By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers) (5 page)

“So?”

Trisha asked before Kara even had a chance to put down her dinner tray. Kara scanned the officers’ mess to see if it was too late to sit somewhere else, but the other women of SOAR had already shifted to make room for her.

Her choice of seating was kinda all over the place. Most people had a spot and hung with their own. Kara moved around some and had only landed at the room’s center table with the SOAR women once or twice over the last two months.

The 75th Rangers always took a cluster of tables on the side closest to the chow line; the ability to get speedy seconds and thirds was an essential element of their existence. She’d only sat with them a few times. It was odd to sit with a combat unit when you didn’t carry a gun for a living—it broke some invisible bond of theirs whenever she joined them. It also made them uncomfortable that her jokes were often raunchier than theirs. She’d grown up in Brooklyn. What did they expect?

The Navy officers ranged across the front and the other side of the mess area. She spent most of her meals with them. Had more connection to them than the women of SOAR. She was never off ship for a mission, just like most of the Navy personnel. The ship was more intimately their home than anyone else’s. You could feel the stability of them. Also, one in six sailors were women. Sitting with them was more comfortable than with the Rangers, but she was still an outsider. Still Army.

And no way was she sitting with the tiny cluster of Delta operators in their quiet back corner. Nobody even sat
near
them. Only Trisha and Claudia Jean, who had both married into Delta for God alone knew what reason, ever crossed over.

She sighed and settled across from Trisha and next to Lola, hoping this wasn’t about what she thought it was about. They were such a tight group; another reason she hadn’t sat with them much.

As a group they unnerved her, and they also filled a table. Until the recent departure of Kee Stevenson and her teenage daughter, Dilya, there hadn’t really been room to join them. Kee was also one of those force-of-nature types that Kara both admired and found a little scary. With her gone, the group looked a little less unnerving. A little.

Connie Davis and Claudia Jean Gibson rarely spoke—scuttlebutt had them as the best mechanic and best Little Bird pilot in all SOAR—which only added to the risk factor of joining them. It was a gathering practically designed to terrify men and humble mere human females.

As Kara was finally settling onto her seat, Justin wandered in beneath that tall, white hat that almost reached to the overhead gray-painted pipes and cable runs. He did a casual scan of the room.

She looked down before she could be caught staring at him. Half alien from another planet and half man she really wanted to kiss again. Which made him even more alien. Sex was fun, a take-it-or-leave-it scenario for Kara. But that kiss, that stupidly simple kiss, had been incredible.

Tray. Focus on your tray. There’s food there.

The chief steward and her crew had served up beef stew and fresh-baked sourdough bread that smelled amazing.

“C’mon!” Trisha urged her, then took a large spoonful of stew and hissed against the heat. Unable to speak, she waved her spoon at Kara to speak.

Kara went for a subject change and turned to Lola. “Is she always this nosy?”

“You have no idea,” Lola commented drily. “Why, what does she have to be nosy about this time, or is it just her normal pushiness?”

Kara did her best to shrug it off, realizing her tactic was on the verge of backfiring on her.

“Cowboy,” Trisha managed to gasp out. Then she took a breath. “Wow! The stew is hot, but really good. So, how was the cowboy? Hot but good? He
shore
is
purty
, ain’t he?” Her fake Texas sounded ridiculous in a Boston Irish accent. Kara recalled an elbow in her ribs; no question Trisha had caught the meaning of Justin’s misstep in the debrief.

“You’re married.”

Trisha sighed happily. “I am. Doesn’t mean I’m blind though.”

“Why should I answer you?”

“Because”—Connie spoke up in that soft voice—“Trisha has over a ninety-seven percent success rate of getting answers with her pestering. Most choose to spare themselves the pain and simply provide requested information.”

Kara eyed the woman. Connie might look like the girl next door with her light-brown hair feather cut to her jaw, but Kara knew there was also a genius lurking behind those eyes. A genius with a photographic memory who just might have actually tallied Trisha’s success rate.

Kara held out her hand toward Trisha, who stared at it in puzzlement for a long moment before she reached out to take it. Kara offered one short handshake.

“Hi. My name is Captain Kara Moretti, and I’m one of the three percent.”

Trisha made a raspberry sound at her as Connie smiled and Lola burst out laughing. Claudia Jean nodded her quiet approval and turned back to her stew.

* * *

Justin sat with Lieutenant Barstowe and some of his Rangers. It was like old home week, just sitting with some guys and shooting the breeze. It was one of his favorite parts of being home.

Most of Roberts Quarter Horse Ranch, the RQR, was a premier American quarter horse breeding and training center. But Ma had a soft spot for training up the young ones in roping and racing for rodeo.

One of the treats for the resident campers had always been a campfire dinner. In summers, the campfire was used far more nights than the stove in the big farmhouse kitchen. The family always joined in for the meal; it was one of the things he missed most when serving overseas. The Texas stars, steaks sizzling on the cast-iron grate, an ice chest of cold Coke, and comfortably sore legs from a day in the saddle.

Sitting with the Rangers gave him some of that same feeling despite the steel-gray room and the bolted-down tables with raised edges to prevent losing a tray in a storm. He’d arrived in the middle of the retelling of the “Taking of the Turks.”

By the time they were done, Justin had reached a couple of conclusions. First off was that a U.S. Ranger was as full of himself as your average Texas rodeo rider. Second that they were actually pretty well justified to feel that way.

Sure, he’d faced his share of rocket-propelled grenades, shoulder-to-air missiles, and other such nasties during his time in the Afghanistan War. But that was far different than crawling through a muddy ditch to find an hombre with an AK-47 and a passel of anger to unload. The Rangers got down on the ground and faced it foot by foot.

“Got a theory,” he told them when the Turks had once more been browbeaten in story as well as song.

“Hit us.” Barstowe grinned across at him.

“Well, you guys are the working horses of Special Ops. All y’all get out there and beat down that track day in and day out.”

There were nods of approval and a few hooahs.

He eased back and dunked some of the good crusty bread into the stew. “Now my job and that of my fellow SOAR fliers is leading you ground-pounders where you need to go. I figure us as the purebreds of the crowd.”

As they razzed him, he shouted them back down, though it was seven to one at his table.

“Seriously, guys. You’re gonna put a pair of Army boots and some little ATVs up against a lady as beautiful as my
Calamity Jane
? Just not in the same league, pardners.”

That bought him some nods and some crap about gettin’ down and gettin’ dirty if he wanted to find out what it was really all about.

“Now them boys,” Justin cut them off and nodded over toward the Delta operators in the corner. Delta often did joint ops with the U.S. Rangers and drew most of its candidates from them. These guys were probably all hoping to make it one day. “They’re like the good old boys. They’re the ones who take home so many of the rodeo’s prizes that the competition for everyone else is who all can come in second. Like they’re so good that they aren’t playing fair.”

“Damn straight.” Barstowe slapped one of his men on the shoulder. “You could take on Gibson with one hand behind your back. Right, Johnson?”

“Hooah, Lieutenant!” Not there was a way he could give any other answer and retain Ranger pride. Though his worried look got another round of laughter going.

“And what does that make the Navy?” Chief Petty Officer Sly Stowell dropped his tray beside Justin’s.

“W’all”—Justin shot a grin over to the Rangers—“all your best rodeo boys need someone to do the driving between the events.”

There was a round of laughter among the Army guys.

Sly nodded calmly until they quieted. “I can see how you might make that mistake.”

“What mistake?” Johnson leaned forward, wanting to make up for no way he could beat Colonel Gibson.

“Thinking that all of you would have a place to ride if it weren’t for the Navy carting your sorry selves every which way and keeping you safe for the other twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes of the day. Did you really take the Turks’ asses down in ninety-five seconds?”

That got him razzes and cheers and more stories of the night’s operation. The Rangers jawed tales back and forth right through a dessert of honeyed fruit that really balanced off the richness of the stew.

“Excuse me, Cowboy. Can you direct me to Captain Moretti?”

Justin turned to look up at the man standing close behind him. His accent was Yankee, though Justin couldn’t pin it down. He was a lean guy, with black hair and skin almost as dark as Kara’s.

He gave a nod toward the table where all of the SOAR women sat together. “The pretty one.”

Justin wasn’t quite sure why he said it just that way. The women of SOAR were not only amazing examples of soldier fitness, but also collectively women who were a true joy to look at.

But Justin didn’t like the guy. Didn’t want to be helping him for some reason.

“A woman. Well, they didn’t tell me that. Excellent! Thanks, pard.” The guy clapped him on the shoulder as if they were old buddies and moved off.

Justin definitely didn’t like the guy.

He also didn’t like that he walked unerringly to Kara despite the insufficient description.

Nor the fact that ten seconds later Kara rose and headed out of the officers’ mess with the man.

It wasn’t jealousy.

Except that Justin could feel an urge deep in his hands to disassemble the stranger into tiny pieces, break him up like kindling, and toss him on the campfire.

“Captain Moretti?”

“I think we already established that, didn’t we?” Kara tried to keep the snide out of her voice, but didn’t succeed very well. It was clear from his accent that he was City and Upper West Side. Yeah, Brooklyn was rising in profile and trendiness—God help them all—and the Upper West Side of Manhattan was no longer the bedrock of old money, but it still felt that way. Though this guy looked more low-lifer, like the Upper West Side was phony and he should sound Morningside Heights. Besides, coming from where he did, he’d be a fan of the Yankees rather than the best baseball team in New York, the Mets.

“We need a secure place to speak. Where is your GCS installed?”

“You need to identify your ass better than
Major Wilson
before we go a step further.” She dug in her heels along the two-man-wide corridor outside the officers’ mess. Her ground control station coffin was close—walk about fifty meters down this corridor, descend a ship’s ladder, and step onto the hangar deck—but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “Gotta know you way better before I take you into a secure location.”

“Hello, Willard,” Colonel Michael Gibson’s voice sounded softly from behind her. “Saw you walk through. Do we have a problem here?”

“Your parents named you Willard?” Kara continued to razz him to buy herself a moment to analyze the unexpected interruption. “Willard Wilson? I’m guessing they didn’t like you at first sight. Not even a little if they named you that. What are we supposed to call you, Willy Willy? Square Willy? Nah, that’s what they must have called you in school. Maybe we’ll call you Willy Nilly.”

Mr. Delta Force Colonel, Mr. Number One Soldier in the U.S. Military, knew the man by name. She could feel her hackles going down. Recommendations didn’t come much higher.

“Got a mouth on ya, don’t cha, Brooklyn?”

“Special for you, West Side.” His fake Brooklyn accent was totally lame. He was one of those guys who was so convinced that he was charming that even the dumbest broad could see through it. And Kara was far from that stupid.

The man looked pleadingly at Michael.

“Don’t be looking at him when you’re asking to get around me. Can’t even fight your own battles?”

“I wasn’t expecting a goddamn—”

“You’ll want to listen to him,” Michael cut the man off.

To the best of her knowledge the ever-so-silent D-boy never cut off anyone. And it wasn’t her that he was cutting off, but rather this Major Dickhead. And in the process telling her that the guy wasn’t as much of a dickhead as she was thinking. Like eight layers of communication in six words. No wonder they’d made him a Delta boy.

“Can we get the hell outta here, lady? We’re drawing a crowd.” The ill-named Willard Wilson was looking over her shoulder.

She glanced back and spotted Justin standing there, stopped two steps outside the mess. His pure white hat and golden hair only emphasized the age of the yellow-painted
Peleliu
corridor. There were even spots of rust showing through on the steel walls. Though that made Justin look just that much newer and shinier.

His face showed he was wondering if he should move in fast or what. Kara appreciated the backup, not that she needed it with Michael Gibson standing beside her, but it was thoughtful of him. Then she had an idea and flashed a subtle hand signal for Justin to hold fast. She saw him shift his stance slightly in answer before she turned back to the Major.

“You’re going to be talking air assets?”

He glared down at her and then nodded reluctantly.

“You show up on the
Peleliu
and you single me out of the crowd, that tells me one piece you need. What else do you need with the 5D, big or small?”

He shifted from scowl to consideration.

“’Cause if you need big, that”—she nodded to Justin—“the tall drink of water in the cowboy hat, is probably the best Chinook pilot there is.”

“And who are you to be saying that?”

There were moments in a soldier’s life that were just sweet. You ground through daily crap. You made Captain. All the bad stuff with the good. But every once in a while the universe just lined up her little lines of fate, and you got to really rub a superior rank’s nose in it.

“Because, Major Willy Nilly—still can’t believe your mama named you that—you are talking to the 5D’s Air Mission Commander.” That she’d been the AMC barely an hour was information he didn’t need. “It’s my job to know my people and the 5D only takes the very best.”

Which actually was a fact she hadn’t taken in about herself yet either. If Justin was in the 5D, he hadn’t been just a good pilot of the MH-47, he was one of the best on the planet. And if she was here—

Watch it, girl! Ego will spin your head.

“A drone jock who’s an AMC?” Wilson asked Michael with a
Who is she shitting?
tone.

Kara jabbed him in the chest, forcing his attention back to her.

“An
RPA pilot
who is an AMC, and also I can tell you that in thirty seconds this corridor is going to be clogged with U.S. Rangers wondering what we’ve been talking about out here for so long, especially because you’re about the least subtle guy ever hatched. They’re action hungry right at the moment and will want to know.” She nodded back toward the gathering noise, knowing full well they’d mostly be exiting out the other side of the mess toward the barracks and the rec room up forward.

Major Wilson cursed and then waved. “All three of you, let’s go.” And he headed off down the corridor.

Kara snagged his shirt before he could move off.

“Now what the fuck, Brooklyn?” Not the Heights. With his prep school and fancy college overtones, he really was Upper West Side and was just playing at belonging onboard here.

Sometimes fate served up a dish even sweeter. She offered her best smile and a sharp salute.

“Regret to inform the Major, but he’s going in the wrong-ass direction.”

* * *

Justin watched them turn and approach him with Kara leading the way along the corridor.

She flashed a low hand signal for Justin to fall in beside her as she approached. The Major had fallen behind with Michael, but Kara kept her voice low.

“You ever think about the fact that you’re one of the best Chinook pilots in existence or you wouldn’t be with the 5D?”

He’d have stumbled to a halt if Kara hadn’t been busy moving down the corridor in her typical faster-than-a-quarter-horse-in-the-last-hundred-yards fashion. His legs had to be twice as long as hers and he still had trouble keeping up.

“No. Can’t say as I had. Knew you were the best RPA there was or they wouldn’t have tagged you for AMC as well. How in the Lord above did you do that anyway? But I hadn’t really thought—”

“—the other way around. I know. I just told Major Jerk-Off that you were the very best, then realized that you must be or you wouldn’t be here. Pretty wild ride, huh, Cowboy?”

“Saddle up, girl. The ride—”

“—is just beginning. I know.”

Justin wondered how many people she ticked off with that sentence-finishing thing. He always hated when a Yankee acted as if he didn’t speak fast enough. But with Kara Moretti, it felt more like they were in fantastic sync, like when you shifted from a rough trot to a smooth canter.

He wanted to say something else to see if she’d keep doing it. But his mind was a blank. He’d never had trouble coming up with words around pretty women, but with Kara Moretti—especially this version of her switched over to some hyperintense AMC gait—he didn’t know what to do.

Except try to keep up.

* * *

Kara braced her arms on the ladder’s rails, lifted her feet, and slid down a full deck. She opened the hatchway to the hangar deck…and then had to wait for the three guys to clamber down the steep steps to join her.

The white cargo container of the ground control station was tucked back in the corner of the echoing space. The hangar deck filled the rear half of the ship for three decks high. Being capped by the steel underside of the flight deck and walled by the ship’s steel hull with only a few gaps in it made a dropped screwdriver echo like a gunshot and a whisper audible down the entire length of the deck. When maintenance was test firing a Black Hawk’s T700 turbines, the sound could blow the top of your head off despite safety muffs.

At the moment, the deck was empty. No lights were on, so only the sharp edge of the early morning sun sliced in through the various openings like the aircraft elevator. The light was so bright, it almost hurt, the shadows so thick that they were black and mysterious. The silence was deep enough that even their rubber-soled footsteps sounded clearly and left rippling echoes like waves on a pond.

She glanced down.

Justin wore Army boots, not cowboy boots. For some reason that struck her as one of the oddest things in an already odd day. She’d had Captain Justin Roberts all neatly slotted away in her mind—Texas, macho, clumsy around women. Your basic goofball.

And in the last few hours he’d flown a mission immaculately, delivered and retrieved his customers in difficult terrain, and given her one of the sweetest kisses of her life.

And it had finally worked its way through her thick skull that he’d been assigned to the 5D fresh out of Fort Campbell training. That meant the instructors had really seen something in him. Hell, SOAR only had sixty Chinook pilots out of the more than twelve hundred of the craft out there across the various services. That alone meant the man was damn good at what he did.

And if SOAR only took the best, the 5D skimmed off the absolute top fliers, something the mythical founders of the company, Majors Beale and Henderson, had instituted right from the beginning five years earlier.

Well, she’d always found having a standard to live up to was a strong motivator. And if Beale’s copilot had gone on to be the company’s first AMC, it was time for Kara to step it up if she was going to hang on to being the second one in the company’s short history.

The GCS coffin itself was crowded up against the forward bulkhead of the hangar deck. Heavy cables snaked out of the side, one into the ship’s power, the other into the communications array to emerge at the six-meter dish she’d rigged high aloft for communicating with her RPAs. It auto-tracked the Gray Eagle when it was in line of sight and switched over to the
Peleliu
’s satellite feed when the RPA went out of range, like during her dive last night.

At the door of the GCS coffin, Kara halted and looked back at Colonel Gibson. “You’re sure about this dude?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Kara already knew that there would be few higher stamps of approval than Michael’s; she just wanted another shot at Major Willard Wilson. She resisted tagging him aloud as Limp Willy, but it was a close thing.

She keyed the code and then leaned in for the retinal scan. The heavy bolts thunked open and she led the way in, turning on the internal lights.

* * *

Justin was last in and stumbled to a halt. He’d seen the outside every day for two months. It looked like a white-painted cargo container, barely worthy of note if not for the heavy locks. But he’d never been in the GCS before, and it was like seeing a whole new side to Kara Moretti.

How much did he know about this woman?

“Not much” was the answer staring him in the face.

One wall was dominated by a pair of long white boxes that he recognized as Gray Eagle coffins. He’d been responsible several times for transporting one of them to an appropriate airstrip, because the MQ-1C Gray Eagle needed a couple thousand feet of runway, more than twice the length of the
Peleliu
. So, when the 5D and the ship were on the move, the ground team would box up the Gray Eagle RPA. Then he’d fetch it, and them, for the move. Afterward, he’d deliver them to some handy Air Force base for launch and recovery.

How odd to fly an aircraft that you almost never saw. It’s what those guys at NASA must feel like. He remembered a trip he and his siblings had made to Florida when they were all kids. His parents had taken the three of them to Kennedy Space Center for a shuttle launch. Rafe only ever cared about the horses, but Bessie Anne had wanted to be an astronaut. Sister who was an astronaut had sounded pretty cool to a nine-year-old. She’d gone U.S. Air Force, but hadn’t made it into the program before the shuttles went away.

But he’d remembered that launch and the tour Ma had arranged of the command-and-control center. Granted there had been like sixty gals and guys there, but you could just feel that everything had a purpose and it all had a single focus—launching a rocket into space.

Kara’s coffin was like that; it was immersion in an absolutely focused space.

On the first stretch of the wall opposite the Gray Eagle’s containers were a long workbench and three much smaller coffins. They were barely two meters long each and as big across as his forearm. These would be the ScanEagle RPAs. They could be launched off a patrol boat or any ship with a little open space. He’d seen Kara use the little craft a couple times for simpler sorties or as a communications relay when the Gray Eagle was over the horizon and there wasn’t a satellite channel handy. Even now, one was out on the bench, clearly taken apart for service.

It was the back end of the container that really drove home how different Moretti was. The Gray Eagle’s ground control station was a full pilot-and-copilot rig, but Kara’s only view of the world was through screens.

And for such a seemingly simple craft, there were a whole lot of screens. Big ones where he had windows on the
Jane
, secondaries that must include sensor data when active. Then a full set of flight instrumentation and controls.

On top of that was a bank of radios even more daunting than on his
Calamity Jane
, which was saying something. SOAR’s MH-47Gs had a whole lot more tech rigged up to them than your average Chinook: terrain avoidance, signal jamming, and advanced threat detection were only the start of what he’d had to learn when he transferred into the 160th Regiment. But the Gray Eagle specialized in signal interception and location, and had the hardware on show to back it up.