The way he talked about Candace was a curious mixture of humbling and daunting. The more he talked about her, the more imposing the super became. He clearly worshipped the ground she walked on. But it was also a little bit odd. He only spoke of her in relation to firefighting. How she’d done recruitment in a way he’d never seen before. How she kept everyone’s spirits up even after a two-day cut on a fire line that was overrun. He never once said anything about their relationship.
“I came from a firefighting family,” she told him, but Jill never had much to say beyond that. She came from a line of firewomen. She was the only daughter of two of Seattle’s first female fire officers. That she was straight didn’t bother her moms; they had made her various boyfriends welcome over the years. And her birth mom’s father, Grampa Jones, had been one as well. Jill had served with her parents awhile, but felt overshadowed by them. They were both such strong, outgoing personalities that Jill had feared she was becoming invisible in her own quiet way.
They’d been surprised when she’d signed up for the wildland engine crew. But if they’d been hurt, they didn’t show it. Instead, for her birthday they’d given her tuition for both emergency vehicle training and the expensive CDL—the commercial driver’s license wasn’t required but they had gotten it for her anyway. Neither of which would have saved her from the rolling tree that had wiped out their engine even if she’d been at the wheel.
She kept quiet on the details of her firefighting family because she’d learned over the years that most guys didn’t understand about growing up with two mothers, so she kept that fact to herself.
She hadn’t gone to college. She’d been a Junior Fireman in high school and gone straight into the academy for three months to earn her firefighter certifications. There had never been any question about what she’d do, only what her particular path to fire would be. Listening to Jess Monroe talk about Candace Cantrell was definitely giving her ideas.
6
Jess couldn’t get a feel for Jill Conway-Jones. He remembered down at the wrecked engine that she’d been funny. But up here on the line, she was mostly quiet. When she spoke, it was to ask him about hotshotting.
They switched over to grubbing a twenty-foot line, which was just as exciting as it sounded. It was working the dirt with a Pulaski until there was nothing living in a swath that was hopefully wide enough to stop a fire from crossing—not even organic duff was allowed to remain. The cut trees would force the fire down to the ground, the removal of the branches and underbrush would rob it of fuels to slow it further, and the grubbed line would hopefully stop it cold.
But for everything she didn’t say, she more than made up for by doing. She’d tirelessly leaned into branches that must have weighed more than she did. And, once she got the proper Pulaski technique, she kept up with him right down the line.
The more he did manage to get from her, the more he cursed the luck of Trent the engine driver, whether he was Conway or Jones. A woman like her didn’t come along even every year, never mind every day.
He did finally poke around enough to rediscover her funny side.
“Supergirl is trying to be superhotshot,” Jess had forgotten his early nickname for her until they’d worked through the whole night and a dirty, smoking dawn was approaching.
“No, she’s actually trying not to be superlame.”
“She’d can’t be,” Jess insisted in between slices with the Pulaski—he had to chop out a stubborn root. “That job description has already been taken by me. Only one allowed per team.”
“Fine. You want the title, it’s yours,” the smile he could hear in her voice through the exhaustion just made him like her all the more. “I’ll get myself a t-shirt to prove it. It’ll have the red and yellow S on it and then in tiny letters, I’ll have it say, ‘…and, yes, he is with me’.”
Almost too exhausted to breathe, she still gave him the energy to laugh.
When sunrise finally did happen, they’d sat on a cut log to rest through a breakfast break of energy bars, an orange, and a canteen of water with electrolyte powder.
“Yum! You hotshots really know how to live the high life.”
Jess grimaced, “Just wait until the fire gets here. This has all been prep.”
As if in answer to her question, the first air tanker of the morning raced by low overhead, dumping a long line of red retardant on the line of trees beyond the firebreak. Wouldn’t do to have some errant spark, of which there would be plenty to hunt down and kill during the height of the battle, ignite the fire beyond the fire line.
7
How’s our tag-a-long doing?” Candace walked up to where she and Jess were still eating on the log. Beside her was one of the sawyers, a big handsome guy she hadn’t met yet. Candace put enough sarcasm in her voice that Jill knew she was being teased.
Jess groaned as if wounded to the core and Jill had to fight to suppress a laugh. His constant energy and sense of fun was all that had kept her upright through a brutal night’s work.
“I think I’m now the tag-a-long,” Jess whined like an old man. “Jill doesn’t know the meaning of slow down. Picks up technique faster than any recruit who’s ever crossed our lines.”
“He’s been a great teacher,” Jill put in. His constant fine-tuning, even long after exhaustion had them both staggering, had revealed a drive for excellence that matched her own and a style of patient teaching that she could only hope to learn some day.
“She learns even faster than you, big guy,” he addressed the sawyer.
“No way!” The guy faced her squarely. “Okay, lady. That means it’s you and me for the fire. Then we’ll see how you do.”
Jill couldn’t tell if he was teasing or serious. He was an imposing man. Like one of those military clichés with the manly jaw and the broad shoulders.
“Aren’t men just the cutest things?” Then Candace pulled him into a kiss. And not just some friendly peck either.
Jill startled and looked from them to Jess to see how he was taking it. Rather than angry, he looked…
Jealous?
“Come on you two. Do you have to keep proving how happy you are? Get a room, go behind a tree, something.”
The big guy broke off and looked down at Candace, “We’ve got to get him a lady.”
Jill was still trying to catch up with what was happening. Jess wasn’t with Candace? The big guy was. That explained why he’d only talked about Candace on the fires, because that’s what she and Jess did together—team superintendent and assistant. Jill had to sift through all the stories he’d told about their meeting and working together. If they weren’t a couple, everything shifted to show his huge respect for a strong woman. She’d thought he was putting his lover up on some silly pedestal, ready to fall.
“How about you, lady?” The big guy looked down at her. “You in the market for a slightly used hotshot? He’s kinda scruffy, but we all like him well enough.”
“No, she’s got a guy, the broken arm we medevaced out last night. Her name’s Jill,” Jess offered. “Jill, this char-monkey is Evan. But we call him Mud to keep his ego in check.” Then he leaned close as if to whisper in confidence, “Doesn’t help.”
Jill felt cornered until she caught Candace’s sly smile. Here were two men who thought that a strong woman was an asset—not just an asset, but absolutely worth seeking out and following. Jill had been raised by two of the strongest women that she’d ever met, ones she’d spent her whole life trying to make proud.
And she’d bet that both of her moms would love these three.
Here they were, three magnificent firefighters, standing as friends for a moment in the dawn light before turning to face the approaching flames.
Could there be any place that she’d rather be?
Then she turned to look at Jess. Considerate, passionate…single. He’d spent the whole night telling her about his life a
nd how much he loved what he did and the people he did it with. She’d learned less about some boyfriends in six months than she’d learned about him in the last dozen hours. Jess had blown poor Trent out of the water in the first thirty seconds when he’d caught her and laughed at one of her jokes.
Jill looked at Candace, “Need another hotshot?”
What would have been a ridiculous question a dozen hours ago felt completely normal now.
Candace simply held out a hand and they shook on it.
Deal.
Done.
Yes!
She could really get to enjoy working for a woman like her.
She looked back up at Evan.
“Scruffy hotshot slightly used? Might work for me,” she poked Jess in the arm as if she was testing a side of beef. “How about this one? Think he’s interested?”
She’d never been so forward in her life, but the way his muscles felt, she’d have to do it more often.
Jess was blinking at her, trying just as hard to catch up.
“Trent was my fire partner, Jess,” she offered the missing clue.
He kept blinking at her in surprise.
“Not the quickest one is he?” Jill glanced up at Candace.
“He’s fast enough under normal conditions. But like all the really good ones,” Candace went up on her toes to kiss Evan on his cheek, “you can knock them into stunned puppy land pretty easily.”
Jill decided to help Jess along, since she was the one being forward.
He had called her Supergirl after all.
She leaned over and kissed him.
It took Jess Monroe about two more seconds and then he caught on very well indeed. In moments the exhaustion that had been coursing through her body like an aching pulse beat was replaced with a sizzling heat.
“Maybe,” Evan drawled out, “we should get one of the helos to do a water drop on these two; cool the fire down a bit.”
Maybe, Jill thought to herself, but she didn’t think it would make any difference at all.
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For Her Dark Eyes Only
A sniper is a very unusual person, a Delta Force sniper doubly so. The more research I do, the more I am aware of this fact. America saw a taste of this in the major movie, American Sniper. I have read numerous memoirs by snipers and I can feel them trying to explain their uniqueness, but how can they?
I’m reminded of some friends who spent four years traveling around the world. They told me that they rarely spoke of their trip because people just couldn’t relate. After my own 18-month long solo bicycle journey around the world, I finally understood what they meant. People would ask me the first few questions, but then it was somehow too strange or too foreign to turn into a real conversation. My traveling friends? Them I could finely really talk to.
Reading about snipers, I understand that I can only “see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). However, I wanted to see if I could somehow communicate what I had learned about the feeling of the choices they must make.
The “over the top” bad guys and the lushness of the setting? I wish they were over the top. They are taken in bits and pieces from a dozen different accounts of real events and reimagined into a representative whole that I wish didn’t exist.
But for all that, at its heart this is a love story, though perhaps the most unusual one I’ve ever told.
1
Sucks!” I called out to the watch officer as I strode into the command hangar at the ass-end of Riyadh airfield. Surprising a Delta Force operator with one of my sniper-silent approaches was never a good idea. Doing it to the six-foot-two of officer who stood four inches taller than me and had much broader shoulders was an even worse one.
Part of our low profile stance in Saudi Arabia was that we ran our operation in the shadowy back corner of the most rundown hangar on the base. It was so beat-up that it captured more of the passing sandstorms than it kept out. Delta’s watch post was tucked behind a small flock of Night Stalkers’ helos and an Air Force four-prop C-130 cargo plane which served as our secure storage and could get us up and out in fifteen minutes if we had to jump in somewhere. At night, with only a single desk lamp on, it was a murky place of shadows and secrets.
“Kurt,” was all that Lieutenant Bill Bruce grunted in reply—about as much as my greeting deserved. Two a.m. shift change, and the country was still cooking so hot that I had probably sweat out a liter just crossing over from the long banks of containerized living units—CLUs—in the US Spec Ops sector. My last leave back home on the Oregon Coast was still in my blood and the desert sucked. The six hours that Lieutenant Bruce had just spent on the watch desk also couldn’t have been much of lark. So, neither of us had been issued a cheery mood.
“I swear my CLU was shipped over during Desert Storm.” The container had two bunks, two chairs, and a toilet in a twenty-foot steel box with an AC unit bolted on one end that groaned, wheezed, and could sometimes drop the inside temperature a whole ten degrees—my home for the last six months that Delta Force had parked my ass here.
“CLUs weren’t part of inventory back then, Sergeant.” The lieutenant’s ex-SEAL was showing through. Those guys never had a decent sense of humor, not even after joining The Unit—what most folks call Delta Force. We were officially CAG, the Combat Applications Group, with a strong emphasis on “Application.”
“Maybe you could un-invent them, sir.” Then I didn’t see any reason to not keep messing with him. “I bet some supply sergeant timewarped it back so that it would corrode and spring sand leaks until I moved in.” It was almost plausible. I’d long since learned to never underestimate the power of a good quartermaster—especially if you ticked him off.
Still no response.
“I swear, thing’s the same age I am and someone should have taken it out to pasture and shot it a long time back.” I might have done it myself if we weren’t supposed to be keeping such a low profile.
We tried to stay quiet because the Saudis weren’t big fans of having US commandos squatting in the heart of their country, no matter how badly they needed us. Being here worked for us too. From Riyadh we were four hundred klicks to Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and a dozen other disasters waiting to happen. So, during those rare pauses in between assignments, this base was where we squatted and sweat until hot metal and the almost cinnamon tang of blowing dust had become a part of who we were.
The lieutenant kept his blue-eyed gaze flat and his face deadpan. Thought I’d earned more than that, but there wasn’t even a hint of a smile; the bastard was damned hard to read at the best of times. He was married to a seriously cute helo pilot from the Night Stalkers, but I was careful to not even glance at her when Lieutenant Bruce was around. The man might be an officer, but he was also a Unit operator and just as dangerous as any of us. He also hung tight with Colonel Gibson who was more dangerous than all of us combined.
“Anything cooking on the desk?”…other than the damned desk in this heat? I grabbed a water bottle out of the kicker fridge and rubbed it across my forehead—so cold it almost gave me a headache. A mission would make the night much more tolerable, but it all looked pretty damn quiet. The folding table supported a stack of silent comm gear, a couple big screens that were supposed to be for situational displays but streamed movies just fine on pizza-and-no beer nights—dry post on Saudi soil.
“Left you some routine crap,” Bill flicked a finger against the paper in the in-basket.
“Thanks so much, asshole.” I gave it a friendly tone.
He glanced at me. There were certain looks that they only teach in officer’s school and this was one of them.
“Thanks so much, asshole Sir.” Shit! Still nothing. There was no saluting in the field. It might attract a sniper’s bullet targeted at whoever that identified as being in charge. But I was tempted just in case there
was a sniper on the hunt tonight, because that would at least change the mood.
The lieutenant tapped the pile again, marking it as my top priority, before heading out into the dark heat.
The small fan perched on the edge of the desk helped a little when I dropped into the folding steel chair. Now instead of slowly baking to death, I was going to be put out of my misery much sooner by the blowtorch of fan-driven hot air.
Comms were silent. I logged into the computer and made sure the command message queue was up on the screen. I popped up a second window that showed the regional queue as well. Nothing but a whole lot of quiet. I could have heard a gecko walking on the metal ceiling a dozen meters above me.
Feet on the desk, I pulled over the in-basket and began flipping through it. Some supply chain crap. New sergeant coming over soon. No sign of my reassignment to somewhere, anywhere else, not that I was expecting one anytime soon but I could always hope. I’d give up my next pay for two damned minutes of Oregon Coast air—just a walk with my lady down the long sand beaches; the wind off the Pacific rolling in cool, wet, and so fresh it was like no one had ever breathed it before.
Dreaming of other places, I had the manila folder from deep in the pile half open before I froze in place. The chill up my spine had a whole lot more to do with Arctic training than Saudi desert. I almost shouted out Landmine! to warn everyone around me—except if I did, only the plane and helicopters were there to hear me. I was sitting alone and holding a viper made out of beige manila—a viper way more dangerous than the flesh-and-blood kind.
“Classified-Secret.”
A big red stamp on the cover. Typically illegible authorization signature. An innocuous number on the tab.
Why the hell was a classified document buried in the watch desk in-basket? I wanted to take the damn thing and ram it right up the lieutenant’s ass for leaving such a thing out to be found.
The Ides of Matt 2016 Page 7
