Guardian of the Heart Read online

  Assume terrible and plan for something worse. Her sister-in-law might be a mechanic, but it didn’t mean she had the rule wrong for a medic.

  Noreen shrugged on her small pack—the ten-pounder of the bare essentials. Over the years, she’d been watching the Delta Force operators. When they went into a battle zone, they didn’t go in like the US Rangers with loads of gear. They carried the absolute minimum, along with as much ammo as they could manage. That was a Delta Force operator’s idea of traveling light—five pounds of survival gear and forty pounds of ammo.

  The full med-kit weighed too much if she had to help carry or drag a soldier back to the bird—it slowed her down. Piece by precious piece she’d pared her primary field kit in half, then half again, and lived in terror of the day she’d learn a bad lesson about what she’d left behind on the helo. She always had the full kit ready and waiting just in case she changed her mind at the last second.

  “One minute,” Vince “Cruiser” Jawolski (who only looked a little like his hero Tom Cruise) called out. “Boulder country. Close.”

  Boulders meant there probably wouldn’t be a way to land the helo. She’d grabbed a stretcher, but now tossed it aside.

  Close meant close to enemy fire. Vince would have to drop them off, dodge away for safety, then circle back when she was ready for extraction.

  “Ropes?” The new guy asked, as if she didn’t know how to kick out her own Fast Rope. Nice of him to ask though. Overly macho, but nice.

  Noreen leaned her head out the door to look into the night. Her night-vision goggles showed the battle zone in a hundred shades of green. Long rips of gunfire from the helicopters circling above. The occasional bold streak of a missile leaving a hot trail across her field of vision, then ending in a bright bloom of destruction when it hit an enemy position.

  Ground fire pounded upward. Big, bright lines of anti-aircraft. Small, nasty slices from AK-47s and the like. No sign of RPGs. No bright flare of a fire near a downed bird.

  US ground troops, clearly marked by the infrared-reflective tabs on their uniforms, were spread out across the boulder field and moving forward under heavy fire.

  “Low and quiet,” she called back.

  Captain Luc swung his Minigun into position.

  “Quiet means don’t fire unless you have to,” she called out.

  “I know what the hell it means, sister,” his snarl said that, in addition to his pretty smile, he had a mean-as-hell battle mode. “Just wanta be in position to save your fine ass if I need to.”

  And that actually made her laugh. She normally hated it when someone separated her from the crowd for being female, but he’d made it sound like a high compliment and that tickled her.

  “Barry has a fine ass, too,” she countered as she searched for the injured team.

  “Was wondering when you’d notice,” Barry would be searching out the other side.

  “Two o’clock, a hundred yards out.” The first to spot the wounded, Xavier’s voice was abruptly pure business.

  Noreen checked and didn’t see anything. And then she realized, that was the point: she didn’t see anything. A couple of human-sized heat signatures, but no gunfire from their position. Captain Luc had potential.

  “Do it!”

  Xavier had expected the pilot to fly forward. Instead, he dropped from twenty feet above the boulder field to ten. Before he could drop any farther, Noreen jumped. At five feet, Barry followed but he was already well behind her.

  Noreen had landed on one boulder, but let her momentum shift and send her leaping onto the next. She hit a flat rock in a long dive, then swung her legs around like a vault over a pommel horse before moving to the next.

  Even as the pilots began pulling back, Noreen reached the wounded soldiers.

  “What the hell?” He’d never seen anything like it.

  “Parkour,” Mason told him, even though he’d been facing the other way over his own side-facing Minigun. “You know those guys who climb walls and jump from rooftop to rooftop with no special gear? She got all trained up in that.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone move so fast over a landscape.”

  He saw Barry finally catch up with her and they huddled down over the two men lying among the boulders.

  That’s when Xavier spotted enemy troops climbing a cliff wall to the south. They were trying to get into position above the med team. Not wanting to attract way too much attention to their CSAR bird by using his Minigun, he swung his FN-SCAR rifle up from his chest.

  He lined up over the Minigun, checked the angle to make sure he wasn’t going to shoot the spinning rotor blades of his own damned helo, and fired three-round bursts. The first was low and right. The second took out the man to the left, the third nailed the bastard with his rifle aimed down into the battlefield below.

  Xavier could see that he got off a single round, which sparked rock not two feet from Noreen’s head. He didn’t live long enough to shoot off a second.

  Noreen didn’t even bother to look up at the distraction though she must have heard it. Barry flinched badly though he was farther away. That was one cool-headed chick.

  The battle line surged back and forth, helos raining down brilliant arcs of fire. At least they were brilliant in his night-vision gear—without NVGs, they would fall like invisible death upon the enemy’s heads. The anti-aircraft fire made his palms itch.

  He should be shooting those bastards, he had a decent angle—okay, a kinda decent angle—on them. But that would draw fire to the CSAR bird. Once they were involved in the fray, it would be much harder to break off and go for the extraction. Their best move was to stay low and quiet in the background.

  The ground team had to call for an extraction at some point. Then he could lay a ring of death if necessary. He safetied and let his rifle hang once more against his chest. Then he grabbed the Minigun’s handles. Next perp who messed with their med team was going to get a hundred-round burst in the face rather than just three.

  “Told you,” Mason spoke up over the intercom. “Angel of Death. She’s just keeping us hanging here like she was out on a Sunday stroll.”

  “Or until she thinks it safe to transport the guy.”

  “You’ll see,” was the sergeant’s dire prediction. He obviously wasn’t the cheerful sort. “We should already have them aboard and be outta here.”

  “You’re still flying CSAR,” Xavier spotted a potential threat, but so did a passing Little Bird attack helo that blew the crap out of it.

  After a long silence and a short gun burst, Mason responded. “I like saving our guys. It’s a good thing. But the Angel of Death—shouldn’t have called her that, definitely not to her face—is some kind of extreme.”

  Some kind of extreme. Made Xavier wonder if that carried over into other parts of her life. He was most of the way to a pleasant fantasy when he spotted a problem.

  They’d been circling a mile outside the battle zone. At the moment, he was facing out toward what should have been empty night, but it wasn’t.

  “Trouble at four o’clock,” he called to the pilots. “Coming up the road fast.”

  The pilot twisted the helo’s nose to face the incoming traffic, which let both him and Mason line up on them simultaneously by leaning out their windows and aiming forward.

  It was a line of vehicles. Out here, it wouldn’t be theirs. And they were coming up from behind the US lines. The rearmost position of the US offensive right now was defined by their medics.

  “Engage or extract?” He knew what his answer would be, but it wasn’t his call.

  One of the pilots got on the radio with the Air Mission Commander flying somewhere high, maybe even back at base and watching through a drone.

  “Engage!”

  Shit! If something went wrong, the med team would be added to tonight’s casualty list. Now it was his job to make sure that they weren’t.

  He lined up on the lead vehicle and pulled the trigger.

  “Uh-oh! That’s not right!” Nor
een twisted to look east into the night. All of tonight’s action had been to the west, except for those shooters that she could just feel Xavier was responsible for eliminating.

  The hard, heavy, chainsaw brap! of a pair of Miniguns to the east meant they were now surrounded.

  She stared down at the Ranger she’d been unable to save. Lifting him to a helicopter would have eliminated what little chance he had, but not even all the gear aboard would have saved him in time.

  His buddy was alternately begging his friend to wake up and screaming at her. When he grabbed the front of her flight vest to shake her, she sighed—then leaned a calf gently against the shattered knee he was too hyped to notice. Sometimes it took a bit to burn a hole through a wall of panic.

  Thankfully, it took only that little pressure to get his undivided attention. He released her and collapsed back.

  She glanced again to the east and saw that their own flight out was fully engaged in the battle. Now came the thing she hated the most. She’d signed up to save lives, not take them.

  Noreen slammed the injured Ranger’s rifle into his hands and shouted, “Saddle up, soldier. We’ve got unfriendly incoming.” His Ranger brain knew what to do with that.

  She slapped a morphine ampule into his thigh to deaden the shattered knee. Barry had already stabilized it with a splint and bandage—nothing arterial, but he’d probably need a new joint.

  Taking the dead Ranger’s rifle, she knelt beside Barry with his handgun out, and the three of them peered around the shielding boulder. Back on the farm, her big brother had made sure that she was an excellent shot, even before she’d gone Army ROTC. She had the rifle because she could outshoot Barry every time and they both knew it—he was from Buffalo, New York and hadn’t held a gun before Basic Training.

  The CSAR bird had climbed and was hammering down at something she couldn’t see. But it was coming their way fast. The occasional explosion on the ground didn’t stop whatever was on the move in their direction. All of the other helos were busy to the west, this end of the battle was up to the lone CSAR Black Hawk.

  Noreen had seen more than enough firefights from the ground. And she knew The Jar’s firing pattern well enough to pick it out anywhere. She should give the guy a break—he was damned good.

  Xavier Jones was better.

  He used a Minigun the way she used a surgical knife, with precision and speed. Operating theaters always made her a little crazy to watch—the surgeons moved so damn slowly. If she had an artery to clamp off to save someone’s life, she sliced deep and got there as fast as she could. Battlefield surgery wasn’t pretty, but it had to be effective.

  In comparison, Mason waved a broadsword of bullets and Xavier used a rapier—fast, precise, and (she hoped for her sake) lethal.

  Still, the helo was moving closer as they dodged and weaved above whoever was on the ground.

  A line of pickups rolled into view. The second one exploded, scattering metal and bodies in all directions.

  Ignoring the carnage, she lined up on the first vehicle. The Ranger’s first round took out the windshield a moment before her shot took out the driver—half a second change and it would have been the Ranger’s kill and not hers. Through the scope she could see the front passenger grab for the wheel, but it was too late—they caught a big rock and it rolled the truck up and over.

  Killed by a woman—they weren’t going to heaven.

  How much that must gall them when they found out after crossing over. She had few doubts that the admitting room to the afterlife was taking full retribution on all of ISIS, but she did like adding that extra mark to their eternal damnation.

  The battle blurred.

  Some fighters thrown clear from the destruction gathered up their rifles. She, Barry, and the Ranger picked off the ones they could.

  Another truck squeezed by the flipped one. Xavier killed that one while The Jar took out the next in line.

  During a brief lull, someone shouted “Now!” over the radio.

  Between one eye blink and the next, the Black Hawk was hovering two steps away with its belly touching the rocks.

  Xavier reached down to help and the two Rangers were whisked aboard. Barry climbed in and Noreen barely had a moment to grab her med bag before a massive hand clamped down on her vest and lifted her aboard one-handed.

  Xavier’s strength was a visceral shock—as if his grasp had an actual g-force to it.

  He thumped her down on the deck, snapped a three-meter monkey line to her vest to keep her aboard, and was back in his seat faster than she could catch her breath.

  As the helo peeled away, Xavier and Mason wiped out the last of the line of new arrivals down below.

  “One dead, one stable,” she managed to call despite how breathless she felt.

  Cruiser acknowledged her report and began to once more circle outside the battle zone just in case there were more wounded during the night’s action. Barry was seeing to the Ranger with the screwed-up knee—she bagged his buddy.

  When the battle finished with no more injuries, the big Chinook circled down to gather up the ground forces and the very few surviving assailants, now prisoners.

  “You are one chill medic, Miss Guardian,” Xavier’s voice rumbled as they turned for home.

  She didn’t feel “chill,” not with the memory of how it had felt to be lifted to safety by Xavier.

  Chapter 3

  A dozen missions in a dozen nights and Xavier decided that Noreen’s nicknames were justified: Guardian of the Night, Angel of Death, Bitch of Black Death, and all of the others he began hearing from the rest of the team. Though in her favor, she was only a bitch when something came between her and the person she was rescuing.

  When they had a wounded bad guy, she became especially fierce. They didn’t want her help, most of the extremist radicals would rather die than be touched by a woman. One time she’d pulled her sidearm and shoved it half into a guy’s mouth to shut him up so that she and Barry could stitch him back together. He’d kept yammering around the barrel until Xavier had taken the gun and flipped off the safety—then the guy had shut up and let her work.

  Female Night Stalkers were still few and far between—despite being the only Special Operations team to actively recruit women before it was mandated by law—but there was no questioning that Noreen deserved to be one. He’d flown CSAR for years, but never seen anyone like her.

  He asked around about the survival rate of her patients and came away surprised that she wasn’t nicknamed “The Savior” no matter how sacrilegious it might be. That dead Ranger the first night was a complete exception once Noreen Wallace got her hands on them.

  The other problem he was having was that she was an officer and he was enlisted.

  Since not thinking about Noreen Wallace wasn’t working for him, he’d shifted to a tactic of avoidance on the ground. She was still right there, so close and alive on every mission, but he made sure he was long gone before she’d restocked the helo’s med gear.

  However, Balad Air Base didn’t offer the level of evasive options it once had. Gone were the days of forty thousand US personnel. Now Balad was manned by two very distinct groups that didn’t come together. The main contingent was a few thousand members of the Iraqi Air Force and their F-16s. The other was the Americans: a single Night Stalker company, the Special Operations Forces they were responsible for delivering and rescuing, and a small collection of support personnel. Total count closer to one hundred than two.

  His first tour had been here at “The Big Snake” of Camp Anaconda. Now back to its original Balad Air Base name, it was almost unrecognizable. The “downtown” with Subway, Burger King, and all the other food joints were gone. The outdoor Olympic-sized swimming pool had a nasty green tinge to the water, the indoor one was bone dry. And the first-run movie house was now third-run Iraqi propaganda films—when it was running at all. Most of the housing was a ghost town—so bad that they’d even been advised to avoid the southeast quadrant of the base fo
r security reasons.

  Dropping from forty thousand to less than two hadn’t built a lot of community spirit. He’d been to FOBs—Forward Operating Bases—that were little more than HESCO barriers and machine gun mounts that were cheerier.

  For something to do, the Night Stalker enlisteds had taken over an old briefing room, scrounged up a few pinball machines from various places, and installed a soda and munchies fridge. Various chairs and couches and a big screen TV for video games had made it about as welcoming as the inside of a Black Hawk after a battle. Maybe after a battle and a dust storm just before it was hit by a hurricane. But it was still an okay place to hang.

  Tonight had been quiet, a short mission (back before midnight) and no casualties. To avoid the Wreck Room, as they’d dubbed it, he’d spent a couple hours out on the range. Mason (Noreen had let him off the The Jar hook but hadn’t replaced it with anything else yet) came out with him and they’d run through a couple hundred rounds apiece.

  That first night he never should have missed the first shooter and the master sergeant helped him figure out why. It was Mason who spotted it. Without realizing it, Xavier had typically flown on the left side of the Black Hawks throughout his career, letting him steady his right shoulder (his shooting shoulder) against the back of the copilot’s seat. Now he was sitting right side and it felt twisted.

  They rigged up an old car seat that had been dumped nearby, with no sign of what had happened to the car itself, against a side wall that simulated the cramped position of the gunner’s seats. He worked at it until he had a better feel for the shift. Back and forth, back and forth—they’d taken turns switching the seat side to side, again and again, until they were both shooting evenly no matter their position. Then they’d shot another stack of clips apiece to anchor it into muscle memory. If he and Mason had been scoring—which they both said they weren’t but clearly were—they’d have tied. He could get to like Mason.

  The master sergeant headed to dinner—which in a Night Stalkers clock-flipped world of nighttime missions and daytime slumber was about 0300—while Xavier visited the quartermaster to sign off for the spent rounds.