The Ides of Matt 2017

by M. L. Buchman

  Even now he could feel those thoughtful, unrevealing eyes tracking him as if he was her next sniper target.

  He walked over the broad, kilometer-long hillside slope that she would be crawling across. It was as ugly as a Kansas prairie—a place he hadn’t been able to leave fast enough. He took his seat on the raised platform for the spotter/target—last of the three to arrive. Open to all sides, it had a wooden roof that seemed to focus the heat, even if it blocked most of the sun. From the central rafter dangled a metal target that the snipers would have to hit in order to pass—hit without being spotted.

  There wasn’t a breath of air. No wind to mask the sniper’s traverse through the grass and brush. None that would get in his lungs after standing so close to Cindy Chavez and watch her fine-fingered quick movements of preparing her ghillie.

  JD hoped that she made it, he really did. He knew he’d pushed her harder than any of the others. But his next assignment badly needed a woman of Cindy’s caliber if they were going to survive it.

  Chapter Three

  A three-hour skull-drag across the field. Never bring your head up. Never move two inches when one would do.

  Four of the eight stalkers had been picked off by the sharp-eyed spotters. They’d have another try at it after lunch—by which time the North Carolina heat would be beyond brain-baking and their limbs would already be weary beyond functioning from their first attempt. Fine motor control would be out the window.

  Not her.

  A Marine Scout Sniper had to start a thousand meters out and crawl undetected to within three hundred meters from the spotter/target. A Delta operator was supposed to get within a hundred: the length of a football field from the best spotters in the business. A fifteen-second sprint away.

  The first of the snipers to reach the start line undetected just fired off a blank to indicate he was ready. The three spotters on the platform all focused on finding him. She’d bet it was “Grizzly” Jones. His beard was as unruly as a bear’s, which was a fair description of his body shape as well. He was incredibly good.

  If the spotters couldn’t find him, they’d clear him to fire a single live round at a metal target hanging over their heads. If they still couldn’t find the shooter by muzzle flash, or by the blowback suppressor stirring up the grass, then he’d pass the test.

  The rule was: no one else moved while they waited for a sniper’s second shot.

  They were unable to find the shooter. The spotters cleared him to fire.

  Cindy heard the hard crack of his live round followed almost instantly by the sharp clang of the metal target mounted in the center of the spotter group.

  The spotters continued their efforts, but miscalled his location by a good three meters. A sniper not only had to arrive invisibly, he was also supposed to avoid being shot immediately after making his own kill.

  The sniper rose on the all clear signal. She didn’t bother wasting time to see who it was.

  One thing she’d learned about Delta, rules were for other people.

  Since the moment everyone’s attention had focused on finding Grizzly—or whoever—Cindy had been headed sideways.

  Chapter Four

  Two more snipers had passed. That meant there was only one left and JD would be damned if he could find her.

  The time limit was fast approaching and he didn’t want Cindy to time out. He needed her on his next assignment. He wanted this success for her. He wanted her—

  The thought petered out there. An unfinished truth.

  He rubbed the sweat from his eyes. The air was shimmering at even a hundred meters. The smell of baking grass, scrub, and the unique blend that was Fort Bragg dirt—that he knew so well from crawling across so much of it himself over the years—was distracting him.

  What would Cindy smell like? Not in her ghillie, but instead fresh from a shower after a hard day in the field? Or still hot and sweaty, lying back among the five-petaled wood-anemone? He liked that thought. It made a pleasant companion as he returned to scanning the field. The controls on the tripod-mounted scope nearly burned his hand with the late morning heat.

  He figured it was okay to think such things, as long as he never showed them. To keep such thoughts about her in check—which was damned hard because she was so incredible—he made a point of keeping her angry at him. Her name had been but the latest of many techniques, but already she was growing immune to it. He was running out of ploys to avoid thinking about her.

  Focus on the hunt.

  A sniper wasn’t just a hunter who could kill at a distance, they were also a countersniper. The very best snipers hunted other snipers. Finding a sniper hunting him was eerie…and fun. How he’d stumbled into the best job on the planet, he didn’t know. How a woman like Cindy had charged into it simply awed him. He knew how goddamn hard it was.

  Did that stalk of yellow lupine waver with the blurring heat, or because Cindy had brushed against it? Or was it a part of her ghillie suit? He wouldn’t put it past her to put a bright flower in her camouflage, simply because no one else in their right mind would think to do something so likely to draw attention.

  Was the dark spot at the right edge of the field and a hundred and twenty meters out just a dark spot in the foliage, or was it the bore of Cindy’s rifle aimed his way? There was no glint of the glass of her rifle scope immediately above the dark spot, so he moved on.

  There was a directionless snap of someone firing a blank round.

  It had to be Cindy, she was the only one left out there. He double-checked his watch. One minute inside the time limit, she was still good. Knowing her, she’d probably been in position for an hour and had simply waited to make him worry.

  A glance down the line at the other two spotters. Neither one had a clue.

  He felt an itch between his shoulder blades, but couldn’t pin it down.

  He called out, “Clear to fire.”

  All three of them had their heads up from their scopes hoping to spot the muzzle flash. Typically, they could pin down the shooter’s location within a dozen meters before the shot, then used the scopes to pinpoint for the muzzle flash. Not this time.

  Her second round slapped into the metal target. The other two trainers were still scanning the field.

  JD glanced up at the battered metal target dangling over their heads and couldn’t help smiling. A thousand rounds had scarred the front of the metal plate. There was only one impact splash on the back of the target.

  He turned to look behind him. He should have trusted that itch between his shoulders.

  A quick scan told him that there wasn’t a chance that he was going to spot her—there was a line of dense brush behind the spotter’s platform.

  The other two spotters noted the direction of his gaze. Their protests about the trainee leaving the boundary of the stalking field were immediate, but he didn’t bother listening.

  He might not be able to see her, but Cindy Sue Chavez was exactly what he was looking for.

  Chapter Five

  In the last twelve hours, Cindy still hadn’t gotten over JD’s knowing smile. It had been erased by the time she was called “clear” and had descended from an exceptionally prickly hawthorn tree she’d climbed into on the wrong side of the range.

  There’s been no hint of a smile as he’d ordered her to prepare for immediate deployment.

  “We have an assignment,” he’d addressed her without the derision that had become his standard modus operandi these last thirty days. “Deep infiltration. High risk. Masquerading as a couple. Minimum time is anticipated as thirty days. If it goes right, we may be deployed for several months together. You’re my first choice and my only choice. We’ll leave at sunset. Does that work for you?”

  Deep undercover with Master Sergeant JD Ramírez? Not the pain in her ass that he’d been for the retraining, but rather the most impressive and attractive soldier she’d ever met—suddenly addressing her as an equal?

  Her surprise was vaster than the hundred and thirty acres
of the Range 37 shooting range and she’d barely managed to nod her agreement.

  At sunset, they’d hustled aboard a C-17 Globemaster transport jet and staked claim to the steel decking of the sloped rear ramp—one of the most comfortable spots on an uncomfortable plane. It had turned southwest toward Mexico and he had done what all Spec Ops warriors did on a flight—passed out. Headed into a mission, you never knew when you’d get to sleep next, so the jet engine’s conversation-ending roar worked better than a general anesthetic on any Special Operations warrior.

  Except it didn’t for her this time. Maybe it was because she’d spent six months deploying from helicopters; sleeping to the heavy downbeat of the rotors while being rocked in the cradle of a racing Black Hawk was her norm. Maybe the stability of the massive C-17 is what was throwing her off.

  She didn’t want to think that it might be his enigmatic smile that was costing her precious sleep. She’d expected him to be pissed at her trick—the other two spotters certainly had been—not smile.

  JD Ramírez was a classic Delta soldier—nothing about him stood out, at least to the untrained eye. It was the SEALs and Rangers who tended to have the big guys. A Delta had strength and skills like the other teams, but mostly they possessed an irrationally extreme perseverance against all odds. None of that showed on the outside.

  While not overly handsome, that smile had completely altered her view of him. After thirty days of hounding after her to outperform every operator around her, his smile—so clear in her rifle scope—had been beyond radiant. And not as if her success was his doing; she knew that type of arrogance all too well.

  No. It was as if he was proud of her in the way her father had been the day she’d joined up to defend their new country.

  Cindy would be damned if she was going to get all sniffly. That wasn’t in a Delta’s personality matrix, but she still couldn’t shake that smile. It was a long time before the engine roar anesthetic kicked in even enough to doze.

  Chapter Six

  Turning his back on where Cindy Chavez lay beside him during the flight didn’t help matters in the slightest. JD couldn’t believe what he’d seen as she’d crawled out of that hawthorn. Bloody from a hundred thorn scratches—and a smile as big as the sun in the Kansas sky.

  He remembered the first day he’d seen her. He’d been the lead range instructor at the shooting test during Operator Selection. A hundred and twenty applicants were down to fifteen before they reached him. His goal was to make sure that every one of the fifteen was also a top marksman. By this point in the selection, a missed target wasn’t a black mark, instead it was an opportunity for instruction—right up until too many misses knocked the hopeful back for retraining.

  You’re not reading the heat shimmer correctly.

  Don’t hesitate before a heartbeat, instead plan for it. At a thousand meters, the surge of blood driven into muscle by a heartbeat could shift a shooter’s aim by several meters.

  Of the twelve who made it through the shooting test, there was one he never had to give a correction to, because she never missed. He’d placed her last on the second day of shooting, by which time the wind was kicking hard and gusty over the blazing pasture of the Range 37 stalking range. Undeterred, she’d finished the test with only two misses—an incredible achievement he was only able to match, not beat.

  “How the hell did you do that, Cindy?” Without even thinking, he’d rolled over on the steel decking to face her. She was so close and so goddamn beautiful that he couldn’t find the air to explain what he was asking about. He wasn’t even sure himself anymore. They were close enough that, despite the dim red nightlight of the cargo bay, he could see every eyelash as her eyes fluttered open.

  The Globemaster was transporting a pair of Black Hawks and a half dozen pallets of supplies to Colombia for the never-ending drug war. The crews and equipment crammed the eighty-by-eighteen foot bay solidly. Their vehicle—a totally incongruous Dodge Viper sports car that he couldn’t wait to drive—rested on the last pallet in the line. The two of them lay on the C-17’s sloped rear ramp close beside it. They’d be getting off much sooner than everyone else aboard.

  She blinked at him in surprise.

  “You actually talking to me, Master Sergeant?”

  “Might be,” not that he’d admit to it. And now he was close enough to smell her. The odors of the sniper exercise had survived her shower, but there was another, indefinable scent that almost had him reaching for her. She smelled of wilderness, adventure, and a warm fire on a cold winter night.

  “Will wonders never cease,” she muttered, little louder than the engine roar. “How did I do what? Climb a tree with no one noticing?”

  “You did that by ignoring the rules, which is one of the reasons you’re on this mission. By the way, how close were you before you did that?”

  “I was inside the shoot line for twenty minutes before Grizzly shot, but once I crawled there it seemed too simple.”

  “Too simple,” he grunted out. The stalking test was one of the hardest challenges there was for a sniper, and she’d shown a level of confidence exceptional for even a Delta by not just taking her victory.

  She nodded.

  “Where did you learn such patience?” He’d meant to ask where she’d learned to shoot. Her eyes skittered aside strangely at his new question. “Don’t lie now. You already cheated on the test this morning. One sin per day should be enough.”

  Her eyes slowly returned to focus on him. Made even darker by the Globemaster’s dim lighting, they seemed to reveal more of her than they ever had before. “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure of what?”

  “That one sin per day is enough.”

  He propped his head onto his fist, with his elbow placed on the steel deck so that he could look at her more clearly. Unsure of what she was referring to, he shrugged and hoped that she’d continue on her own. The engine roar seemed to build during her continued silence until it wrapped around them like a cocoon.

  Now it was her turn to shrug before speaking. “What’s the real reason you’ve been pushing at me so hard all month? It’s not gender bias. I figured that one out on my own.”

  “I need you for this assignment. I need a top-performing woman.”

  “There’s your one sin for the day. Now try again, without the half-lie.”

  “Some day you’ll have to tell me how you did that.”

  She shrugged maybe yes, maybe no.

  JD looked at her. Really looked. They lay closer together than he’d ever been to her. As her eyes were telling him nothing, he watched her lips for some hint of her thoughts. He could just lean in and—

  Get himself tossed into lockup for sexual harassment.

  “I’m pushing you away because…” Because he was an idiot. He should be doing anything he could to bring her close. Though much closer and they’d be in each other’s arms.

  Her gaze almost skittered aside again, but this time locked and held.

  “You a hypnotist too?” he barely managed to whisper.

  Chapter Seven

  Cindy wished she had a US Army Field Manual on men. JD Ramírez had been pushing her away because…he was attracted to her?

  “What kind of sense does that make?”

  His eyes crossed for a moment as he puzzled at her question.

  “You’re attracted to me?”

  “No,” his voice was flat, almost harsh again.

  “Then what?”

  He reached out and brushed a finger along her cheek.

  It sent a chill of surprise through her so strong that she couldn’t suppress the shudder.

  “It’s nothing as mild as that,” he whispered. Then he blinked hard as if suddenly coming awake.

  “Shit!”

  He sat up abruptly, leaving her lying on the sloped rear ramp trying to gather her thoughts that had just scattered to the horizon faster than the big jet’s turbulent wake.

  He didn’t go far. JD yanked off his jacket and leaned
back against the charcoal gray sports car’s bumper and faced her with his knees pulled up and his elbows resting on them.

  She sat up and looked at him. They were toe to toe. Beyond him she could see the 101st Airborne fliers and grunts and a couple squads of 75th Rangers. Some slept, some were joking around. There was a poker game going on in one of the helo’s open cargo bays. They were all leaving the two Delta Force operators, their hot car, and their secret mission alone.

  Her insides were far less orderly. Everything was tied up in knots. JD didn’t hate her, which was news in itself. But he also wasn’t attracted to her—it was “nothing as mild as that.” What came after that was only too clear.

  “You pushed me so hard so that…so that I wouldn’t want to be around you?”

  He nodded, then shrugged, then shook his head. But he wasn’t looking up from his boots either.

  “I’m a patient person, JD, but you’d better explain yourself because I suck at guessing games.”

  “Where did you get such patience?” He glanced up at her, looked away, appeared to realize what he was doing and finally faced her squarely.

  “Change of subject.”

  “I asked first, and earlier.”

  “No way, José Domingo.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “What is it then?”

  He shook his head.

  She growled in frustration. “Enough shit, Jesús Dominic or whatever your name is. Speak or I’ll beat the crap out of you. Right here. Right now. Faster than even any of the 75th Rangers can save you.”

  His smile invited her to try and she was almost tempted. When she didn’t, he studied the ceiling of the Globemaster’s cargo bay for a long moment before responding.

  “I’ve never met a woman like you, Cindy Sue,” this time it was a friendly tease rather than derision.