Blood & Tacos #3 by Stephen Mertz, Todd Robinson, Rob Kroese, Chris La Tray, Garnett Elliott Read Free Book Online Page A

try
Hank & Muddy
. In men’s adventure, he wrote at least nine Executioner novels, possibly more. He created
Stone: MIA Hunter
and
Cody’s Army
, as well as the
Tunnel Rats
—an accomplished writer who deserves to be discovered and rediscovered. Check out a pro at work.
     
    Vietnam. 1970. Quang Ngai Province, north of Saigon.
     
    The Huey gunship banked in over Firebase Tiger, a clearing carved from the jungle hilltop. The woman, who was calling herself Tara Carpenter, snapped pictures from the open side door of the helicopter, from behind the shoulder of the door gunner and his big, mounted M-60 machine gun.
    The landing zone was a barren five acres. After the stark green carpet of jungle they’d flown over from Saigon, the base was drab and squalid. There were no trees, no color except for the coating of dust that blanketed everything: bunkers, vehicles and personnel. Machine gun emplacements were at intervals along the perimeter. Artillery and mortars were inside the compound. The sun, like an angry red ball seen through the gauze of a humid haze, arced low in the west, painting the horizon a brilliant red. This all vanished behind a veil of red dust, a sandstorm kicked up by the chopper’s backwash as the pilot touched the Huey down gently and initiated systems shutdown.
    Tara’s fellow passenger stood beside her.
    He said, “Getting enough pretty pictures for the war protestors back home?”
    He didn’t wait for a response, leaving the gunship and striding toward a welcoming committee of three waiting soldiers.
    His name was Cord McCall. He was an investigator assigned to a special operations unit of the Joint Services Criminal Investigation Division. Death was naturally commonplace in a war zone, but there were other crimes perpetrated within military ranks—homicide, desertion, robbery—that fell under the CID’s jurisdiction. McCall, a Major, was forty years old, dark-haired, heavily muscled. His fatigues were sharply pressed even in the three-digit heat and suffocating humidity. He wore an Army issue Colt .45 automatic in a shoulder holster.
    Tara caught up with him. She was seven years his junior, a redhead with intelligent green eyes that glittered like those of a mischievous cat. The GI fatigues she wore did nothing to conceal a trim, shapely figure. She chose not to respond to McCall’s sarcasm because, McCall knew, she well understood and appreciated its source.
    He was not overjoyed in the first place about being assigned the dual task of performing his duties in addition to nurse-maiding an embedded journalist. But there was another, more significant reason for his displeasure with the presence of Tara “Carpenter” in Vietnam, and she and he were the only two people in country or anywhere else who could appreciate the undercurrent of tension that crackled between them.
    They were husband and wife.
    Therein lay one hell of a tale, somehow as simple as it was complex. She’d been his wife for three years before he volunteered for Nam. Tara had never been your average military base wife. She’d been freelancing her photographs to wire services and news magazines before they met. During their separation while Cord was in Vietnam, she had continued to rise through the ranks of professional news photographers.
    But he had been dumbstruck when he showed up that morning at the Saigon airport, not having the slightest idea that the photojournalist assigned to him was his own wife.
    Tara had brazenly confided in him, with only a trace of smugness, that it had taken considerable finagling on her part, including coming up with a cockamamie story for her editor about the need for a cover name, but she pulled it off. Wars were the stuff Pulitzer Prizes were made of but ambition and self-interest were not the only reasons she’d hustled up this assignment. She’d grown impatient, sitting on the sidelines in the States. She wanted to learn for herself what was going on in Vietnam. Her voice softened when