The Ides of Matt 2017 Read online

  The two Delta shooters hopped out and scouted the ground, first around the burnout spot then farther afield. They snapped to like a pair of Irish Setters and disappeared out of sight over the river embankment.

  Twenty seconds later they rushed back onto the helicopter.

  Dustin pulled up into the air—parking on an Iraqi highway where two explosions had just occurred with the Iraqi Army on the way was nuts even by SOAR standards.

  “The river,” the Delta operator spoke as soon as he was back on the intercom. “Blood close by the bank—”

  Dustin felt ill and clamped his teeth together.

  “—but probably not arterial. Follow the water.”

  Dustin dropped down into the canyon and eased forward, trusting Lola to watch his back. He wanted to creep slowly so that he could search more carefully, but he was too aware of the impending arrival of the Iraqi forces. His head commanded his heart, so he pushed ahead as fast as he dared. His hand ached on the cyclic as if it knew it would never again hold—

  He slammed the thought aside and watched the river.

  Every branch caught in the current startled him, as did every ripple and bend. A deer who had wandered down to the river for a drink shone like a blazing hot neon sign in his night-vision gear and just about shocked Dustin to death.

  But it wasn’t her.

  He edged as close as he dared to a town, but there was nothing except some old willow trees dropping down over the bank.

  They were going to have to send in a ground SAR team. The chances of them finding…

  Amy had to be alive or he’d be lost.

  Chapter Ten

  Amy heard a pair of helicopters approaching.

  The heavy beat of their rotors was almost as deep as the river’s rushing waters.

  She tried to dig out of the brush bower she’d gathered over herself beneath the trees. Somewhere along the way she’d lost even that much capacity.

  It turned out not to matter. Before they reached her, they turned away and were gone.

  Amy curled up half on the brush, half under. Too exhausted to burrow back beneath the protective layer. She used what memories she could of Dustin to keep her warm.

  But all she could recall was the gray Oregon rain on the frigid December day when they first met.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dustin was just ten kilometers north of the river on the way back to Turkey when the call came in, transmitted from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, via satellite.

  “Nine Vee,” tonight’s code for the mission, “we just received a satellite radio burst from your vicinity. We have an approximate location a couple hundred meters east of Drybnd, but can’t make sense of it.”

  Dustin did his best to keep his hope under control.

  “It was a single word: Willow.”

  Dustin slammed over the cyclic. Laying every bit of five thousand horsepower the twin T700 turboshaft engines could throw into ten tons of helo, he ran his speed right up against the Never Exceed limit.

  He and Amy had met because of one willow tree being cut down and been married in front of the replacement they had planted together.

  Chapter Twelve

  Amy came to as they rushed her from beneath her tree toward a waiting helicopter.

  “Dusty?”

  “Here, babe,” said the man crushing her hand in his.

  “You found my willow tree, just like that first day when we met.”

  “Always will,” he promised her as she slid back toward sleep. “Every day.”

  It was good. Dusty always kept his promises.

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  Love in the Drop Zone

  Cindy Sue Chavez rocks Delta Force training. However, this time the instructor drives her more than a little crazy. Almost as crazy as being called Cindy Sue.

  Master Sergeant JD Ramírez believes in pushing his squad, male or female, as hard as he pushes himself. But Cindy Sue? Her he pushes the hardest of all.

  When the mission calls for the sharpest Delta Force can offer, they discover Love in the Drop Zone.

  Introduction

  I was watching a TV special about the Marine Scout Sniper training. It is generally acknowledged as the toughest sniper course in the military. That got me to thinking. I assume that a Delta sniper probably goes through that same course…but maybe not. What if theirs was even harder?

  And because I like writing about strong women, I decided to send a woman through the course.

  One of the things I have learned about women is that they think very, very differently from men. Men are linear thinkers, with me being out at the extreme. I spent years working as an efficiency expert, often running massive projects to very tight schedules.

  My wife is a very non-linear thinker. We theorize that part of it goes all the way back to hunter-gatherer times. The hunter is focused on the single task. The gatherer is focused on gathering, tending children, keeping a lookout, and a dozen other simultaneous tasks. And in the more modern times, as a career woman with a family, she is juggling even more balls at once. Men think they know what multi-tasking is—in my experience, women live it.

  So how would a female shooter’s approach to a sniper course reflect that?

  That was the simple initial premise of this tale.

  This story is really a romance about how men and women think so differently. And also about how formidable they can be when they join those two skills together to face the same task.

  Chapter One

  A shadow loomed over her, blocking out the heat blast of the early morning sun striking across Fort Bragg, North Carolina’s Range 37 training area. No question who it was—he blocked out everything good about the quiet morning. Even the chatty cuckoos and the dive-bomber buzz of passing hummingbirds seemed to go silent in his presence.

  “Staff Sergeant Cindy Sue Chavez.”

  “Yes, Master Sergeant JD Ramírez?” Could the man be a more formal pain in the ass? She hated being called Cindy Sue and he damn well knew it, but it wasn’t a good idea to talk back to a superior rank—not even when he was being a superior asshole.

  Her mother, coming from Guadalajara, had thought Cindy Sue sounded American. But Cindy was Bangor, Maine born-and-buttered and no one in Bangor was named Cindy Sue because it was just too ridiculous—doubly so with her Mexican features and long, dark hair. Her parents had slipped across the border as two starry-eyed sixteen-year-olds seeking the American Dream. They hadn’t known any better, but it still rankled. She sighed. America wasn’t big on giving out guidebooks to help immigrant dreamers along the way. She should damn well write one, at least on how not to name your kids.

  Cindy’s personal mission to eradicate her middle name had been a success with most of her fellow Delta Force operators. Being a woman in Special Operations did have a few perks. Women were a rare commodity inside The Unit, as well as a reminder of home, most grunts were inclined to treat her nicely and drop the “Sue” after the fourth or tenth time she asked. A rifle butt in the gut often helped the slow learners.

  She wasn’t about to try that on Master Sergeant JD Ramírez whose dark eyes followed her every move. He positively relished how much she hated her extended name, but he was far too dangerous to risk attacking, at least directly. She loved Mama, so rather than indulging in a bit of matricide for giving her the name in the first place, she was leaning very strongly toward offing Master Sergeant JD Ramírez—from a safe distance.

  The heat on Range 37 was already climbing toward catastrophic despite the early hour. Low trees struggled upward to either side of this section of the range. Today’s training course lay along the low grassy hillside with scattered scrub and dotted with cheery flowers in yellows, blues, and purples. No hint of real shade anywhere.

  Ramírez wore boots, camos, and a tight black t-shirt that had clearly been thought up for men like him. He wasn’t exactly Mr. Handsome, but if it was what lay under the clothes th
at counted, he had Mr. Buff down. His skin had the same liquidy perfect genetic tan as hers, blemished by only a few visible battle scars that served to enhance the image. She’d never dated another Latino and—

  Crap!

  Some psychotic, “Cindy Sue” personality needed her head examined if she was thinking that about the master sergeant.

  The fact that he was a Delta Force instructor standing on a Fort Bragg practice range—perfectly in his element—did help the image right along but she wasn’t dumb enough to fall for any girlie, daydreaming trap. Master Sergeant JD Ramírez was magnificent in more than just his looks. He was a hundred percent superior soldier. That was what she aspired to. Which was ridiculous for a woman half his size, but it didn’t matter. She’d known JD almost as long as she’d been in Delta Force and he was the finest warrior she’d never fought with. They had yet to be assigned to an action team together—merely “rubbing shoulders” in situations like this refresher training.

  Ramírez still hadn’t spoken, but she was going to wait him out. She wasn’t even going to give him the satisfaction of looking up at him. Instead, she began preparing for the day.

  His boots took a step away. Hesitated, then took another, unveiling the sunrise’s full glare. None of the birdsong she’d been enjoying returned. His attitude had cleared the entire zone.

  “Do me a favor,” his voice was rough.

  She squinted up at him. All she could see was sun dazzle, but she knew from experience that he never quite looked at her when speaking.

  “What, Master Sergeant?” Not choke you to death for being a personal thorn in my backside? That was almost too big a favor to ask. And why was he haranguing her rather than the other seven operators sitting in the dirt and gearing up to survive today’s test?

  JD had been on her case since the first moment of the course. She didn’t expect him to ease up just because she’d survived her first six months in Delta, hunting Indonesian pirates, but it was way past just being a “thing.” His un-favoritism was so blatant that the other operators had unwound from their arrogant male smugness of innate superiority enough to comment on it. None had offered to protest on her behalf, of course, but that was fine. As a Delta operator she could take care of herself.

  And JD Ramírez was now topping her list of things to be taken care of. Not in a good way. She’d start by stuffing his head inside The Foo Fighters kicker drum. Then have Beyoncé strut her stuff up and down his back while wearing her gold-flecked spike-heel boots. If only.

  Today was the final sniper stalking test. It was the last day of a month-long skills refresher. Not a lot of field stalking involved in hunting Indonesian sea pirates. Her shooting precision from a moving platform like a boat or helicopter had certainly been honed, but Delta didn’t believe in letting any skills go stale. If that meant every deployment ended with a month under the ungentle thumbs of the trainers—who were fellow operators—it was fine with her.

  But she was getting a real antipathy for that trainer being JD.

  “Don’t fuck up, Cindy Sue,” he finally managed to grunt out.

  “Thanks, Master Sergeant. That’s real helpful.” She didn’t need advice on how to get through today’s sniper stalking test—especially not from JD Ramírez. She wished she had a few rounds in her rifle to deal with him. Maybe pepper the dirt as his feet to make him dance to her tune.

  “I’ll be your spotter.”

  Perfect! “Yes, sergeant. Glad it’ll be you.” So perfect that if she had a spare live round, she just might shoot herself in the foot to get out of it. She could feel the other seven of her teammates risking glances at the friendly little tête-à-tête she was having with the master sergeant. Why wasn’t he giving them any beef? They’d been working quietly together, preparing for the day.

  In stalking tests, spotters were definitely not the helpful guy looking over your shoulder and calling out range-to-target, wind speed, temperature, and all of the other factors required in long-shot marksmanship.

  She’d aced the shooting part of the course days ago.

  Now, his job was to sit in the target’s position with a high-powered scope and try to spot her crawling through the brush to kill him—with a single round. If he could pick her out, catch her even bending a stalk of grass the wrong way, she’d flunk the test and have to start over. Three fails and she’d be bounced back to a full week of stalker training.

  In other words, not a chance was she going to let anyone spot her. Especially not Mr. Perfect Soldier JD Ramírez.

  She continued preparing her ghillie suit. An itchy mesh of burlap and tattered string, it broke the unnatural shape of a sniper slithering toward their target. Once interwoven with local flora, it would drape like a cloak over her head and body, making her into a small patch of slow-moving landscape. An extension of the ghillie would wrap around her rifle. She began lacing in bits of foliage that were native to this particular range. New Jersey tea and sweetfern grew well here. A small selection of the summer grasses, even now shifting from flexible green to August brittle brown, would add to the suffocating layer she’d be spending the next four to five hours underneath.

  There was a certain...stench to a well-prepared ghillie suit. It reeked of everywhere it had been. Dragging it along a dirt road for a 10K run had impregnated it with Fort Bragg dust and grime. Trips through reeking mangrove swamps, snorkeling across cow manure ponds, and crawling up the insides of large sewage pipes had added their own head-spinning miasma of awful.

  The Marine Scout Sniper Course had a “pig pond” to teach their snipers to go through anything to reach the target. The Delta trainers were far less kind. The old Maine saying, “Cain’t get the’a from he’a” simply wasn’t in a Delta vocabulary.

  Ghillie suit smell never truly washed off the skin considering the number of hours they’d spent wearing them. The scent clung until at least a couple of layers of skin had been shed over time. It worked as a high-quality male repellent in any bar—certainly better than Deet against the avaricious mosquitos of the Maine woods on her parents’ farm.

  The smell formed an impenetrable barrier to anyone—except for a fellow sniper. To them it was the sweet stench of belonging. However, repelling all would-be boarders wasn’t much of an issue after the first day into the refresher course. Delta training schedules didn’t leave much spare time in an operator’s schedule. Going to the bathroom. Maybe. Eating? On occasion. Sleep? Yep, sleep was for SEALs and other lazy-ass wimps.

  She sat cross-legged in the hot sun and continued working on preparing her ghillie. She did her best to ignore Master Sergeant JD Ramírez as he glared down at her.

  There had been a synergy between them since the first day—an unacknowledged one. She never shot as well as she did when JD was watching her. There was something about his mere presence that drove her to be better. At first, she’d hoped that he’d eventually notice the woman inside the soldier.

  After the last thirty days, she figured she could do with a lot less “notice.”

  Chapter Two

  JD did his best to look away from Cindy, but it wasn’t working. He had a full, eight-operator squad that he’d been hounding through the course for thirty days. Just as planned, they now looked battered and weary. They were completely in that head-down, whatever’s-next-bring-it-on mode that every Delta operator knew to their very core. The battle was mental. The course was partly a skills refresher, but mostly a reinforcement that mere human limitations weren’t a part of being Delta.

  At least he had seven of them in that mode.

  Number Eight, Cindy Sue Chavez, sat calm and collected in the blazing sun, plucking up the local plants for her ghillie as if she was collecting a wedding bouquet. Nothing he or the other instructors had thrown at her made her fade in the slightest. Hell, he was exhausted.

  Delta instructors didn’t slack off—they were on rotation, in from field operations as well. If the squad did a mile swim wearing boots, ammo, and a heavy rifle, the instructors swam right besi
de them wearing the same gear. His shoulders still throbbed from yesterday’s ten-mile hike with a forty-pound rucksack, just before the last test day on the shooting range—an exercise designed to rate ability to shoot after a hard infiltration. He was just glad it wasn’t his day to crawl across the field hoping to god that some sharp-eyed spotter didn’t pick him out of the foliage and send his sorry ass back to the start line.

  “What is it about me that you hate so much, Master Sergeant?” Cindy didn’t look up from preparing her ghillie suit. Her voice was a simple, matter-of-fact, want-a-soda tone.

  “Hate? What makes you think I hate you, Chavez? No more than the next operator who slacks off.”

  It earned him a single long look from her dark brown eyes before she turned back to preparing her ghillie.

  Yeah, they both knew she hadn’t been slacking off and he’d been chapping her ass.

  “Just don’t screw up today.” He walked away before he could say something even lamer.

  Delta women were rare, but he’d worked with a number of them and was past being gender-biased in either direction. Except Cindy Chavez belonged in a gender all her own. Delta women were tough, real hard chargers, just like the men—Delta Force didn’t recruit anyone who wasn’t exceptional.

  But there was something about her that blew all his calibrations about operators.

  Was it her beauty? The fact that she was a top athlete? The fact that she didn’t take shit from anyone—not even him? He especially liked that about her.

  He hadn’t even been able to think of another woman since he’d first met her over a year ago. It had certainly cut down on his favorite recreational pastime. He’d look at a bar babe with her bright blues and deep cleavage zeroed in on him, and then picture the slender, dark-eyed Cindy Chavez and he was outta there.