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His eyes soften. He looks like he’s about to launch into another fatherly lecture—the kind every man on this crew pretends we can’t stand while we’re actually soaking it in—but his phone goes off loudly in front of him.
He picks it up and must not know it’s on speaker.
“Papa, hi!” a tiny voice chirps over the line.
“Hey, munchkin. Ten bucks says you’re calling about that English homework, huh?”
I smile as that gentle twinkle in his eyes amplifies. He gets up quickly and rushes out of the room, already promising his granddaughter her weight in strawberry ice cream because he can’t be there to help her in person this week.
Sexton Jones never lets anybody see what a softie he is, and maybe that’s the point.
Deep down, I know he’s right.
I need to get Delia out of my head for the next few days, however impossible that seems.
Once this is over, we’ll have a whole lifetime to get our shit sorted.
* * *
The next forty-eighthours are a blur of briefings, restless nights on pull-out beds that are harder than I remember, and a whole lot of nervous jokes with my teammates.
Every man has his own way of bullshitting his nerves away, but as zero hour approaches with a plane waiting for us at a private airport less than an hour away...
It’s already pure torture.
I stow my phone away in my locker long before I need to so I’m not tempted to hit up my princess.
At the ass crack of dawn, we’re split into two teams and loaded on an unofficial cargo flight technically being run by the CIA.
The airspace over Cabo isn’t that far, only a couple hours away. The plane is dead silent with men visualizing the drop.
It’ll be my first airborne assault since Syria, aiming for the skinny strip of land where the compound juts out to sea, and hoping like hell the wind doesn’t blow in the wrong direction.
That’s where my mind should be, but it’s not.
Maybe I’m getting too old for this shit or I’ve seen too much, but I know it’s not that.
I can’t keep my mind off Delia, no matter how many knowing glances I get from the commander.
And even when he’s standing in front of the open hatch screaming, “Go, go, go!” with a lead weight strapped to my back, it’s her on my mind.
Not the dark churning waves and cutting cliffs I barely miss on the way down.
Not the first barking gunfire lighting up the night as the cartel realizes they’ve got company.
Not even the deadlywhomp-whomp-whompof their goddamned contraband military helicopter—an asset we missed in our intelligence.
It’s hovering in the air before I even hit the ground, spraying a cluster of men ahead of me with death. The way their screams choke off instantly tells me some of that hellfire found its mark.
Fuck!
Less than sixty seconds on the ground, and we’re already taking casualties.
The instant I can run, I do, leading my unit—or what’s left of them—toward the break in the outer barbed wire gate we were told about by local informants.
Thank God that part was right.
Everything else is already so FUBARed it makes me shudder, even as I dodge a sweeping searchlight and a new hail of gunfire.
