Lightning Strike to the Heart Read online

  Every curve that he’d so appreciated watching, he now knew was backed up by muscle in the best way possible.

  She’d also proven to have a sharp intellect and hadn’t panicked during the scariest jump he had ever been on. Now it was time to see if her skills played out in the field. He certainly hoped so, because they were in the deep end now. For one, he hadn’t planned on landing inside the compound itself—if this was the right one. The houses were crowded close together here up against the city walls, the big homes of the wealthy and powerful. Here they were close enough to the country to still have ties and traditions there, like the farm animals in the courtyard.

  After untangling himself, Hal was only seconds ahead of Mann on stuffing away his chute, and assembling his HK416 rifle and scope. By unspoken consent they swept the compound from opposite directions. The scopes interfaced with their NVGs and showed no guards, which was odd.

  Actually, maybe it wasn’t. After the pounding they’d taken in the storm, it seemed mild here on the ground by comparison. By any other standards though it was an awful night—a mush of sleet and freezing rain thick enough to haze the main house and the guard’s quarters only a hundred feet away.

  His scan also proved that they were in the right place. A pre-storm drone’s surveillance had matched the layout which he had memorized during planning.

  Inspection complete, he chopped a hand toward the guard’s quarters where a dim light showed in the window. They’d all be huddled inside, out of the storm, probably coming out only for hourly patrols.

  Hal checked his watch, oh-two-fourteen. If the guards had any common sense, none of them would be any emerging for another forty-six minutes. A single light in one of the windows showed that someone was still awake.

  He was ten feet from the door when it swung open.

  Crap! Fifteen-minute patrols. Oh-two-fifteen. Oh-two-thirty.

  Maintaining his sprint, he drove his shoulder straight into the man’s gut. With a grunt he collapsed back into the room with Hal on top of him. He brought the stock of his rifle sharply up against the man’s chin who then collapsed into unconsciousness. Since the guard had stepped from the lit room into the darkness, his vision had been compromised. He wouldn’t be able to report anything of what or who had hit him.

  Hal crouched, tense and alert.

  A single lamp. A half dozen chairs. A table with a book set face down on its surface. A door to the right and another to the left. A deafening drum roll of rain drove against the tin roof in sharp gusts.

  There was a brush against his shoulder, just enough contact to tell him Teresa was rushing by him on the right side.

  Hal rolled back to his feet and eased up to the left-hand door. Teresa turned off the light and the room plunged back into night-vision green.

  Poised at the doors, they both pulled out dart guns.

  At a shared nod they rolled through the doors simultaneously.

  Hal was standing in a tiny barren room with a circular hole in the floor and a brass pot of water for rinsing one’s left hand and flushing any waste down the hole. He could see the warmth of a recent handprint on the rim of the bowl and a distinct heat by the hole in the floor. He was in a typical mid-Eastern toilet.

  By the time he’d re-crossed the main room and reached the other door, Teresa was already retrieving the four darts that had knocked out the other guards.

  “Got the bathroom, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, how did you know?”

  She pointed at the two doors and said, “No immediate outbuilding equals inside toilet. You won by…” then her grin turned wicked, “…process of elimination.”

  He groaned.

  She held up a hand and when he responded in kind she high-fived it with enthusiasm.

  Absolutely his kind of woman.

  5

  “Now it gets interesting.”

  “Interesting,” Teresa did her best to match the Master Sergeant’s wry tone. In the last sixteen minutes, she’d: beat up on a ham-handed Air Force grunt, performed a HALO parachute jump through the heart of a squall, spent a few minutes unsnarling herself from the splendidly hard-bodied Master Sergeant—a task she’d found herself curiously reluctant to hasten—and taken down five heavily-armed house guards without having to kill any.

  “Interesting” didn’t begin to cover it.

  This was the kind of mission she’d dreamed of for years. Military parents bred military kids and it was finally her turn. It wouldn’t last. By tomorrow she could be back at MSST which was far more about training and being ready than action, but for now she’d dive in headfirst.

  Again, a careful scan of the grounds from the guard-house door.

  No action.

  They swept across the yard to the main house.

  Their target obviously wasn’t a man prone to worrying. He maintained only minimal guards with only one at a time on night duty patrol. She and Hal had planned for much more security when they were designing the mission.

  The front door was locked. Rather than breaching it, Hal signaled her left as he circled right. No hovering. No protecting the “fragile female.” In the Master Sergeant’s world you were either a soldier or you weren’t. It was like a breath of fresh air. No man except her dad had ever believed in her like that.

  Side of the house was clear.

  At the rear, the only person she encountered was Hal coming around the other way. There were two more goats sleeping in the protection of the narrow space between the stone-and-mortar house and the compound’s concrete rear wall, but Hal stepped by them so carefully they barely woke. A powerful soldier who could move so lightly; he was oddly beautiful to watch—part dancer and part walking death.

  There was no door, but there was a window. Locked.

  Through the glass they could see the clear heat signature of a couple lying together in a bed. She and Hal shifted to another window, smaller and higher.

  “I’ll boost you up,” Hal knelt and cupped his hands.

  “No. Me.” She had an idea, saw the opportunity, and didn’t give him a choice. She knelt quickly with one knee in the slush and the other raised. With her boot firmly planted, her knee would make a solid step for him.

  He shrugged, stepped on her knee, balanced a moment to spread tape on the glass. He waited for a renewed blast of wind from the storm and punched it with a gloved fist—the tape prevented any shards from falling to shatter loudly on the interior floor—then he reached through and unlocked it. In moments his weight was gone.

  She called up softly, “You in the shitter again?”

  6

  Hal sighed.

  Nothing got past Teresa. Not only had he been set up, but he’d climbed right into it without thinking.

  He was indeed standing in the master bathroom. A far nicer version than the one in the guard’s quarters with a modern shower, a sit-down toilet, and tile work that was probably attractive but was all a uniform dark green, almost black with lack of heat in his NVGs…but still “in the shitter again.”

  Teresa handed through her rifle, then with a jump-and-grab, slipped through the window and landed beside him. She applied a friendly nudge in the ribs, that lost him about half his air, and then they moved forward into the house. A quick scouting revealed that it was unoccupied except for the master bedroom; they met again outside the closed bedroom door.

  No noise or light within.

  Hal pulled out a fiber-optic viewer and slipped it under the door. Both figures still lay on the bed, neither appeared to have moved.

  At his nod, Teresa opened the door, while he remained low by the floor with his weapon raised.

  One of the figures sat up, a woman with long hair and a heavy nightgown. She turned to face them. “You’re early,” she said in passable English. “What are you doing here?”

  Hal had wanted to keep this mission as low profile as possible, so when the Air Force had a flight already planned that would only need a small route diversion, he’d taken it, adjusting the “pr
eferred” schedule that had accompanied the mission details to match the Air Force’s.

  The man stirred slowly.

  Hal spotted the AK-47 leaning against the wall within easy reach. He moved so that he stood between it and the man who came awake with a start. The man reached for the rifle and shouted in alarm when his hand ran into Hal’s thigh in the dark.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here? I am just a businessman, but I have friends.” The man’s voice rose until he was shouting in Arabic.

  “I think,” Teresa said softly over the radio, “that the man we’re looking for is a woman.”

  The man rose and struck out at him. His fist landed squarely against the butt of Hal’s Glock 17 handgun that he wore at the center of his gut for a faster draw. The man yelped as he jerked back his injured hand.

  7

  “Another hour,” the woman insisted, “and I would have been standing out in the yard.”

  “We’re here now,” Hal snapped.

  Irritation was another new emotion in Teresa’s catalog of unexpected sides to Hal Waldman. Accepting a woman without question, not caught staring at her too often, a sense of humor, and now irritation—proving that he actually did have emotions. What else was hidden behind the Master Sergeant’s all-business tough-guy mask?

  Of course, she’d be irritated too if she’d had to subdue the man in his own bed. Neither the gag nor having his hands and feet bound had silenced him; that had taken Hal resting the barrel of his HK416 rifle against his chest and flicking off the safety.

  “What does it matter, lady? Let’s get moving before your guards wake up.”

  Which shouldn’t be for two more hours with the dose Teresa had shot into them.

  The woman shifted uncomfortably.

  Teresa had spent the last year in forward language support for Special Operations Forces working as trainers and advisors in Syria—one of the reasons she’d been so close to hand when the mission call came. Her best friend in high school had been from Egypt, which had influenced Teresa to learn Arabic and spend her Junior Year Abroad in Cairo. The last year in theater had polished her vocabulary and accent.

  It had also taught her that many Iraqi women, no matter how Westernized, were uncomfortable talking directly to a man.

  “You may speak to me,” Teresa remained with English as that was the language the woman had been using.

  “If you had taken me when you were supposed to, my husband would know nothing. He would remain in his business and I would be able to deliver all of his passwords to you without him any wiser.”

  “Don’t you think he would have guessed?”

  The woman looked over at her husband in a way that required no knowledge of language to translate between two women of any culture.

  Teresa glanced at Hal. He hadn’t missed the look either. Every attempt she made to pigeonhole him failed miserably. Macho Delta operators weren’t supposed to understand when a woman knew they were the brains behind the successful man.

  “Why would we want his passwords, but not him?” Hal asked.

  The woman continued to stare at Teresa as if Hal didn’t exist.

  Teresa wondered quite how that was possible. By the glow of the single bedside light—that faded and flickered deeply with each blast of the outside storm—Master Sergeant Hal Waldman looked every inch the conquering hero.

  “Because,” the woman replied softly, “his business is communications. He designed the secure communications system between Taliban cells throughout the region.”

  8

  Their exfiltration plan had included one cooperative male extractee: not a woman and a very unwilling man. Hal had been puzzling over how to adapt to that when Teresa hit the solution.

  Now they were all piled in the family Toyota Highlander. The women were both in the backseat, fully covered by robe and veil. The man was in the driver’s seat, convinced to behave by the HK416 pressed into his ribcage from inside Hal’s own voluminous robe and veil.

  “How do you see while wearing this?” The narrow slit at his eyes, covered by a fine mesh to block any view in, might be ideal cover but every time he moved his head what little view he had disappeared behind some fold of fabric.

  “Careful,” Teresa warned him, “or we’ll make you wear nylons for a day. And don’t think I can’t make you do it.”

  There wasn’t a chance she’d succeed, but he’d wager it would be fun if she tried.

  The other woman laughed aloud, then the sound was suddenly muffled as they rounded a corner and pulled up to a military checkpoint.

  With a careful prod of the HK, the man behaved.

  To Hal’s ear he didn’t have the proper amount of complaint in his tone for being on the road at three in the morning to drive his wife and sisters to aid a sick aunt in the next town over.

  Teresa leaned forward and whispered something in the man’s ear. His voice faltered, then he found his stride and they were soon pulling away from the checkpoint. Soon, they were rolling down an empty stretch of highway.

  Hal pulled out a satellite phone and dialed the number he’d been given. Twenty minutes later there was a roar close overhead as if the storm, which had been abating, was now hammering back down on them.

  Then in the headlights, he could pick out an all-black Night Stalkers Chinook helicopter landing in the middle of the road with its rear ramp down.

  They drove straight aboard. After some jockeying, the Loadmaster signaled for lockdown and they were tied into place. They were aloft within two minutes of the helicopter’s arrival.

  “Let’s switch seats and I’ll tie him back up.”

  “Oh, he’ll behave,” Teresa said with utter confidence.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I told him what I’d do to his manhood with my knife if he didn’t do everything perfectly. I gave him every reason to believe me.”

  Even if the man didn’t speak any English, he was glancing over at Hal nervously as if guessing the conversation and seeking protection.

  Hal grimaced in sympathetic pain. “Maybe I won’t take your nylons bet.”

  “Pity,” a woman’s voice spoke from close beside him. The Loadmaster—a woman—was leaning against his lowered window. “I bet you’d look cute in them.”

  She walked away, humming the tune to a Gypsy Rose Lee stripper song.

  “Not a chance,” he called out after her, but she just broke into song. Strangely enough the other members of the Chinook’s crew joined in as they banked hard, racing back toward friendly territory.

  He turned back to face Teresa in the backseat, “Not a chance.”

  But he sure wouldn’t mind seeing Chief Petty Officer Teresa Mann in a pair—a flawless soldier with an amazing body. That was a deadly combo indeed.

  9

  Hal didn’t see anything of Teresa Mann after their first few minutes back on the ground. By the time he’d gone through debrief and delivered his two charges, she had faded into the dawn and was already gone back into whatever invisible Coast Guard fog bank she’d popped out of.

  Searching for her hadn’t helped, not that his operational tempo allowed a lot of time to do so.

  An inquiry to MSST was returned with a: The United States Coast Guard does not respond to requests for information about the Maritime Safety and Security Team.

  A follow-up to the USCG itself simply addressed to CPO Teresa Mann was returned with the puzzling endorsement: No longer with the service.

  A Google search returned 23,880 hits, and none of them were her as far as he could tell—except for a seriously cute high school yearbook photo from some unpronounceable high school in Poughkeepsie, New York.

  Pounding his head against the wall hadn’t helped either.

  By mid-summer he’d decided that he would give it one more shot. He’d been rotated back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina for some Unit refresher training. He didn’t even know where to begin to look for her now that he was stateside, but there had to be some lead he could pi
ck up. If not, he promised himself he’d stop being pitiful about a woman he’d known barely thirty-six hours six months ago…and he’d do that very soon.

  The squad he’d spent a long day simulating room-clearing with dragged him out on the town. Hal wasn’t really in the mood for some dive bar, but you just didn’t turn down seven other grunts who’d fired a thousand rounds each together.

  They were three bars into Bragg Boulevard before he gave in and just went with the flow. Tomorrow was a “dark” day—an actual, honest-to-god, stateside day of rest. By the fifth bar they were down to three others plus himself. The other four had been peeled off by some of the bar bait with long legs and bottle-blond hair that always flowed around Fort Bragg.

  At the seventh bar, he ended up alone. Hal kind of remembered the other three saying they were moving on, but he’d ground to a halt here. He wasn’t drunk, hadn’t finished a whole beer in any of the places, but he was slowing down.

  An hour later and half a beer in, he wondered if this was where he’d be sleeping tonight. It was a good spot: back in the corner, a band that was just loud enough to turn his brain into tapioca pudding without beating him to death, and a pleasant enough flow of female scenery to keep him entertained. None of them really grabbed his attention but they were fun to watch. And none bothered to gun for the solitary drinker in the corner. When on assignment he usually slept in far worse places.

  He knew how he must look. The slight shell-shock of someone fresh back from the front suddenly surrounded by the bounties of America. Unless they were one of your buddies, you just left guys like him alone until they were back up to speed.

  The room shifted.

  The noise level didn’t change.

  But there had been something. It was the sort of thing that only a trained operator would probably notice; the feel had altered.

  He started hunting for the source and it didn’t take long to spot. Nine new arrivals—soldiers who moved like operators. But it wasn’t just that they were Special Ops; you couldn’t get a drink within fifty miles of Fort Bragg without running into some form of top soldier.