by Don Bendell
“You smell wonderful, Virginia . . . Mariella Burani Bouquet of Roses?”
“Yes, it is,” she cooed, and thought Where did this man come from? She asked, “And I love your smell, too. What is that you are wearing? I love it.”
“Obsession,” he answered. “Listen, I know I mentioned room service, but I really do not want you to think of me or this as a one-night stand. How about dinner downstairs in the restaurant?”
Virginia said, “Sergeant, you are incredible. How did you learn to become such a . . . a . . .”
“Gentleman?” he interrupted.
“Yes,” she replied. “I have to tell you, there just aren’t many anymore.”
Charlie said, “My dad was a raging drunk, but one good thing he used to do was warm my butt if I ever walked through the door in front of a woman or was not respectful to females in any way. He said men are not trained to be gentlemen anymore.”
Charlie looked out the window at the lights of Manhattan and said, “My mom was such a lady and so beautiful, what he said made sense, and it was the way I wanted my mom to always be treated, because Dad was so rough to live with. Those lessons kind of stuck with me, I guess.”
She said, “You are certainly different from any man I have dated. Any man I have known.”
Charlie smiled and handed her her nylons and underwear, which made her blush.
She wanted to drop her towel and let him stare.
Her body was even more voluptuous than he had imagined in his own flirting thoughts. She spent many hours in the gym each week, as well as in a tanning booth.
She said, “If you will give me a few minutes, I will be ready, sir.”
They fed each other seafood, and kept feeding each other all through the meal. After they ate, he held her hand and walked her toward the pool room. It was an indoor pool with two hot tubs at the end of the room. Nobody was in the big indoor pool house, which had large trees everywhere around the outside of the room. Easy listening music played from the ceiling sound system, and Charlie swept her into his arms, and they started dancing slowly, rhythmically to the music. The more they danced, the more they pressed their bodies together, and their lips met. The song ended, and they stepped back, staring into each other’s eyes and smiling softly.
Charlie wanted this woman. He had been through the grinder as a warrior, and his lust was tenfold because of the events of the past several days.
She thought to herself that this was a relationship that could go nowhere. He was like the ultimate warrior, but would spend most of his adult life off fighting in wars, while the love of his life would be back home waiting, watching the door in anticipation, the TV news, her computer, her telephone.
Virginia was a woman of action herself, and she knew if she gave herself to this man, it would be for the fantasy, the lifelong memory she would always think back to, but it could not turn into a lifelong relationship. They lived in different worlds. She decided it would be worth it.
He walked over to the window to see if the patio looked like a romantic setting, but it did not.
As soon as he walked away, she smiled and whispered to herself, “Well, girl, one night with a cross between Crazy Horse and Harrison Ford would be worth ten thousand nights with some attorney or accountant. Might as well let go, enjoy yourself, and feel guilty later.”
He returned, and they danced more.
He said, “I really was not looking for a nicer place to dance, Virginia. I needed to catch my breath and think. You and I live in different worlds, but you have me entranced, totally. I am just being honest. If you and I are together tonight, I want you to understand how seldom I might make it to New York City.”
She smiled and said, “I don’t want you to think I am a pickup or sleep around, Charlie, but I was thinking, too. I am a big girl, and I believe sometimes in life two people can share and enjoy a common experience that becomes a treasured memory in both their lives.”
She stepped into his arms and kissed him and pressed against him.
Charlie said, “Woman, we need to get you upstairs and off your feet. You have had a long day.”
“Me?” She gasped.
After the first time they made love, they just lay in bed together, talking well into the night. Virginia was amazed to learn that Charlie was a direct descendant of Sitting Bull of the famous Battle of the Little Big Horn, called by many Custer’s Last Stand. Charlie used the Lakota term Battle of the Greasy Grass.
The way he described Montana, and his home at the Pine Ridge Reservation in western South Dakota, and the West itself, made her eager to go there to visit.
“Earlier,” he said, twirling a strand of her hair with two fingers, “you called me Sergeant. I assume you know to never call me that in front of anybody?”
“I figured so,” Virginia responded. “Tell me about your work.”
Charlie said, “I cannot. You know how you can never betray a trust with one of your clients?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I have a top secret security clearance and am in a top secret unit,” he explained, “and just like you can never betray a client’s trust, I cannot either. It is just that my client is the United States of America and my unit as well.”
“I bet you assume because I am a New York City attorney that I am a liberal Democrat,” she said.
“I did not really care,” he said. “With my job, I am apolitical. I never tell my political views to anybody. I just do what I am told and serve at the pleasure of whoever is the commander in chief.”
She said, “Well, just so you know, I am a conservative registered Republican, and I am even actively involved in politics in my precinct in Manhattan.”
He grinned and pulled her close to him. “You wanna hold a caucus, Counselor?”
She giggled and said, “Ooh, yes, you have my vote. Let me just go into my private booth.”
Chuckling, she slid down under the sheets.
Later, she fell asleep with her head on his massive chest, his arm wrapped around her protectively, just like she had fantasized.
CHARLIE wore the AN, or army/navy, PVS-7 generation 3 U.S. military night vision goggle/binocular system, attached to the front of his K-pot (Kevlar helmet). He was going to be first in the door when they blew it, and his team members were directly behind him. Charlie would go in after the door was blasted and immediately skirt the right side of the room, while Rico, his partner, who was hunched over Charlie’s back right now, would immediately move to the left, and Spider would take the center of the room. Their feet would be about eighteen inches apart, knees slightly bent, leaning forward at the shoulders, right hand firmly around the pistol grip, with index finger on the trigger, while the web between the thumb and index finger of the left hand pushed on the upper grip of the pistol, finger wrapped around the right hand, running straight forward parallel to the slide in the Springfield Arms .45 XD, automatic, Charlie’s chosen pistol. Normally, it was loaded with Teflon-coated and serrated Black Talon rounds, but now it was loaded with simple .45 automatic wad-cutters.
Charlie saw a figure in the smoke, a pregnant woman wearing a burqa. Her eyes were opened wide in fear. There was a hostage taker next to her, and Charlie immediately squeezed two face shots with the front titanium sight on the hostage taker’s forehead, and the rear sight, as always, was slightly blurred. Bang, bang—both shots hit the jihadist in the forehead, almost simultaneously, but then Charlie noticed the AK-47 assault rifle pointed directly at him. It was in the hands of the pregnant Iraqi woman. Bang, bang. His double-tap followed within a millisecond of the first one. He immediately saw two bullet holes in the forehead of each life-sized silhouette target.
Now he noticed his teammate Royal seated on a bench with an al Qaeda member holding another AK-47, a folding stock model, to his head. The hostage taker was very close to Royal, and Royal was real, no silhouette target. Bang! Bang! Charlie put two more rounds in quick succession into the terrorist’s forehead. The target vibrated from the bul
let shock, and Royal breathed a sigh of relief, although it was much tougher for the shooter than the hostage when each Delta Force teammate took his turn as a hostage in the House of Horrors live-fire exercises. In the old compound, called the Stockade, it was called the Shooting House.
Charlie barely noticed all the shooting going on around him, by his other teammates, but now he had Royal by the arm and was bent over taking him out the front door, having cleared his targets, and the entire team had the room secured.
The team made it outside then, and then took a break to have coffee and water, and one die-hard smoker on the team just had to have his cigarette.
Whether it was one of the rooms in the Shooting House or breaching one of the commercial aircraft mock-ups, whenever the Detachment-Delta team members went through a live-fire exercise with real living, breathing persons mixed in with silhouette targets, it was beyond what would be described as an adrenaline high. These men had incredible trust in one another, so they each did not really worry very much sitting in the Shooting House. But when it came to being a shooter, they had to work hard to keep themselves calm so they would not be off-target with a single bullet. Their partners’ lives depended on their ability to perform under such stressors.
Charlie had just started to speak to Royal, when the front of the House of Horrors crashed open. The silhouette targets, most of them looking like Islamic terrorists, were still simply targets, but they came forward like a small army with guns blazing. The lead silhouette target-come-to-life was actually James Rashad, and his head was sewed back on, blood seeping, but the threads clearly visible, and he was holding a gun at the head of Virginia, who had a frightened look on her face.
The entire team opened fire with double-taps from their weapons, hitting the jihadists in the face, usually the forehead. Charlie put two shots right between Rashad’s eyes, but he shook his head and the expended bullets flew off to the side out of the bullet holes.
“Oh, you want to fight dirty, huh?” he said to Charlie.
With that, the rogue cop stuck his pistol up against Virginia’s temple and cocked it.
Charlie yelled, “No!” and sat up breathing heavily, looking all around the hotel room.
Virginia’s nude form lay next to him. She was sleeping soundly and was breathing softly. She stirred a little and a smile lit up her face. It must be nice, Charlie thought to himself, as he saw how peacefully and securely she slept.
He remembered various sayings, such as George Orwell’s in his 1945 “Notes on Nationalism,” in which he wrote “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.” The quote had been misquoted many times, with credit even being given to Sir Winston Churchill. Most often, Charlie heard it being said, “We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Out of curiosity, he really researched it one time and found the actual quote by Orwell.
THE knock on the door awakened Virginia, and she stretched and smiled, looking at the rose lying next to her face on the pillow. Then she noticed Charlie dressed and moving catlike to the door. He looked through the peep-hole, glanced at her, and winked, while she pulled the sheet over her, and he opened the door. A waiter walked in pushing a stainless steel catering cart. Charlie thanked him, handed him some money, and the waiter smiled, nodded, and left the room, the door closing with a loud click.
“Hungry?”
“Starved,” she said. “What time is it?”
He said, “Daylight.”
She laughed and ran into the bathroom, emerging a few minutes later with one of his shirts on, which engulfed her. She sat down opposite him after giving him a soft kiss.
“This is great!” she said, “What did you order?”
He said, “Room service like I promised last night.”
“Oh my!” she replied, as he uncovered both dishes, steaming plates with rib steaks smothered in mushrooms, two eggs over easy, hash browns, and wheat toast, along with glasses of orange juice and two pots of hot tea, which he had already learned she liked as he did.
“I won’t be offended if you want me to change your order,” he said. “Some people are picky about breakfast, and I wanted to surprise you so I guessed.”
She came around the table and kissed him again, saying, “You guessed right, Sergeant Strongheart. This is above all my favorite breakfast. You nailed it, pal.”
He chuckled at her expression, which struck him funny coming from a female attorney.
Virginia cleared her appointments and stayed with Charlie until he had to leave for his plane.
They wistfully parted, each knowing that this relationship was probably going to be only a treasured memory for both of them.
They both had new adventures to embark upon. Virginia was on an exciting new case, and Charlie actually prayed silently as he left, and told God he would love to have a real love, a woman he could live with the rest of his life, and have children, lots of them. He wondered if there was such a woman anywhere, who could handle his life as an operator in Detachment-Delta and could handle the danger he faced, the long absences, and the secrecy about his work. He had tried betrothal to one woman, and the job killed the relationship, but he could not imagine any other profession. He was born to the job.
As his plane headed southward toward North Carolina, Charlie had no idea what was in store for him when he returned to Fort Bragg, but he new whatever it was, it would make him feel alive.
CHAPTER FIVE
New Operation
CHARLIE drove out Gruber Road at Fort Bragg, past McKellar’s Lodge, and finally arrived at the Delta Force compound. He reported in and met with the Old Man and gave him a briefing on the operation in New York City. After a few hours of briefings, Charlie was with his team, doing what they usually did—training.
He found himself on a bench on the outside of an MH6 Little Bird, a light helicopter adapted for Delta Force use. The tops of the trees suddenly swayed, while he and his teammates came up over a stand of pines, and a bus loaded with passengers made its way down a dirt road next to the sandy pine thicket. The Little Bird had flown out in front of the bus and gone into a hover, when suddenly the trunk of a tree exploded and the large pine fell across the bus’s path with a loud thump. The Little Bird set down in a cloud of light tan sand, followed by a second Little Bird, as eight Delta operators poured off the seats mounted on both sides of the choppers, with three of them, including Charlie, boarding the bus. A “hostage,” Pitbull, who was actually Charlie’s team commander, a captain, who was a star full-back on the West Point football team, was flex-cuffed and seated on the second seat, with a dummy terrorist next to him with a gun, and a dummy terrorist behind him holding another gun to his head.
Charlie put a double-tap into the face of the terrorist next to Pitbull, while a teammate double-tapped the forehead of the terrorist behind the hostage. Boom! The back door of the bus exploded open and two more teammates came through the emergency exit door and shot up the remaining hostage holders, having to be very careful not to shoot the live bus driver now slumped in faux death over the large black steering wheel. They followed Charlie and his teammate as the two of them grabbed Pitbull by the upper arms and escorted him to the first Little Bird, where he was tossed in. The remaining C.A.G operators had formed a perimeter around the two aircraft and fell back as the remaining team members hopped onto the benches. The pilots cranked up the rotors, and sand swirled out and up from the rotor wash, and the Little Birds lifted up, banked left, and rose over the tree cover, roaring away, leaving a smoking bus, full of shot-up mannequins and one real driver feigning death as he still lay across the steering wheel.
This part of North Carolina was covered with tall, stately evergreens, with interspersed swamps filled with hardwoods. The ground everywhere was sandy with a fine, grainy sand, sometimes almost white. Most of the pines found at Fort Bragg had no lower branches. This was partly from the army very wisely warding off larg
e forest fires by trimming the trunks of the trees at least ten feet off the ground. That way, in a dry year, a fire would be more likely to simply sweep through a forest or thicket burning dry grasses and undergrowth and at the most darkening the trunks of trees, but not igniting the highly flammable and sometimes explosive upper canopy.
The entire team hydrated with water and Gatorade, and then met in the audio visual room to watch several camera angles of their execution of the mission, after which the self-critique would begin.
Pitbull called Charlie aside after the debriefing, calling him by his nickname, short for Pocahontas. “Poke, the Old Man and the staff want you in the briefing room tomorrow morning at oh-dark-thirty for a heavy-duty briefing.”
“ ’Bout what, Cap?”
“Beats me,” the team leader replied. “You know, need-to-know. None of my business, I guess. I just know it is something classified Tango Sierra, NOFORN.”
The latter were the phonetic letters for TS (top secret) and the acronym for “no foreigners.”
The briefing room was filled with a number of strangers when Charlie entered the next morning. He could tell several were probably retired army officers and in shock when they saw the laxity in the military demeanor of the several Detachment-Delta personnel in the room.
The Old Man and the command sergeant major came in, and Charlie said, “Good morning, Pops. Morning, Weasel.”
Pops grinned and nodded. Weasel, the senior noncommissioned officer in 1st SFOD-D, said, “Howdy, Poke.”
Just about everybody in Detachment-Delta had a nickname, even the bosses, and there was little or no military formality, because the anonymity was so important. Charlie had even, early on, gotten in trouble for being dressed too noticeably with his obvious modern-day Lakota attire and hairstyle, until he explained that with his dark complexion and jet black hair, he would come under even closer scrutiny by people wondering if he was a Middle Easterner. This made complete sense to the commanding officer, Colonel Peter “Pops” Gresham.
