Cindy Dees: Medusa’s Master

A book in the Hot Watch series, 2009

Dear Reader,

Please allow me to take this opportunity to thank the hundreds of you who have contacted me over the past two years to ask about Kat’s story. Without your encouragement, I’m not sure I’d ever have found this story, let alone written it. So this one’s for you.

That said, it’s a thrill for me to welcome you to Kat’s book! It might have been a long time in the cooking, but I’d like to think the meal was worth the wait. The Medusas are back in action, this time on the beautiful island of Barbados.

It was the appearance of Jeff Steiger, the one man with exactly what it would take to sweep Kat off her feet, that gave me my inspiration. As soon as he waltzed across my mind with his killer dimples and irresistible New Orleans drawl, I knew Kat was sunk. It’s not often that a Medusa owes a man for much of anything, but in this case, Kat owes him one. For without him, Medusa’s Master might not have taken shape.

So buckle your seat belt, hang on tight, and get ready to rock and roll as Kat and Jeff sweep you away on the latest wild ride of the Medusas!

Cindy

Katrina Kim stepped out into the cavernous H.O.T. Watch headquarters, gazing around in shock as much at the banks of computers and analysts as at the domed enormity of the cave enclosing it all in perpetual night. And she’d thought the mini-submarine ride to get to the inside of this hollowed-out volcano had been wild. This place was incredible .

“Ahh, there you are, Captain Kim.” An attractive woman wearing khaki shorts and a dark polo shirt strode toward her, holding out her hand. “I’m Jennifer Blackfoot.”

Katrina studied the offered hand impassively. A grab and twist at the base of the thumb would put the woman down on the ground. Or, there was the pressure point in the wrist, which would bring a grown man in a full battle rage to a screeching halt. Or there was always the tried-and-true bend-and-snap to break fingers and generally maim the sensitive instrument that was the human hand.

Gently, she clasped the woman’s proffered hand. “Please. Call me Kat.” Standard protocol to ask civilians to use her first name. It put them at ease around Special Forces operatives like her.

Kat was one of the founding members of the Medusas, the first all-female Special Forces team the U.S. military had fielded a couple of years earlier. The Medusas had long since earned their battle stripes and were well respected within the Special Forces community. At the moment, the Medusas were in North Carolina on call, waiting for a crisis to blow up somewhere that required their particular brand of attention. In another month, all the Medusas were scheduled to stand down and go into a training cycle. In the meantime, she’d been sent to this classified facility in the Caribbean on a special assignment.

She didn’t know anything about the mission. She’d been awakened by a phone call early this morning, telling her to be at the airfield in an hour in civilian clothes with warm-weather gear for immediate deployment. And here she was, none the wiser as to what would be expected of her, knowing only that it would be extremely high risk. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have called her.

God, she loved this job.

Suppressing an actual smile of enjoyment at the low-level hum of adrenaline coursing through her veins, she glanced over at the civilian woman walking beside her and asked, “When will I receive my mission briefing?”

Her guide looked over, surprised. “General Wittenauer didn’t fill you in?”

“No, ma’am.”

The woman laughed. “Don’t ‘ma’am’ me. I’m just a civilian. My friends call me Jennifer or Jenn.”

Kat pursed her lips. She rarely stuck around anywhere long enough to make actual friends. “The way I hear it, you run this outfit.”

Jennifer shrugged. “I run the civilian side of the house. Commander Hathaway runs the military side. Frankly, being in charge around here mostly consists of sprinting like crazy to stay at the front of the stampede.”

Kat nodded knowingly. Although they all tried to impose as much order as possible on their world, Special Ops was often a chaotic enterprise.

Jennifer ushered her through a thick, steel door and into a low, long corridor hewn out of rough rock. “You’ll be working with Jeff Steiger. His handle’s Maverick. He’ll bring you up to speed on his little project.”

A little project, huh? An odd choice of words for a Special Ops mission.

Jennifer pulled out a cell phone and made a call. “This is Raven. Where’s Maverick?” A short pause. “Thanks.”

Raven? A good handle for the woman. She had long, black hair that formed a shimmering, silken fall almost to her hips.

“Captain Steiger is in the gym.”

“There’s a gym down here?” Kat asked, surprised.

“We’ve got it all. Cafeteria, sleeping quarters, long-term food supplies…there’s even a small infirmary.”

Impressive. She followed Jennifer-Raven through a labyrinth of hallways to yet another anonymous door. If this place were ever invaded, she wished the intruders luck finding anything. Nothing was marked in this maze, and every hall, every door, looked exactly the same.

As they stepped into a well-outfitted gym, her companion announced, “Ladies’ locker room is behind the weight machines. You’ll probably find Maverick on the fighting mats pummeling some poor sod. I saw on the training schedule that he and his Ops team were going to be practicing unarmed combat this afternoon.”

“Is he good?” Kat murmured.

“He’s unofficial champ of the entire bunker. And we’ve got upwards of sixty operators attached to this outfit.”

Interesting. It had been a long time since anyone had given her a real challenge in unarmed combat. Oh, she faked having to struggle against most guys, but she usually held back. It was for the best that way.

Jennifer made her farewells, and Kat looked around. It smelled like every other gym in creation, of sweat and disinfectant, burnt rubber and iron. Weights clanked on the far side of a currently empty basketball court, and off to her right, a group of men made the distinctive shouted grunts of martial artists in training. Hidoshi-san, the man who’d adopted her and had been father, teacher and sensei to her from infancy, had called the shouts kiais , but each martial school had its own name for them.

She strolled across the hardwood basketball floor, observing a half-dozen pairs of men wrestling around on the mat, practicing ground-fighting techniques. It looked like a Brazilian jiujitsu variant they were doing, with some of the usual rules suspended to modify it for urban combat.

BJJ was a twentieth-century variant on a much older form of judo. Mentally she turned her nose up at it. Her training had been in the original, classical traditions from one of the great modern masters: judo-the way of grappling, karate-do-the way of the open hand, kendo-the way of the sword, iai-do-the way of the fast sword, even aikido-the way of harmony.