herself.

  And JD Ramírez was now topping her list of things to be taken care of. Not in a good way. She’d start by stuffing his head inside The Foo Fighters kicker drum. Then have Beyoncé strut her stuff up and down his back while wearing her gold-flecked spike-heel boots. If only.

  Today was the final sniper stalking test. It was the last day of a month-long skills refresher. Not a lot of field stalking involved in hunting Indonesian sea pirates. Her shooting precision from a moving platform like a boat or helicopter had certainly been honed, but Delta didn’t believe in letting any skills go stale. If that meant every deployment ended with a month under the ungentle thumbs of the trainers—who were fellow operators—it was fine with her.

  But she was getting a real antipathy for that trainer being JD.

  “Don’t fuck up, Cindy Sue,” he finally managed to grunt out.

  “Thanks, Master Sergeant. That’s real helpful.” She didn’t need advice on how to get through today’s sniper stalking test—especially not from JD Ramírez. She wished she had a few rounds in her rifle to deal with him. Maybe pepper the dirt as his feet to make him dance to her tune.

  “I’ll be your spotter.”

  Perfect! “Yes, sergeant. Glad it’ll be you.” So perfect that if she had a spare live round, she just might shoot herself in the foot to get out of it. She could feel the other seven of her teammates risking glances at the friendly little tête-à-tête she was having with the master sergeant. Why wasn’t he giving them any beef? They’d been working quietly together, preparing for the day.

  In stalking tests, spotters were definitely not the helpful guy looking over your shoulder and calling out range-to-target, wind speed, temperature, and all of the other factors required in long-shot marksmanship.

  She’d aced the shooting part of the course days ago.

  Now, his job was to sit in the target’s position with a high-powered scope and try to spot her crawling through the brush to kill him—with a single round. If he could pick her out, catch her even bending a stalk of grass the wrong way, she’d flunk the test and have to start over. Three fails and she’d be bounced back to a full week of stalker training.

  In other words, not a chance was she going to let anyone spot her. Especially not Mr. Perfect S
oldier JD Ramírez.

  She continued preparing her ghillie suit. An itchy mesh of burlap and tattered string, it broke the unnatural shape of a sniper slithering toward their target. Once interwoven with local flora, it would drape like a cloak over her head and body, making her into a small patch of slow-moving landscape. An extension of the ghillie would wrap around her rifle. She began lacing in bits of foliage that were native to this particular range. New Jersey tea and sweetfern grew well here. A small selection of the summer grasses, even now shifting from flexible green to August brittle brown, would add to the suffocating layer she’d be spending the next four to five hours underneath.

  There was a certain...stench to a well-prepared ghillie suit. It reeked of everywhere it had been. Dragging it along a dirt road for a 10K run had impregnated it with Fort Bragg dust and grime. Trips through reeking mangrove swamps, snorkeling across cow manure ponds, and crawling up the insides of large sewage pipes had added their own head-spinning miasma of awful.

  The Marine Scout Sniper Course had a “pig pond” to teach their snipers to go through anything to reach the target. The Delta trainers were far less kind. The old Maine saying, “Cain’t get the’a from he’a” simply wasn’t in a Delta vocabulary.

  Ghillie suit smell never truly washed off the skin considering the number of hours they’d spent wearing them. The scent clung until at least a couple of layers of skin had been shed over time. It worked as a high-quality male repellent in any bar—certainly better than Deet against the avaricious mosquitos of the Maine woods on her parents’ farm.

  The smell formed an impenetrable barrier to anyone—except for a fellow sniper. To them it was the sweet stench of belonging. However, repelling all would-be boarders wasn’t much of an issue after the first day into the refresher course. Delta training schedules didn’t leave much spare time in an operator’s schedule. Going to the bathroom. Maybe. Eating? On occasion. Sleep? Yep, sleep was for SEALs and other lazy-ass wimps.

  She sat cross-legged in the hot sun and continued working on preparing her ghillie. She did her best to ignore Master Sergeant JD Ramírez as he glared down at her.

  There had been a synergy between them since the first day—an unacknowledged one. She never shot as well as she did when JD was watching her. There was something about his mere presence that drove her to be better. At first, she’d hoped that he’d eventually notice the woman inside the soldier.

  After the last thirty days, she figured she could do with a lot less “notice.”

  2

  JD did his best to look away from Cindy, but it wasn’t working. He had a full, eight-operator squad that he’d been hounding through the course for thirty days. Just as planned, they now looked battered and weary. They were completely in that head-down, whatever’s-next-bring-it-on mode that every Delta operator knew to their very core. The battle was mental. The course was partly a skills refresher, but mostly a reinforcement that mere human limitations weren’t a part of being Delta.

  At least he had seven of them in that mode.

  Number Eight, Cindy Sue Chavez, sat calm and collected in the blazing sun, plucking up the local plants for her ghillie as if she was collecting a wedding bouquet. Nothing he or the other instructors had thrown at her made her fade in the slightest. Hell, he was exhausted.

  Delta instructors didn’t slack off—they were on rotation, in from field operations as well. If the squad did a mile swim wearing boots, ammo, and a heavy rifle, the instructors swam right beside them wearing the same gear. His shoulders still throbbed from yesterday’s ten-mile hike with a forty-pound rucksack, just before the last test day on the shooting range—an exercise designed to rate ability to shoot after a hard infiltration. He was just glad it wasn’t his day to crawl across the field hoping to god that some sharp-eyed spotter didn’t pick him out of the foliage and send his sorry ass back to the start line.

  “What is it about me that you hate so much, Master Sergeant?” Cindy didn’t look up from preparing her ghillie suit. Her voice was a simple, matter-of-fact, want-a-soda tone.

  “Hate? What makes you think I hate you, Chavez? No more than the next operator who slacks off.”

  It earned him a single long look from her dark brown eyes before she turned back to preparing her ghillie.

  Yeah, they both knew she hadn’t been slacking off and he’d been chapping her ass.

  “Just don’t screw up today.” He walked away before he could say something even lamer.

  Delta women were rare, but he’d worked with a number of them and was past being gender-biased in either direction. Except Cindy Chavez belonged in a gender all her own. Delta women were tough, real hard chargers, just like the men—Delta Force didn’t recruit anyone who wasn’t exceptional.

  But there was something about her that blew all his calibrations about operators.

  Was it her beauty? The fact that she was a top athlete? The fact that she didn’t take shit from anyone—not even him? He especially liked that about her.

  He hadn’t even been able to think of another woman since he’d first met her over a year ago. It had certainly cut down on his favorite recreational pastime. He’d look at a bar babe with her bright blues and deep cleavage zeroed in on him, and then picture the slender, dark-eyed Cindy Chavez and he was outta there.

  Even now he could feel those thoughtful, unrevealing eyes tracking him as if he was her next sniper target.

  He walked over the broad, kilometer-long hillside slope that she would be crawling across. It was as ugly as a Kansas prairie—a place he hadn’t been able to leave fast enough. He took his seat on the raised platform for the spotter/target—last of the three to arrive. Open to all sides, it had a wooden roof that seemed to focus the heat, even if it blocked most of the sun. From the central rafter dangled a metal target that the snipers would have to hit in order to pass—hit without being spotted.

  There wasn’t a breath of air. No wind to mask the sniper’s traverse through the grass and brush. None that would get in his lungs after standing so close to Cindy Chavez and watch her fine-fingered quick movements of preparing her ghillie.

  JD hoped that she made it, he really did. He knew he’d pushed her harder than any of the others. But his next assignment badly needed a woman of Cindy’s caliber if they were going to survive it.

  3

  A three-hour skull-drag across the field. Never bring your head up. Never move two inches when one would do.

  Four of the eight stalkers had been picked off by the sharp-eyed spotters. They’d have another try at it after lunch—by which time the North Carolina heat would be beyond brain-baking and their limbs would already be weary beyond functioning from their first attempt. Fine motor control would be out the window.

  Not her.

  A Marine Scout Sniper had to start a thousand meters out and crawl undetected to within three hundred meters from the spotter/target. A Delta operator was supposed to get within a hundred: the length of a football field from the best spotters in the business. A fifteen-second sprint away.

  The first of the snipers to reach the start line undetected just fired off a blank to indicate he was ready. The three spotters on the platform all focused on finding him. She’d bet it was “Grizzly” Jones. His beard was as unruly as a bear’s, which was a fair description of his body shape as well. He was incredibly good.

  If the spotters couldn’t find him, they’d clear him to fire a single live round at a metal target hanging over their heads. If they still couldn’t find the shooter by muzzle flash, or by the blowback suppressor stirring up the grass, then he’d pass the test.

  The rule was: no one else moved while they waited for a sniper’s second shot.

  They were unable to find the shooter. The spotters cleared him to fire.

  Cindy heard the hard crack of his live round followed almost instantly by the sharp clang of the metal target mounted in the center of the spotter group.

  The spotters continued their efforts, but miscalled his location b
y a good three meters. A sniper not only had to arrive invisibly, he was also supposed to avoid being shot immediately after making his own kill.

  The sniper rose on the all clear signal. She didn’t bother wasting time to see who it was.

  One thing she’d learned about Delta, rules were for other people.

  Since the moment everyone’s attention had focused on finding Grizzly—or whoever—Cindy had been headed sideways.

  4

  Two more snipers had passed. That meant there was only one left and JD would be damned if he could find her.

  The time limit was fast approaching and he didn’t want Cindy to time out. He needed her on his next assignment. He wanted this success for her. He wanted her—

  The thought petered out there. An unfinished truth.

  He rubbed the sweat from his eyes. The air was shimmering at even a hundred meters. The smell of baking grass, scrub, and the unique blend that was Fort Bragg dirt—that he knew so well from crawling across so much of it himself over the years—was distracting him.

  What would Cindy smell like? Not in her ghillie, but instead fresh from a shower after a hard day in the field? Or still hot and sweaty, lying back among the five-petaled wood-anemone? He liked that thought. It made a pleasant companion as he returned to scanning the field. The controls on the tripod-mounted scope nearly burned his hand with the late morning heat.

  He figured it was okay to think such things, as long as he never showed them. To keep such thoughts about her in check—which was damned hard because she was so incredible—he made a point of keeping her angry at him. Her name had been but the latest of many techniques, but already she was growing immune to it. He was running out of ploys to avoid thinking about her.