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  Once she’d done the last of the security rounds and Mutt and Jeff had signaled an all clear, they began clearing the weapons that had been in the terrorists’ possession.

  Six months ago, when her own class had been the ones on the couches and chairs, she’d been nearly catatonic with shock—and desperate with need. In a few blazing seconds, the arriving Deltas had shot every terrorist and not harmed a single recruit. No prior intel on the number of terrorists, hostages, or their positions.

  Now she knew how they did it. The Unit—though it was easier to think of herself as Delta—trained exhaustively to deal with the unknown. Hostage rescue was but one of a hundred skills they practiced endlessly.

  Half a year of brutal training, learning how to walk, then run, then run backward, all while becoming absolutely lethal shots. The Unit didn’t waste rounds during training. Unlike most outfits, they never delivered a hail of bullets—except when it was called for. Instead, every single shot counted, was aimed and placed with an accuracy practiced until it was instinctive. But while doing that, the fewer than a thousand operators of The Unit’s entire combat personnel still shot more training rounds than the two hundred thousand jarheads of the Marine Corps.

  Of the five “hostages” who had survived this round of Delta Selection, there was one woman—only the third to ever qualify for The Unit. She was the first to recover; spotting Melissa, the woman shot her a cheeky grin of Oh yeah, sister!

  Melissa offered an infinitesimal nod in return before gathering the last of the weapons and heading for the door. She wondered what the first woman of Delta had felt when she’d spotted Melissa on the couch. She certainly hadn’t smiled back. Or nodded. Or even blinked.

  Carla Effing Anderson.

  The first woman of Delta.

  She’d been too chill to offer even the tiniest bit of encouragement to Melissa.

  Of course Melissa had been in near-terminal shock. She’d thought that she was the first woman to make it into The Unit—right until the moment Carla led in the room-clearing strike team.

  One moment her class had been having a tactics discussion with Colonel Michael Gibson.

  Then the room had gone dark, the door blown, the flashbang, and twenty-four shots went into eight terrorist dummies.

  In less than four seconds, the terrorists were “dead,” and Carla Anderson had simply materialized a meter in front of Melissa. Even Star Trek transporters didn’t work that quickly. Melissa still had no idea how she’d done it.

  And all through OTC, Melissa had heard nothing but “Carla always this…” and “Carla always that…”

  Crap! She was sick of it.

  What was worse, Melissa didn’t hear it only from the training cadre. Mutt, real name Tom Maxwell, had gone through Delta Selection and half of OTC with the famed Carla Anderson before blowing out a knee and having to drop back to Melissa’s class. He’d clearly been impressed as could be by the woman and had been real slow about learning when the heck to shut up. He’d finally backed off when Melissa had threatened to kneecap him in the other knee. In answer, he’d shot her a grin and said, “Exactly what Carla would have done. Except she wouldn’t have warned me first.”

  Melissa had always lived up to only one standard since her brother’s death—her own. Granted, following in the footsteps of Carla Effing Anderson had pushed her harder, but it had also ticked her off. If she ever met the woman, Melissa was going to kick her butt just on general principle.

  Last out the door behind Mutt and Jeff, she paused for one final glance back into the room.

  There was a fourth type of person in the room, just one.

  Colonel Michael Gibson, the most senior and scariest operator of them all. He’d stood unflinching during their entire raid as rounds flew close by either side of him. He was a bird colonel, yet he still fought out on the front lines. There wasn’t anyone else like him—definitely not in the room, probably not anywhere in The Unit. Which meant he was the top warrior anywhere in any military.

  No matter how many were in the room, he would always need a category of his own, commanding absolute respect by the simple fact of his presence.

  “These are the graduates of the class before yours,” Gibson informed the latest selectees/freed hostages in his surprisingly quiet voice. His words earned him the same gasps of surprise it had elicited from her own class six months earlier. “Operator Training Course will begin the day after tomorrow at oh-six-hundred. Get some sleep.”

  And they’d need it too. Fresh from the single most harrowing part of the entire month of Delta Selection, the Commander’s Review Board, she’d been hammered and desperately wanted to let loose a bit. But her body had been wiser and she’d slept most of the thirty-six hours between the end of Selection and the start of OTC. And he hadn’t been kidding about needing sleep. That oh-six-hundred formation, after only one day’s break, had been the start of a twelve-hour day of shooting skills requiring immense concentration.

  The newbie woman recovered enough for a question to cross her face, though it was another ten seconds before it connected to her body and her hand shot up. Unlike Melissa’s own fair, blond, and built physique, she was a sleek-figured brunette with skin just dark enough that it wouldn’t peel at the first exposure to sunlight each spring like Melissa’s.

  Gibson nodded at the newbie in that slow, this-had-better-be-good way of his.

  “How many women in The Unit?”

  More than Melissa had been able to articulate six months ago when Carla Anderson had magically materialized a single foot in front of her.

  “Two, now. You will make three. Feel free to inspect the results of this team’s attack,” he addressed the rest of the group. Then the Colonel did one of his fade things that was so fascinating to watch.

  As the five new graduates of the Selection Process rose to inspect the carnage that she, Mutt, and Jeff had wrought on the seven terrorist mannequins, Gibson moved at exactly the same speed they did, even using gestures common to them and nothing like his own daunting self. To them it would feel as if he was just one of them, milling about the room, trying to understand how the attack had been executed; except he wasn’t. He moved across the room without drawing their attention, then shooed Melissa out the doorway and into the corridor beyond, with no recruit the wiser to his seemingly magical disappearance.

  Gibson always reminded her of someone, but she could never pin down who. They’d seen him only rarely during OTC; typically he was still forward deployed despite his age and rank. But he’d been there for her Commander’s Review Board, her graduation, and now her achieving full operator status. She didn’t recognize his face; she had an exceptional memory for faces. But still he was irritatingly familiar, irritating because she couldn’t pin it down and there was no way they could have possibly met before.

  He had showed up one other time, during the fourth month of their training. By that point her class was totally down with the basic Delta skills. They were convinced that it was just a matter of honing them from that point on.

  They’d shared a pretty cocky, we got this attitude…until the silent Colonel showed up. Their class, still six people at that point, had been sent to track Gibson in a tiny five-acre plot of woods. Not even overgrown, it should have been a cakewalk.

  They didn’t find him.

  But he found them.

  None of them even saw a teammate go down.

  And none of them had seen the man who took down all six of them; to drive the lesson home, he hadn’t been gentle. With their due humbling and numerous bruises handed out, he’d spent a week showing them how to do the same. After that, Delta training had shifted—no longer about honing what they knew, it had become about discovering what they didn’t know.

  A quartermaster was waiting for them in the corridor. While the recruits’ voices slowly came back to life in the shoot-room, her team turned in their weapons,
signing everything back in.

  She felt practically naked without the HK rifle over her shoulder and the Glock handgun strapped over her solar plexus.

  Been through a lot of changes, girl. And she’d bet there were a whole lot more to come.

  * * *

  Sunrise was less than an hour off when Chad jostled his shoulder.

  Richie hadn’t been asleep and barely managed to suppress an oath as Chad shook him hard enough to wake the dead—his idea of humor. Richie noticed that he was a little more cautious with Duane, who often woke with his knife half-drawn. Kyle and Carla were already at the hut’s entrance.

  Kyle had taken one look at the order and, in minutes, outlined a plan of how they were going to exit the farm with hopefully minimal exposure and risk. The guards they were anticipating would be off duty and the patrol timing would be wrong, but Kyle’s plan was as solid as they could get with what they knew.

  No way would Richie be missing this place. Dirt floor, woven grass mat, and a thatched roof that could really use some thatch before the next rainstorm but wasn’t going to get it.

  He felt sorry for the laborers. Some of the farmers were about to have an even worse season than the last one. At a big site like this, they were little better than slaves. Once the coca was gone, they’d be free, but with no assets and no working farm crop. In the coca business, locals just weren’t part of the profit equation.

  Rolando and the drug lord’s other armed guards Richie liked well enough, but had less sympathy for.

  The Delta team slipped out into the darkness, just a hint of the blue in the sky that was already washing out the fainter stars. They passed the farmers’ huts and were almost to the road leading out of the camp.

  “Where are you going, amigos?” Rolando, his AK-47 no longer over his shoulder but now in his hands.

  “Hey, buddy.” Chad started forward, but stopped and tried to look stupid when Rolando flicked off the safety.

  Carla stepped forward with an easy sway of her hips. Her dirty blue work shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal that her assets weren’t all that much less impressive than the fabled Mayra’s.

  Rolando’s eyes dropped to her cleavage.

  She moved a hand up to his chest. With a little flick of her wrist, she revealed the long KA-BAR military knife she was holding and rammed it up under his chin and into his brain.

  Rolando twitched once.

  “That’s for trying to ram it up my backside without asking.”

  “He what?” Kyle snarled, but Carla didn’t waste any time answering. If there was ever a woman able to defend herself, Richie knew it was Carla Anderson.

  Then Rolando collapsed to the ground and his finger must have snagged on the trigger. A single 7.62mm round gave a loud crack and zinged off into the trees.

  “Shit!” the whole team said pretty much in unison.

  With their clandestine departure blown, Chad swept up the AK-47 and fired a security round into Rolando’s forehead.

  In seconds, they were fifty meters away and moving fast. Kyle had Rolando’s sidearm and Carla had a subcompact Glock 27 that she’d produced from somewhere—where was one of the questions Richie suspected he’d be better off not asking. Still, it was an interesting problem because they’d all been checked on arrival as being unarmed. Richie had pre-buried his GPS and satellite gear in the jungle, carefully crossing then recrossing the mined perimeter before they’d come into the camp so that he could retrieve them once the team had been accepted.

  The two guards at the main gate were half-awake when they stumbled to their feet. They went back down fast and Richie and Duane now had AK-47s as well. Chad stripped them of a pair of Makarov handguns, tossing one to Richie that he caught midair.

  There was an old Jeep parked by the gate, but neither of the guards had a key. It was probably back in the open, on Rolando’s body. Chad started hot-wiring it while the rest of them stood watch.

  Then Richie heard it. Distant at first, but building fast. The four-engine gut-thumping roar of a loaded 747.

  “Come on, Chad,” Carla pleaded. “Get us out of here.”

  The Jeep’s engine roared to life and they piled in.

  Duane tossed his AK-47 to Chad and dove into the driver’s seat—he was the best driver they had. He’d been working up the sprint-car circuit toward NASCAR when he’d taken his detour into the military.

  Kyle and Richie dropped two more armed guards who came rushing from the huts, half-dressed and scared awake.

  Duane raced the Jeep out of camp along the road, praying for no booby traps.

  Then the largest tanker plane in the world descended and began its run.

  The 747, converted for firefighting, had been put into deep storage in the Tucson desert when its owners went out of business. The CIA had found another use for the massive plane, which now began its dump of twenty thousand gallons—over eighty tons—of defoliant across the exact coordinates that Richie had sent to them just six hours ago.

  His Delta team had been to twelve coca farms in the last six months. And the 747 tanker had visited each in turn. Twelve farms that wouldn’t produce a single leaf of coca anytime soon.

  “Down,” Chad shouted.

  They all ducked and hung on as Duane rammed the heavy wooden outer barrier at thirty miles an hour. It blew apart. A four-by-four shattered the windshield and Carla knocked the remains of the glass clear with the butt of a Chinese QBB machine gun she’d acquired somewhere along the way before turning it around to shoot a guard who’d been standing well clear of the gate.

  Richie kept an eye out to the rear, but no one was following. If they were, they’d have a long way to go. The team had been pulled out of Bolivia. They were being tasked to a new assignment.

  That was fine.

  After six months training together and another six in the field, it was the last line of the message that had worried them all.

  Proceed to Maracaibo, Venezuela. Acquire new team member.

  * * *

  Colonel Gibson led Melissa and her team down the dark central corridor of the hostage rescue training building. She could still hear the amazed voices of the newest class as they attempted to reconstruct the shoot-room attack.

  The building had six doors along this concrete hallway—six doors of hell.

  The doors had started out as a bewildering array of challenges that she would never understand. Over the last six months she’d been sent through each one of the six so many times that it no longer mattered which one they entered, with how little preparation; there would be no surprises that she couldn’t take in stride.

  An airliner, a cave-and-tunnel system, an elaborate multistory shoot-house in which the walls and stairs were never in the same place twice, even the one where Gibson was now leading them, the bridge of a ship. Through the last door on the right stood an airplane-hangar-sized space with the upper three stories of an oceangoing vessel standing in its center, complete with a flybridge sticking out to either side like wings.

  The white steel tower had given her endless hours of trouble; big ships were designed with far too many sharp corners and narrow ladderways for the bad guys to use to their advantage. The training cadre had helped them beat it, but it had been so much harder than it looked, even tougher to take down cleanly than an airplane filled with passengers.

  As a former museum technician, she had to admire each of the sets that The Unit’s training cadre provided. When she was in the scenarios, they were incredibly believable. Radar scopes swept, instruments lit, televisions displayed—everything authentic right down to the questionable fashion sense of the mannequins. To add to the authenticity, they often did the raids with Simunitions rather than live ammo. In those situations, armored training cadre shot back.

  Melissa had worked at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, for three years before she’d dec
ided to use her dual citizenship to sign up for the U.S. military. At the museum she’d helped build elaborate sets that had to stand up to millions of visitors a year yet still be interactive and intriguing. The cadre’s set dressers were of an equally high caliber.

  In moments Gibson and their team were all seated in thoroughly believable command chairs of a cruise ship’s main bridge. Last time she’d fought her way aboard, it had been configured as a container ship. The set was battered, but the training cadre did a fine job of putting it back together despite stray gunfire and the occasional application of explosives. Thankfully the museum’s tourists hadn’t been quite that aggressive.

  Colonel Gibson sat in the helmsman’s seat, looking greyhound fit, his dark hair and light eyes a startling contrast when you noticed them, when he wasn’t being invisible. He was dressed in the same ACUs they were—Army Combat Uniform and boots—nothing to distinguish his superior rank or vastly superior skill.

  She’d always felt a little uncomfortable around him and could never quite be still when he watched her. She realized that she was fooling around with the switches on the communications officer’s panel and pulled her hands into her lap.

  A smile quirked at the corner of Gibson’s lips, which was wholly impossible, and then it was gone, so she knew she’d imagined it.

  “Well done,” Gibson began. “Three Delta against seven terrorists, very well done.”

  And suddenly Melissa felt about three meters tall and, like Alice in Wonderland, wondered how she still fit in the room. She reached out to slap a high five with Mutt, who sat in the radar tech’s chair beside her.