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Title: According to Plan 1
Rating: Adult
Disclaimer: Hoot and Sanderson are composites and have nothing to do with any real life men. Any resemblance to copyrighted works of art, or two particularly hot manly actors, is superficial in nature, and should be used only as a visual aid.
Note: Takes place a few days before the events of Black Hawk Down..
According to Plan 1
Hoot was late.
Sanderson tired not to worry. Hoot was a big boy. He could take care of himself. But he always made his rendezvous. Always.
Sanderson paced the tarmac, squinting into the setting sun. This was their third week in this desert hell, and Hoot’s fourth solo foray into the Mog. The first had been easy, just eight hours, time enough for him to get the lay of the land, make a couple of contacts with locals, be seen. Or not.
The second and third had each been 48 hours. Too long for most ops, but Hoot seemed to like it. He claimed that around the 36 hour mark his powers of observation heightened.
No food and no sleep for 36 hours – Sanderson wasn’t so sure about that as a sound battle tactic. He was sure that if he was out there 36 hours without food or sleep, he might observe a few things that weren’t entirely there. But the intel Hoot returned with was almost always accurate.
A little too accurate sometimes. Sanderson didn’t really want to know what Hoot did to obtain it.
Hoot never talked about what he did, specifically, when he was out. He came in, joked around with the guys a bit, sat at a table, alone, to write a report, including maps and diagrams, in pencil, in his neat, precise printing, gave it to the commanding officer and went to the mess. Sanderson had seen Hoot’s reports. There were no details about Hoot’s actions, only about what he observed, not how he observed it.
After wolfing down more food than Sanderson could eat in a whole day, Hoot would then shower, shave, lie on his cot and read for half and hour, and then sleep, without moving, for ten hours or so.
And then he was good to go. Again.
Sanderson knew Hoot didn’t eat when he was in the field, unless he’d carried the food himself. He would drink tea or coffee brewed in pots used by everyone else, but he wouldn’t eat solid food he hadn’t prepared himself, or observed being prepared. It was some kind of strange compulsion. And he didn’t bring MREs when he was in his journalist disguise, and he didn’t want to be obviously lugging around two days of food, so he brought the minimum – some nuts, dried meat, maybe some dried fruit. It would seem like food to your ordinary civilian, especially in the Mog, but it wasn’t really food for a guy of Hoot’s size and muscle mass. It couldn’t be good for him, to fast for so long and then binge right before sleeping. But who was Sanderson to argue? Whatever Hoot ate or didn’t eat, he was in perfect physical condition.
Sanderson didn’t know why he was obsessing about Hoot’s unhealthy eating habits. He guessed there wasn’t anything else to obsess about.
He had to obsess about something, though, because Hoot was late, and Hoot was never late, and if Sanderson didn’t obsess about something, then he’d have to start wondering about why he was so obsessed with Hoot being late.
The first rendezvous had been scheduled for that morning. The back-up meet was in thirty minutes. And Sanderson wanted to go, even though he wasn’t on the roster.
For the first rendezvous Sanderson had been scheduled to ride shotgun. Well, ride assault rifle. He’d been in the bird as it circled the meeting place, sand and dust and heat and no Hoot. Circling six times, flying out over the sea, returning to circle again. Sanderson kept imagining he could see Hoot, crouching on a dune, smoking one of those godawful dark cigarettes, hand on the seat of his bicycle.
Hoot loved to travel by bicycle. First thing he ever did when he set up in a new location was get a bike. Fast, he said, fast and quiet and small. He liked transportation he had complete control over, and he could toss into a Black Hawk or a Humvee without any fuss. No fuss. That was Hoot.
Everyone had tried to act like it was normal when they returned to base. No big deal. Runs were changed, cancelled, aborted, all the time. Things don’t always go according to plan.
But Hoot was never late.
“Let me go, Shug,” Sanderson’d said casually.
Randy had studied Sanderson with narrowed green eyes, one long look from head to toe. His nose twitched. “What’s the matter, Jeff? You don’t trust me to bring Hoot home in one piece?”
Gary loomed behind Randy, amusement painted on his face. “We’ll get your boy home, don’t worry.”
Sanderson watched the Black Hawk rise into the air, Elvis at the helm, Shugart and Gordon and Busch aboard.
Bastards. They’d left him out on purpose. They were laughing at him, right now, laughing at him as he paced back and forth on the runway, worrying about Hoot.
They should laugh at him. He was ridiculously attached to Hoot. There was no reasonable explanation for it.
He’d known Hoot forever. They’d done their airborne together. And in Delta training, he and Hoot formed a natural team. They fit together perfectly, in the field.
They’d spent countless hours together on the firing range, in hides, in the gym, running together, training together, planning together. They’d executed the only (un)recorded successful raid of Colonel Harkness’ liquor cabinet back, back before they ever knew what Delta was. Once they had both joined Delta, they were unbeatable. They’d even beat the examiners to the target during one memorable training exercise.
The other guys might have been a bit jealous, the way he and Hoot were able to communicate without talking, the way they moved in tandem, so easily, so artlessly.
Sanderson took the flak good naturedly. He knew he got a bit protective of Hoot, had a tendency to make excuses for him when he was anti-social or downright disrespectful of commanding officers. He liked to take care of people, and if they called him ‘mother hen’ it was okay.
Wasn’t like it was one-sided. Hoot paid him back, over and over, by keeping him cool.
Sanderson sometimes got emotional. It used to be worse; Hoot had helped him get that side of himself under control. Everyone thought Sanderson was the most easy going man alive, but he got upset. Injustice was what made him the most upset. Sanderson hated unfairness. But unfairness is a part of life, especially in the army, and Hoot had a way of chilling Sanderson out with a few words or a gesture. Because nothing ever rattled Hoot.
No matter what happened – people dying, bombs exploding around him, dumb-ass orders from above endangering good men – Hoot didn’t react emotionally. He reacted tactically to everything. He responded to the threat. He didn’t get upset. He was baffled by people who responded on the emotional level, but he’d learned, with Sanderson’s help, to hide it.
Hoot would explain the way things were and tell the upset person to get it together. He would give them something to focus on, something to do, and tell them to do it. He was a genius at it. It was one of the amazing things about Hoot.
Only one. There were a lot of other amazing things about Hoot. His abilities in the field were astounding.
It wasn’t like Hoot was the best at everything. Sanderson had way better personal skills. And he could throw a grenade farther, and with greater accuracy. And no one could shoot as well as Randy. But Hoot was up there in the top percentile for most things.
And physically… Sanderson tried not to think about Hoot physically. It was too overwhelming. And things just weren’t like that between Sanderson and Hoot. So Sanderson chose not to think about it. And he succeeded, most of the time.
When he did think about it, his palms got sweaty. Because Hoot was about as perfect a specimen as he’d ever seen.
One time, a year or so back, they were in… Sanderson was so well trained he didn’t even think the name of the place, he just remembered the hut they took turns sleeping in and the canopy of dark green above and the strange, crackling blue sparks a certain type of indigenous wood threw up from the fire. After everything had gone down the way it was supposed to, they were sent for a debriefing and something fucked up. The Colonel didn’t show on time. A message arrived telling them to sit tight.
Fortunately, it was a nice place to sit tight. There was a beach, with no sharks, and a palapa for shade. Sanderson could still close his eyes and see Hoot lying on a pallet, sleeping his after-op ten hours, muscles rippling when he woke and sat up, rubbing his eyes. Later in the evening, Sanderson would swear he’d seen Hoot looking at him as he cooked the food over grill. Looking at the bulge of Sanderson’s forearm, and at his legs. It made Sanderson nervous. Was Hoot comparing himself to Sanderson? Who could stand up to being compared to Hoot, for fuck’s sake?
Sanderson was a bit awkward about it. He wasn’t normally a self-conscious person, and he had nothing to be ashamed of. He was as fit and toned as anyone else in Delta, which made him in better shape than 99.9 percent of the population. But he wasn’t Hoot.
He’d handed Hoot his food and made a point of sitting on the other side of the table, and he pulled a long-sleeve shirt on when the night air cooled a bit. Hoot had looked at him with curiosity in those dark eyes. When Sanderson chose to sleep on the couch, Hoot didn’t say a word. Of course, Hoot wasn’t in the habit of talking all that much anyway. Not right after a mission. But Sanderson knew Hoot could sense his the awkwardness.
They never mentioned it, never talked about it, but he never saw Hoot looking at him again, and he himself had become more careful about looking at Hoot. Didn’t want something like that to fuck up a perfect working partnership, right?
Hell, Hoot probably didn’t even remember it. But it stuck in Sanderson’s mind.
It hadn’t put a wedge between them or anything. They were still the consummate partners, now leading different teams on the same mission. When Delta made a foray as a unit, his and Hoot’s teams cooperated as smoothly as he and Hoot did.
They had their disagreements, about ammunition or scopes or the best way to wear a particular harness, so it wasn’t like they were twins, mimicking each other or reacting to everything exactly the same way. But Sanderson did know how Hoot would react. And Hoot knew how Sanderson would react. And they could be next to each other behind a bunker or across the street from each other, leading separate teams, or miles apart at opposite sides of a city working different ends of the same problem or across the world on an entirely different missions - they knew.
Right now, Hoot was aware that Sanderson would be worried about him. But he wouldn’t let it concern him too much, because he was making his way to the rendezvous point, goddamn it, he was concentrating on making the meet and getting back to base. That’s what he had to be doing, Sanderson thought, as Sanderson walked to the mess to make sure there was food waiting for Hoot when he returned.
Because Hoot was coming back. Any minute now. Hoot was coming back.
Next: According to Plan 2
Back to: Soldier Porn
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