Ghostrider - M. L. Buchman Page 0,71

Prime Target in sights? Not even any risk of collateral civilian damage? Nope! Still need clearance from the politicos back in DC.

Taliban’s and al-Qaeda’s only ROE was kill. Fuckers didn’t even care who so long as it got the job done. That’s what America’s Rules Of Engagement should have been.

Taz had picked a fine spot. With his wife Consuela gone, Taz was the only person he truly trusted and he’d been right to do so.

This small valley in the center of the Baja California lay just south of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir—the highest mountains of the entire peninsula. Despite the narrowness of the peninsula, just a hundred kilometers wide here, it was easy to get lost in these mountains. The nearest road that deserved a name lay thirty kilometers away. The nearest town even farther.

The valley, his valley, had just one dirt track leading through it sideways. To the west Taz had dropped a cliff on it, and to the east she’d blown a switchback off the face of a steep pass. Now the only way in and out was by air or scrambling scree on foot.

The woman was amazing. Not Consuela, but amazing.

Consuela had stuck with him through the Academy and followed him around the globe as he’d flown the old AC-130H gunships. He’d taken them into Panama and flown for Bush I into Kuwait against Saddam.

For nine years, the Spectre and Consuela Martinez had been the core of his life. Nine short years before she was knifed by a couple of coked-up yuppie punks needing the two hundred bucks she’d just gotten from the ATM for their next fix of Mexican nose candy. She’d lived just long enough to make sure they got life in prison.

When they were released on good behavior a mere six years later, his life had shifted paths. First he’d made sure they both died in pain far worse than Consuela’s, fully aware of why.

Then he’d started building.

If the American justice system was so broken, he’d fix it himself.

A year later he’d found his fury embodied in a ridiculously petite Airman First Class Vicki Cortez.

When the rules of engagement no longer made sense, it was time to make new rules.

It was the one thing he’d never been able to convince Drake of.

52

Taz braced her palms against Jeremy’s chest as the final shudders slammed through her.

Sweet Jesus but she’d needed this.

After he’d flailed uncertainly for a bit, she’d placed one of his hands on a breast and the other on her ass. He’d gotten the idea soon enough after that.

When she went to get off him, he didn’t let go.

Instead, he shifted his hand from her breast and pulled her down to lie on him.

“Oh,” he sighed in her ear when she finally gave in and lay against him. “This feels amazing, too. You’re so hard and soft. It’s just amazing. No, I already said that, but it is. I mean, you are. I can feel every muscle as strong as bone, but your skin is incredibly soft and smooth. Better than the leather on a custom SyberJet SJ30. And where your, uh, chest is on mine feels all soft and cushiony and—”

“Silence works, too.”

He was quiet for about five seconds. “I was never very good at that.” He tentatively slipped his arms around her back and waist, then squeezed her hard against him.

Again she tried to push off, but he kept holding her.

“Not yet. Please. This is too amazing…uh…incredible…good?”

Taz finally let herself simply lie against him.

As he cataloged—aloud—each sensation, she realized that was part of how he was processing the experience, storing it for future memory, so she let him go on. She had always taken Mama’s lesson of silence as guidance—until it was mastered. Now there was no way that what happened inside her could possibly ever reach the outside world.

Never show them even a hint of weakness, had been another of Mama’s favorite admonitions.

And she hadn’t.

Not once.

Not when Mama had walked into a grocery store during a gang heist and been shot for her mistake.

And not to the Air Force recruiter who’d spoken at her school’s Career Day. After his presentation, she’d simply walked up to him and said, “Where do I sign?” When he’d asked why the Air Force, she’d just repeated her request. He’d pointed; she’d signed. It was the farthest place she could imagine from where she was.

Oddly, each thing that Jeremy cataloged, right down to the cooling of their evaporating sweat and the offsetting warmth where