August 6, 8:00 a.m.
Free-fire zone Alpha
Air Force Major Vanessa Blake ducked and spun, plastering her back against the muddy wall of her foxhole, narrowly avoiding a barrage of incoming fire. Enemy infantry had their position surrounded on three sides, and the only reason it wasn’t all four sides was the river at their backs. Correction. The water moccasin-, alligator-infested river at their backs.
“Ammo check!” she called.
“Low!”
“Low!”
“Out!”
“Low!”
“Five minutes’ worth!”
“Somebody get over to Echo position and pass that ammo around. We’re not gonna last two more minutes at this rate!” she ordered tersely. Crud. They were in a heap of trouble. She had only sixteen guys left standing out of fifty, and the enemy had close to forty. She had to do something radical, here. Something unexpected. Think, Vanessa! The woods around them had plenty of cover for enemy shooters, and that’s why they were getting slaughtered like trapped rats in this foxhole complex. She had to turn the tables. Make the woods work against the advancing forces. She glanced up at the trees overhead. Big, mature oaks, mostly. Sturdy. Strong enough to climb…
“Guys,” she called out low, “I’ve got an idea. Huddle.” The enemy was close enough to hear her plan if she shouted it to the far end of the bunker.
“We’re going to crawl out of here and climb the trees around this position. Then we’ll let the enemy advance to the foxholes and pick them off from above. Set your weapons for single shots. We don’t have enough ammo left to spray their lines with automatic fire. Use sticks and leaves to camouflage yourselves. Get up high in the branches, and when I give the signal, start firing down through the leaves. Think snipers, here. No wild shots. Wait till your targets are close enough to guarantee a hit. Take your time. Aim carefully. Keep your wits about you. Got it?”
The glum faces around her lit up with hope. They were all likely to die messy deaths before this day was out, but by God, they’d go out fighting if she had anything to say about it.
“We’re gonna have to move fast. We’ll split up and crawl out each end of the bunker. Stay behind cover as much as you can, but keep moving. We’ve only got a couple minutes to get into position. Let’s do it,” she said forcefully. She turned and led half the men in a crouching run to one end of the linked foxholes.
She slithered on her belly out of the red clay muck of the foxhole, her bulky rifle cradled awkwardly across her elbows. Belly crawling with a fast twisting motion of her torso, like the alligators that inhabited the area, she passed up a couple trees with nice, low branches for climbing. Better leave those to the guys with less physical strength than her. One by one, she dropped off her troops in an arc around the enemy’s right flank. And then she was alone. Staying low, she tossed a length of nylon rope around the girth of a giant oak tree. Using the rope as a climbing harness, she shimmied up the tree as slick as any lumberjack.
She worked her way a good thirty feet up the tree and turned to survey the situation. Perfect. Clear line of sight down the brown-shirted line of enemy soldiers. She chambered a round in her rifle and took aim carefully. And fired.
A satisfying red circle blossomed in the middle of the chest of one of the enemy soldiers. One down. Shots began to rain down from all directions, and in a matter of seconds, half the enemy line was out.
“Fall back!” the enemy commander screamed. Chaos ensued as his forces attempted to obey in the midst of the death raining from above.
“Everybody down!” Vanessa shouted. “Charge!”
She shimmied out of the tree and joined up with her troops. They took off in hot pursuit, picking off stragglers as the skirmish turned into a lopsided rout.
August 6, 8:15 a.m.
Free-fire zone Alpha
“Jesus H. Christ. What a mess,” Lieutenant Colonel Jack Scatalone announced in disgust from the fat edge of the battlefield as he watched the tide of the mock battle turn abruptly. He put down the field glasses and held out his hand. “Give me one of those toy guns.”
“Are you sure, sir? Your uniform…”
“It can be cleaned,” he snapped. “Or replaced. How do you fire this damn thing?” He inspected the oval canister attached to the top of the half-scale rifle that somebody had thrust into his hands.
“It’s full, sir,” his host stammered. “Two hundred half-inch paint pellets. It’s really an honor to have you show us a couple moves.” The eager kid quickly showed him how to pressurize and fire the paintball rifle.
He took off his wheel cap and stripped off his dark blue Class A jacket, with its multiple Special Forces badges and Christmas tree of ribbons. He passed them to a pair of waiting hands along with his crisply starched, light blue shirt and tie. He squatted, scooped up handfuls of red mud and streaked his face with the stuff. A little in his hair, and great stripes of it across his white T-shirt, and then he was off and running, low and fast. He circled wide of the current action, closing in silently from the left rear.
Rather than fire his weapon and give away his position with the popping sound of the air rifle, he stepped up behind his targets, pressed the rifle barrel into their ribs and murmured low in their ears, “Bang. You’re dead, buddy.”
He took out most of the right end of the line before Major Blake realized her troops were disappearing like magic. He heard her call for her remaining men to pull in tight in a close fighting formation.
Thank you, Major. Now her men were all nicely clumped for him to wipe out all at once. He moved in for the easy kill.
The eight remaining men had taken cover behind a huge, fallen log. He was going to have to circle around it and come in from the other side. But the poor bastards would be ducks in a shooting gallery. This wasn’t even going to be a challenge. He eased forward, at one with the woods around him. One foot in front of another in complete silence, he glided forward. He hadn’t been in the Special Forces for fourteen years for nothing.
Down a hill streaked with runoff gullies to that little stand of brush at the bottom. It would provide perfect camouflage for the shot. Dead leaves lay in an ankle-deep carpet in this part of the woods, and he eased each foot down separately to minimize the rustling noise of his passing. He crouched and braced the barrel of the toy rifle against a sapling. Peering through the leaves, he caught sight of the cluster of scared-looking soldiers. Bingo. He took aim and began to squeeze the trigger.
And jolted violently as an apparition in brown rose out of the flat ground beside him. Something hit him hard in the chest, stinging sharply. He looked down in disbelief at the circular splatter of red paint on his chest. Then looked up at the broad, white grin showing out of a face completely covered in mud and crushed leaves.
“Gotcha,” the woman declared triumphantly.
Son of a bitch. She must have laid down in one of those runoff gullies and covered herself in leaves. And she’d done it so carefully he hadn’t noticed the disturbance to the ground cover. He scowled narrowly. Okay, so Vanessa Blake was good in a game of paintball. Big deal. But that didn’t mean she’d be worth a damn under live-fire conditions.
“Major Blake, I presume?” he said coldly.
She climbed to her feet and brushed leaves off herself. Not that it did a bit of good. She was caked from head to foot in red mud. “Who wants to know?” she replied coolly.
“I do,” he bit out. “Lieutenant Colonel Jack Scatalone.” He held out a hand to her. Normally he’d expect a salute from a lower-ranking officer, but they weren’t in uniform, and she’d just killed him. Her grip was firm, confident, as she returned the handshake in a businesslike fashion.
“What brings you out here today?” She glanced down at his ruined navy blue uniform slacks. “You’re not exactly dressed for this kind of fun.”
“I was sent to fetch you.” The words tasted sour in his mouth. He did not appreciate being the errand boy for anyone, even if his new boss was a four-star general.
One graceful eyebrow arched under the mud. “By whom?”
“If you’re done playing toy soldier, come with me. I’ll tell you more on the way.”
“Do I have time for a shower?” she asked as she tromped out of the woods beside him.
It gave him a perverse sense of satisfaction to think about dragging her through the pristine halls of the Pentagon looking like a pig in swill. “No,” he snapped. In fact, he probably had the time, but he’d cooled his jets long enough while she played toy soldier this morning. His foul mood didn’t improve one bit when he and the major emerged from the woods. A rousing cheer went up, and a hundred weekend warriors grinned like idiots at the big, fat splotch of red on his chest. Bested by a woman. Dammit.
The good news was that he was going to get all kinds of opportunities to get his pound of flesh back from her. The major just didn’t know it yet. But she would soon.
August 6, 10 a.m.
northern North Carolina
Vanessa studied the man driving the civilian car in hostile silence beside her. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark tan. Lean features. Hard. His profile could’ve been chiseled from rock. So could his personality. He hadn’t said two words since they’d left the paintball range an hour ago. So much for telling her more about this mystery summons en route to wherever they were going. She’d met his kind before. Macho jerks who couldn’t stand the idea of women infiltrating their precious military. She shrugged mentally. His kind were a dying breed. Women were here to stay and he could just get used to it.
She was surprised when he turned into what looked like a private driveway. A brick mansion came into view, but he kept on driving, around to the back side of the spread. What the heck? And then she spotted a hefty helicopter on the back lawn. Black, ugly and powerful-looking. A Black Hawk. Standard issue special ops aircraft.
Ah. Uncle Sam had used this house’s private helicopter pad. For convenience or for secrecy? Fort Bragg wasn’t much farther from the paintball range than this spread, and it had an entire airfield. Dang. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to “fetch her” in the middle of her vacation. Her once-every-five-years, the-Air-Force-made-her-take-it vacation. Of course, she doubted her boss had high-stress mock combat in mind when he shoved leave orders at her and told her to relax. She grinned. This was relaxing. Or, had been until the colonel showed up. She waited silently while Scatalone tossed the car keys to a gray-haired man standing by the helipad. The guy looked retired military. Scatalone motioned her into the copter.
She strapped herself into a no-frills, nylon-webbing seat across from Scatalone. The bird lifted off without delay, and her stomach rumbled ominously. She swallowed hard and prayed that the secret nemesis of her career—persistent airsickness—wouldn’t reveal itself. Although the grumpy colonel’s black patent leather shoes were caked in mud and looked liked hell, she didn’t want to barf all over them.
How she managed to hang on to her breakfast through the interminable chopper ride she had no idea. It was probably just as well that she was filthy. Nobody could see the sickly green color her skin had to be.
She’d just about decided to let rip with the contents of her stomach when the distinctive skyline of Washington, D.C., came into view outside her window. Whoa. Who wanted to talk to her so urgently here? And about what? She was a know-nothing computer programmer working on a new database for a supply squadron in North Carolina. Not that she chose that career. Uncle Sam stuck her in a dead-end job to shut her up. To get her off everyone’s case about the idea of letting her apply to the Special Forces. Not that her efforts had done a lick of good. Her dream wasn’t to be.
They rushed north along the Potomac River and swooped in aggressively for a landing on top of a big red H painted in a white circle on the gray roof of the Pentagon. Almost back to terra firma. Don’t barf. Do not barf.
The colonel was true to his word and gave her no opportunity whatsoever to clean herself up, refusing even her request for a rest room stop inside the Pentagon’s plush heliport arrival lounge. Sheesh. She might accuse the guy of engaging in psychological warfare were he an enemy interrogator.
Clearly he was hoping to intimidate her. Throw her off balance. But he didn’t know her well enough to realize she got a kick out of strolling down the high-gloss corridors of the Pentagon looking like the creature from the Black Lagoon. The looks all the scurrying flunkies threw at her in the halls were priceless. She was grandly amused by the time the lieutenant colonel turned into a rich, walnut-paneled corridor. Holy cow. The offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Well, then. That was definitely intimidating. But damned if she’d let Jack Scatalone know it.
They stepped into a sitting area furnished like some old-world gentlemen’s club with leather couches and thick rugs. Despite its soothing décor, the atmosphere in the office was electric. Like this place was the center of something important. Like life and death decisions were made here. Her adrenaline surged. God, she loved being where the action was.
Okay, so now she felt a little weird in her camo fatigues and full-body mud wrap. When they’d landed, Jack had shrugged back into his shirt, tie and Class A jacket, and he’d brushed most of the dried mud off his pants and shoes. In stark contrast to her, he looked reasonably presentable. To cover her discomfort, she occupied herself with picking bits of oak leaves off her clothes and tossing them into a trash can.
A thin, severe, gray-haired secretary stepped out of an interior office and looked down her nose with distaste at Vanessa. “General Wittenauer will see you now.”
Wittenauer? The JSOC commander? The Joint Special Operations Command itself? Headquarters and operational command center for all interservice special operations units and missions. Except it was based out of North Carolina, not the Pentagon. Her pulse leaped in sudden anticipation. She’d applied to Special Forces school every year for the first ten years of her career, knowing full well that women were not accepted to that elite training. But a girl could always hope. Maybe that’s why she’d been summoned to JSOC’s Washington branch office….
Nah. Wishful thinking. She’d caused enough waves in those early years that she’d been shuttled off to a series of dead-end desk jobs ever since. The air force steadfastly refused to make use of more than one-tenth of her skills as a computer programmer. She managed last year to wangle an assignment to Pope AFB in North Carolina, right across the airfield from Fort Bragg, home of the army Special Forces. But that was as close as she’d ever gotten to the real thing. Her career had stalled out, and unless a miracle happened, she was never going to see lieutenant colonel in this man’s air force.
It was a bitter pill to swallow. She’d joined the service with such high hopes of serving her country in a glorious fashion, heck, of at least making a difference. But all she’d managed to do was trap herself into the role of little cog in a big machine.
Cautiously, she followed Scatalone into the general’s office.
Hal Wittenauer looked up from his desk. He nodded briefly at her escort and then turned his attention to her. His brittle gaze stabbed her like one of the carbon steel knives made famous by his black ops teams. Nobody’d told her to report in formally, so she mimicked Scatalone and just stood ramrod straight beneath the general’s cold scrutiny.
The general finally broke the silence and addressed her in a growl. “Am I interrupting you?”
“Not at all, sir,” she answered smoothly. “I was engaging in a little recreational activity on my leave.”
“Rolling around in mud?” he asked skeptically.
“Playing paintball,” she admitted.
Wittenauer looked over at Scatalone. “Your uniform seems uncharacteristically disheveled. Any problem finding the major?”
She saw the muscles in Scatalone’s jaw ripple. “No problem, sir.”
Bull. She blurted, “I killed him.”
The general’s rapier-sharp gaze snapped to her. If he was amused in the slightest, he hid it well. In fact, his jaw started to ripple, too. He stared at her for an inordinately long time. She held his gaze steadily. She’d waited for ten years to meet the man seated at this desk, and she wasn’t going to go all girlie shy and abashed now.
Finally the general announced, “Brief her in, Jack. Let’s give her a try.”
A try at what?
“And for God’s sake, get her cleaned up,” the general snapped.
Scatalone led her out of Wittenauer’s office and across the sitting area. “In here,” he barked at her as if she were some raw recruit. Without comment she stepped into another office, much smaller than the general’s but just as plush. These boys in D.C. sure liked their creature comforts.
“In there.” Scatalone pointed at a door between two tall bookshelves filled with the memorabilia of a distinguished special ops career. A moment’s envy filled her. But then she opened the door. Wow. A private bathroom? Nice. She locked the door loudly just to get Scatalone’s goat and stripped out of her stiff, mud-caked clothes. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Lord, she looked like an alien invader with bright blue eyes.
She took a quick shower and rinsed out her clothes while she was at it. Wet was better than muddy. She wrung out her fatigue pants and olive-drab T-shirt as best she could and shimmied back into the cold, cloying garments. Ick. No help for it. But at least she didn’t smell like a North Carolina swamp anymore. She opened the medicine cabinet and borrowed a comb she found there to detangle her chin-length chestnut hair. Without a blow-dryer to straighten it, her hair was going to end up a mass of ringlets around her face. No help for that, either. Jack Scatalone would just have to deal with her looking like Shirley Temple.
She stepped out into his office. Scatalone looked up from his desk, did a double take and glared. What was his problem?
“Come with me,” he growled.
She followed him down into the bowels of the Pentagon to a small PX. She had no idea there was anything like this compact department store inside the Pentagon. Like most past exchanges, it carried everything from sporting goods to clothes, from uniforms to children’s toys. Although it was good to note that the Pentagon PX was noticeably shy on toys.
“Get yourself a uniform and whatever toiletries you need,” Scatalone ordered.
“For how long?”
“Couple weeks. I doubt you’ll last any longer than that.”
“Is this a permanent reassignment?” she asked, surprised.
“I doubt it,” he bit out.
What burr was up his butt? Or was he just a jerk naturally?
Uniform slacks, shirt, shoes, major’s epaulets and an engraved-while-you-wait name tag went in her basket. She tossed in toothpaste, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, and deodorant, as well. But she’d be damned if she was going to buy tampons in front of the guy.
“That’s it?” he asked in surprise.
Ha. She’d managed to throw him off balance. Sure, she wore makeup and perfume, and primped like any other woman, but for some reason, she felt compelled to match this guy’s macho. “Whoops. Forgot one thing.”
She bit her lip to keep from grinning as she hauled him over to the lingerie section of the store and picked up a fire engine-red ensemble of lace panties and push-up bra. Dirty old generals must choose the store’s inventory, she thought.
“That’s everything,” she announced cheerfully.
His eyes were dark slits of irritation as he led her to the checkout counter. Excellent. But he turned the tables and surprised her when he pulled out a government credit card and charged it all before she could pull out her own wallet. Her purchases were bagged, and he led her back up to his office. Two minutes in his bathroom—whoa, his own bathroom? Plush assignment—and she was presentable again. She stepped out. And bit back a grin as his eyes dropped immediately to her chest. Thinking about that naughty red bra, was he?
“What gives?” she demanded. “Why did you and General Wittenauer drag me all the way up here to Washington? Have you got a computer problem you need fixed?”
“Computer…hell, no.” Scatalone grabbed a thick file off his desk and headed for the door. “Come with me.”
If he gave her the runaround for too much longer without some sort of explanation, she was going to walk out on him, lieutenant colonel or not. This time, he led her down to one of the deepest sublevels of the Pentagon—The Toilet, as it was fondly called in honor of the sewage that came in when the pipes burst. She’d worked down here before in the Central Computer Processing Center. They called on her occasionally to write programs for them. She was surprised when Scatalone led her past the computer complex, though, and down a darker, narrower hall. It was dry and musty, with exposed pipes overhead and paint reminiscent of the 1940s.
“In here.” He ducked through an unmarked door.
He flipped on the lights and she looked around. It was a fairly large space, but every inch of it was crammed with tall filing cabinets. It felt like a tight rat maze. A single table stood in a small space in the center of the room.
“Okay, Colonel. Spill it or I’m outta here.”
Amusement glinted in his eyes as he sat down at the table and gestured her into the chair across from him. He made a big deal out of looking at his watch, then he said flatly, “Four hours, nineteen minutes before you lost your patience. Not good enough, Major.”
For what? What in the hell was he talking about? Of course, after that stinging rebuke, it wasn’t like she’d ask him in this lifetime.
He opened the file and picked up a sheet of paper. “You went to MIT. Degree with honors in Computer Science. Studied Arabic, Spanish and Chinese. Why those three?”
“Hot spots in the world,” she answered shortly. “Good languages to know.”
He gave her an intent, assessing look. Finally he glanced down to the paper and continued. “Made the 1992 Olympic team in swimming, but a shoulder injury kept you from competing.”
“Yes.” That looked for all the world like her personnel file in front of him. Except it should be in San Antonio at the air force personnel center.
“Applied to spec ops school ten times,” he read.
She folded her arms across her chest and pressed her lips together.
“Why’d you quit applying?” he shot at her.
“I was ordered to,” she shot back.
One dark eyebrow went up. “By whom?”
“General Wittenauer’s predecessor. He told me I was harassing his office, and if I didn’t stop, he’d put a letter of reprimand in my record.”
“And that stopped you?” Scatalone said scornfully.
Her eyes narrowed. “Sometimes you have to cut your losses and try again another day. Pursuit of my goal at that time had become counterproductive.”
He shuffled through the rest of her file and didn’t seem interested in anything else he saw. Not that a series of dead-end desk jobs should blow his skirts up. Without warning, he pinned her with a piercing stare. “Why Special Forces?” he barked.
His abrupt question startled her. Enough to pop an image into her mind. Of an old color photograph, its tones faded to green and yellow. Marred down the middle by a vertical white line where it had been folded long ago. Two grinning, shirtless young men hammed for the camera, their arms thrown over each other’s shoulders. Young and wild. On top of the world. They died a week after the picture was taken. And one of them was her father, U.S. Navy SEAL Vince Blake.
She shrugged. “I’ve got the skills. I’ve got the drive. I’ve got the desire. Why not Special Forces?” she threw back at him.
He betrayed no reaction to her challenge. He asked stonily, “So it’s still your goal to be the first woman to enter the Special Forces?”
The question made her feel naked. It was her most closely held dream, and she’d privately trained for it for years. It was why she put up with being pushed into a forgotten job. Why she worked out for hours every day. Why she pursued hobbies like skeet shooting and full-combat paintball. But she wasn’t the least bit comfortable sharing her life’s ambition with this gruff stranger. She answered defensively, “I don’t give a flip whether I’m the first woman or the last. I just want a shot at it.”
He put the typed paper back in the file and closed it deliberately. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her long and hard. Finally he spoke heavily, “Then today’s your lucky day, Major.”