The Ides of Matt 2016 Read online

  Three thousand. Two. At one-five she pulled her ripcord and by one thousand, the black chute opened with a sharp crack and the harness slammed up against her crotch and tried to remove her breasts—standard fare for the ride.

  A flash of lightning, more distant this time, revealed Hal Waldman close by and still no sign of the ground. She corrected right, then left to tuck in tight behind him.

  The squall blowing out of the southwest at forty knots made for excellent cover, but she couldn’t believe they’d actually been crazy enough to jump in it.

  A parachute typically landed going under twenty miles an hour; a hard stall at the last second could cut that in half. They were going to be blown backwards while flying full-speed forward. Nothing in her combat training had prepared her for that.

  A final glance at the GPS showed that Hal already had them flying into the wind and, yes, they were traveling backwards.

  “This wasn’t in any of my training!” she shouted at the wind.

  “Mine either.”

  Crap!

  She’d forgotten that they had an open radio link as long as they were within fifty meters of each other.

  “Not exactly a confidence builder, Waldman.”

  “It’s the Army, what do you expect?”

  She hadn’t expected Master Sergeant Hal Waldman to be understanding, let alone have any hint of humor. The combination was almost enough to make her bobble the descent.

  Unit operators were a tough, manly-men bunch, but with four older brothers she knew how to handle that. A Delta soldier would never admit a weakness, yet Hal had just admitted that he too was riding the hairy edge at the moment and it oddly gave her some hope.

  They were below two hundred feet when they broke out of the cloud cover.

  Her night-vision goggles revealed a classic upper-middle class Iraqi compound displayed in an NVG’s thousand shades of green heat. A high stone wall around a dusty courtyard that was currently a muddy courtyard. Several solid-looking buildings that she hoped they didn’t hit. A variety of miscellaneous obstacles.

  Too late to do more than pick where they were going to crash land, she let nerves and trained reflexes take over. Rather than stalling the chute to kill forward motion, they kept moving ahead at full flight into the wind…and the wind kept carrying them backward. She had to keep glancing over her shoulder to make sure she was being blown toward a safe landing zone.

  In a blur too fast for her mind to record, she adjusted to avoid a parked Toyota pickup, dodged a stone well, and slammed backward into the mud. Their chutes dragged them across the courtyard until they slammed into the perimeter wall together. Once she decided she was alive and opened her eyes, her night vision revealed two cows and a goat that were too startled to do more than stare as they cowered there seeking some protection against the wall.

  She, Hal, and their chutes were all tangled together. Hal’s arms were pinned to her body by a snarl of nylon paracords and his facemask was pressed hard against hers—their noses practically touching except for the two thin layers of plastic.

  Hal struggled briefly but was unable to free himself. He didn’t use the opportunity for a quick feel even though his arms were wrapped around her.

  Thinking back she was able to reconstruct that at the last moment he’d grabbed her and taken the brunt of the slam into the wall himself in order to spare her, which was damned decent—they’d hit hard. She was winded despite the buffer.

  They each managed to pull a hand free and peel off their facemasks now that they were out of oxygen. The rain, so cold and painful at altitude, was a refreshing wash across her heated face. The snarl of the paracord kept their faces only inches apart, but he eased the awkwardness with a smile and joke.

  “What do you do for fun when you aren’t doing crazy shit like this?”

  A cow stepped closer to sniff at them as a slap of wind slammed the stink of cow breath and manure at her.

  “Barbeque,” she told the cow. “Four older brothers, I’m big on barbeque.”

  4

  Hal made a quick scan of the yard as he laughed at her joke. Their arrival had gone by unobserved, which was good as they were still snarled together and he couldn’t draw so much as a penknife. Her humor after so dangerous a flight helped steady him as he worked to free himself and pack his chute. And their brief entanglement that had forced him into contact with a number of parts of Petty Officer Mann’s body—for which he apologized—he couldn’t regret for an instant. Despite flight gear, harness, and a small field pack, it had been impossible to avoid the body he’d sat only inches from for the last twenty-seven hours.

  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-cro
ssed 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 Teresa 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, and 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 “preferred” 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 exi
st.

  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.