Big sky dog whisperer, p.3
Big Sky Dog Whisperer, page 3
Chapter Three
Jodie had tried sleeping in the bunk they’d given her. She had her own room with a two-tier bunk sporting clean sheets and lovely Native American woven blankets. Small sink and bathroom down the hall. She’d settled in just fine.
But sleep wouldn’t come.
Overtired. She was just overtired from the long drive.
Still nothing. She lay there long enough to watch the moonlight shift across the bare wood wall that had seen dozens of seasons of ranch hands come through. When it lit her jacket on the back of the door, she took the hint, pulled it on, and went out for a walk.
Her ears—her ear—actually popped as she stepped out beneath the light of the half moon. The silence was so deep that it was an assault on her senses. No Navy barracks. No hospital or vet sounds. No constant rumble of Brooklyn outside. She waited to feel the tiniest vibration as an F train passed by fifty feet under her bootheels. Nothing.
She actually had to snap her fingers lightly to make sure her hearing was working at all. It was. Montana wasn’t. How could there be a place that made no sound?
As if in answer, she heard a set of wingbeats. Having no directional sense for sound with only one ear, she had to scan the whole horizon to spot the big owl before it disappeared over the bunkhouse roof. The thing was huge. Good night to not be a mouse.
Except for a porchlight in front of the main house, the only light was the setting half-moon’s. She checked her watch, zero dark thirty—just like the title of the bin Laden takedown movie. But no SEAL team, loaded for bear in a pair of stealth Night Stalkers helicopters, came roaring over the rooftops. They’d attacked Osama’s compound in the dead of night. In their number was a military war dog. Cairo had become famous in that moment—even meeting the President.
Brandy, on a far less illustrious mission, reported by no one except her commander on some official post-mission briefing document, had become a basket case.
Jodie pulled her denim jacket more tightly around her though the night was warm. The air smelled of grass and flowers. Of the distant horse barn and…
She found the kennel more by body memory than any conscious thought, the shining starlight enough to see her way. Her body actually buzzed with exhaustion and her brain felt like it was still back in the endless stretches of South Dakota. She planted one foot in front of the other until she reached the building, never once certain that she felt the ground as she stepped on it.
At the threshold, everything started to make sense. The kennel might be better built than the typical concrete-block and tin-roof structures the military threw up for field cages, but otherwise they were much the same. The hint of wet dog permeated the structure. A sharp tang of antiseptic salve spread on some dog’s cut reached her through the ever-present whiff of Clorox bleach used to scrub every surface. The lingering musk of canned dog food served hours ago was as familiar as boot leather. It was all a reassurance that these dogs were well cared for.
Tiny noises followed her down the aisle. A click of claws on concrete, as some dog rolled over to watch the shadow walking past their cages. One of the dogs huffed out a question in a low, explosive release of a breath—so that he could draw in fresh scent through that ever-so-sensitive nose.
Supposedly a thousand times more sensitive than a human nose, what did they smell? Unleaded fuel from filling up her truck in Great Falls? Drive-thru burgers because she hadn’t dared leave her dog in the car alone in Billings or Bozeman or Butte—one of those B towns that seemed to be everywhere in Montana? Maybe the sack of onion bagels her mother had placed in her hands as she’d set out into the night less than twenty minutes after her call with Altman?
Past the seven occupied cages and the four empty ones, she reached the last one in the row.
This time the whine was one of eager greeting. She’d unloaded Brandy in here, coaxing her out of the truck. At her frantic pacing, Jodie had managed to lever the big portable dog cage from the back of her truck into the caged area. Brandy had dived into the security of familiarity like she’d just escaped a Navy drown-proofing exercise.
Unable to face the pain, Jodie had followed Patrick to drop her own gear in a bunkroom. While she’d showered, he’d fetched her a breakfast burrito. If that was how they ate on ranches, she should have come to one sooner. It had tasted awesome and her body had been wolfing it down automatically as she’d explored the ranch. Wandering past the kennel and out to the field where Stan had been training the dogs.
Brandy whined again in the dark, so Jodie undid the latch and stepped into the cage with her. Brandy plunged into her shoulder so hard that she was slammed back against the wall. Once she recovered, Jodie sat down on the dog bed and Brandy swarmed her lap. She’d never been able to train her that once you hit fifty pounds, you were no longer a lap dog. Brandy curled up, and after a few quick nuzzles, collapsed into an exhausted sleep.
In moments Jodie’s legs were going numb. It was comfortingly familiar and she stroked her hands deep into the dog’s fur.
As numb as she supposed she’d been this morning when she’d found the guy with the hooks, Stan, working the dogs through the obstacle course. She had leaned on the fence as she had a hundred times at other courses. Not her turn, she’d watch the handler running the dogs through their paces.
This was actually earlier in the process than she was used to seeing. Usually, it was dog-and-handler pairings working a course. A military war dog went through initial selection at about three months: basic intelligence, situational awareness, able to learn commands, and not afraid of bright lights and loud noises. Then they were typically fostered out for at least a year with frequent check-ins. Lackland AFB ran a whole crowd of families willing to foster incredibly active Malinois puppies. They had to live within three hundred miles of the base outside San Antonio, Texas, so that they could bring the dog in for monthly assessments.
If the dogs passed through fostering well, then they received six months of rigorous testing and training before being paired with a handler. And that was regular MWDs.
Military war dogs for Special Operations Forces like SEAL Team 6, Rangers, and Delta Force all came from private contractors.
Jodie had watched this training with fascination. Brandy was good, as good as she and the Lackland trainers could make her. But these dogs had been doing something else entirely.
She could work Brandy on- or off-leash—not all MWDs could be trusted off-leash.
This guy worked them in teams of three completely off-leash. And just like a team, he deployed them to separate challenges and different tasks. Leaping straight up from sitting to grab a ball dangling six feet in the air. Commanded to take out a bad-guy pop-up mannequin high atop a fifth-wheel RV trailer, a dog had circled to jump on the pickup’s hood and roof, making a clean bound across to the fifth wheel to put on the bite.
Scenario after scenario, all done by hand signal and voice command.
It was an impressive show. Half the commands were hand signals and half in German—the standard language for most American war dogs. It cut down on confusion in a crowd, such as a dog triggering when someone said, “When I get back to the office, I’m really going to attack that.”
Then for just a moment the trainer had turned and looked at her. The sunlight caught his scarred left jaw. His dark eyes had inspected her and found her…lacking? He was pissed off at…? Hell if she knew or cared.
Then he’d waved in the last dog. In moments, the precision of the exercise was blown to hell. Like he’d sent in a saboteur—a sleeper-agent terrorist. Dogs yipped in surprise as they lost their balance or missed the mark. They tried to return to the course, but the rogue agent blocked their every attempt.
Mr. Hooks had started laughing like a madman, delighted to destroy the perfect precision he’d created.
This wasn’t some…joke. This was military war dog training. Nothing could be more serious.
Yet he laughed at dropping a dog-shaped bomb in their midst. Just like some bastard Syrian militia had dropped a mortar round on a US advisory team patrolling through the middle of a marketplace. Bombing their own goddamn civilians in the process.
She’d felt the explosion all over again. The searing, icepick-deep pain as her right ear was silenced forever. And the pure agony when she opened her eyes and saw Brandy where she lay, blown twenty feet through the air to crash land in a tomato vendor’s stall. For a moment, she’d thought all the red was squashed fruit. Then she’d seen the wetness of Brandy’s blood welling up from a dozen places under her black fur. Only the Kevlar vest and doggles—sand goggles for dogs—had saved her dog’s life and vision.
Jodie didn’t know what she’d done next after that memory slammed into her.
She’d “come to” nowhere near the ranch’s obstacle course. She’d hiked up on some high ridge and been walking toward the sharp peaks of the Rocky Mountains. She hadn’t even known which direction she’d gone or where the ranch lay from here.
But she never blanked.
Ever.
That was part of PTSD and that was not her.
There’d been a hawk’s cry and the rustle of wind through the bright green grass reaching up to her knees.
Her left side was sun-warmed, so she’d been walking west. She had then turned east and began trudging back. She’d originally arrived at the ranch in the morning. By the time she’d come to, the sun had been well past due south and headed to west. She must have walked for hours.
It had been coming on to sunset and she’d begun to wonder if she’d have to sleep wild tonight when she saw the first signs of life. A group of horses and riders trotting down a hillside about half a mile away. In the vast silence, she could hear their excited talk drifting down the wind. The kind of talk that came as the end of a long patrol neared.
She changed her angle to intersect their track. Half an hour later, beneath a blood red sky so vast that it seemed to go on forever, she stumbled upon the ranch. She’d come at it from an odd angle: behind the main house, between the guest cabins to the right and the bunkhouse to the left.
Jodie had gone straight for the latter, drunk as much water as her gut could hold straight from the tap, and plunged into the bunk to lose herself in sleep, just as she’d lost herself on the prairie.
Except she hadn’t.
She’d lain awake remembering every mission she and Brandy had walked together. And imagining every mission they’d never walk in the future. Dreading the body count racking up every day because they weren’t out there doing their job.
Now, sitting in the cage with Brandy curled up in her lap, at least this one, single thing was right. Through long practice, she shifted Brandy’s weight to the side without waking her. By clutching an arm tightly around Brandy’s chest, they were both mostly on the dog bed.
Stan looked down at the sleeping pair. He’d gone looking for the woman once he had the dogs bedded down but hadn’t found her anywhere. He hadn’t knocked on her door at dinner, figuring after that long drive, she just needed sleep.
After that, he’d spent a while watching the dog, what little he could see of her. She’d hidden herself deep in the portable cage’s shadow. When he tried going into the cage, she hadn’t snarled or snapped. Instead she’d cowered even deeper into shadow with a whimper of fear.
Unable to bring himself to face that, he’d backed away until he could track down the handler and find out what the fuck had happened to make a dog do that.
Well, he’d finally found her.
Somewhere in the night, she’d come to the cage and curled up with her dog. It felt voyeuristic to watch them sleep. How many nights had he and Lucy slept curled up together like that before she’d been blown to hell? Shredded along with his arm and two of his team by a little boy the Taliban had wired up with an explosive and sent over to “pet the doggie.” Ten-thousand-dollar reward for killing an MWD, twenty if you got the handler as well—a fortune by Afghanistan standards where the average per capita income was four hundred dollars a year. Apparently that was also the price of a kid’s life.
Something about the sleeping pair pissed him off. And something about them made him wish it was him curled up with the dog instead of her.
At least she still had her damned dog. What right did she have to be upset when her dog was right there beside her instead of blown into a thousand pieces in Afghanistan?
The dog woke first, saw him, and bolted from the woman’s arms into the portable cage with a yip of fear.
The woman jolted upright, slapping for a sidearm she wasn’t wearing.
He envied her even that. He’d been lefthanded and couldn’t have slapped instinctively for a weapon even if he was wearing one.
“Morning.”
She eyed him, glanced over at her dog cowering in the portable, then back at him.
Blue. Her eyes were an intense blue, dark-blue here in the shadowed cage.
“Morning, I guess.”
“Spend the night here?”
“No, I spent it in Kansas.” She shrugged as she scrubbed at her face as if trying to wake it up. It was a good face. He hadn’t really noticed yesterday, when her eyes had been bloodshot holes with dark rings beneath. Then she’d looked…just like any SEAL strung out at the end of a hard mission. “Couldn’t get to sleep in the bunk. Too quiet.”
“You want some chow first, or do you wanta just start?”
She glanced at Brandy hiding in the shadows. “Let’s just start.”
“You got a name, sister?”
“Yeah. So does my dog.”
“I’ll take either one.”
“Brandy,” but she didn’t bother telling him if that was her or the dog.
Sass. He liked that in a sailor.
It wasn’t until Jodie had coaxed Brandy out of the portable that she noticed that the guy had moved into the cage. He’d done it so smoothly and quietly that there was no doubting he was a SEAL. Stan Corman, SEAL Team 6. This must be the guy.
He had the attitude to prove it as well. Supreme arrogance.
Only when he was sitting so close did she see how big he was. Despite the loss of an arm, he was one of those guys you could easily use as a substitute for an M1 Abrams battle tank. But his very stillness made him unthreatening despite the harsh scars on his face and the garish arm. It wasn’t some pretty, cosmetic prosthesis thing. Instead it was all exposed steel and wires right up to the nylon socket for his stump.
She liked that he did nothing to hide it.
Here I am. This is me. Deal with it.
Okay, she’d deal with it. She just hoped her dog could.
“This,” she stroked a hand over the dog’s head as she had again moved into Jodie’s lap, “is Brandy. And yes, ‘she’s a fine girl,’ and no, please don’t sing the goddamn song. I’m Jodie Jaffe, most folks call me JJ.”
He nodded to her, but kept his eyes on Brandy as he said, “Hello, fine girl.” He made it feel as if he was talking to both of them. At least he had some sense of humor.
Brandy eyed him carefully.
Unsure what to expect, Jodie waited.
So did Stan.
And Brandy.
Jodie almost asked what he was doing, but he gave her the tiniest shake of his head. So she waited and watched him.
The burn scars on his face pulled slightly at the corner of his mouth. It didn’t make him appear to be smiling, but more as if he was laughing at some joke only he understood. Or perhaps the best joke of all was that he was laughing at himself. It made the right side of his face the more serious side. There, she could see that he’d once been lady-killer handsome; might still be if he ever really smiled.
He didn’t strike her as the kind of guy who smiled much.
Had she been? She no longer remembered. Twelve long years of service might have knocked that out of her.
Jodie felt the change beneath her palm resting on Brandy’s head.
Brandy had extended her nose toward Stan, perhaps just a half inch, but toward him. And then she’d taken a deep sniff.
At Stan’s infinitesimal nod, Jodie whispered a soft, “Good girl.”
“You can’t!”
Stan groaned. It had already been a long morning.
Timmy was working the dogs, not the coursework they should be doing, but that was beyond the old cowboy’s skills. But he could run the ball tosser to exercise them. One of the ranch hands had cobbled it together for him. On “days off” the dogs got to play. The tosser launched tennis balls high and hard. The direction was made unpredictable by a loosely attached exit tube. The dogs chased their assigned balls, retrieved them, and dropped them back in the hopper at the base of the machine. Timmy just had to point at the next dog up and hit the launch button.
His own morning had been a constant battle of wits with a freaked-out dog. And an almost equally freaked handler.
Brandy would sniff Stan but wouldn’t let him touch her.
She’d walk on the lead with Jodie, if that belly-scraping near crawl could be considered a walk. Still knew how to swim, but the dog was weak as hell. Probably hadn’t gone for a decent run since being blown up two months ago.
The handler wasn’t in all that much better shape. Steady, and knew how to dig deep to hold it together. But he recognized in her how tight that hold was. Knew it like a second skin.
He’d tried JJ on for size, but didn’t like it. JJ sounded like a guy on the team—probably the joker of the patrol. Jodie might be wearing fatigues and boots, but she was very definitely a woman. Overprotective, but that was part of being a dog handler.
And now that protectiveness was becoming a major pain in his ass.
For a last test, he’d loaded them in the back of his truck and driven out to The Urban. It was group of old ranch buildings, maybe a branding camp from when they used to run cattle decades ago. He’d fixed it up as an “urban experience” training area. Hidden traps, explosive hides, and all the other challenges he’d been able to build in. It was still one of the weakest areas in his training setup, but it was the best he had.
