Heart Strike Read online

  “Gosh, Colonel. You sure know how to make a girl’s head spin.”

  His smile was wintry.

  Then she pointed at Mutt and Jeff. “I mean, just look at them.” They were clearly feeling the same effects she was from the rare compliment.

  That earned her the first laugh she’d ever heard from the Colonel. Mutt stuck his tongue out at her. When she was foolish enough to turn her back on him, he tugged on her short French braid. Jeff merely sighed.

  The three of them had plagued each other from the first day. They’d tried to tag her as M&M because, “Melissa Moore, you gotta know you’re total eye candy.” She might be, but she’d walked more than a hundred other top soldiers into the ground to get here.

  Most men who’d tried to bed her called her The Ice Queen because she froze them out. She had a dream of finding someone who brought the heat and the heart, not just fun but someone who would be a keeper. She had that dream as a young girl…she’d had a lot of stupid, naive dreams back then.

  In vengeance for M&M, Tom Maxwell and Sem Jaffe became Mutt and Jeff.

  Worse for them, she’d made sure that M&M didn’t stick and that Mutt and Jeff did.

  She’d left behind Charli from her middle name Charlene, because that had been her brother’s nickname for her. The name had died with him. Her middle initial was turned into “Cat” because she could sneak up on anyone, except Gibson. And just as cats sometimes had too many toes, she had too few. She’d lost two toes and her brother to an ice storm during a winter climb up Washington State’s Mount Rainier. Shut it out. Shut it out. Even after five years, the memory still hurt like a knife.

  “Mutt and Jeff.”

  Melissa The Cat wanted to purr when Gibson called them that.

  “We need you on fireteams based out of Saudi Arabia. Are you ready for that?”

  “Sure,” they chimed in together. They were always doing that, which is why her tag for them had stuck so well.

  She’d be up for that too. Her Arabic was poor—okay, dismal—but she knew from experience just how fast she could fix that. There wasn’t anyone in The Unit with less than three languages fluent and several more at least serviceable.

  “Good.” Gibson nodded. “Your flight leaves in forty-five minutes. You have time to shower, pack your gear, and get to Hangar Seventeen. Go.”

  There was a stunned second or two as they realized that they wouldn’t all be deploying together. They’d known that was unlikely of course, had talked about it, but it was still a shock. For six months of OTC plus the additional month of Delta Selection with Jeff, the three of them had rarely been apart. They’d become her friends. Her team. They had, as the saying went, gone through hell and hell together.

  There wasn’t a third second of hesitation—The Unit’s operators were trained to adapt rapidly.

  Maxwell and Jaffe offered her high fives; instead she gave each of them a hug.

  “Now she lays some flesh on us,” Mutt quipped. Jeff was quiet as usual, but gave her a good hug and a high five. Then he whispered quietly to her, “Kick ass, sister.”

  Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded and they were gone.

  The shock of their departure left her in the lurch, like she’d leaned up against a wall that had always been there and suddenly it wasn’t.

  Colonel Gibson was silent, waiting patiently in his helmsman’s chair.

  She did her best to school her nerves into a calm state—wasn’t working, so she shot for a calmer state and made it only partway there—before sitting down. Not quite sure how, she’d landed in the captain’s seat. Now that she was in it, the chair felt odd, wrong, too big and too important. Hell, she’d only graduated OTC a dozen minutes ago and already her two closest friends were up and gone out of her life. The military was like that, but it didn’t make it any easier.

  Melissa forced her attention back to Gibson and shot for casual to hide the lack of calm. “So, what’s the deal, Boss?”

  He glanced at his watch uncertainly.

  Nervous? The most highly trained soldier in any military in any country was nervous? Oh man, this was going to be so bad.

  “I have—” He cleared his throat and started again. “You are fluent in Spanish?”

  He must know that she was from her file. “Ja, ich spreche Spanisch. Auch, Italienisch und Französisch,” she answered in flawless German.

  No smile. Not even a hint that he could. He had actually laughed with her not a moment before; Melissa was sure he had…fairly sure. She knew he wasn’t about to confess to being her father, because Mom and Dad were living happily on their houseboat in Victoria Harbour on Vancouver Island in Canada.

  “And you can fly planes.”

  “Small ones, sure. I can even take off a helicopter without crashing, if I have an instructor beside me.” Melissa and her brother had gotten their private pilot licenses together, and she’d had a few rotorcraft lessons for the fun of it. She’d kept her private pilot’s license current more in his memory than anything else.

  So what the hell was going on? Why was he asking her things he must already know? And she could still read the nerves on him. She tinkered with the captain’s command board, wondering what it would take to navigate out of this moment. That switch there? Or the darkened map display? Key in a new GPS coordinate and go, full throttle outta here.

  “I have recommended that you be assigned to our top South American team.”

  “Sounds muy bueno,” she agreed cautiously.

  “Good. Your transport is in one hour, Hangar Three.”

  He rose to his feet and headed for the door.

  She took a deep breath and jumped in. “What’s the other shoe, sir? The one you don’t want to drop.”

  He stopped with his back to her, hands braced on the door.

  Melissa held her breath, could feel the fear squeezing in on her—a place dark and bitterly cold. A feeling she had struggled with often on particularly long and lonely nights.

  “I’m sorry.” Gibson turned to face her, his face carefully controlled, then whispered, “I’m sorry that I couldn’t save your brother.”

  Though he looked at her for a long time, Colonel Michael Gibson was gone long before she could recover from the shock.

  At least now she knew why she both had and hadn’t recognized him. On a bitterly cold and cruel mountain five years ago, Colonel Michael Gibson—as unrecognizably swathed in as much mountain gear as she had been—had saved her life. Saved it and completely changed it.

  * * *

  “I didn’t ask for anyone else.” Carla “Wild Woman” Anderson was on a roll. The same roll she’d been on fairly continuously since the orders had come in.

  Richie kept his head low, pretending to concentrate on sorting out their radio gear. He’d spread it across one of the hotel suite living room’s rosewood coffee tables and then propped up the tablet computer to catch up on the news. The remains of his chili-laced hot chocolate had long since cooled from breakfast. But he sipped at it anyway to try and appear thoughtful.

  It must have worked, as she headed over to the window to stare south once more as if she could divine who was flying in from five miles away.

  The room was something of a shock to his body with its broad clean windows, luxurious furnishings, and stunning view of Maracaibo, Venezuela. Hot showers and efficient room service only made it all the stranger. The suite had five bedrooms, but as Carla and Kyle shared one, there was a spare.

  An ominous spare, as they knew someone was inbound to occupy it. Kyle had gone out to the airport to meet him, and his buffering effect on Carla’s temper was much missed.

  Richie was just hoping they were done with their six months posing as itinerant Bolivian coca plantations laborers. Nothing to connect their team with the large, unmarked CIA and Colombian planes that flew low overhead in the middle of the night and blanke
ted the plantations with defoliant. They’d destroyed over four thousand hectares of coca that would never be processed into cocaine, though that ten percent felt like such a small dent in the estimated sixteen thousand hectares in cultivation. Thankfully, one farm didn’t talk much with the next, so no one in the camps knew to ask how the intel for the planes was so perfect despite rough terrain, camouflage nets, and remote locations.

  His problem, and he suspected half of Carla’s—as she stormed into Richie’s bedroom again because he had the best view of the airport—was that he was sick of the Bolivian fields. So much of it had been scout work. It was time for a little action.

  Now the team had been directed to a quiet hotel suite along the waterfront in Maracaibo. Then they’d been told to plant their asses and wait.

  Carla wasn’t good at waiting, except when actually on a mission, and then she had the patience of a sphinx. But now, in a room that she insisted was too beige, looking out at a city that was too crowded and a river that was too wide and a sky that was…

  Richie didn’t mind the waiting. With most of the last six months out deep in the field, he was behind on a dozen different fronts of his normal news gathering. The Russians were testing a new microwave “gun” that could fry a drone’s electronics from ten kilometers away. The Air Force had retired the A-10 Thunderbolt…again—even though they still had nothing to replace it. Heckler & Koch had a new modification for the HK416 rifle, a softer bolt return that should make it even quieter. He couldn’t wait to try it—he looked up the mod but couldn’t see any way to fabricate one in the field.

  There was a cool article about DEVGRU on one of the military blogs intended for veterans and their families. It was really impressive how few facts they had right; half of the images were just standard SEAL teams and two clearly showed Marines. SEAL Team Six, as DEVGRU was still incorrectly known despite shedding that name thirty years before, continued to be a media sensation—which left The Unit to continue operating nicely in the dark. Of course the rare articles about The Unit were even farther off the mark than this one about ST6, which was even more satisfying.

  “Did you ask for someone new?”

  He’d missed Carla’s return. She now stood close beside the dining table where Duane and Chad had an intense game of Truco going over the last dregs of breakfast. The card game really needed four players, but having no one else willing to join in didn’t stop them. The Colombian forty-card version of contract rummy was cutthroat and anything but quiet—a skill they’d all honed on the coca farms.

  She broke their concentration, which was hard to do. Chad and Duane always played with an intense mano-a-mano combativeness—especially when they were trying to ignore one of Carla’s rants.

  “Huh?”

  “What?”

  Carla snarled at them.

  Richie watched out of the corner of his eye. Duane didn’t look like he came from a well-to-do household like Richie’s; instead he looked like he came from a boxing ring. He was a good-looking guy, at least the ladies all seemed to think so, but he just looked that tough. And he was leveraging that with a dark scowl of concentration at the moment.

  Chad was the opposite. He wasn’t called “The Reaper” for his charming Iowan personality and farm-boy looks, but rather for the hundred-percent thoroughness he wrought on any who crossed him—a survival skill honed by the Special Forces Green Berets.

  “You two are useless,” Carla snapped at them.

  They both gazed at her blankly for several long seconds, grunted at each other, shared a shrug of confusion, and turned back to their game. It was well timed; she appeared to buy it.

  Richie couldn’t help himself; he watched Carla as she stormed back and forth across the room.

  It was a mistake.

  “What are you looking at, Q?”—a moniker he’d been tagged with long before Delta. Which was too cool, because James Bond’s technical support wizard totally rocked. Richie had done okay identifying with Desmond Llewelyn, except that the guy had been old the day he was born. Richie had never clicked with John Cleese, but Ben Whishaw was awesome. Too thin and scrawny to go Delta, but still way cool. Richie checked online—no new trailer on the next film yet.

  Besides, how was he supposed to not look at Carla? She was the first woman of Delta. She had long dark hair, a Bond-girl body honed fit by The Unit and half a year in the field, and features and skin tone that harkened back to her Cherokee ancestors. She was magnificent, way out of his league, and the most dangerous member of their team—with the possible exception of her husband.

  Except Kyle wasn’t here at the moment to keep Carla from taking it out on the rest of them.

  “I didn’t make any requests.” Richie recalled what he could of his handling-a-hostile-witness training. Not a witness, but definitely hostile in her current mood. Duane and Chad had chosen the dangerous tack of ignoring her. Yet it seemed to be working for them, perhaps because of the added variable of being members of her team, so they knew she wouldn’t hurt them without greater provocation.

  Richie didn’t think the dumb-silent act would work for him, so he’d try interaction. Agreement with a witness may put them at ease, leading them to think that you are there to help them.

  “It is puzzling though,” he tested carefully.

  Carla stopped pacing and faced him directly, her dark eyes black with her anger, fist clenched where the butt of her sidearm would normally be.

  Her attire was completely incongruous with her mood. She wore a light blue sundress that would fit in at the hotel and the local city streets, but still it looked damned strange on her. He was used to Carla in worn camo pants or jeans, boots, and a ratty T-shirt. The dress did look weird on her, but it also looked great. Once again he was left to wonder if he’d ever find someone so amazing for himself.

  “The five of us”—Richie nodded around the room—offer the witness a supporting statement as if you are helping them. It is most effective when it is information they already possess. They will take their prior knowledge of that information as an internal recognition that they are the ones in control of the situation—“we were kept together after OTC graduation six months ago.”

  Duane and Chad were eyeing him carefully from behind their cards. Ready to leap to his rescue if needed? More likely wanting to see just how much Carla might hurt him. Richie decided he was on his own and ignored them.

  “It makes it hard to see why they’d bring in another person,” Carla finally spoke.

  When the witness first speaks, you have developed a basic rapport. Pause to see if they will continue. Be prepared with another statement of support if they don’t. If they do, it will indicate a growing level of trust.

  “If,” Carla bit at her words, “they try to put someone in charge other than Kyle, I’m going to murder them.”

  Richie laughed in surprise.

  Duane and Chad both came out from behind their cards now that Carla had finally revealed what was eating at her.

  “What the hell, Q?” Suddenly Carla was right in his face and the pretty part of her now mattered much less than the dangerous part.

  Breaking an initial rapport abruptly will increase a witness’s hostility by a factor of two to five times depending on the severity of your breach.

  “Sorry.” Richie held up his hands defensively. “I just didn’t really expect our hostile-witness training to work on you. Now we get why you’re upset.”

  “Hostile what?” The last word wasn’t a steam-whistle shriek, but rather low and dangerous. Then—the moment before Richie thought Carla was going to jump over the low coffee table and throttle him—she covered her face and screamed into her hands. She dropped back into a floral-brocade couch that completely clashed with her dress and groaned.

  “Hey, Carla,” Chad spoke up. “Anyone tries to replace Kyle, I’ll send them down the garbage chute.”

  Richie
smiled—their second live mission as a team had required them to climb up one.

  “I’m being a bitch, aren’t I?” Carla looked deeply chagrined.

  “No more than normal, honey.” Duane made a rare dry comment.

  “Sorry,” she mouthed at Richie.

  He shrugged an easy acceptance. Carla’s rants rarely lasted long and they always had a reason behind them. It was one of her strengths in the field. Their cover would start to shred and Carla would just let herself go off, creating the perfect distraction and convincing the bad guys of her own authenticity right down to the core. Because she really did care that much. The bad guys just couldn’t read their own doom in her rants.

  “Hostile witness?” Her wry tone brought some heat to his cheeks.

  “Well, it worked.”

  She tried to scowl at him but ruined it with a smile.

  Then she bolted to her feet when there was a scrape-tap-scrape on the hotel room’s door. Long-short-long, K for Kyle in Morse code. Had he been knocking under duress, it would have been tap-scrape-tap for the short-long-short of R for Reeves. First initial was an all clear; last initial was a danger signal. He knew better than to unlock the door with his own card key under any circumstances.

  Still, Chad and Duane slipped hands down onto their sidearms before nodding to Carla to open the door.

  * * *

  Melissa stood in the cheery lemon-and-sky-blue hall of the luxury hotel and still couldn’t make sense of how she’d gotten here. She was supposed to be joining a top Delta team, not wandering around a luxury hotel. Something was going wrong and her instincts were saying, “Run!” but she had no idea toward or away from what. The perfect clarity of the last six months—actually, the last five years—had been shattered in an instant by Colonel Gibson’s parting comment.

  Five years ago her brother had talked her into the fatal winter climb of Mount Rainier. An unidentified man had hiked solo across the glaciers atop the peak during a raging winter storm and saved her life, though it was too late for her brother. It had turned out that even if the balaclava-masked rescuer had been standing right there at the first moment, it would have been too late for him.