A cousin of his—who had demanded a mere hundred grand for selling the allied bombing patterns over a terrorist-held city when he should have earned half a million—was dismissed, without the grace-saving of “based on his request” in the announcement of his departure. His career, his life in Saudi politics was finished. Mira and I laid a bet that his fortunes would be gone in twenty-four hours and his family in forty-eight. End it now, Dude.
And still we waited in thirsty silence.
We were the hum in an air-conditioning vent, a shadow behind a palm tree, a breath on the wind. We sucked on pebbles to draw precious saliva to soothe aching throats.
Three long days we waited and watched. On the long watches I wondered if the goddamn lieutenant had reported us AWOL—away without leave—or if he’d left a simple “on assignment” on our registers. We were past that now. Even the ache didn’t matter, only the mission.
The self-assigned mission.
Night four.
Abdul’s private war council had finally been called.
Out in the great courtyard of his home, an evening of food and debauchery on a grand scale convened. His war council of thirty of his closest and most trusted—brothers, cousins, sons. All of his sons.
“Go, Mira. Go now. While you can.” I was assembling my McMillan TAC-50 sniper rifle.
“That boat sailed the minute we stepped off the reservation, Kurt.” She began lining up magazines for me. Five rounds per mag of .50 BMG sniper-grade ammo; four to a pound and as long as the five dollar bill each one cost.
We’d scouted the ideal spot, found it in the bastard’s bedroom.
A monstrous bed, satin sheets the size of pool covers, red Persian rugs on white marble floors, gold fixtures in a bathroom big enough to park a couple Humvees in. Wealth dripped out of the faucets and shone from the crystal chandeliers. I’d never seen anything like it and frankly never wanted to again. It was cold in this blazingly hot country. More frigid and heartless than a winter storm blowing in off the north Pacific.
Mira had quietly spoken with the four current wives—apparently none of them were very fond of their husband-prince and the dismissed wife had been a favorite in their circle. For their own safety in deniability afterward, Mira had tied them up in the bathroom. Then we’d barricaded ourselves in.
The only opening was the French doors that swung out into the night. An ornate dresser of inlaid English rosewood turned into a shooting stand placed well inside the room. With the flash suppressor and an extra foot of silencer, I’d attract little attention. Only a perfect shot from the courtyard could find me, though we both expected one eventually would.
Mira’s family had been little better than mine. Just like me, her brothers and now the occasional sister, were in the Spec Ops community. We both knew what was coming for us and, without a word, we were both willing to pay the price if it came to that.
Abdul’s war council spread out in the marble-paved courtyard below me—acres of the stuff. Out in the exact center stood a circle of tables covered with pristine white cloths and laden with an unimaginable bounty. Buckets of iced caviar, great slabs of pâté, whole sides of beef that could feed hundreds, all served by lightly clad women who had clearly been paid to not complain no matter what was done to them.
The range was so close that I couldn’t miss.
The Canadian TAC-50 was twenty-six pounds and six-feet of the baddest rifle in the business. Two of the three longest sniper shots ever confirmed as kills had flown out of TAC-50 barrels—each over two thousand meters and I didn’t have a single shot here over two hundred. I’d selected the beast just in case I had needed the long shot. Instead I had easy targets and massive rounds to punch with.
I dialed back my Schmidt-Bender scope all the way from the thousand-yard zeroing I kept the rifle set for. My bullets were going to drop less than two inches before impact at this range.
We’d all been scrubbed. There was no serial number on either scope or weapon. The only ID Mira and I carried was phony as hell and identified us as mercenaries gone hunting—traceably hired by the remains of a cell of terrorists Abdul had fucked over in Pakistan. Even if we got out clean, we’d “drop” those IDs somewhere that they’d be discovered.
US intel services wanted him in place. US and Saudi military—and any grunt with even half a brain—wanted him gone no matter what the CIA said.
He was about to be erased.
I was committing an act of war. Killing thirty of the King of Saudi Arabia’s immediate relatives couldn’t be shrugged off. One or two might be overlooked, but Abdul had built his network too well and just cutting the head off the serpent wouldn’t be enough.
Worst case scenario? There would be two dead mercs who would never be identified, except by Combat Applications Group Lieutenant Bruce—who’d known exactly what he was doing when he left that “Eyes Only” report for a sniper and his spotter, both with no families outside The Unit.
I snapped in the first magazine with a gentle click and worked the bolt to load the first round so softly that it wouldn’t have disturbed a cricket.
Two hundred meters away, I stared straight into Prince Abdul Malik Hassan’s face through my scope. His head filled my view. It was thrown back in a laugh and it would have been so easy to feed the round to him, right down his throat.
You always heard when an ST6 SEAL died in action. His brothers saw to that, but that wasn’t our way. When my best friend went down in Yemen, his family never knew how it happened. But I knew, now that I’d read the file—they traced it to Abdul giving away our plans. When my bunkmate lost both arms and his eyesight in the Ukraine, Abdul might as well have pulled the trigger.
“Not yet, Abdul,” I whispered down the long length of my sweet rifle.
I shifted my aim.
Not yet.
First you need to watch your family die.
5
The Unit doesn’t believe in suicide missions. Delta’s mission is to deliver results.
I’d arrived in this place knowing the odds. I care about my life and Mira’s, maybe more than anyone because an operator goes in knowing the risks—I take them every day. It would take so little to erase everything except someone’s memory of me. A stray round, a single mistake.
Training taught me that, but it might not have been enough. I wanted Abdul so badly that I would have seen it through even if there had been no chance of escape.
It was Mira who had taught me that there was more, so much more. We’d slowly discovered it together, in each other. Two people discovering that there was family beyond our brothers and sisters of war. Until we ultimately found true family in each other. There was nothing we wouldn’t do for one another.
Nothing.
We began.
It was messy, but it was fast. After three days lying in wait, it was no more than an eyeblink. One heartbeat between shots and two to reload. Just thirty seconds to clear the courtyard of every target—but one.
Then Abdul went down, hard. He went down screaming in panic and running away from the circle of the dead: his murdering council of friends and relatives. For him I used three full magazines, fifteen rounds, all blasted from the big TAC-50 to take him apart one piece at a time.
Toward the end I was peripherally aware of other gunfire—silenced rounds on a different beat. Mira had my back. Kept me safe. But that wasn’t my focus. That’s why I had a spotter and if she wasn’t good enough, we were both done.
She was. Guards who had streamed in from the sides had died in a broad ring around the courtyard
The silence echoed through the palace, Abdul’s final scream no more than a memory in the vast marble plaza. Our gunfire had been quiet pops never heard beyond the French doors. Beside many of the dead lay drawn weapons, but lacking a target, no shot was fired.
Mira and I eased back through the streets of Riyadh in the soft cool breath of the pre-dawn desert. She walked two steps behind me, as a niqab-clad woman should follow her man: respectful, hidden
. Her rifle, like mine, still warm from use, now lay hidden beneath the long folds of her robe. Only her eyes showed.
But in my mind’s eye she moved beside me, her dark hair floating free in the ocean’s winds as we held hands and walked together down the beach in a soft, cool Oregon rain—her dark eyes bright with the joy of being alive.
Love’s Second Chance
Delta Force operator Hector Garcia’s mission as scout for the take-down of a Mexican cartel leads him straight into a gun battle.
Hired gun Alejandra Martinez prowls at the heart of it. The woman who told him to leave town five years ago looks and fights even better than back then.
Only together can they hope to find Love’s Second Chance.
Introduction
For this tale, I sought a lighter tone, though the subject matter is no less upsetting than in For Her Dark Eyes Only.
The drug wars of Mexico affect far more than the flow of drugs into the US. I’ve come back to this time and again in my stories, trying to somehow understand it, to somehow see some light in all of the darkness.
Do I blame the addicts in my country and others for creating the demand? Or the big pharma who helped so many become addicted? Do I blame the farmers in Colombia just trying to make a living? The cartels who control them? The transporters, the dealers, the warlords, the corrupt politicians… The list seems unending.
So, I chose to fight my small battles of hope.
For me, this concept goes back to long before I began writing.
I’m not some politician or corporate magnate who has the ability to influence large groups of people. I’m a deep introvert and, while I’m a wielder of words, rhetoric is not my chosen field of battle.
Asking myself how I could make a difference is what led me to tales like this one. Seeking out little glimmers of light and hope which show how much more we can be than who we currently are.
For this story, I wanted to look at another aspect that is even deeper in Delta Force training than shooting—adaptability. Their training includes the ability to assess and react on the fly at a level that no one else can achieve. Part of that is accomplished by training so constantly. The only time a Delta Force operator isn’t training, is when they’re in battle.
They are taught to continuously rethink every action and to layer that on top of such a deep skill set, that pivoting from one plan to another becomes honed into an instinctual ability. The fact that they can make that pivot on the fly as a team is simply mind-boggling. It’s something that doesn’t fit well in a short story, though I did try to capture that essence in the four Delta Force novels.
However, I was certainly able to do that for a one-man operation.
And for motivation?
What better than a second chance at finding true love.
1
“You really stepped in some shit this time, Alejandra Martinez.” She didn’t even know where to direct her fire. Or if she should fire at all.
Lying prone on the roof of the highest building in the area, a whole two stories, gave her the best vantage of the cesspool that had been her hometown for over twenty-five years. US-Mexican border towns sucked, especially when they were on the Mexican side. But she’d never found a way to leave it.
If she started shooting over the low parapet of aged adobe, they’d know she was up here and that could start to suck really fast. Of course another couple of hours up here in the midday sun baking her butt on an adobe grill and maybe she would be ready to shoot all of the assholes who had conspired to trap her up here. They’d gotten blood on her new jeans and sneakers, which was really pissing her off. At least it wasn’t hers.
“Next time you’re stuck in a street war and trying to survive, remember to bring milk and cookies. Or at least some water.” Good reminder, if she ever got out of this one. A six of cold beer sounded good too.
Life had been so much simpler twenty-four hours ago. She’d had a lover, a lousy-as-shit job—making it only a little better than her lover—and something that sort of resembled a place to be.
Now she had a cartel war surrounding the building she lay on top of, and her job was dead—her former employer had owned most of the blood she was wearing. Too bad her job had been to protect his stupid ass. He’d not only been stupid enough to piss off the Alvarado cartel that controlled all the contraband traffic through this town, he’d neglected to tell her he was also setting up the street gangs for a hard fall. They’d found out. Everyone wanted him dead and it was hard to blame them.
The steady crack of automatic gunfire and the hard thwaps of bullets impacting on stone and metal echoed up and down the streets below. These guys were using ammo like it was free. As far as she could tell they were either fighting over who got to claim taking the idiot down, or they were having a gunfight just for the hell of it.
“This town is really going down the toilet.”
“Wasn’t all that impressive to begin with,” a deep voice resonated from close behind her.
As she swung around, a big hand grabbed the barrel of her rifle, stopping it halfway to its new target.
There’d been no sound.
No warning. Not a creak or shift of the rotten roof timbers.
A big muchacho knelt close behind her on the roof. He was loaded for action. He held a combat rifle in one hand and her rifle barrel in the other as calmly as if it was the other end of an umbrella or something. Despite his light jacket she could see a pair of Glock 19s in twin shoulder holsters and would wager he had more ammo and another hidden carry or two on him.
A glance past him—the roof access hatch was still closed and latched.
“How the hell did you—” But then she recognized him and knew. “Hector Garcia? Haven’t seen your pretty face since Marina was still a virgin.” Which was close enough to never. Her little sister had probably seduced her first boy from side-by-side bassinets at the hospital and hadn’t slowed down since. At times it was hard to tell if she was a whore or just a slut.
Actually, Hector’s wasn’t a pretty face, not even the part that wasn’t covered by his wrap-around shades and a scruff of three-day beard that looked good on him. He’d broken his nose twice that she knew of, and now maybe a third time by the look of it. She still remembered the knife fight that had earned him the wavering scar from jawline to temple. His dark hair was long, the way he’d worn it ever since he’d lost an ear during a street brawl. He might be a mess, but Hector also looked really good. He used to be one of those slender and dangerous types. Now he was a powerfully wide and dangerous type.
And at the moment…she must look like shit. Just perfect.
She’d been riding guarda on a candidate for congress presently bleeding out in the middle of the plaza. What idiota campaigned in favor of building a wall on the Mexican side of the border to stop drugs and illegal emigration? That was American-style craziness. But he’d paid her more than she could make anywhere else even marginally legal—which meant he was also on the take in a dozen different ways and worried about it. She could have defended him against one or two shooters. But the two gangs duking it out on the streets below had brought them to his speech by the truckload. She’d dropped four before her sense of self-preservation kicked in.
Now Alejandra was really pissed about the blood on her. She’d also crawled through a shattered luncheon buffet on her way up to the roof. Total mess.
Not usual at all for her to think about how she looked in the middle of a gunfight, but she and Hector had a past—even if it was a long-ago past—and her last shred of vanity had been drowned in reeking mole sauce and blood.
He let go of the barrel and she sat up to get a better look at him.
“Shit, woman!” He placed a big hand on top of her head and shoved her back down onto the roof.
Moments later a single bullet cracked by overhead. She’d drawn exactly the kind of attention she hadn’t wanted.
Hector rose quickly onto one knee, then swung his rifle up so fast she could barely foll
ow it. No time to aim. No time for anything. He just fired: two shots, a hesitation with a slight shift upward, then a third. He dropped back down. “That should take care of that.”
She’d been a shooter of one form or another ever since she was little: possum as a kid, armadillos to put meat on the table after Dad had bugged out, and bad guys as a policewoman—until the drug lords made that too dangerous a beat. But she’d never seen anything even close to what Hector had just done. He’d barely even looked for the target. Maybe the sound of the bullet had been enough. Maybe for him. And she knew if she tracked down the corpse—for she had no doubt that’s all it was now—it would have two holes close together in the chest and one more in the head.
There was certainly no return shot whistling aloft from below.
“Sorry,” she should have stayed down.
“De nada! So,” Hector lay on the roof beside her. “You busy much?”
“You saw the body in the plaza?”
“Yeah.”
“That was my meal ticket. No major loss—wasn’t much of a lover either.”
Hector’s face darkened at her second statement.
She swung the butt of her rifle into his gut, aiming between a pouch of ammo and a Glock 19. She caught him hard enough to earn her an angry grunt.
“You been gone, hombre. You don’t get to judge shit.”
He shrugged one shoulder in agreement, but didn’t look much happier about it.
Well, neither was she. Especially not with Hector Garcia lying just inches away to remind her of how good her best lover ever had been.
The gunfire down on the plaza was dying down. Probably running out of ammo at the rate they were using it.
The Complete Delta Force Shooters Page 5
