Heart Strike (4 page)

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.

Then her rescuer had disappeared.

All she'd ever found out was that his first name was Michael.

She'd been airlifted from just below the peak, blind from the blizzard, by a U.S. Army helicopter piloted by a Captain Mark Henderson. He'd offered to track down her rescuer and later reported he hadn't been able to. He was a lousy liar, which told Melissa that he'd succeeded but couldn't reveal who it was. Someone secret.

The helicopter had told her that her rescuer had been from the U.S. Army, so she'd joined. Not in hopes of ever finding Michael, but in learning the skills to pay back as he had. Her parents had been aghast. Before the climb, she'd been firmly on track for a very comfortable career in the museum's exhibits department. Afterward, she became an Army soldier, and not a Canadian one.

The higher she'd progressed in the United States Army, the more she'd learned about what sort of man her rescuer must have been. She'd gone 101st Airborne, then almost gone for Green Beret. But in the end, the sheer audacity of a man doing a solo winter climb on Rainier and succeeding in rescuing her by calling in Army air support made her reset her sights. She'd gone for Delta Force and made it.

And, much to her amazement, she'd ultimately been right. Only the very best Delta operator on the planet could have saved her from those hellish conditions alone. And he had been—Colonel Michael Gibson.

What's more, during training, he must have known it was her. And now he'd sent her here—the thick-carpeted hallway of a luxury hotel in Venezuela.

She inspected the man who'd fetched her from the airport acting completely as if he was an ordinary citizen. While transferring at Aruba, someone had insisted on selling her an “I (heart) Aruba” T-shirt that she didn't want. He'd closed the sale when he'd told her, “Wear it when you get off the plane, pretty lady. It will work wonders for you.” And then he winked at her. So, the T-shirt was the identifying mark for her contact at the Maracaibo airport. She'd fought it on, at least a size too small—maybe more but avoided mirrors because she didn't want to know—and done her best not to feel totally humiliated.

Melissa had felt as stupid as could be stepping off the plane in Maracaibo, the only tall light-blond person of either gender on the flight, in a sea of actual returning tourists—almost exclusively of smaller stature and Spanish-dark. Though dozens of them wore Aruba-worshipping T-shirts. Voluntarily.

In Maracaibo, a hard-bodied man had breezed up, given her a hug as if she'd known who he was. Otherwise, the embrace was completely appropriate to the circumstances, but no more; decent guy not even trying for a grope.

He greeted her with, “Hey, sis! How was the flight?”

No one had called her “sis” since her brother died. She couldn't even manage a mumbled response on the blessedly short drive back to the hotel. She could hear that he was trying to be pleasant, then eyeing her oddly when she didn't respond. Gracious, she didn't even understand the words though they sounded like English, which made her feel like even more of an idiot than the T-shirt did. Unit operators were not supposed to feel like idiots, especially not in the first twenty-four hours after graduation. It wasn't really fair.

But it didn't take a genius to pick out what he was from the first moment. Kyle Reeves—she knew once her “brother” had introduced himself—blended into the crowd a little too perfectly. Whereas she hadn't blended in at all. But she knew. One Delta operator could pick out another just by how their eyes moved and how they shifted through a crowd, always scanning for potential threats and vigilant to have an exit at their back.

“Like the T-shirt. Fred always did have a sense of humor,” he said as they waited for the hotel door to be opened.

“Fred?” The disconnect only worsened, as that had been her brother's first name, but at least she could understand his words now.

“Fred Smith.” He glanced away as the peephole darkened with someone looking out at them. “He's an alphabet man.”

“Fred Smith,” she managed. Not her brother. Instead, an alphabet agency man, probably a CIA spook, who had sold her a T-shirt to make her stand out more in a crowd than she already did. And the jerk had made her pay for it! If she ever met him again, she'd squeeze him until she got her money back for making her feel so stupid.

Kyle Reeves stood at ease beside her…except she'd come to suspect that nothing was “at ease” with Reeves. There was a readiness about him. He had a lively smile, a quick wit, and appeared to live on the balls of his feet, ready every instant to spring into action.

As if she needed another sign that this was for real.

The door locks began to rattle open.