The Ides of Matt 2016

Lightning Strike to the Heart-2

3

Teresa figured that her oxygen reserve had run out prematurely and she was going to have to peel back her mask and risk frostbite, when it occurred to her that she wasn’t breathing at all. With a sharp gasp, she sucked in oxygen, and her head cleared.

Eight thousand.

Another breath that tasted of panic. She bit it back hard and forced her next breath to be even and regulated.

That last lightning flash had been so close she could still feel the induced charge across her skin. She’d been staring into the darkness toward Hal Waldman, her brain seeking some confirmation that she wasn’t alone in this madness, went the bolt had shocked through the clouds close behind her and revealed him in sharp relief against the storm. The brutal thump of thunder slammed her closer to him and momentarily drowned out both wind and storm.

Closer to him. She knew nothing about him, but he exuded confidence and safety. Even in this crazy jump, she felt as if it was possible merely because he fell alongside her.

She’d worked heavy-duty Coast Guard missions before, but when her commander had offered her a shot at jumping with the legendary Delta Force, she’d leapt at the chance. For some i***t reason she’d thought that three years in the MSST had prepared her for anything, but it certainly hadn’t prepared her for this. Jumping in this weather proved that the Delta guys really were as nuts as rumor said—something she’d never quite believed until this moment.

She’d been ready for macho bravura and a dismissive attitude. What she hadn’t been ready for was when Master Sergeant Hal Waldman had simply waved her to a seat and started right into the briefing without so much as a hello. Pure soldier, a hundred-percent business. When he’d eventually offered a few openings to friendly conversation, she’d been too surprised to react before he shrugged and moved on.

Even after three years, most of the MSST cadre didn’t treat her with such simple acceptance. Women were only a little more common there than they were in Special Operations—as in not at all.

Sergeant Waldman’s steadiness had helped keep her own nerves calm. She’d only been assigned to carefully planned missions before, until she’d chafed at the restriction, as if she somehow wasn’t good enough. Delta’s specialty was the short notice plunge into unknown conditions. Someone was finally trusting her out on the edge…actually way past it. Ice fogged most of her facemask and the wind had bitten right through her flightsuit despite the waterproof materials and thick fleece lining.

Three thousand. Two. At one-five she pulled her ripcord and by one thousand, the black chute opened with a sharp c***k 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 s**t 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-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.