For Her Dark Eyes Only Read online

  4

  For three days we watched him.

  Mira and I crawled in and watched him. We lived in his house. We smelled the food he ate. We watched him fuck his wives at night from so close we could smell the sex on him afterward. We didn’t drink water so that we wouldn’t have to pee. We didn’t eat so that we wouldn’t have to shit.

  Mira and I were a US Delta Force sniper team—so invisible that we weren’t even there.

  But we were and we listened.

  Abdul had a rage in him. That part of him I recognized. That part of him I knew down to my bones. Before The Unit, it had twisted inside my guts like a knife every time I thought of my family. I didn’t beat or kill, but I knew what drove him.

  He got angry at a wife for not being eager to receive him. After he beat her, and used her hard, he stated the fateful “I divorce you” three times—all a guy had to do to end a marriage in this culture. At that moment she lost rights to any of her children and was banished back to her family, never to emerge from the shame again. Mira almost took him down at that point, but I held her back. Abdul wasn’t the only reason we were here.

  A cousin of his—who had demanded a mere hundred grand for selling the allied bombing patterns over a terrorist-held city when he should have earned half a million—was dismissed, without the grace-saving of “based on his request” in the announcement of his departure. His career, his life in Saudi politics was finished. Mira and I laid a bet that his fortunes would be gone in twenty-four hours and his family in forty-eight. End it now, Dude.

  And still we waited in thirsty silence.

  We were the hum in an air-conditioning vent, a shadow behind a palm tree, a breath on the wind. We sucked on pebbles to draw precious saliva to soothe aching throats.

  Three long days we waited and watched. On the long watches I wondered if the goddamn lieutenant had reported us AWOL—away without leave—or if he’d left a simple “on assignment” on our registers. We were past that now. Even the ache didn’t matter, only the mission.

  The self-assigned mission.

  Night four.

  Abdul’s private war council had finally been called.

  Out in the great courtyard of his home, an evening of food and debauchery on a grand scale convened. His war council of thirty of his closest and most trusted—brothers, cousins, sons. All of his sons.

  “Go, Mira. Go now. While you can.” I was assembling my McMillan sniper rifle.

  “That boat sailed the minute we stepped off the reservation, Kurt.” She began lining up magazines for me. Five rounds per mag of .50 BMG sniper-grade ammo; four to a pound and as long as the five dollar bill each one cost. We’d scouted the ideal spot, found it in the bastard’s bedroom. A monstrous bed, satin sheets the size of pool covers, red Persian rugs on white marble floors, gold fixtures in a bathroom big enough to park a couple Humvees in. Wealth dripped out of the faucets and shone from the crystal chandeliers. I’d never seen anything like it and frankly never wanted to again. It was cold in this blazingly hot country. More frigid and heartless than a winter storm blowing in off the north Pacific.

  Mira had quietly spoken with the four current wives—apparently none of them were very fond of their husband-prince and the dismissed wife had been a favorite in their circle. For their own safety in deniability afterward, Mira had tied them up in the bathroom. Then we’d barricaded ourselves in.

  The only opening was the French doors that swung out into the night. An ornate dresser of inlaid English rosewood turned into a shooting stand placed well inside the room. With the flash suppressor and an extra foot of silencer, I’d attract little attention. Only a perfect shot from the courtyard could find me, though we both expected one eventually would.

  Mira’s family had been little better than mine. Just like me, her brothers and now the occasional sister, were in the Spec Ops community. We both knew what was coming for us and, without a word, we were both willing to pay the price if it came to that.

  Abdul’s war council spread out in the marble-paved courtyard below me—acres of the stuff. Out in the exact center stood a circle of tables covered with pristine white cloths and laden with an unimaginable bounty. Buckets of iced caviar, great slabs of pâté, whole sides of beef that could feed hundreds, all served by lightly clad women who had clearly been paid to not complain no matter what was done to them.

  The range was so close that I couldn’t miss.

  The Canadian Tac-50 was twenty-six pounds and six-feet of the baddest rifle in the business. Two of the three longest sniper shots ever confirmed as kills had flown out of Tac-50 barrels—each over two thousand yards and I didn’t have a single shot here over two hundred. I’d selected the beast just in case I had needed the long shot. Instead I had easy targets and massive rounds to punch with.

  I dialed back my Schmidt-Bender scope all the way to compensate for the thousand-yard zeroing I kept the rifle set for. My bullets were going to drop less than two inches before impact at this range.

  We’d all been scrubbed. There was no serial number on either scope or weapon. The only ID Mira and I carried was phony as hell and identified us as mercenaries gone hunting—traceably hired by the remains of a cell of terrorists Abdul had fucked over in Pakistan. Even if we got out clean, we’d “drop” those IDs somewhere that they’d be discovered.

  US intel services wanted him in place. US and Saudi military—and any grunt with even half a brain—wanted him gone no matter what the CIA said. He was about to be erased.

  I was committing an act of war. Killing thirty of the King of Saudi Arabia’s immediate relatives couldn’t be shrugged off. One or two might be overlooked, but Abdul had built his network too well and just cutting the head off the serpent wouldn’t be enough.

  Worst case scenario? There would be two dead mercs who would never be identified, except by Combat Applications Group Lieutenant Bruce—who’d known exactly what he was doing when he left that “Eyes Only” report for a sniper and his spotter, both with no families outside The Unit.

  I snapped in the first magazine with a gentle click and worked the bolt to load the first round so softly that it wouldn’t have disturbed a cricket.

  Two hundred yards away, I stared straight into Prince Abdul Malik Hassan’s face through my scope. His head filled my view. It was thrown back in a laugh and it would have been so easy to feed a round to him, right down his throat.

  You always heard when an ST6 SEAL died in action. His brothers saw to that, but that wasn’t our way. When my best friend went down in Yemen, his family never knew how it happened. But I knew, now that I’d read the file—they traced it to Abdul giving away our plans. When Mira’s bunkmate lost both arms and her eyesight in the Ukraine, Abdul might as well have pulled the trigger.

  “Not yet, Abdul,” I whispered down the long length of my sweet rifle.

  I shifted my aim.

  Not yet.

  First you need to watch your family die.

  5

  The Unit doesn’t believe in suicide missions. Delta’s mission is to deliver results. I’d arrived in this place knowing the odds. I care about my life and Mira’s, maybe more than anyone because an operator goes in knowing the risks—I take them every day. It would take so little to erase everything except someone’s memory of me. A stray round, a single mistake.

  Training taught me that, but it might not have been enough. I wanted Abdul so badly that I would have seen it through even if there had been no chance of escape.

  It was Mira who had taught me that there was more, so much more. We’d slowly discovered it together, in each other. Two people learning that there was family beyond our brothers and sisters of war. Until we ultimately found true family in each other. There was nothing we wouldn’t do for one another.

  Nothing.

  We began.

  It was messy, but it was fast. After three days lying in wai
t, it was no more than an eyeblink. One heartbeat between shots and three to reload. Just thirty seconds to clear the courtyard of every target—but one.

  Then Abdul went down, hard. He went down screaming in panic and running away from the circle of the dead: his murdering council of friends and relatives. For him I used three full magazines, fifteen rounds, all blasted from the big Tac-50 to take him apart one piece at a time.

  Toward the end I was peripherally aware of other gunfire—silenced rounds on a different beat—but that wasn’t my focus. That’s why I had a spotter and if she wasn’t good enough, we were both done.

  She was.

  The silence echoed through the courtyard, Abdul’s final scream no more than a memory in the vast marble plaza. Our gunfire had been quiet pops never heard beyond the French doors. Beside many of the dead lay drawn weapons, but lacking a target, no shot was fired.

  Mira and I eased back through the streets of Riyadh in the soft cool breath of the pre-dawn desert. She walked two steps behind me, as a niqab-clad woman should follow her man: respectful, hidden. Her rifle, like mine, still warm from use, now lay hidden beneath the long folds of her robe. Only her eyes showed.

  But in my mind’s eye she moved beside me, her dark hair floating free in the ocean’s winds as we held hands and walked together down the beach in a soft, cool Oregon rain—her dark eyes bright with the joy of being alive.

  About the Author

  M. L. Buchman has over 40 novels in print. His military romantic suspense books have been named Barnes & Noble and NPR “Top 5 of the year” and Booklist “Top 10 of the Year.” He has been nominated for the Reviewer’s Choice Award for “Top 10 Romantic Suspense of 2014” by RT Book Reviews. In addition to romance, he also writes thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction.

  In among his career as a corporate project manager he has: rebuilt and single-handed a fifty-foot sailboat, both flown and jumped out of airplanes, designed and built two houses, and bicycled solo around the world.

  He is now making his living as a full-time writer on the Oregon Coast with his beloved wife. He is constantly amazed at what you can do with a degree in Geophysics. You may keep up with his writing by subscribing to his newsletter at www.mlbuchman.com.

  Target Engaged (excerpt) -a Delta Force novel-

  Carla Anderson rolled up to the looming, storm-fence gate on her brother’s midnight-blue Kawasaki Ninja 1000 motorcycle. The pounding of the engine against her sore butt emphasized every mile from Fort Carson in Pueblo, Colorado, home of the 4th Infantry and hopefully never again the home of Sergeant Carla Anderson. The bike was all she had left of Clay, other than a folded flag, and she was here to honor that.

  If this was the correct “here.”

  A small guard post stood by the gate into a broad, dusty compound. It looked deserted and she didn’t see even a camera.

  This was Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She knew that much. Two hundred and fifty square miles of military installation, not counting the addition of the neighboring Pope Army Airfield.

  She’d gotten her Airborne parachute training here and had never even known what was hidden in this remote corner. Bragg was exactly the sort of place where a tiny, elite unit of the U.S. military could disappear—in plain sight.

  This back corner of the home of the 82nd Airborne was harder to find than it looked. What she could see of the compound through the fence definitely ranked “worst on base.”

  The setup was totally whacked.

  Standing outside the fence at the guard post she could see a large, squat building across the compound. The gray concrete building was incongruously cheerful with bright pink roses along the front walkway—the only landscaping visible anywhere. More recent buildings—in better condition only because they were newer—ranged off to the right. She could breach the old fence in a dozen different places just in the hundred-yard span she could see before it disappeared into a clump of scrub and low trees drooping in the June heat.

  Wholly indefensible.

  There was no way that this could be the headquarters of the top combat unit in any country’s military.

  Unless this really was their home, in which case the indefensible fence—inde-fence-ible?—was a complete sham designed to fool a sucker. She’d stick with the main gate.

  She peeled off her helmet and scrubbed at her long brown hair to get some air back into her scalp. Guys always went gaga over her hair, which was a useful distraction at times. She always wore it as long as her successive commanders allowed. Pushing the limits was one of her personal life policies.

  She couldn’t help herself. When there was a limit, Carla always had to see just how far it could be nudged. Surprisingly far was usually the answer. Her hair had been at earlobe length in Basic. By the time she joined her first forward combat team, it brushed her jaw. Now it was down on her shoulders. It was actually something of a pain in the ass at this length—another couple inches before it could reliably ponytail—but she did like having the longest hair in the entire unit.

  Carla called out a loud “Hello!” at the empty compound shimmering in the heat haze.

  No response.

  Using her boot in case the tall chain-link fence was electrified, she gave it a hard shake, making it rattle loudly in the dead air. Not even any birdsong in the oppressive midday heat.

  A rangy man in his late forties or early fifties, his hair half gone to gray, wandered around from behind a small shack as if he just happened to be there by chance. He was dressed like any off-duty soldier: worn khaki pants, a black T-shirt, and scuffed Army boots. He slouched to a stop and tipped his head to study her from behind his Ray-Bans. He needed a haircut and a shave. This was not a soldier out to make a good first impression.

  “Don’t y’all get hot in that gear?” He nodded to indicate her riding leathers without raking his eyes down her frame, which was both unusual and appreciated.

  “Only on warm days,” she answered him. It was June in North Carolina. The temperature had crossed ninety hours ago and the air was humid enough to swim in, but complaining never got you anywhere.

  “What do you need?”

  So much for the pleasantries. “Looking for Delta.”

  “Never heard of it,” the man replied with a negligent shrug. But something about how he did it told her she was in the right place.

  “Combat Applications Group?” Delta Force had many names, and they certainly lived to “apply combat” to a situation. No one on the planet did it better.

  His next shrug was eloquent.

  Delta Lesson One: Folks on the inside of the wire didn’t call it Delta Force. It was CAG or “The Unit.” She got it. Check. Still easier to think of it as Delta though.

  She pulled out her orders and held them up. “Received a set of these. Says to show up here today.”

  “Let me see that.”

  “Let me through the gate and you can look at it as long as you want.”

  “Sass!” He made it an accusation.

  “Nope. Just don’t want them getting damaged or lost maybe by accident.” She offered her blandest smile with that.

  “They’re that important to you, girlie?”

  “Yep!”

  He cracked what might have been the start of a grin, but it didn’t get far on that grim face. Then he opened the gate and she idled the bike forward, scuffing her boots through the dust.

  From this side she could see that the chain link was wholly intact. There was a five-meter swath of scorched earth inside the fence line. Through the heat haze, she could see both infrared and laser spy eyes down the length of the wire. And that was only the defenses she could see. So…a very not inde-fence-ible fence. Absolutely the right place.

  When she went to hold out the orders, he waved them aside.

  “Don’t you want to see them?” This had to be the right place. She was the first woman in h
istory to walk through The Unit’s gates by order. A part of her wanted the man to acknowledge that. Any man. A Marine Corps marching band wouldn’t have been out of order.

  She wanted to stand again as she had on that very first day, raising her right hand. “I, Carla Anderson, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution…”

  She shoved that aside. The only man’s acknowledgment she’d ever cared about was her big brother’s, and he was gone.

  The man just turned away and spoke to her over his shoulder as he closed the gate behind her bike. “Go ahead and check in. You’re one of the last to arrive. We start in a couple hours”—as if it were a blasted dinner party. “And I already saw those orders when I signed them. Now put them away before someone else sees them and thinks you’re still a soldier.” He walked away.

  She watched the man’s retreating back. He’d signed her orders?

  That was the notoriously hard-ass Colonel Charlie Brighton?

  What the hell was the leader of the U.S. Army’s Tier One asset doing manning the gate? Duh…assessing new applicants.

  This place was whacked. Totally!

  There were only three Tier One assets in the entire U.S. military. There was Navy’s Special Warfare Development Group, DEVGRU, that the public thought was called SEAL Team Six—although it hadn’t been named that for thirty years now. There was the Air Force’s 24th STS—which pretty much no one on the outside had ever heard of. And there was the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—Delta—whose very existence was still denied by the Pentagon despite four decades of operations, several books, and a couple of seriously off-the-mark movies that were still fun to watch because Chuck Norris kicked ass even under the stupidest of circumstances.

  Total Tier One women across all three teams? Zero.

  About to be? One. Staff Sergeant First Class Carla Anderson.

  Where did she need to go to check in? There was no signage. No drill sergeant hovering. No—