The 160th Aviation Regiment, better known as the Night Stalkers was flying a crew of special operators into the desert behind the Iraqi Tawakalna Division. That was prior to the Desert Storm battle which would eventually become known as 73 Easting.

We were the taxi service for the spooks because our HH53B Pave Lows were more-or-less invisible at night. They also mounted M134-D miniguns whose depleted uranium rounds could deal out serious hurt if challenged. As we began the descent into the desert I was a twenty one year old crew chief and door gunner, nearing the end of his first hitch.

I was strapped into the gunner’s position wearing all of the night vision technology that was available in 1992 and peering out onto the desert floor looking for bad guys. The problem is that deserts are not flat. They look like frozen oceans and there were a million waves out there, any one of which could be hiding evil doers under the crest.

The Warrant Officer who was steering the aircraft came in to hover at 12 feet so that the operators could jump the rest of the way onto the downslope of the dune. Then we planned to get the fuck out of there because a hovering helicopter is a sitting duck. As the last of our operators dropped, we discovered to our chagrin that we were dropping them about 70 yards from the most surprised group of Tangos in the entire Republican Guard.

They had heard all of the noise but they couldn’t see the Pave Low in the dark. Our guys had night vision so they saw them as soon as they hit and rolled and they proceeded to open fire with everything they had. The problem was that they were outnumbered 20 to 1 and given the sheer weight of numbers their prospects for continued survival were not looking very positive.

I expended the entire belt of my Gatling in 10 six second bursts. The 7.62mm bullets kicked up a storm of sand as they walked through the ranks of the Iraqis, who were starting to deploy behind an old Soviet BTR-60 armored personnel carrier. Given the M-124’s 2,000 rounds per minute rate of fire, my tracers must have looked like I was using a ray-gun.

The BTR then blew up cutting the odds down to about 8 to 1. I was frantically re-belting when somebody on their side got our starboard engine with an RPG. The helicopter began to violently rock and auto-rotate. In the meantime I had finally reloaded and gone back to providing the firepower that the operators needed to chase the rest of the Iraqis off.

Of course in order to do that I had to continue to man my position and I rode that doomed bird into the ground, firing all the way. The resulting crash was a seriously painful experience. I was ejected and rolled down the face of the dune at thirty miles an hour, just as the upper bulkhead of the helicopter crashed down on me.

Somehow the flailing rotor missed me. My body armor and the helmet and the full face mask I was wearing saved my life but I was in very bad shape. The special operators patched me up as best they could and then carried me and the body of the pilot out after they had finished their mission. The mission was to paint an Iraqi command and control center for two JDAMS that were probably dropped from 40,000 feet. Breathing was a real problem for me due to the broken ribs but I still remember the “end of the world” roar of four tons of high explosive arriving from out of nowhere.

Malcolm was the one who put me in for the Silver Star. He was a very tough, do-it-all kind of Brit who was clearly not in OUR military. In fact it was never clear to me what he was doing leading a Delta team. I just assumed that he worked for a little “Company” that is still based in Langley Virginia. They all knew that it was the fact that I had stuck by my gun that had saved them from the indescribable experience of sharing Saddam’s hospitality.

Mal in particular was grateful. He visited me a lot when I was in the hospital and we struck up a friendship that was one of the few close relationships I have ever had with anybody. I am a very private person. Janey says I am just shy. But I really think it has more to do with my general attitude toward the human race. In my experience most of the people I have known will sell anybody out for the legendary 17 pieces of silver and I just can’t tolerate that.

Mal was different. He was what we men call a “solid, standup guy.” You could trust him at his word and he never let me down. He was the jaunty kind of devil-may-care, damn-your-eyes sort of fellow that the Brits have relied on for the past 400 years to ensure that “the sun never sets.” He was ten years older than me, handsome to a fault in that classic Oxbridge sort of way and to top it off I had heard that he was also a genuine English Lord.

The fact that a guy with all of that breeding and culture was willing to spend any time with a kid from the Duluth docks was very special to me and frankly there was a lot of hero worship going on, even though I was the one who got the medal.

Northern Minnesota is not the kind of place that lends itself to easy living and my dad was a very hard man. My mom had died some time so far in the dim past that I couldn’t remember what she looked like.

The family lore had it that it was a car crash that killed her. But it could have just as easily been a moose stampede for all that anybody knew, or cared.

I was raised by various relatives and learned very quickly that the only person who I could trust was me.

My old man was a tough bar fighting, whore fucking individual who was drunk more than he was sober. Yet he never missed a day of work on the ore ships. His lifestyle finally caught up with him when he picked a fight with the wrong person in a bar and the guy shot him on my eighth birthday.

I was raised after that by his sister who considered me a “burden placed on her by a vengeful God.” Needless to say the word “love” was an abstract to me. I didn’t experience it growing up and definitely didn’t feel it.

Some people remember their teenage years as a time of football games and proms. I worked the taconite ore loading docks from the time I was eight, running errands for the men and bringing them things.

Eventually I worked my way into a loader’s assistant job at 13, shoveling stray pellets of low grade iron ore back on the conveyer belts.

The pay was man’s pay, 14 dollars an hour and I worked weekends and any time after school since the ore freighters were pretty-much a 24 hour operation.

Some of the money went to the old man’s family but most of it went into a special account that I had set up for myself.

I really didn’t miss the high school social life. For guys, most of that time is spent either proving your manhood or trying to get laid.

Working a ten hour shift on an ore freighter shoveling iron pellets did wonders for my physique and one of my older cousins took my cherry when I was 13.

Plus, there were plenty of low class slutty girls hanging around the bars that my friends from the ore ships liked to sneak me into. A “precocious” teenager who was as strong as me was like catnip to all of them.

So the getting laid part was just a matter of finding the time between work and school.

I joined the Army the day I turned 18. The transition into the military is hard for a lot of kids but for me it was the first time I felt a part of something. The food was regular and there was daily comradeship. And I threw myself into Basic the way Janey did dance. It was a passion and a dedication and as a result I was first in everything.

With my ASVAB scores and my performance in Basic, I had the option of any MOS when I was assigned. But mechanics interested me the most and helicopters seemed like the future. So I did the entire 15u program.

Frankly, the discipline that it took for a 21 year old to keep something as complex as a Sikorsky 53H flying, was the introduction to manhood that my old man had missed giving me.

I was never lonely in the Army. My friends and I worked together as a team and we played together like a pack of young wolves. The drinking and fucking part is just what all boys that age do.

This might give away some of our male secrets but nobody in that particular age group is thinking, “I desperately need to find the girl who I can settle down with and raise children.”

That’s what they might tell some susceptible girl in order to nail down a reliable supply of pussy, or get their rocks off in a one night stand. But mainly they just want to brag to their friends that they fucked Sally. The subtext being, “Who you weren’t man enough to convince to open her legs.”

Romance, or any kind of emotion except horniness, rarely plays a part in the calculation when teenage boy sex happens. I realize that that may make guys sound a little simple minded. But the fact that something like the same concept was running through the minds of the female population only made the sex at that age even more meaningless.

For several years Malcolm and I had a running contest every time our leaves coincided. We would pick up any number of girls in whatever off-base, honkey-tonk we happened to be frequenting and party until we passed out. The aim was to fuck as many of those women as we could in that period and then compare scores.

Since we traded them with each other I realize that that sounds both risky, and maybe even gay as hell. But boys in their twenties are rarely deep philosophical thinkers, particularly if they are drunken soldiers on leave.

Obviously, it was important to me to keep that part of my past away from Janey, since I am pretty sure she would not like the person I used to be.

Therefore, I have never come close to telling her about my early life. As far as she knew I was some kind of bookish nerd who spent his time in the basement of my house playing on the internet and for the sake of our happy marriage that was the way I wanted to keep it.

Janey taught me what love really was. And in every respect my love for her remade me into a completely new and better person. Consequently, because my past is irrelevant it is kept in a sealed room where it belongs.

I did another tour after Desert Storm. When I got out I began to play with analytics as a means of predicting and aligning market position. They would call that “data mining” now and it is a major industry. But back then there was very little interest.

Nonetheless, I have always been able to see the golden path and things changed radically over the following decade. So my little company evolved from my basement, to a big chrome and glass building that I sold as soon as I could find a corporate taker.

I had set the company up originally using the savings that I had accumulated during my teenage years. Since it was a sole proprietorship I made a lot of money. I was still in the process of parking it in safe investments when I met Janey.

I had a ten figure bank account and yet I was still a redneck kid from Duluth. But I am smart enough that I can mimic almost anything. I was living in Boston at the time. So I spent my spare time carefully studying the Harvard Yard types and the MIT nerds over in Cambridge. That transformed me into somebody else.

In the East Coast social scene, the newly reinvented version of me probably came off like a modern day Jay Gatsby. I was a fabulously rich and mysterious “preppy” who had appeared from out of nowhere.

As a result, I began to date a higher class of women. I even dated some women who you would instantly recognize from the media. But there was no connection with any of them and I was as lonely and rootless as I had always been in my empty life.

I just continued to drift along with no real sense of purpose, other than the small rewards I could get from my writing and some minor business ventures.

I was not hypocritical enough to feel sorry for myself. The money filled in a lot of the loneliness. If you are from Duluth you will know your way around a boat and so I spent money on a serious sailing yacht and I also splurged on the car that I had always wanted, which didn’t even dent my principal.

Naturally, I had a constant sense that something was missing in my life. It was an itch that I couldn’t scratch because I had never had any experience, or point of reference to identify what was missing, or what I needed to do to fill the void.

I was working on a multivariate prediction algorithm for technology data mines with a Professor at Wharton. I had hired him a couple of times in the past as a consultant. This time HE called ME and asked if I was interested in doing a three week seminar at Wharton for emerging market analysis.

Given the honor, I should have said “yes” immediately but I had not finished high school before I joined up. And I got my GED and Bachelor’s through the military’s ACES program.

So frankly I was more than a little intimidated by the thought of being with a group of students who were much better educated than I was. My friend assured me that given the way the basic Wharton student worships money, the fact that I had a billion dollars of disposable wealth would offset any concerns about my pedigree.

I had gotten lost trying to find the classroom so I was a little late and I might add nervous as hell as I stood in the door. I had actually never been in any real college classroom before and I was expecting a lectern like they always show in the movies.

Instead it was just five tables arranged in a “U” shape. As I was anxiously trying to give the appearance that I knew what I was doing, I was greeted by a sultry voice telling me that the professor hadn’t shown up yet. I looked at the source of the voice and almost tripped over a chair.

Every man has a picture of their ideal woman. It is a compilation of experiences, tastes and desires and it is different for every man. But we all know instinctively what our perfect woman looks like. And a lot of our initial attraction is based on how close a woman comes to matching that ideal image.

There in front of me was a female who checked every one of my long list of boxes. She had a flawless, perfectly proportioned face. She had on an expensive and very tasteful outfit on. And more relevantly she had a body that you would not imagine existed in the physical universe; only my fevered dreams.

The attraction to her was instantaneous and absolute. I thought to myself, holy shit!!! All of the shields slammed up and I was a rock and an island, impervious to the threat that this unearthly beautiful woman represented.

You might think that that was a weird response given my rascally track record with women. But the person in front of me was bringing out feelings that I had absolutely no experience with.

I wanted her in “that” way. You would have to be made out of solid titanium to NOT want somebody who was that sexually attractive “that” way.

But there were nuances in her voice and powers behind her eyes that were communicating into places that I never knew existed. It was a subtle resonance at a subconscious level but it almost made me feel like she was looking into my soul.

I went from being nervous about teaching a college class to wanting to share my life with this person forever. That all happened in approximately 6 seconds. I guess it was just that inexplicable emotion known as “love at first sight.”

The fact that I didn’t recognize the feeling was excusable given the fact that I had never known an emotion called “love” in my entire wretched life.

Paul had some old Army buddy who he wanted to visit and so we drove up to the guy’s place for the weekend. The host held some kind of minor Baronetcy in the Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire area.

Their friendship made no sense to me, since Paul was a Sergeant Major in OUR army not a member of the Grenadier Guards. But I learned a long time ago that there are twists and turns in Paul’s life that I don’t really know about and which I frankly don’t WANT to know about. So I was good with the prospect of spending a day sipping Champaign cocktails with the English nobility.

The house itself was just like the ones where I had spent my whole life, since our aristocracy got most of its ideas about taste from THEIR aristocracy. It was the usual rambling exercise in brick and cornices with the obligatory chimneys, slate roof and ivy.

Paul may be brilliant and a billionaire business man but he acts like the overawed new boy in school when he is around that sort of thing. So I decided I would have to be his social buffer for the weekend.

They were waiting for us in the circle drive. Paul had rented a Jaguar XK Tourer for the time in England. It is a snazzy car but there is NOT a lot of room for the kind of gear a woman like me needs to bring along on a trip to the English countryside. Consequently, they had several of the help lined up on the stairs of the estate to wrestle my various cases and trunks out of the boot.

The guy himself looked more like an Aussie to me than the various Eton-Cambridge types who I have known in my past. He was somewhere in his early 50s and he looked fit and tough. Paul told me that the two of them had met in some sort of spook situation during Desert Storm and that was definitely plausible given what I was seeing. In fact this guy was somebody I found very attractive, in a “married lady” attraction way.

His wife was one of those lifeless blue-bloods who clutter up the social scene on both sides of the Atlantic. In short she reminded me of my mother.

She was tall, fashionably slim and languid. She had a beautiful but very cold face carefully made up and fine blond hair pulled back into one of those aristocratic buns that the horsey set favors.

She was looking at Paul like her husband had just brought a mangy mongrel dog onto the estate.

I can play that game as well as anybody and so we exchanged the sort of polite introductions that established that both of us thought the other one wasn’t quite up to snuff.

I was wearing an Empire waist Jane Austen style linen dress, which showed off more cleavage than I really wanted to display. But I liked the effect that it had on both of our hosts.

“Mal”, as he insisted I call him, did everything but leave a rope of drool across my tits. His wife Penelope, not Penny, smiled frigidly and looked like she wanted to burn me at the stake.

Paul and Mal went through some sort of extended “guy” ritual with far too much hugging, back slapping and guffawing for my taste. The one thing I got out of it was that Paul clearly worshiped the ground this guy walked on.

Mal put his arm around ME and more or less dragged me off the porch and into the foyer of the manor house. I was afraid his wife wouldn’t be pleased by that. But she actually looked thankful that he hadn’t chosen to put his arm around her.

The foyer was probably original and so the oak beams, mahogany paneling and marble flooring must have dated back several centuries.

It WAS an impressive house though. And it absolutely radiated noblesse oblige. I have spent my life in houses like that. In fact this one was actually a little smaller and less grand then my parent’s house. But I could see that Paul was totally intimidated by his surroundings and starting to flounder.

I would find out later that his relationship with good old Mal was an artifact of their days in the military and Paul had no idea what being a REAL Lord actually entailed. I on the other hand was beginning to suspect that Sir Malcolm had droit du seigneur on his mind.

Even by her normal high standards Janey was magnificent. I am always in awe of her social grace but there are times when she is in her element and I am humbled by her poise and sophistication. I, on the other hand, am totally intimidated by my “betters.”

I had never thought of Malcolm’s social position in all of the time that we were carousing through fleabag bars. But when we rolled up to the entrance to Malcolm’s mansion and they were standing there like the Lord and Lady of the Manor I almost kept on driving.

Getting out of the Jag I banged my head on the door frame, tripped over the sill and did a stumbling arrival in front of Mal and his wife. Getting out of the other side Janey was as dignified and regal as the Queen herself.

She radiated proper breeding social superiority and just the right touch of condescension. I know that that sort of self-assurance is something you develop over a lifetime and it requires an absolute sense of your own entitlements. And I also knew that Janey’s performance was carefully calculated to protect me from my own feelings of inadequacy.

She is a stunning woman and that body in the white linen dress that she was wearing contrasted with her beautiful dusky skin actually made Malcolm do a double take.

In the bad old days the obvious lust that he was showing for her would have been worth a couple of extra points on my score card. But in this particular case I didn’t like the way he was looking at my wife.

I also didn’t like the way his wife was looking at Janey but for a different reason. There was some sort of subliminal bitch fight going on between those two that Malcolm and I both could sense and which we chose to cover up by wrestling around the way two guys do when they haven’t seen each other in a very long time.

He dropped his arm around Janey’s bare shoulders and sort of “whisked” her into the entrance hall. Janey followed right along with the move like she didn’t notice the possessive way he was holding her.

Malcolm is larger than life with the “hail fellow well met” stuff and the first half hour of getting us settled in was a display of alpha male behavior that was so clearly aimed at Janey that I was beginning to feel a little pang of jealousy.

I remembered some of our more extravagantly debauched moments back in the old life and I was seeing something like the same conduct here toward her. The problem being that Janey was my life’s partner, not some drunken skag who he was lining up to fuck.

However, he then changed gears totally with a, “I’ll leave you two to get ready mate. Drinks will be on the garden patio. Dress formal.”

Once the door had closed and I heard his footsteps receding down the hall I turned to Janey and said as guardedly as possible, “He seems to like you a lot.”

She gave me one of her brilliant smiles and said, “That’s an interesting way of putting it.”

I was in a difficult situation here.

For obvious reasons I didn’t want to get into too much detail about the standard operating rules when we used to get together and I definitely didn’t want to poison the well as far as Janey’s attitude toward Malcolm was concerned. So I just said, “He’s a little over the top when it comes to his treatment of women, but it’s harmless.”

She looked right through me, shrugged and said, “If you say so.”

She was changing out of her traveling dress and into something more formal and I was wrestling with the studs on my tux. I love formal wear. It is so opposite anything that I ever worn in the past that I will take any opportunity to “dress” for dinner.

Janey was walking around the room wearing a frilly white bra and thong set and doing her hair. I couldn’t stand the sight of that voluptuous beauty just standing there with so little on. So I dropped everything on the bureau and walked over to take her into my arms.

A mostly naked Janey under your hands is an experience. She has rock hard muscles but because she is a woman they are covered with the sort of silky skin that makes her feel both firm and totally soft and supple at the same time.

She moaned slightly and turned her face up to be kissed. Kissing her is also an experience in-and-of itself. She burns at a slightly higher temperature than normal people and so her mouth is exceptionally hot and soft at the same time.

She has beautiful, sculptured lips in a wide sensual mouth and when she kisses you she is totally “there” no matter whether it is a short peck or a deep kiss like we were sharing now.

I could feel her heat and frankly I was wondering whether she would be interested in a quickie, when she whacked me on the chest and said, “Down boy. We don’t want to keep our hosts waiting. But you had better be ready to perform tonight.”

I took that as a promise.

Since it was an uncharacteristically hot and sunny English day dinner was served out on the patio, on tables shaded by umbrellas. The actual hanging out was perfect proof that you can’t turn the clock back. His wife clearly didn’t like me and I suspected it was because she knew that I was not “the right sort.”

Malcolm was his usual energetic, witty self, but the camaraderie from the good old days was missing. I think that was mainly because neither of us was drunk enough and the women were ladies, not bar whores. We reminisced about various places where we had served without getting into any specifics about the service and consumed a considerable amount of alcohol, martinis and then white wine.

The afternoon was exactly as I remembered lawn parties growing up, meaning pretentious and boring. I had on the standard uniform that I have worn to those things since I was a little girl, wide hat, formal flowered silk dress and sensible heels.

There was a slight breeze and I was aware of how it molded the light material of the dress to my body, whenever I stood up. So I was sitting a lot.

As the afternoon progressed, Paul’s friend had gone from occasional glances to full out leers. And if he was not somebody Paul felt close to I would have already made it clear that I didn’t appreciate the attention. But it was obvious that Paul craved this guy’s approval and I was part of the package.

Men’s pack instincts probably kept the species alive, or at least fed and protected, for millions of years and in my opinion that instinct has never been bred out of them. Malcolm had all of the entitlement of his social position and he was a natural alpha male anyhow.

Paul has all of those dominant characteristics. But between the age difference and other status things, Paul idolized him. I am sure that the fact that he was used to getting his way with women drove his current “crush” on me.

I would have found Malcolm very attractive if I wasn’t already committed to the love of my life. Women who look like me learn how to use their powers early on, and I was in full command of my womanly artifices before I reached drinking age.

So it was NOT a new experience to have a guy who was twenty years older than me spending the afternoon drooling on me. And I knew all of the tricks of the trade to keep most guys at arm’s length. But this one was different and a lot more dangerous.

He had clearly had a lot of women beg him for the privilege of being fucked. And he also clearly had a hunter’s instincts when it came to stalking new quarry. If I wasn’t so experienced with the being stalked part he would have either scared me to death, or caused me to immediately fall into bed with him.

But I have my own capabilities in those areas and frankly it was stimulating to be the “big game” for so experienced a hunter. The move and countermove with this guy relived the boredom of the afternoon and evening. And it was very flattering.

We made our way through the afternoon and evening. Malcolm was relentlessly hitting on Janey which would have given me considerable cause for jealousy if it were not for the fact that I trusted both of them.

I am fully aware of what a trophy she is and if she were less of a person I know she would have used that status. But our early married life convinced me that the person underneath all of that beautiful female skin was a formidable human being, with a depth of intelligence, personal strength of character and mature sense of human values that was humbling in the extreme.

I would be lying to you if I said that the initial attraction and the subsequent chase before the marriage were motivated by her beautiful soul.

Janey is just simply dazzlingly sexually attractive. But even before we sealed the deal on our own commitment I began to see what a remarkably strong and courageous woman she was.

And as we grew together as husband and wife her physical looks tended to fade into the background of my perception and all I saw was the whole magnificent person that she was.

The party died down as evening faded into night. Unfortunately there really wasn’t that much to talk about. So we all made our excuses and headed off to our separate rooms.

Like most English estates this building had wings. We were in a room on one wing of the building, perhaps 75 yards from the main part of the house and Malcolm and his wife slept in an analogous room in the other wing.

That gave us plenty of personal space. I am one of those people who start getting sleepy as soon as the sun sets and we had been drinking all day, although none of us were close to drunk.

Janey is a cat so she is nocturnal. She makes up for her night time prowling by sleeping late into the morning. We both kind of like the fact that our sleep cycles are different because it gives us some private time.

As soon as we got back to the room I started unzipping her dress. I had been watching her display the goods all day and I wanted her in the worst sort of way. She molded herself against me in the boneless fashion that only a trained dancer can do and we kissed passionately as she backed me toward the bed.