For Her Dark Eyes Only by M. L. Buchman

Author:M. L. Buchman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
Published: 2016-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Unit doesn’t believe in suicide missions. Delta’s mission is to deliver results. I’d arrived in this place knowing the odds. I care about my life and Mira’s, maybe more than anyone because an operator goes in knowing the risks—I take them every day. It would take so little to erase everything except someone’s memory of me. A stray round, a single mistake.

Training taught me that, but it might not have been enough. I wanted Abdul so badly that I would have seen it through even if there had been no chance of escape.

It was Mira who had taught me that there was more, so much more. We’d slowly discovered it together, in each other. Two people learning that there was family beyond our brothers and sisters of war. Until we ultimately found true family in each other. There was nothing we wouldn’t do for one another.

Nothing.

We began.

It was messy, but it was fast. After three days lying in wait, it was no more than an eyeblink. One heartbeat between shots and three to reload. Just thirty seconds to clear the courtyard of every target—but one.

Then Abdul went down, hard. He went down screaming in panic and running away from the circle of the dead: his murdering council of friends and relatives. For him I used three full magazines, fifteen rounds, all blasted from the big Tac-50 to take him apart one piece at a time.

Toward the end I was peripherally aware of other gunfire—silenced rounds on a different beat—but that wasn’t my focus. That’s why I had a spotter and if she wasn’t good enough, we were both done.

She was.

The silence echoed through the courtyard, Abdul’s final scream no more than a memory in the vast marble plaza. Our gunfire had been quiet pops never heard beyond the French doors. Beside many of the dead lay drawn weapons, but lacking a target, no shot was fired.

Mira and I eased back through the streets of Riyadh in the soft cool breath of the pre-dawn desert. She walked two steps behind me, as a niqab-clad woman should follow her man: respectful, hidden. Her rifle, like mine, still warm from use, now lay hidden beneath the long folds of her robe. Only her eyes showed.

But in my mind’s eye she moved beside me, her dark hair floating free in the ocean’s winds as we held hands and walked together down the beach in a soft, cool Oregon rain—her dark eyes bright with the joy of being alive.

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