This is from the first book. It is a standalone story but it also explains the hero's background in the Lifetime Romance series. I decided to put it in the LW category because it has elements of that in it. I apologize in advance to the Anonymous trolls out there, but our heroine is a true loving wife, in the non-ironic sense. For the rest of you, I hope you enjoy it.
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English History
Paul
The 160th Aviation Regiment, better known as the Night Stalkers was flying a crew of special operators into the desert behind the Iraqi Tawakalna Division. That was prior to the Desert Storm battle which would eventually become known as 73 Easting.
We were the taxi service for the spooks because our HH53B Pave Lows were more-or-less invisible at night. They also mounted M134-D miniguns whose depleted uranium rounds could deal out serious hurt if challenged.
As we began the descent into the desert I was a twenty one year old crew chief and door gunner, nearing the end of his first hitch.
I was strapped into the gunner's position wearing all of the night vision technology that was available in 1992 and peering out onto the desert floor looking for bad guys.
The problem is that deserts are not flat. They look like frozen oceans and there were a million waves out there, any one of which could be hiding evil doers under the crest.
The Warrant Officer who was steering the aircraft came in to hover at 12 feet so that the operators could jump the rest of the way onto the downslope of the dune. Then we planned to get the fuck out of there because a hovering helicopter is a sitting duck.
As the last of our operators dropped, we discovered to our chagrin that we were dropping them about 70 yards from the most surprised group of Tangos in the entire Republican Guard.
They had heard all of the noise but they couldn't see the Pave Low in the dark. Our guys had night vision so they saw them as soon as they hit and rolled and they proceeded to open fire with everything they had.
The problem was that they were outnumbered 20 to 1 and given the sheer weight of numbers their prospects for continued survival were not looking very positive.
I expended the entire belt of my Gatling in 10 six second bursts. The 7.62mm bullets kicked up a storm of sand as they walked through the ranks of the Iraqis, who were starting to deploy behind an old Soviet BTR-60 armored personnel carrier.
Given the M-124's 2,000 rounds per minute rate of fire, my tracers must have looked like I was using a ray-gun.
The BTR then blew up cutting the odds down to about 8 to 1. I was frantically re-belting when somebody on their side got our starboard engine with an RPG.
The helicopter began to violently rock and auto-rotate. In the meantime I had finally reloaded and gone back to providing the firepower that the operators needed to chase the rest of the Iraqis off.
Of course in order to do that I had to continue to man my position and I rode that doomed bird into the ground, firing all the way.
The resulting crash was a seriously painful experience. I was ejected and rolled down the face of the dune at thirty miles an hour, as the upper bulkhead of the helicopter crashed down on me.
Somehow the flailing rotor missed me. My body armor and the helmet and the full face mask I was wearing saved my life but I was in very bad shape.
The special operators patched me up as best they could and then carried me and the body of the pilot out after they had finished their mission.
The mission was to paint an Iraqi command and control center for two JDAMS that were probably dropped from 40,000 feet. Breathing was a real problem for me due to the broken ribs but I still remember the "end of the world" roar of four tons of high explosive arriving from out of nowhere.
Malcolm was the one who put me in for the Silver Star. He was a very tough, do-it-all kind of Brit who was clearly not in OUR military. In fact it was never clear to me what he was doing leading a Delta team. I just assumed that he worked for a little "Company" that is still based in Langley Virginia.
They all knew that it was the fact that I had stuck by my gun that had saved them from the indescribable experience of sharing Saddam's hospitality for the duration.
Mal in particular was grateful. He visited me a lot when I was in the hospital and we struck up a friendship that was one of the few close relationships I have ever had with anybody.
I am a very private person. Janey says I am just shy. But I really think it has more to do with my general attitude toward the human race.
In my experience most of the people I have known will sell anybody out for the legendary 17 pieces of silver and I just can't tolerate that.
Mal was different. He was what we men call a "solid, standup guy." You could trust him at his word and he never let me down. He was the jaunty kind of devil-may-care, damn-your-eyes sort of fellow that the Brits have relied on for the past 400 years to ensure that "the sun never sets."
He was ten years older than me, handsome to a fault in that classic Oxbridge sort of way and to top it off I had heard that he was also a genuine English Lord.
The fact that a guy with all of that breeding and culture was willing to spend any time with a kid from the Duluth docks was very special to me and frankly there was a lot of hero worship going on, even though I was the one who got the medal.
Northern Minnesota is not the kind of place that lends itself to easy living and my dad was a very hard man. My mom had died some time so far in the dim past that I couldn't remember what she looked like.
The family lore had it that it was a car crash that killed her. But it could have just as easily been a moose stampede for all that anybody knew, or cared.
