Free Target Engaged by M. L. Buchman Page A

apart—mostly because they couldn’t get any closer without losing it—and received the others’ congratulations. Chad and Duane, Max and Harry.
    Once Richie made it through and had been thoroughly thumped on the back, the seven of them had followed the Colonel across the compound toward a set of concrete block buildings they hadn’t approached before.
    The final seven.
    Kyle couldn’t believe it. The other five who’d sat around the final campfire but not survived Review Board had been damn fine soldiers, tough as hell to have survived Stress Phase.
    But when he saw who had made it, Delta Selection somehow made sense. These were not normal soldiers around him, nor merely exceptional ones. Not anymore, because those had been weeded out.
    These were Delta, as different from the average Special Forces Green Beret as Navy from Army. You could even see it in how they walked. They weren’t trooping along behind this colonel, or even watching him particularly. These soldiers were independent, out-of-the-box thinkers who were chatting with and congratulating each other, already well on their way to being a close-knit team.
    Except one.
    Carla alone walked near the Colonel.
    Colonel? Kyle hadn’t learned who the man was during the Commander’s Review Board, but he’d found that the man’s quiet questions were always the deepest and hardest to answer. This guy had the look of coming fresh in from the field. Who even knew there was another colonel in Delta besides the commanding officer? And still on active deployment at his rank? That made the man special in a dozen different ways.
    Kyle hadn’t given much thought to The Unit beyond joining it. He liked to set a goal and achieve it before assessing the situation and setting the next one.
    He’d been in Delta less than an hour and the new goal was clear. Every man in that review board had looked to this Colonel Gibson, not to Brighton, the unit commander. He was the ultimate Delta warrior. Quiet rather than arrogant. Focused.
    Most wouldn’t see him as anything exceptional, but Kyle’s father would appreciate this man. Everything he did—speaking, moving, being still—came from a pure center of attention that radiated outward.
    It might take Kyle five years or fifteen, but he wanted people to look at him that way, to command respect simply by being present. He wanted to become Delta’s number one warrior.
    Kyle moved up close behind the Colonel and Carla to overhear as the Colonel led them toward the largest building on the compound—one they hadn’t entered before. Kyle shifted his position in the group as nonchalantly as he could. Only Carla appeared to notice his move, but she ignored him. He’d wager the Colonel noticed as well.
    â€œMy brother spoke very highly of you, sir.” She kept her voice low and Kyle almost missed it.
    â€œA good man and an exceptional pilot. Emily Beale flew with only the very best.”
    It was Kyle’s first clue that Carla Anderson had a past, and that was a surprise. Everybody did, of course. There were grunts who talked about theirs—a few who wouldn’t shut up about it—and others who didn’t so much, and you learned to accept that.
    Carla had always been one of the ones who didn’t—not at all.
    It had added to her mystery, as if she’d been manifested on Earth out of pure soldier cloth. She’d talk about the Army and her time in the dust bowl of Southwest Asia, but that was it. She’d started with Team Lioness, embedded in forward search teams to frisk Muslim women without violating their religious belief that no man other than their husband could touch them. The problem with forward search-and-recon was how often it turned into forward firefight. She’d performed so well in battle that they’d switched her over to a pure combat unit.
    Yet here she was, talking to a Delta colonel about people Kyle had never