Target Engaged (3 page)

But she'd felt that look of pure heat from Kyle since the moment of her arrival when he'd stood ready to take out the 75th Ranger meathead.

It was sweet of him, but wholly unnecessary. She'd learned Carla Lesson Number One ages ago:
You're on your own, girl.

No question of that even long before the day she'd hit Basic Training. On her first day in the Army, a drill instructor had tried to grope her and ended up eating dirt right in front of a passing major, which hadn't gone over so well. The other drills weren't too pleased about their buddy spending a month in the stockade and losing two grades, but no one else had messed with her, other than making her eight weeks with them a living hell.

Still, it had been thoughtful of Kyle. The applause had been a nice gesture too, though she'd noted it wasn't exactly a popular one.

Now his look was a questioning one—she could read his face so easily. She didn't wait for him to ask.

“I know what to do with one of these, tough guy. Do you?”

He looked down at her hands and how she held the weapon and then back up at her face. “Loser buys the first round of drinks once we're through selection.”

“Deal!”

Then the words registered.

Damn! She found herself liking him despite her better judgment. He'd just said that he fully expected her to be one of those still standing at the end of the thirty days of Delta Selection.

Compliments never went to her head because they were always about her being female. “You did that really well…for a woman.”

Yet Kyle was looking right past that as if he could actually see
her.
It was pretty damned sexy.

He turned to receive his magazines from the training cadre.

“Five rounds to zero your scope.” The Delta trainer handed Kyle a short magazine.

Carla felt that was pretty damn stingy. Ten to fifteen rounds would be more appropriate for an unfamiliar weapon.

The trainer also handed out three long magazines—fully loaded by the way Kyle was holding them. “Ninety rounds for thirty targets. You must hit twenty-eight of the targets to complete Assessment Phase of the selection process and continue on to the Stress Phase.”

Kyle glanced her way and winked. Then he slipped two of the magazines into a thigh pouch, which left him holding the zeroing rounds and only one magazine.

Thirty rounds, thirty targets. Mister Show-Off, huh? She'd take that challenge.

He grinned at her when she did the same with her rounds.

A number of guys had been watching them. Some laughed at her in derision, which didn't bother her any. If they wanted to underestimate her, they were welcome to; it gave her the advantage. Some looked thoughtful. About a third of the men took the challenge of tucking away two of their magazines. That bravado so wasn't going to last.

“Green 3” was the first one called forward to zero her weapon.

She took a quick look at the range. There were targets that were posted pretty damn far away from the shooting positions. She normally zeroed at thirty meters. This time she went for fifty.

* * *

Kyle tried to keep watch. He should be entirely in his own head and worrying about his own shooting, but he couldn't resist assessing the others. At the first distance, at the close-in ten-meter targets, there were still several guys out of the fifty shooters who missed at least one of the five targets and had to expend an extra round.

He'd thought that the men they'd left on the ground back at the Delta compound had thinned the herd, but the day wasn't over yet. Didn't these guys even know how to zero their weapons?

At thirty meters, five more targets and the number of misses increased.

At fifty, they were down to twenty shooters maintaining the one-round-per-target ratio.

After a hundred meters, there were ten. They also added an extra target. Four shooters who'd been counting targets rather than looking at all available objectives safetied and aimed their weapons at the ground signaling they were done. The extra target was marked as a miss. The training cadre never said a word until after each new candidate had come up the line and done his shooting.

Kyle liked shooting. He'd never been one of those guys who got sexually charged up while firing a weapon. There was something very primal about it, but it had never affected him that way. He simply enjoyed the precision and control.

Watching Carla Anderson fire a weapon was a whole different matter. It was a vision that sure as hell fired up his juices.

The guys who'd been teasing her had shut up by now.

They were no longer shooting at paper targets. At this distance, there was a hand-wide circle of steel suspended at the middle of a wooden target. It gave out a bright
plink
sound and a puff of reluctant dust no matter how many times it was struck.

Carla's time as she shifted her fire from target to target was also damned good, especially using an unfamiliar weapon.

When they went from standing to prone positions for the six targets at three hundred meters, he swallowed and had to look away. Even through her Army combat uniform she looked amazing. ACUs were baggy, hid shape. Except when she was lying flat in the dirt and they clung around her buttocks.

She was a fellow soldier and clearly a good one. So what did it say about him that he wanted to tackle her right there on the ground—their fellow soldiers and the training cadre be damned—and see just where it led?

Get the woman out of your head, Kyle!
Yeah, like that was going to happen anytime soon. He'd given up on that after the first day of Delta Selection. No amount of his father's martial-arts training about controlling chi and finding his center was helping either.

She'd come into the mess hall after check-in—out of her leathers, wearing camo pants and a black T-shirt. She was now dressed just like every other jock in the room yet looking like none of them. But that wasn't what had gotten him. It was the juxtaposition of the babe on a bike and the total soldier who'd strode into a room of a hundred men with her head high and her stride sure.

If the positions were reversed, Kyle didn't know if he'd have that much nerve.

Face it, dude. You walk into a room of a hundred women, you're gonna be happier than a pig in shit.
Okay, he'd grant the truth of that statement, but it didn't make her one bit less impressive.

Especially when she was one of only five still maintaining a single shot per target. The hot winds and inevitable swirling dust devils of the North Carolina heat didn't deter her one bit.

At three hundred, they permanently left behind four shooters who had already run through their ninety rounds. They'd fired at twenty-seven targets; no one ignored the sixth target at this distance, but some didn't have the rounds to hit it. Or they'd used their last shot. With nothing left in the three magazines to shoot at the hardest targets, the three maximum-range ones, they were out. They had to hit twenty-eight. Four guys were starting the final-distance targets with only a single round still left in their chamber.

The training cadre walked them past the five-hundred-meter shooting position out to six hundred. That was the practical limit of the 5.56 x 45 mm NATO round they were firing.

At this distance, Kyle was the second one up. Three targets, three rounds left in his magazine. Twice he waited out hard gusts, but he managed to hit all three on his first try.

A Green Beret named Chad also made thirty for thirty.

A SEAL and a Ranger cursed and had to pull out a second magazine to get all thirty targets, but easily qualified with two nearly full magazines remaining.

Carla was the only one left with a chance at a single round per target.

Six hundred meters was a world different from three hundred. Out here you had to have perfect control of your heartbeat and your breathing and know what to do with both them and the environment.

Two guys spent a whole magazine, thirty rounds, before managing that crucial qualifying twenty-eighth target. Ten more were told that if they wanted to take the next six months or more to improve their shooting skills, they were welcome to reapply to a future selection process, a courtesy not extended to the four guys they'd already carted away from the three-hundred-meter position.

Starting at three hundred meters, the attitude had changed as well. The training cadre wasn't merely sitting back quietly and announcing “hit” or “miss” in deadpan voices. They started telling the shooter what they were doing wrong—shooting on the breath but not the pulse beat or the wrong part of the pulse beat.

“Green 3” was called up last. The day's heat had continued to rise throughout the shooting, especially as shooters took longer and longer between shots out at this range. The sun had shifted from behind to a quarter off the targets, really irritating. The winds across the range were chaotic, gusting as high as fifteen knots, which could knock a round completely sideways as it traveled for a full second to cross the six-tenths of a kilometer to target.

Everyone, even those who had failed, gathered around to watch Carla. She snagged her hair back into a rough ponytail, teased and snarled by the wind. Kyle's hands itched with the desire to comb her hair out between his fingers and find out if it was as soft as it looked.

She settled and waited. A few of the guys were still dense enough to be nudging each other and trading knowing nods. No “girl” could shoot reliably at this distance.

Kyle knew full well that the number one sniper in Russia's history had been Lyudmila Pavlichenko, with over three hundred confirmed German kills during World War II—and that was with a weapon that was so much less than the HK416. These weren't even sniper distances. Those didn't come into their own until they were out past a kilometer.

Someone had told Kyle about a “hotshot bitch” flying with the Night Stalkers who was unbeatable in competition. It didn't sound right. A helicopter was a crappy sniper platform, but that's what the guy had said before going on to describe each of her fine physical attributes:
pint-sized, Asian, and built like a brick shithouse
. As if that was more important than how she did what she did when she outshot him.
Yep! Just brush that bit of bruised ego under the carpet, buddy. You stick with your story.

Kyle willed the winds to die for Carla, but they didn't appear to be cooperating.

Everyone jolted when she unexpectedly fired. She must have detected a cosmic wormhole through the wind that he'd missed.

There was no bright
plink
sound, but she was already swinging her weapon to the next target with a calm assuredness before the bullet could possibly arrive.

Then the spotter called out, “Hit.” A second called, “Confirm hit,” from behind his scope.

The wind had carried the sound away.

* * *

Carla's world had narrowed to an arrow point. There were only weapon, range, and target. There were only her pulse and the beat of the wind. When everything aligned, she nailed the second target and moved on to the third.

Her brother had taught her the basics after she'd almost become mountain lion food on a hike. He'd bought her a used Remington 597 WMR with a scope and a hundred rounds of ammo. The next time, she'd taken a thousand rounds and hiked deep into the Colorado Rockies to practice. Not only did she sleep better after that, but she also ate better out in the wilderness. The .22 Mag rounds killed smaller game up through fox and coyote and scared off most big game.

The Army had taken those skills and honed them with too much experience. She'd never be a true sniper, waiting for days to take a single shot at two kilometers out before sliding away just as quietly, but she knew what to do with the weapon in her hands. The shorter distances had familiarized her with the HK416's quirks, or rather, lack of them. It was a finely honed shooting machine, and she was now as integral with it as her heart was with the winds. Fort Bragg's winds had nothing on the howlers that shot through the deep canyons of the Colorado Rockies.

She took the final shot with reluctance, knowing she'd have to leave this perfect, quiet space when she did.

The bolt rang empty as she spent the last round in the magazine and rested her cheeks against the sun- and powder-warmed weapon. She closed her eyes and waited.

“Hit,” her spotter announced.

“Confirm hit,” the second one agreed.

Then another sound came at her, battering her senses that had been so wrapped in the quiet.

She rolled over and sat up.

There was Kyle Reeves front and center, applauding.

And, so different from her arrival just a week ago, they were all doing so, every last man jack of them.

A rolling wave of noise.

Applauding her.

The faces blurred. She'd often won praise from her immediate fireteam, but this was a circle of fifty of the best soldiers there were, and they were applauding her.

She didn't know what to do with it.

Overwhelm slapped at her. Carla wanted to curl up until they went away, go back to the peace of her shooting space.

But she couldn't or she'd never live it down.

So instead she unbuttoned her thigh pocket, pulled out the two still-full magazines, and tossed them to Kyle. At least he had to stop applauding to catch them. Once he had them, he tapped the two against the pair he still had buttoned up in his thigh pocket.

Rather than panicking, she sat there like the village idiot, grinning up at the man who looked at her like she was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen.

No, the heat still burned there, deep in those dark eyes.

He looked at her like the most amazing
woman
he'd ever seen…

Carla had to admit it felt pretty damn good.

And that it was totally mutual.

“Day thirty,” Carla muttered to herself as she shouldered her rucksack. “Oh joy.” She made sure the ends of her hair weren't pinned under the straps and headed to roll call. Last day of Delta Selection. Though this day was starting at straight-up midnight, it was still the last day.

She'd survived seven days of Assessment, the burnout series of exercises and hikes. She'd survived the one-week cut, the shooting assessment, and now twenty-two days of the Stress Phase.

“Last day.” She grunted forty-nine pounds of ruck back off her shoulders once she reached the assembly point. She dropped the pack in the dirt and offered it an admonitory kick, over a third her body weight. Forty-four pounds—twenty kilos—was the required minimum for this hike. She added the extra two kilos to make sure she was over the minimum at each of the check-in point scales along today's route.

She hated how easily guys like Kyle could just sling on a heavy ruck. Carla could do it, but it took work. It didn't seem fair that they got all the upper-body strength and didn't appreciate it while she'd earned every last muscle fiber the hard way.

The last thirty days of testing had leaned them down. Short on calories because they simply couldn't consume them as fast as they were burning them. Short on sleep and long on physical workouts, especially massively long hikes with heavy loads and difficult orienteering over complex terrain.

The day after the shooting assessment, they'd been loaded into trucks and shipped out to the Uwharrie National Forest for Stress Phase hikes, lots of them.

At least this hike didn't also require the thirty pounds of her LBE. The load-bearing equipment harness was a soldier's personal “essential crap” carrier. In case she ever had to shed the rucksack, her LBE made it so she'd still be fully armed and have water. This hike was rucks only.

She'd grown up hiking the mountains of Colorado, sometimes walking several weeks into the wilderness with only what she could carry; this was no different. Back then, it was either hike or hang out with her drunk dad in Durango—man, that was like eight kinds of suck.

Well, in the Colorado Rockies she didn't usually walk with a heavy M16 in her hands. She typically packed her 597 over her shoulder for hunting and a .357 on her hip in case she stumbled on a bear who needed convincing to change direction. She almost shivered recalling the day she'd learned just how little a black bear cared about a .22 round, even a WMR one. The rifle—which had been her constant protector until the two days she'd spent clinging high in a slender aspen tree—had only pissed off the bear.

A lot of the guys had griped about not being allowed to sling the M16 rather than carry it. Didn't bother her a bit. Having a desire to survive her service in dangerous places, she'd always carried her Army-issue for fast access. That habit had saved her life more than once.

It was also useful for rapping the occasionally overconfident grunt hard in the balls. If you came up alongside the leg and gave a final twist at the last moment, it got you in under most brands of body armor.

Delta Selection had leaned them down in other ways.

First day they'd taken a photo of the squadron of 104 cocky soldiers. Mostly cocky. No sign of the Neanderthal who'd greeted her and then tried to eat a concrete wall. And her face was sober in that photo.

Carla didn't have any hoo-ha in her head about representing the first women to break yet another gender barrier. She'd stood there during that photo and contemplated what it would take to reach the end of this and still be standing. This hadn't been about anyone else, the way she thought it would be—not even her dead mother or brother. This was about her.

She was learning to be down with that and prepared herself for whatever was coming.

Carla would wager that today's rules would be as simple as usual despite it being day thirty, the last day of testing…unless there was another surprise on the far side of the day.

If there was, she'd do that too. Bring it on.

Only twenty candidates remained here at the end of week four.

Eighty-four were gone. And among the departed wasn't the “little woman” or “girlie” or any of the other names they'd called her. She was still standing despite the betting pools that she knew were strong against her.

Kyle Reeves was still in too, his dark gaze ready to devour her at the least invitation—which she still hadn't issued, despite the temptation.

The dude was different. In some ways he was almost as whacked as the Delta compound…which she'd become quite used to by now. He looked more handsome with time, which seemed impossible considering where he'd started out. It certainly didn't hurt that his hair was forest-dark brown and clearly meant for a woman to run her fingers through. Or that his whiskey-warm eyes could see right down into her soul.

If she'd had one.

She was only too aware of that part of her lying buried with her mom and brother in Arlington Cemetery. Someday she'd wind up beside them, but not yet. She was going to honor them with every heartbeat and every breath she had.

Kyle was also the king grunt here. He was the only one who consistently beat her times on the hikes—every, single goddamned hike. That the bastard also beat everyone else's times didn't make her feel any better about him doing that to her.

A wave of unofficial hand-to-hand, mano-a-mano, wrestling competitiveness had swept through the group in week three, which was spent around campfires deep in the Uwharrie. Kyle put them all down. Though Chad the Green Beret was stronger, one of the few who was, Kyle was faster.

She'd sat as an unchallenged spectator. At first she'd considered going in and teaching them a thing or two. Then she'd figured that she'd ultimately end up down in the dirt with Sergeant Kyle Reeves, and she wasn't ready for that…yet.

That in itself was an odd thought. In two ways. One, that she was holding off on taking a sexual partner who tempted her. And two, that she hoped he'd be just as eager. Normally she didn't care about the latter one way or the other as long as he said yes.

The final and totally impossible thing that was wacko about Sergeant Kyle Reeves was that he appeared to be content with the world around him. At ease in every situation, which she found even more engaging than that first heated look.

Oh, she'd caught him watching her plenty since that first day. No big surprise, as she was the only chick here.

But ever since the shooting assessment, there'd been something more. Gal with a gun gave him a hard-on? Fine. He wound her own fantasies up every time she couldn't beat him.

Well, turnabout was fair play. If there was anyone she was going to best on this last day of the Delta Force Selection Stress Phase, he was it. She was done fooling around.

She wasn't a woman hoping tremulously with quivering lip to be let into The Unit. She was gonna kick ass, excelling right past their number one soldier or run herself into the ground trying.

Now, on day thirty, she wasn't sure it was possible, because Kyle was just that damn good. But it was the last day and she'd give it her all.

Yeah. Good goal for the day.
Reeves, your tight soldier ass is mine!
She wondered if there was a department of the Army where she should file her claim—they had a department for everything else under the sun. The name would be something obscure that you'd never associate with what it was: Department of Acquisition of Rear Echelons.

DARE, girl!
Dare to be great and kick his ass.

Sergeant Major Maxwell, the head instructor of the Delta training cadre, called them to order. He had always made the rules of what was expected absolutely clear, if you only listened and didn't try to interpret. There wasn't any deeper level. They told you what they wanted you to know—no more and no less.

“Final day,” he announced once they'd formed up in a ragged line. Delta wasn't big on formality, and there weren't enough of them left to call for forming in ranks. “Time for the Forty-Miler.”

It deserved capital letters. There'd been rumors of it, even on the outside. It was the only thing in Delta that wasn't done in metric. Almost everything else in the U.S. military had converted over to aid interoperability and joint-operations communication with other national forces. Even Liberia and Burma were flipping, which left U.S. civilians as the only ones still using English units.

But the “Forty-Miler” was tradition even as Carla's brain automatically converted it to sixty-five kilometers. Sixty-five klicks with a full ruck.
Definitely time to pony up, girl.
This wasn't going to be any cakewalk along some fire road like the early days of Delta Selection. She was going to be chasing Kyle's ass over rough territory.

“Twenty kilos, forty miles, folks,” in yet another of the brilliantly screwed-up double-unit standards that thrived in so many corners of the U.S. military. “You have your map and compass. No roads or trails except when approaching or departing an RV.”

The training cadre always set up rendezvous points where they could drive in a truck to haul away those who voluntarily quit.

“As usual, there is an unspecified time limit to this exercise, so you don't want to be strolling. I will mention that the terrain is no more pleasant than usual.”

They'd spent the last twenty days crisscrossing the Uwharrie National Forest, which nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains thirty klicks northwest of Fort Bragg. She now knew it would be brutal without being told. If there was a single piece of non-ugly terrain in the entire forest, they hadn't found it. The twenty days of Stress Phase that they'd spent here had intimately introduced them to the very worst elements of these rugged hills.

His wry comment earned a weak laugh and several groans from the group. A selection-process hike meant swamps and mountains and brambles and… Didn't matter. One day. She could do one more day.

Night.

It was zero-dark-zero now, which meant the first six hours of the hike would be in darkness. No way to scout the route visually; this would start as a pure map-and-compass job from the start..

Kyle shot her a cocky salute.

She gave him the finger and a grin. He absolutely knew that she'd be coming after him this time.

He wasn't a big man, just an inch over her own five-eight; no soldier still remaining was big. Delta didn't select for towering and broad-chested—though Kyle had the broad-chested part down cold. They selected for tough and more tenacious than a Tasmanian devil.

That was the part she had down cold.

Over the last month, there had been a lot of reactions to her. After feeding that guy the outhouse, the physical crap (pun intended) had stopped.

She never thought she'd be thankful for those last two years of high school spent working nights and weekends as a bouncer in her cousin's strip club—a job she'd initially gotten because of how much time her father spent there. She'd learned most of her early manhandling skills fending off Dad's “pals” and dragging his drunk ass home. It had paid off innumerable times in the military. Who knew.

The more typical reactions to her only continued through the first week. They were split between those trying to harass her and those trying to curry some sort of favor. The first group, she was pleased to see, went away because they didn't survive that heavy first cut at the end of week one.

The guys who were trying to curry favor through unexpected niceties learned: first, that it made no impression on her, and second, they were soon too tired and sore to think about anything other than themselves.

In regular Army, the guys were always offering to press her uniforms, teaching her how to use a heat gun to expand her boot's leather to take the polish better, or hiding chocolates and mash notes in her bunk. Scanty lace undergarments were also a common gift. The next time she saw them, she would thank them, return the note or the underwear—though she ate the chocolate—then walk away. Didn't matter if it was in front of the guy's buddies, a drill sergeant, or a bird colonel. Confused the shit out of most of them and made it stop pretty quickly.

Sergeant Kyle Reeves had done none of that. He'd simply been steady. She felt the heat every time his eyes lingered, but otherwise he treated her no differently than any other candidate. Perhaps friendlier, but he was one of those naturally friendly guys who seemed to know everyone's life story within minutes of meeting them. Not something she'd ever been good at, not even close.

“Also per usual,” the Sergeant Major continued, “you may not speak to or assist another candidate unless they are critically injured and unable to help themselves.”

That was the rule that had weeded out over twenty candidates in the second week. They didn't know how to be self-reliant, how to function outside the structure of a military team.

Delta Lesson Number Kajillion Four:
You gotta be able to do it alone against all odds.

“Remember, create a small fire in an open area if you're hopelessly lost and voluntarily withdrawing. Do not use your radio unless it is a matter of imminent death and we need to get a medevac extract team to you. You're good to go.”

Delta Lesson Number Kajillion Four and a Half:
You gotta do it exactly by their rules.
You just wanna quit and you use the radio, then no nice-nice letter when they kicked your ass back down to the regular units.

That was the problem with Delta rules. The trainers were Delta themselves. They never got upset and they never explained. They tell you to go for a brutal hike, you go. They tell you to go sit under a tree with your ruck, you go and sit under a tree with your ruck. They tell you to go take yet another psychological questionnaire, you take it—and they did that a lot. Weirdly, it wasn't about blind obedience, though that's how Carla had taken it at first. Instead, it was about doing what was needed without hesitation—right now.