The Ides of Matt 2016

by M. L. Buchman

  Hal pulled out a satellite phone and dialed the number he’d been given. Twenty minutes later there was a roar close overhead as if the storm, which had been abating, was now hammering back down on them.

  Then in the headlights, he could pick out an all-black Night Stalkers Chinook helicopter landing in the middle of the road with its rear ramp down.

  They drove straight aboard. After some jockeying, the Loadmaster signaled for lockdown and they were tied into place. They were aloft within two minutes of the helicopter’s arrival.

  “Let’s switch seats and I’ll tie him back up.”

  “Oh, he’ll behave,” Teresa said with utter confidence.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I told him what I’d do to his manhood with my knife if he didn’t do everything perfectly. I gave him every reason to believe me.”

  Even if the man didn’t speak any English, he was glancing over at Hal nervously as if guessing the conversation and seeking protection.

  Hal grimaced in sympathetic pain. “Maybe I won’t take your nylons bet.”

  “Pity,” a woman’s voice spoke from close beside him. The Loadmaster—a woman—was leaning against his lowered window. “I bet you’d look cute in them.”

  She walked away, humming the tune to a Gypsy Rose Lee stripper song.

  “Not a chance,” he called out after her, but she just broke into song. Strangely enough the other members of the Chinook’s crew joined in as they banked hard, racing back toward friendly territory.

  He turned back to face Teresa in the backseat, “Not a chance.”

  But he sure wouldn’t mind seeing Chief Petty Officer Teresa Mann in a pair—a flawless soldier with an amazing body. That was a deadly combo indeed.

  9

  Hal didn’t see anything of Teresa Mann after their first few minutes back on the ground. By the time he’d gone through debrief and delivered his two charges, she had faded into the dawn and was already gone back into whatever invisible Coast Guard fog bank she’d popped out of.

  Searching for her hadn’t helped, not that his operational tempo allowed much time to do so.

  An inquiry to MSST was returned with a: The United States Coast Guard does not respond to requests for information about the Maritime Safety and Security Team.

  A follow-up to the USCG itself simply addressed to CPO Teresa Mann was returned with the puzzling endorsement: No longer with the service.

  A Google search returned 23,880 hits, and none of them were her as far as he could tell—except for a seriously cute high school yearbook photo from some unpronounceable high school in Poughkeepsie, New York.

  Pounding his head against the wall hadn’t helped either.

  By mid-summer he’d decided that he would give it one more shot. He’d been rotated back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina for some Unit refresher training. He didn’t even know where to begin to look for her now that he was stateside, but there had to be some lead he could pick up. If not, he promised himself he’d stop being pitiful about a woman he’d known barely thirty-six hours six months ago…and he’d do that very soon.

  The squad he’d spent a long day simulating room-clearing with dragged him out on the town. Hal wasn’t really in the mood for some dive bar, but you just didn’t turn down seven other grunts who’d fired a thousand rounds each together.

  They were three bars into Bragg Boulevard before he gave in and just went with the flow. Tomorrow was a “dark” day—an actual, honest-to-god, stateside day of rest. By the fifth bar they were down to three others plus himself. The other four had been peeled off by some of the bar bait with long legs and bottle-blond hair that always flowed around Fort Bragg.

  At the seventh bar, he ended up alone. Hal kind of remembered the other three saying they were moving on, but he’d ground to a halt here. He wasn’t drunk, hadn’t finished a whole beer in any of the places, but he was slowing down.

  An hour later and half a beer in, he wondered if this was where he’d be sleeping tonight. It was a good spot: back in the corner, a band that was just loud enough to turn his brain into tapioca pudding without beating him to death, and a pleasant enough flow of female scenery to keep him entertained. None of them really grabbed his attention but they were fun to watch. And none bothered to gun for the solitary drinker in the corner. When on assignment he usually slept in far worse places.

  He knew how he must look. The slight shell-shock of someone fresh back from the front suddenly surrounded by the bounties of America. Unless they were one of your buddies, you just left guys like him alone until they were back up to speed.

  The room shifted.

  The noise level didn’t change.

  But there had been something. It was the sort of thing that only a trained operator would probably notice; the feel had altered.

  He started hunting for the source and it didn’t take long to spot. Nine new arrivals— soldiers who moved like operators. But it wasn’t just that they were Special Ops; you couldn’t get a drink within fifty miles of Fort Bragg without running into some form of top soldier.

  Hal blinked a couple of times to bring them into sharper focus.

  It wasn’t just that they were Delta, though they were unquestionably from The Unit.

  There was also a strange energy about them, as if every step they took was suddenly their first.

  A new class had graduated from the Operator’s Training Course. Nobody else moved that way; that impossible bravado generated by finally knowing that for a fact, you are one of the very best warriors on the planet. There was an electrical charge that sizzled off their every step.

  He should go over and buy them a round, but he hated giving up his corner table.

  He should…

  A tenth soldier walked in, moving with that same impossible confidence.

  The only woman among them, he’d know her anywhere even though her hair was shorter, because only one woman possessed the finest ass in the military.

  And when she turned and spotted him? That smile lit him up like one of those lightning bolts had finally caught him.

  That’s why she’d disappeared off the grid and out of MSST; she’d gone for Delta Selection and made it through the six months of OTC.

  He could feel the smile on his own face. Unit Operator Teresa Mann looked as if she too had been struck by lightning and it looked damn good on her.

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  Summer of Fire and Heart

  This story sprung up because Ashley had been such a joyous character when I first discovered her in a New Jersey cowboy boot shop.

  No, really!

  You don’t believe me? Just thumb on back to Night Stalkers #7, By Break of Day. She sells a pair of cowboy boots to the heroine.

  But it wasn’t only her fun voice that I wanted to follow up on. I’m also constantly fascinated by how we touch and affect those around us. What is a simple, unheeded moment for us, could thoroughly alter someone else’s life.

  On top of that, doing something new—which is Ashley’s break from her past—became the theme of the story. Perhaps even more than Ashley, the story is about the power of adventure.

  I have done several out-of-the-box, non-“normal” things in my life and the payoffs have been extraordinary. That’s not to say they weren’t scary, but they were almost always worthwhile. I took off work for a summer to rebuild a fifty-foot sailboat (which ended up taking three years mixed in with another job), and it taught me how to really sail. I bicycled solo around the world for eighteen months Ultimately, on my scariest and best adventure of all, I decided to leave the corporate world and become a full-time writer.

  But the daily adventures have sometimes also had an amazing impact upon me. So this is a story about a woman who takes a big leap and a man who takes many smaller ones.

  1

  Ash
ley Mason had gotten exactly what she asked for and was at a complete loss of what to do about it. The scenery from her fire lookout tower was incredible; the Bitterroot Wilderness stretched away in every direction. Rocky Mountains soared and steep-walled valleys plunged, all of it thick with pine trees of the darkest greens she’d ever seen.

  Mount Sunflower—the highest point in her native Kansas at four thousand and thirty-nine feet, rising from the surrounding countryside by a whole nineteen feet—wasn’t much higher than the valley floors here.

  Her perch for the summer atop Medicine Point, which was the biggest mountain she’d ever been on, stood over two Kansases high with room to spare.

  And she would kill for a latte right now. But the nearest refrigerator was a gazillion miles away, so no milk. She wasn’t desperate enough to make one with non-dairy powdered creamer yet…but she was getting there.

  The sky here was amazing, and she tugged down on her Kansas City Royals baseball cap so that she didn’t have to see so much of it. The blue sky above went on almost as forever far as the green below and it was unnerving her.

  It was all that cowboy’s fault. There she’d been, happy as a pig in a poke to be out of Kansas. Paramus, New Jersey wasn’t exactly the center of the universe, but it was such a relief from the endless flat of Hepler—a town that only existed because some fool had run two roads together out there in the middle of corn-fed nowhere with no thought about the trouble that would be causing future generations like hers.

  She’d been aiming for the Big Apple, but found an authentic Western wear boot shop in Paramus, New Jersey just before crossing the Hudson River and never quite finished the journey. It was just as well, her visits to the Big Apple almost convinced her that Hepler, Kansas wasn’t so bad after all. But Ashley had dug in there just fine; not enough to plant roots, but just fine. She knew how to sell it with her Kansas accent, her track-and-field body, and her long blond hair. While there she’d accumulated a cheap apartment, an okay boyfriend, and a rattletrap Ford F150 that was now parked a three-hour hike down the mountain.

  She’d been the queen of boot sales. No customer who came into the shop—especially not the really handsome ones—had managed to escape her clutches without a new pair of boots. It didn’t matter how city they were; she could convince them that the only way to get a girl like her was with a fine pair of cowboy boots. Of course she never dated a customer, but she sure as shootin’ knew how to sell them, each and every one.

  Then that gorgeous cowboy had walked in, his Amarillo accent ringing so clearly of the great outdoors that he’d ruined Paramus for her in the first thirty seconds. Worse, he’d had a Brooklyn girlfriend with him and bought her a three thousand dollar pair of Lucchese hand-sewn boots. Ashley had always lusted after a pair of her own but even the employee discount didn’t put them in range. And she knew that if the cards were flipped, she wouldn’t want to end up with some hotshot city boy after all. She wanted…

  Well. That was the problem. She’d didn’t know, but she knew she wasn’t going to find it in Paramus any more than she had in Hepler. She’d wanted out and had grabbed onto the first thing that was the opposite of selling cowboy boots to city folk who would wear them to a bar one time and then stuff them back behind their Pradas, Jimmy Choos, and Fratellis.

  And she’d gotten her wish—some fairy godmother really had it in for her—nothing could be more opposite to Paramus than Medicine Point fire lookout. Five months. She’d signed up for five freaking months atop the Montana Wilderness.

  The first day she’d been gobsmacked by the wonder of it all. Days two through four had been setting up a routine and listening to her playlist—loud enough to drive out the silence…mostly.

  Now it was day five and she was ready to bungee jump off her tower to end it all. The “cab”—her home for the next five months—was no bigger than a corn crib. The fourteen-by-fourteen foot box stood on stork-long legs of massive logs, twenty feet above the peak of Medicine Point. The summit was a craggy field with a couple of small campsites nearby, and then dramatic vertical plunges in every direction except the knife-edge trail that led back toward her truck.

  Her nearest neighbor wasn’t much closer than the nearest latte. Cougar Peak, The Lonesome Bachelor, and Old Crag lookouts were perched atop neighboring mountains, which meant they were twenty to sixty miles away. She could barely make out the towers through her big binoculars, never mind any people.

  She stood on the narrow wrap-around catwalk, like a tiny summer veranda with a high porch rail. She leaned on it and looked down at the impossibly deep valley to the east. Any neighbor down there might as well be as far off as Paramus, except for her two days off every other week.

  And it wouldn’t do her any good even if she did come down off the mountain. The only towns within a hundred miles were no bigger than Hepler.­

  “Who knew that heaven would turn out to be such hell?” She asked the view. Gripping the catwalk rail until her knuckles went white, she screamed in frustration…and there was no one for miles around to hear her.

  2

  Brent Tucker nearly jumped out of his shoes at the scream that sounded just above his head. He’d thought he was all alone atop Medicine Point. Of course after the brutal hike up to the peak he hadn’t exactly been focusing well.

  He dumped his bundled-up hang glider—which had felt light enough five hours and three thousand feet ago—and looked upward. He’d walked right up beside the lookout tower to stare down off the rocky cliff edge at the jump he’d trudged so far to take.

  Now he tipped his head back to look up and saw someone standing on the cab’s perimeter walkway with their head down buried against their arms on the rail. All he could really see of them was a royal blue baseball hat with the letters KC on the front in white.

  “You okay?”

  With a squeak of surprise the person raised their head and looked down at him. Even the shading of the hat couldn’t hide the piercing blue eyes that inspected him in some alarm. Then her—definitely a her, a pretty enough her to tie his tongue in knots—long blond hair fell forward and hid her face.

  “Who are you?” She didn’t even try to wrestle the hair aside, so he guessed that she could see him even if he could no longer see her. He had traveled around the country enough to know that her accent wasn’t Texas or Oklahoma. It was Kansas…but it wasn’t. Somehow it sounded softer and smoother than any of them despite the flare of anger behind the question.

  “Brent,” as if that explained anything. “Tucker,” which explained even less. “Brent Tucker,” he tried again, but talking to pretty women had always flummoxed him.

  “Hi there, Brent.” The “Hi” came out in a delicious cross of “Ha” and “Hey” and invited him to say something.

  “Sorry to disturb you.” Sad, Brent. Real sad. “I’ll just set up and get out of your way. Shouldn’t take more than thirty minutes.”

  “Thirty minutes?” She said it with a squeak of surprise and checked her watch. “Darn it!” And she disappeared from the rail.

  He could hear her footfalls across the deck above him, but they stopped after a few moments, ending long before she could have reached the stairs down from her aerie. At a loss for what else to do, he began unbundling his hang glider. The faster he set up, the faster he’d be gone.

  Once he had it out of the bag, he began piecing together the metal tubes for the wing edges and then the struts for the control bar. He had the wing fabric stretched and was just attaching the harness when a voice sounded close behind him.

  “Sorry. I’m supposed to check for fire every half hour and I kinda forgot.”

  He spun to face her. Close up she had many amazing attributes. Tall enough to look him right in the eye, and a body in tight t-shirt and shorts proportioned to splendidly go with her height. Well-worn calf-high cowboy boots emphasized her long, muscular legs. Her blond hair was now back off her face, tucked
through the rear hole in the ball cap. As pretty as she was, it was her eyes that commanded all attention. They were the same knockout blue as the Montana summer sky.

  “What’s that?” She moved to inspect his craft.

  “A hang glider. Where have you lived that you don’t know that?” Continuing as smooth as ever, Brent.

  “Places where a molehill is a mountain. This—” she waved a hand at the vista, “I’ve never seen a thing like all this before jus’ last week. Don’t know as I ever want to again.”

  “Are you kidding me? This is glorious. I could look at this every day. This is one of the most unspoiled expanses of the forty-eight states. Every time I look at this I feel infinitely small and infinitely lucky. How can you not just love this?” Now you’re going out of your way to insult someone you don’t even know. He should smack himself—would if he could figure out how to do it without looking even stupider.

  “I was already feelin’ kinda small, and can’t say as I’m much liking the help from the landscape.” She turned from him to squint out at the horizon. “It’s like it has secrets and no way does it plan on telling any of them, at least not to this girl.”

  “I’d think anyone would want to tell you their secrets.”

  Now she aimed that squint of inspection at him. He’d never flirted with a girl. He’d watched plenty of others do it, but his few attempts were always dismal failures. And now he was continuing his unblemished record of being an idiot around women.

  His brain functioned on a perfect inverse proportional curve; the more attractive the woman, the more of a stumblebum he became. He’d managed to get up to the middle ground okay, where he could date a woman who was nice and fun to be with. But this Amazonian blond fire lookout was in an entirely different category and he was knocked right back into hopeless science geek.

  To distract himself, he finished the inspection of his glider. Brent had planned to spend some time enjoying the view and he’d expected to spend a lot of time working up his nerve before jumping. He’d had plenty of lessons on smaller terrain, but this was to be his first major solo flight.