Janey pushed her light brown bangs off her forehead while Claire drank some water. “Green Berets are trained for anything and everything, but their specialty is working with and training indigenous forces. Back in the Vietnam War, they were the jungle warfare specialists—they called them the snake eaters.”
“Snake eaters?” Claire’s stomach pitched.
“They’ve branched out since, especially to desert and mountain warfare, but they are some of the toughest SOBs in the army.” Janey eyed her. “Well, if you have a Green Beret sergeant first-class training you, I won’t worry so much. Those guys know everything. You’ll learn how to take care of yourself or die trying.”
“Oh, Janey.” Claire staggered to a park bench and collapsed. “Why did my dad do this to me? Am I going to have to eat snakes?”
Her friend laughed. “Because he doesn’t want you to go, and yes, probably. But they taste kind of like tough chicken—so I’ve been told. Hey, and here I was complaining about a desk job.”
Claire sat up straight. When had she become a whiner? Whiners never won. “I’m still going to do it. I can eat snakes. I can survive in the jungle. I can do it.” She jumped to her feet and jogged in place, ignoring the burn in her thigh muscles. “Let’s go!”
Janey shook her head and smiled. “By the time you come back, you’ll be able to kick my ass. Come on, soldier girl. I’ll teach you some running cadences—they’ll help you breathe better. Repeat after me—okay?” She broke into a jog and Claire followed. “I wanna be an Airborne Ranger.”
“I wanna be an Airborne Ranger,” Claire managed to gasp.
“Live the life of sex and danger.”
“Live the life of—what?” Claire stopped again.
“Sex and danger, Claire, sex and danger. They go hand-in-hand for soldiers. The danger gets their adrenaline all revved up and they burn it off with sex.” Janey grinned. “Remember that time we were supposed to go shopping and I told you I had to work all weekend? Well, last year I’d gone out a couple times with this one marine right before he shipped out.”
“Yes?” Claire lifted an eyebrow.
Janey wiggled her eyebrows in return. “He shipped back in. In more than one way.”
“Janey!” Claire scolded.
“I know, I know.” Her friend didn’t look abashed at all. “But, Claire, he was so tan and buff—and eager, after a year in the desert. Social opportunities there are mighty limited.”
“So you took pity on a poor, lonely marine.”
“Believe me, I got as much as I gave.” Her friend got a quizzical look on her face. “I wonder if your Green Beret is fresh from the sandbox.”
“Sandbox?”
“What the soldiers call their Middle East deployments.”
Claire shrugged. “I don’t know, and I don’t care. Whoever he is, he’s probably some suck-up who thinks he can advance his career by doing a favor for a congressman.”
“If Sergeant First Class…you said Boudreaux, right? If SFC Boudreaux was an ambitious suck-up, he sure wouldn’t be in the Green Berets. Used to be Special Forces was a dead end on the army career ladder. Not so much anymore, but these guys are not your loudmouth glory hounds who go overseas with their general on fact-finding missions and brag how they heard gunfire from five miles away.” Janey frowned. “Man, I wanna go overseas. Riding a desk in D.C. is not what I had in mind when I joined the army.”
“I wish Sergeant Boudreaux would go back.” Claire knew she was probably pouting but didn’t care.
“He’s probably not any happier to do this than you are.” Janey did lunges to stretch her calf muscles.
“He’s either missing out on team training time or personal leave. Instead of hanging out in the woods, doing mock warfare with his buddies, or even better, getting laid and drunk, he’s got to train some squeamish chick who once spent two hours looking for her convertible in the Tysons Galleria parking lot.”
“So I’m directionally challenged—I came out the Macy’s door instead of Neiman Marcus,” Claire mumbled.
“Claire, your dad had dropped you off that day—you didn’t even have your car.”
“All right, Janey, all right.” Claire’s face flushed. “Maybe I do need to reinforce some outdoor skills.”
Janey nodded and smiled encouragingly. “I’m sure you’ll learn a lot of useful things from Sergeant First Class Boudreaux.”
Claire knew her friend was worried about her being able to take care of herself, but at least Janey wasn’t haranguing her like her dad. Once she got back from San Lucas, it was time to get her own place.
“We’d better move before we cramp up.” Janey took off jogging backward, her face mischievous. “Here’s a new cadence especially for you. ‘I wanna be a Green Beret.’”
“I wanna…be a…Green Beret.” Claire was starting to puff again.
“‘Live the life of sex and foreplay…’”
“Janey!”
Chapter Two
“READY TO GET UP AND at ‘em?” Her father’s falsely hearty voice boomed through the large conference room at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. A gleaming wood table dominated the room with photos of base commanders and world maps framed on the walls. He gestured at one of his aides to set Claire’s gear under a white dry-erase board. Claire was scheduled to start her training the next day, but her father had insisted on a meet-and-greet with her trainer before sending her off, and the commanding officer had wanted to inspect her gear. “Learn all about the great outdoors, eh, kitten?”
“Dad, please,” Claire muttered. Bad enough she looked like some tricked-out Victorian explorer with seventeen pockets on her super-expensive, brand-new, quick-dry khaki vest and cargo pants. Bad enough she was like Jane about to meet her own personal ape-man. Bad enough she was twenty-four and was still called “kitten.”
She tried to ignore her dad and her churning stomach, in that order, and focused on a large painted wooden logo on the wall. Black and silver, the words De Oppresso Liber were painted in a semicircle under a six-pronged star. She walked closer—the star was actually a pair of crossed arrows over a long, lethal-looking knife.
According to what Claire had found out searching online after her run with Janey, the Green Berets didn’t need any arrows or knives. They could probably kill somebody with a paper clip and a plastic drinking straw—the bendy kind.
De Oppresso Liber. She guessed from her French and Spanish classes that the Latin motto meant From Oppression Freeing or something like that. Freedom from oppression. A noble goal.
In her own little way, that was Claire’s goal, too. Not that anyone would consider her oppressed. After all, her father was one of the most powerful politicians in America, her family had plenty of money and she had never wondered if she would have enough to eat. Nothing to complain about, yet…
She wasn’t truly free because she hadn’t tried to be. No Declaration of Independence had flowed from her pen, no charge up San Juan Hill, no stand at the Alamo. Well, maybe not that last one—she had cried when she visited the mission-fort in San Antonio and seen where real heroes had given their lives for their beliefs.
But it had always been easier to go along with her dad’s plans for her, especially after her mother died, when they had clung to each other in their grief.
Claire snuck a look at her father, who was giving a long list of instructions to his assistant. Her father had moved on, had even casually dated a few widows or divorcées. She was actually okay with that, knowing that he