Light Up the Night (5 page)

Their conversation was running down. Bill would have to make a decision soon or they'd start battering at him again. A verbal battle was not one he was well equipped to tackle. He had about as long as it would take them to refill and complain about their Navy coffee.

Working more closely with the Night Stalkers was a big downside for him. They were among Bill's least favorite people. Okay, that wasn't quite right. After seven years as a SEAL, he'd been on dozens of missions and hundreds of training flights on the helicopters of the 160th SOAR. They were exceptional pilots to the very last man, or woman. He'd never flown with any of the other women of SOAR, but after last night he didn't question their standards.

CW 2 Patricia O'Malley was clearly exceptional, and no question that she'd be pushing on him if he stayed aboard.

But he would never wholly trust them, which was a near-disastrous problem on missions. It was like not trusting your gun to fire, your knife to cut, or your buddy to stand right beside you ready to die, if necessary, when things went sideways.

Because of one deed, an event more than twenty years ago, he would never trust them completely. The Battle of Mogadishu should never have been a battle. It was a smash-and-grab operation. Capture a couple key advisers of Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the most powerful warlord in Mogadishu, and gut his powerful rule over the Mog. Instead, two of their choppers had been shot down, turning the smash-and-grab into a total clusterfuck. It had been an awful day for them and, as a result, an awful day for his own father. It nearly broke the family he left behind.

The Army stipend for a young private first class had done almost nothing to stave off the brutal poverty that had ruined his mother's life and made his a living hell.

As an eight-year-old kid who'd lost his father, he'd sworn to pay back the Somalis and the Night Stalkers both. He wasn't sure which one he was angrier at. As an adult, he understood the Night Stalkers' devastating loss as well and he was a little more mature about it. A little. But something had made him stupid enough to volunteer when the assignment to penetrate the pirate crews of Somalia had come up. And now they were asking him to trust SOAR in the one place he was least likely to do so.

Even two decades after his father's death, Somalia was a total train wreck. Except they weren't even that fortunate. Those in power weren't there long enough for strategizing, something totally out of their mind-set. They were simply reacting to warlords, Islamic extremists battling for control, and a massive depletion of fishing stock by foreign fleets taking advantage of Somalia's anarchy, which made the country unable to guard its own seas.

The question was: Could he help fix something if he stayed on with Operation Heavy Hand to quash the pirates? Answer to that much, at least, was “yes.”

Could he resist the urge to blow the damn country even further back into the Stone Age than it already was? Well, implementing a major invasion was beyond his circle of control, so it was a moot point.

Was he willing to fly with people like Patricia O'Malley to do what he could? He didn't like his own answer to that one, or that it was even a question he'd asked himself in that way.

What the hell was a female Boston-Irish Night Stalker doing in his head? Crap, but that woman was there every time he turned around, even when she wasn't. And he was sitting still…trying not to remember how she'd grinned at him when he warned her about his eyes going purple. And—time to focus.

He looked over at Michael, the only one who hadn't spoken in the half hour the others had used to try talking him into this. Speaking of exceptional people, he would have the chance to serve alongside the best warrior on the planet. That opportunity was damn hard to argue with too.

“Well, Colonel. What are you thinking?”

Michael did his slow assessment of each person's face around the suddenly silent room.

Then he turned and studied Bill long enough for Bill to begin counting his heartbeats.

“You already made your choice. Why are you asking me?”

Bill shrugged, but it did nothing to ease that target itch between his shoulder blades.

“Tonight's flight is a wide-area sweep.” AMC Stevenson stood at the small podium at the front of the 02 deck briefing room. It was a twenty-by-thirty-foot room on the closest deck beneath the flight deck.

Trisha slouched in the last of a half-dozen rows of comfortable chairs. It was cushy enough to let a pilot forget she was about to launch on some mission that would pound her butt sore before the night was through. The only other feature of the room was a whole lotta gray-painted steel.

What was it with these guys? The Coast Guard boats were all pristine white with orange accents, and their choppers were orange with white accents. Their mission was to be seen. The Night Stalkers' machines were nonreflective black-on-black, but inside Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the rooms had a bit of color and some nice pictures taken by various Night Stalkers, mostly of helos in exotic locales, but some of them were really good shots.

The Navy could just as easily have gone with blue or pastels. It wasn't as if there were any outside windows to the briefing room where a bad guy could peek in and critique the color scheme. Sure, gray was the best low-visibility coloring for the sea and the sky, but using the same color inside simply showed a lack of imagination. They definitely needed to start recruiting more interior designers.

The briefing room was weary with the scuffs and aging of ten thousand missions over the thirty-five years since the ship's original commissioning. No amount of blah gray paint hid the dings from years of service. What in the world had dented the wall just above the Air Mission Controller's head? Something had run into it hard, from the other side. Trisha pictured the ship's layout.

The only thing out there was the elevator shaft for shifting the jets and choppers from the hangar up to the flight deck. Some kinda monster sea roll must have sent a plane slamming into the other side of the wall. Guess it was better than going overboard.

Only about half of the chairs were occupied, with everyone still in their off-duty clothes until they heard the night's task assignments. It was a veritable sea of green T-shirts, camo pants, and sneakers. Dennis, Max, and Roland were there, so that accounted for all of the Little Birds. Lola Maloney and her DAP team were there. Dusty James, who had only recently made the jump to a front-seater of the
Vicious
after four years as a gunner and mechanic for Major Henderson on the
Viper
, wasn't. Apparently no need for the transport Black Hawk tonight. The AMC would be working from the ship's communications platform in the upper stories of the
Peleliu
's tower.

All pretty standard. Even having Michael Gibson in the room appeared to be standard. No one else commented on it anyway, so Trisha assumed it was normal. His rock-steady nerves and the presence of the top D-boy served as a constant reminder that this was a serious operation with the highest levels of support.

There was only one break in the familiar sea of green, one spot of Navy blue. Only one blemish of a person here who didn't belong.

Trisha glared over at Billy the SEAL sitting in the front row beside Michael. Couldn't they find off-ship transport for the man? Instead of being gone, he was in a preflight mission briefing. Something was wrong with this picture, but no one was telling her a damn thing.

A glance at her copilot revealed that Roland had no more idea what was going on than she did.

“O'Malley!”

“Sir!” She jumped to her feet when the AMC called out to her. She did a trick that every soldier learned by second year if they were going to survive the Army—she rewound the last few moments of conversation that she'd been hearing but not really paying attention to.

She was supposed to take Lieutenant Bruce under her wing.

Who the heck was Lieutenant Bruce?

That's when she caught Billy the SEAL glaring at her with those wondrous blue eyes that had cost her half a day's sleep and looking very unhappy. Lieutenant William “Billy the SEAL” Bruce? Crap. Bloody Scotsman.

“Yes, sir! Glad to, sir!” she repeated and dropped back into her seat after carefully ignoring the Navy SEAL.

Maybe this was some kind of newbie hazing. But she didn't think SOAR did much of that. Or maybe they did, but still, they wouldn't do that when a mission was involved.

She'd flown for two years with the toughest instructors ever fielded in heli-aviation, and that was after five years with the Screaming Eagles. Her final months had been the best. Her friend from their days in the 101st, Major Emily Beale, had taken a final rotation as a training instructor as she was leaving SOAR. For three glorious months Emily had shown Trisha what you could make a helicopter really do.

Trisha came into the field and flew copilot with Lola Maloney and learned even more during her initial skirmishes. By the time they seated her in a Mission-Enhanced Little Bird beside Roland, she was all set to prove just what a MELB could really do. The Little Bird was the best toy a girl had ever been given to play with.

So, why were they saddling her behind with Billy the Lieutenant SEAL if it wasn't hazing?

“You two seem to have a rapport.” Chief Warrant Lola Maloney was standing right in front of her.

“A rapport, ma'am?” Trisha had missed the rest of the briefing. Even the rewind trick wasn't working. Everyone else was streaming out of the room. She'd have to catch up with Roland to find out what was going down tonight. They hadn't called her name again, so she'd be background, standard operations.

“Yes.”

“Chief Warrant?” Trisha tried to make sense of what Maloney had just said. She and the SEAL had a pretty fair feeling of mutual disgust going on—if you ignored the bit of heat she couldn't seem to stop from running up and down her system—but that was about all.

“What is it, O'Malley?” Maloney stood with the casual ease of a magazine model on break. Her long, mahogany-colored hair draped down to her shoulders and framed a face and dark eyes that made a lot of men stop and stare. But Trisha had flown with her, and the woman was an amazing pilot, as well. If it weren't sacrilege in the Trisha Personal Handbook, she'd say that Lola might even be as skilled as Emily Beale. The woman definitely wasn't here because of her looks.

“Why me?” Trisha blurted it out and hoped she wasn't stepping over the line.

The Chief Warrant merely smiled. “You are the one most recently through training. And we always need to consider our customers whether they be Ranger, Delta, or SEAL. A chance to work one on one with a highly decorated SEAL is good practice. Second, he'll be mostly flying in the
Vengeance
with me, and if he is to recommend ‘best use' tactics, he needs exposure to what each bird can do. Your skill with the Little Bird makes you well suited to the task.”

Okay, if the number-two-ranked Night Stalker on board the
Peleliu
wanted to pay her a compliment like that, she'd do her best to not let her ego run rampant.

Reading her expression as acceptance, Lola Maloney nodded and was gone.

Now the only people left in the briefing room were Trisha herself and, standing by his seat in the front row, Billy the SEAL, facing her with his arms crossed over his ever-so-pretty chest. He wore that near-permanent scowl he seemed so glad to hand out at every opportunity.

“Okay, sailor. We have over an hour to flight.” So, some part of her had been listening and caught the mission start time at least. “We might as well make use of it. C'mon.”

She turned for the hatchway nearest the stairs leading up to the flight deck without waiting to see if he followed.

Trisha was halfway up the ladder before she felt vibrations through the steel indicating that he was following behind her. The footsteps were no heavier than a child might make. The man could certainly move quietly.

At the head of the ladder, she grabbed a sound-muffling headset and draped it around her neck in case someone was running up their engines.

She resisted the urge to look back and gauge if his mood was as foul as hers.

***

Bill grabbed a headset and followed Patricia out onto the flight deck. He was still trying to figure out why in the hell he wasn't flying back to his team right now. He missed the guys. They would be running some new scenario on something that would kick all their asses and set the bar just that one inch higher. And here he was with Night Stalkers, Somali, and one more time following this stunner of a woman from behind. That part at least he could really learn to enjoy.

The heat of the flight deck slapped at him. The gray-steel surface had been baking all day in the East African sun, which had only just ducked below the horizon. The heat shimmers were so thick in the early evening light that the horizon danced as if it were a live beast and not merely a quiet ocean of rolling waves. Even the bow lights a mere four hundred feet away flickered as if they were erratic strobes rather than steady white lights.

Patricia O'Malley did the same thing. She shimmered with the anger that coursed off her in waves.

“Why me?” Her voice and her displeasure had been clear enough, despite the shuffling of the fliers as they emptied from the briefing room. Perhaps for a normal person, the distance would have masked her words. But like most Special Ops, he spoke three languages and had learned to mostly read lips during quiet operations where a whisper could give away your position and possibly get you killed. Even the slightest bit of a word through crowd noise, and he could tell the general purpose of the conversation.

And he didn't need any of that to read Patricia O'Malley's displeasure three rows away in the briefing room. So she had no use for him? Fine. He'd just have no use for her, no matter what the hell the pint-sized twerp was doing to his libido.

She led him aft past the line of tied-down helicopters. Parked, silent death, waiting for their next chance to strike out. He was used to the transport Black Hawks. He'd ridden in them hundreds of times, both SOAR's and others when SOAR wasn't available. And he'd give them credit—the Night Stalkers' birds were immaculate. They had the highest percentage of equipment availability of any unit that flew, Army, Navy, or Air Force.

Most units were glad to have their birds mission-capable eighty-five percent of the time. SOAR's helicopters pushed that percentage into the high nineties. He'd heard that the Night Stalkers considered a bird not ready for even a training flight a “mission failure” and treated it that way, including a full investigation. It didn't happen very often.

They walked past the nose of the
Vengeance
, the Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk flown by Lola Maloney. He knew the DAPs well, or so he'd thought. But now that he considered it, he'd rarely been so close to one. They lurked carefully in the high-guard position, only rarely coming to ground. Up close, especially in the falling light of evening after the sun was down but before the deck lights came up, the machine looked terrifying.

There were only about a dozen DAPs on the planet, designed by and built solely for the Night Stalkers. No one else had them. No one else even came close. It was the most lethal heli-platform ever assembled. And that was if you discounted the people, who were actually the bird's true strength.

And this wasn't a normal DAP. Rumor, again only rumors available about most of what SOAR did despite his being a SEAL, whispered that only two DAPs had ever been converted to the stealth standards used on the raid of Osama bin Laden's compound.

The
Vengeance
was one of them, the other apparently destroyed on a mission. The whisper said it was in a fire on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, which made no sense. That meant this bird was truly unique. Five blades instead of four. A large sound cap covering the lifters at the center of the rotor. Angular shapes and odd forms rather than a Black Hawk's normal rounded lines. The thing looked vicious.

More of the Mission Enhanced Little Birds had been built than the DAPs, but that didn't make them exactly common, either. This particular operation only had one, and they'd given it to Patricia O'Malley. He knew that SOAR had done some work on the design, but how much could you do to a bird that only weighed fifteen hundred pounds before you added crew, fuel, and weapons?

This was going to be really sad. He was a licensed pilot. Granted, he wasn't combat-rated, but he knew his way around a chopper plenty well, especially the OH-6 Cayuse frame that SOAR's Little Birds were built on.

Then Patricia stopped in front of her helicopter. He hadn't been paying close enough attention last night. This chopper also sported stealth modifications. Six-bladed rotor, instead of the normal five. Angular body shapes that would be carbon-fiber rather than metal. The outboard weapons were encapsulated in radar-nonreflective pods. Damn. Anotherstealth conversion.

“Okay.” Patricia's voice was completely different than at the meal or in the briefing. Suddenly the woman who'd hauled his ass out of Bosaso stood once more before him. She hadn't grown any taller than her normal shrimp-sized self, but it felt as if she had.

“You've flown?”

He nodded.

“Little Birds?”

Cayuse, close enough. Almost five hundred hours in this class of aircraft. He nodded again.

“That's a problem.”

“Why?”

“Because it means that you've flown OH-6 Cayuse, the OH-58 Kiowas, or something similar.”

Shrewd. He'd give her credit for that. He was aware of crossing his arms over his chest, not a “friendly” gesture per his training on blending into a crowd. So he shoved his hands in his jeans pockets, which at least upgraded unfriendly behavior to merely petulant, and leaned against the side of the Little Bird.

He jerked away and rubbed a hand up his arm. The flat, black skin of the chopper was still blazing hot with the sun's setting heat, though the equatorial night was fast darkening the sky.