Page 37 of Badd Ass

“Yeah, well, I’ve lived in San Francisco for half my life and I’ve never been to Alcatraz or the Muir Woods. When you live somewhere, you don’t tend to do the touristy stuff.”

“True,” I said. “So are you at the docks? Want to meet somewhere?”

“Yeah, I am. I just dropped Claire off, actually. Do you have your brother’s bike?”

“Nope, he’s got it, so I’m on foot. I was just thinking I should buy a truck or something. This walking everywhere is bullshit.”

“Aren’t you a soldier? I thought you’d be used to marching.”

I laughed. “I was in the Navy, not the Army. And as a SEAL, we don’t do a lot of unnecessary walking. It’s not an efficient way to infiltrate, for the most part.”

“Infiltrate what?”

“Eh, whatever the mission target was. Way behind enemy lines, onto a boat in the middle of the ocean, behind compound walls. It varied.”

“So how do you infiltrate, then?” She asked.

“Well, again, it depends on the mission. If we were hitting a drug lord’s shipment way out in the middle of the ocean, we’d jump out of a helicopter and swim to it, or if the boat was big enough we’d even do a HALO insertion.”

“What’s a HALO insertion?” she asked, and then spoke before I could answer. “And where are you, anyway?”

“I’m close to you. Just stay where you are, I’ll find you.”

“Okay. So HALO insertion. Go.”

I was close to the docks by then, so I started scanning the crowd, wishing I had Bast’s extra four inches of height to see over the crowd. Finally I spotted her on the boardwalk near one of the gargantuan cruise ships. She was facing away from me, so I crept up behind her.

“Well,” I started, “HALO stands for High Altitude Low Opening. It’s just a really complicated way to skydive, basically. It means we jump at thirty thousand feet and dive to anywhere from four thousand to two thousand feet A-G-L.”

“And A-G-L is what?”

“Above ground level.” I was close now, I kept my voice down so she wouldn’t hear me, though the crowd was thick enough there was little chance of that anyway. “So we’d free-fall for several minutes and reach something like a hundred miles per hour, easily.”

“And why do these HALO jumps?”

“Because at thirty thousand AGL, the aircraft isn’t visible from the ground with the naked eye, so the target won’t be able to see us coming. In a regular fun jump, you go at fourteen thousand AGL, and you open pretty high up, so you have a lot of time floating down. That’s fine when it’s for fun, but when you’re inserting for a military operation, you don’t want the bad guys to see you coming, right? So you free-fall hard and fast and open at the last possible second, so there’s as minimal a chance of being spotted as possible.”

“Oh, I guess that makes sense.” Her voice lowered. “And what other kind of…insertions did you do?”

“All kinds,” I said. “My favorite insertion method was to just sneak in nice and slow…”

I cut the connection, stuffed the phone in my pocket, and closed the last few feet between us. Mara was still facing away, obviously cottoning on to the fact that I’d hung up or that the connection had been lost. She pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at the screen.

“Zane?” Her head pivoted, scanning the crowd around her.

I was within touching distance, now. I sprang, wrapping my arms around her and burying my nose in her neck, then whispered in her ear. “I was always really good at the slow kind of insertions.”

“Oh, yeah?” She’d jumped when I first grabbed her, but had immediately relaxed when she realized it was me. “You’ll have to show me that slow kind of insertion, then. It sounds…interesting.”

I slid my hands across her belly and up beneath her breasts. “The trick is go really slowly, just sort of…slidein, you know?”

She tilted her head back to rest it on my shoulder, slipping a hand between us to trace the ridge of my zipper. “I think I might have an idea how it works. Pretty sure I’ll need a demonstration, though. Just in case.”

“Oh yeah?” I let my hand drift down to cup her core over her jeans.

“Not—not here, though,” she murmured, catching my wrist. “I’m not quite ready for exhibitionism yet.”

“No, me neither.” I bit her earlobe. “So how about you show me your room?”