Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) (22 page)

Connie returned to the helicopter just minutes ahead of the prearranged “go” time. John took the woolen cap and squeezed her hand through the thick wool. It steadied her heart rate. Calmed her nerves.

At the predesignated second, Major Beale yanked the collective and shoved the cyclic forward. In moments they were up and out of the fjord and racing along at ten meters above the ground, well below tree level.

The heavy overcast and light snow were ideal. They’d be nearly invisible and the rotor noise was muted by the descending flakes. A blizzard would be even better. Be nice to see how the stealth mods behaved in a high-wind, zero-visibility attack scenario. Already the ADAS was proving a more than fair replacement for the FLIR.

Connie watched as they flew along the wide track of a groomed cross-country ski trail that rolled and dipped along the gentle snow-shrouded hills, finally opening out over a small road. From there, a farmer’s field led to a swath cleared by recent logging. The route was longer than their original path in, but it kept the Hawks well below radar level and didn’t recross territory where they might have been spotted earlier or even tracked. If the SOG commandos hadn’t finished their job capturing the Swedish air hangar that was tonight’s training target, they’d need all the stealth they could find.

Viper
followed close behind, they were right in the groove.

“Ten miles,” Clay called out.

Connie caught herself checking her gun and kicking a boot against the loaded ammo can. No live ammo tonight—it would be a battle of training lasers—but habits were part of survival, so she didn’t stop her full weapons systems check.

They slipped over a high bank and down into a riverbed, following it north and west. This would get them within a mile of the target.

Connie saw a weather update from the copilot flash up in the visor. The only thing that really mattered was cold. It was a dozen degrees below freezing and they were barely a thousand feet above sea level. No compensation for high altitude or hot, thin air tonight. The Hawk was running at full performance. Of course, now they had to watch for icing conditions.

“Two miles.”

The target, one of the Swedish Air Force’s Gripen jet hangars, had been warned, but not warned. They’d been rearmed with Simunitions weapons, fairly indistinguishable from the real thing except that they had solid-blue painted stocks and would only take specialized, nonlethal rounds. But no special security protocols, standard patrols only.

“Silence from the ground team,” Clay reported.

“Power up,” the Major called out.

It was weird to not hear the miniguns’ electric motors spin up as a high whine on the edge of her hearing. Instead she heard distinct clicks as the lasers were switched to standby. Tight enough beams to register hits on body sensors, but diffuse enough to not blind if they impacted someone who didn’t have his specialized goggles in place.

“Thirty seconds. Training weapons only.”

Connie glanced down at the FN SCAR strapped across her chest, blue stock folded in. Good to go.

She counted halfway down in her head, then the Major broke cover and rolled over the last kilometer up the road at full throttle. They passed the red stoplight halfway there.

The Swedes were very smart. They didn’t depend on large, centralized bases for their air defense. One big bomb in the center of an air base runway and everything would go to crap. England had learned that lesson the hard way in WWII. Sweden planted her jets in pairs in underground hangers all over the country. Their runways were straight stretches of road with a stoplight at either end. Set the light to red to stop car traffic, roll out the planes, and take off from deep in the safety of the surrounding trees; the jets were invisible except from straight above until they were already at fighting speed.

The fact that the light was red could mean the attack by the commandos was a success and they’d blocked the road in preparation for the Black Hawks’ arrival. Or they were about to face down a pair of Swedish fast-movers head on.

With a roll of her thumb Connie zoomed her ADAS view out to the limits. Nothing ahead. Not even any sign of the hangar. There’d been the stoplight on the empty stretch of road, so this had to be the right road. Even as she felt the Major pulling back on the cyclic to slow them down, a reflector, bright in the infrared searchlight, arced through the air and landed in the middle of the road.

Beale flew one rotor past the beacon and thumped down onto the road with
Viper
one rotor back. Two seconds early.

Turning to the side, Connie could see the hangar, its broad doors set back into the hill beside the road. One of the bay doors stood open, and bright flashes of Simunitions fire glittered in the night.

John rose out of his seat and slammed open the cargo bay door, readying to assist anyone in the evac area. Connie swept the area with her laser-simulated minigun, careful to avoid the SOG commandos with the infrared reflective Swedish flags on their gear. Crazy Tim “killed” the jets with two quick bursts of red light.

Connie could hear that the rotors were flat but at full chop, ready for instant departure.

The commandos rolled in, four guys, with two prisoners and a stack of laptops and paper notebooks. This was over a DAP Hawk’s weight limit in Afghanistan. But, she had to remind herself, they were now low and cold and they weren’t carrying a full weapons load, which was the real limiting factor on crew-carrying for the DAP. She usually carried so much hammer force that excess crew was not an option.

They were aloft twenty-eight seconds after arrival and sliding off into the night. They swept less than five feet over a Volvo sedan parked at the red light. The driver, who’d gotten out to stand beside his car and see what he could see, plastered himself on the road as they roared by close overhead. No running lights and moving at one hundred and fifty knots and now, with the stealth upgrades to her rotors, too quiet for anyone to properly judge the distance. The motorist never knew what blew by him. Connie could learn to seriously like this. Rolling right, the Major was back in the riverbed and on her way out.

They dropped the commandos and their “captives” on a Swedish Navy Visby-class corvette anchored off Stockholm. The ship had a single helipad, so the
Vengeance
and
Viper
took turns disgorging the SOGs and their captives. It would give a chance for the SOGs and the Swedish Navy to razz their captured Air Force brethren. A replacement crew would already be in place back in the hangar.

The Swedes made a big deal over them before they left. Not in how neatly the operation had gone, nor how interesting their helicopters were. Connie had expected both of those.

No. A customs inspector came out and insisted on seeing their military IDs and their passports while Major Henderson waited overhead. This struck her as especially odd. Sweden was a member of the European Union, which meant U.S. forces didn’t need their passports to cross into any country for a fair way around. The inspector pulled out a stamp and whacked each of their passports with an exit stamp.

“You have now taken exit of our country.”

No one knew what to make of it. This wasn’t covered in the exercise briefing. They’d just been thrown out of the country.

Within ten seconds of both DAPs being aloft, they were redirected over an encrypted circuit.

They didn’t return to Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport but instead continued out over the Baltic Sea and landed on the USS
Germantown
, a Whidbey Island-class dock-landing ship. The deck crew rolled the
Vengeance
aside while they were still shutting her down to make room for Mark. In moments both
Vengeance
and
Viper
were tied down to the deck and secure.

Connie and John worked in easy harmony double-checking the tie-down work of the Germantown’s crew. Maybe they really had resolved whatever in the hell was going on between them. Connie certainly hoped so.

A CSAR Hawk was also on the deck, though there was no crew about.

“That’s an ‘M.’” Connie pointed it out to John.

The rotor blades on the combat search and rescue bird were wider than a standard blade. Not just CSAR, it had SOAR’s MH60-M upgrade. Having that bird sitting on the deck next to the DAPs was not the most encouraging sign she’d ever seen.

A blast of wind brushed her aside, until she had to grab a handhold on the Hawk to stay upright. An AgustaWestland AW169 with French civilian markings settled out of the night onto the deck. Not quite room to land with the three Black Hawks aboard, so it hovered with an open cargo door over the edge of the deck.

A man in U.S. Naval Commander insignia came up. “Here is the rest of your crew.” He nodded toward the helicopter.

Four guys, each with enough gear to bury a mule, jumped down and landed lightly despite their loads. She recognized the leader, having flown with Colonel Gibson many times in Afghanistan.

“Hey, Michael, thought you were still in the sand,” Major Henderson greeted him jovially.

The Delta Force operator inspected the overcast sky and the flakes of snow drifting out of the cold sky.

“I might wish I still was.”

CSAR and Delta Force. The night just got a whole lot more interesting. And the mission suddenly too real. Here they were in Europe, but their passports were clearly marked as having left. Now, with D-boys along, it meant they would be flying down the knife’s edge.

The Naval Commander shouted to be heard over the sound of the departing AW169. “We’ve taken the liberty of moving your gear aboard from your hotel. Let me show you to your cabins to change into civvies. Your boat leaves in five minutes.”

Five minutes didn’t leave Connie time to ask, “What boat?”

She patted the nose of
Vengeance
for luck, then they all hurried below to change.

“Now this is traveling in style.” On the lowest deck of the landing ship, Connie climbed into the backseat of a Saab 9-5 and John slid in beside her. Certainly one of the more surreal things she’d done lately, climbing into a luxury automobile when the nearest land lay at least twenty miles away through a dark and snowy night.

Two of the D-boys took the front seat. Colonel Gibson and the other D-boy loaded up with the two Majors in the car beside them. The rest of the crew loaded into a third one. With the typical imagination of the Swedes, the three cars were black, silver, and gray.

A loud thump and whine shook all of the cars, louder than the idling ship’s engines. The back end of the ship unhinged. A massive landing ramp fifty feet wide and just as long lowered, exposing the night sky and the rolling waves of the Baltic Sea. The three cars were parked on an LCAC, a seriously large landing craft. These were not the little twelve-foot-wide landing craft of the Normandy beaches that chugged along at ten miles per hour and could dump forty troops or a jeep in the low surf.

The Navy’s modern idea of a landing craft was fifty feet wide and ninety feet long, flew on a cushion of air, and could deliver an Abrams MBT. Last Connie had checked, a main battle tank weighed almost seventy tons. All three cars together weighed less than five, a load so small as to be laughable.

She was in a car on a landing craft, parked inside the cargo hold of a U.S. warship. Sometimes the Army was just too cool for words.

With a roar that hurt her ears despite the car’s insulation, the fans of the landing craft screamed to life. All around them, the large rubber skirt of the landing craft inflated. In a moment, they lifted a few inches off the deck and were sliding out of the back of the ship, down the ramp, and into the ocean.

“It makes perfect sense.” She had to shout a little for John to stand a chance of hearing her. “If you want to sneak into a friendly country you’ve just left, climb aboard a ninety-foot-long military landing craft. What? We’re going to just drive to the nearest road and drop off three cars full of Special Forces troops?”

He nodded in response, she could just make out his grin that went with it. In the darkness of the backseat, despite the D-boys sitting in the front, she risked brushing her fingers along his arm, as if steadying herself. She wasn’t afraid or worried. She simply liked the feeling of touching him.

They roared ahead, the craft weaving a little as it weathered the chop on the Baltic Sea.

“How fast?” John shouted, but she could only shrug.

One of the D-boys, neither of whom had yet to speak their names, called back. “This lightly loaded, she can cruise at seventy knots. If there’s trouble…” he shrugged.

At over eighty miles per hour they were moving almost half the speed of a Black Hawk. Except this ship weighed eighty tons empty, compared with the Black Hawk’s eleven tons fully loaded.

When they slowed, it was a major relief.

In moments, the deck angle changed as if they were climbing some hill out in the ocean. With the air cushion inflated, there was no way for the occupants of the center cargo bay to see anything. That was up to the hovercraft’s crew perched up in their little forward turret two stories above the deck.

Another minute and the fans wound down to a mere roar. Connie could feel the thump as they settled to the ground. A loud hiss sounded as the forward air bag deflated and the front ramps lowered. A one-lane dirt road started not ten feet in front of the ramp.

Their car slid into line third and they were off.

She glanced over her shoulder to see the gates raise and the massive bulbous nose of the craft reinflate. Even before the cars crested the first rise of the road, the hovercraft slid back into the dark night.

***

Connie woke twenty minutes later by the car’s dashboard clock. The other two cars were nowhere to be seen. They were on a busy highway pulling into early-morning Stockholm traffic.

They turned off and into Old Stockholm, right back where they started. This was crazy. John smiled at her again. She’d napped with her head against the door. She wished it had been on his shoulder but was glad her instincts had won that battle. Sleeping on John’s shoulder would not be a good choice in front of the Delta operators.

Together they looked to their left just before the palace. The streets were too small, too winding, but right down there St. George still stood upon the broken body of his dragon. It was good to know. She squeezed John’s arm for a moment, and he flexed the muscles beneath her fingers in return as they drove over the bridge she’d run across and away from him just thirty-six hours before.

At the hotel’s curb, none of the other Saabs near them in line seemed to be the ones belonging to the other two crews. A valet met their car and handed the driver a marker.

The four of them clustered just before the carpeted entrance to the hotel.

“Where…” Connie stopped when she saw the driver hold up the marker. It had two tags. A large bronze disk with a three-digit number stamped on it to reclaim the car. And a paper tag that read, “Mezzanine Conference Room 14.”

The nameless D-boy tore off a tiny bit of the “4” and dropped it in the garbage bin by the door. Just inside, the rest of the “4” and part of the “M” went into a standing ashtray.

Connie stopped watching him after that.

It took them some effort to locate Mezzanine Conference Room 14. It didn’t appear on any of the discreet conference room maps placed conveniently about. It was a small, innocuous door at the end of a long hallway that appeared to have only restrooms and a water fountain. Three layers of security greeted them. The first, dressed as a hotel busboy, was cleared by showing her military ID. The second by a fingerprint scanner. The last, a visual by Frank Adams, the Secret Service agent in charge of the Presidential Protection Detail.

She thought about how she’d behaved the last time she’d been in front of him at the poker table and did her best not to look away in embarrassment.

He nodded to her politely. “Ma’am.” Then he smiled slightly. “We’re also well-trained in what not to see. You have no worries.”

Connie blew out her breath and smiled in return. “Uh, thanks.” Not brilliant, but she didn’t have anything much better anyway.

“Though you may want to rethink…” He glanced down at her hand.

It was clasped in John’s. She shook it loose. It was clearly a surprise to both of them.

She didn’t know what to say.

“We thought,” John rumbled out easily, “that we’d be less conspicuous if we appeared to be a couple.”

“Good thinking, sir, ma’am.” Then Agent Adams winked at her.

“Connie.” The least she could offer in thanks was her first name.

“Yes, ma’am.” She could hear the silent laugh as they crossed into the room. On duty, she’d be “ma’am” or Sergeant Davis. And probably off duty as well.

The inside of the room was something different than she’d expect in the only five-star hotel in the country. It had the luxury. Dark paneled and deeply carpeted in a luxuriously rich blue, and the ceiling was ornately carved in plaster painted in splendid blues and golds. A large oak table dominated the room. But that’s where “expected” came to an abrupt end.

The entire middle of the table was a glass screen that was lit from within. On it glowed a detailed map she didn’t recognize. Along one wall ran a bank of monitors and computers that would be far more fitting in a combat command center, each station fronted with a high-back, carved chair from the “expected” category for a banquet rather than for the technicians who must sit there. The seats were empty at the moment. Some serious comm and isolation gear. She and John walked over to scan a tall rack of electronics.

Unless this room was very isolated, perhaps with steel plate in the walls and ceiling, there were going to be a lot of very angry people in the hotel. No cell phone or other wireless device was likely to be working anywhere close by.

“Serious shielding,” Tim whispered over her and John’s shoulders.

“Hey, buddy.” John grabbed Tim’s arm around the bicep and shook him in a friendly way. A friendly way that would cause a lesser man to flap about as if hurricane tossed.

Tim merely punched John in the arm.

The last of the D-boys drifted in, barely stirring the air as he moved. Behind him the doors whooshed closed, and Connie could feel the air pressure change as they seated home.

Tight door seals. Shielding. Three layers of security. The Grand Hotel offered its guests a great deal more than massage and pickled herring with room service.

Sixteen people in the dark-paneled room.

Two Black Hawk crews. Four Delta Force operators. President Matthews and his Chief of Staff, Daniel something. And two people she didn’t know.

“If everyone could have a seat…” The President waved them all to their chairs around the table as Daniel blanked the table screen.

“Well, Em. As you suggested, plan for the worst. This is bad and the timeline is suddenly very short.”

None of them spoke. Clearly the President was waiting for some response, but they all got it. They had trained for years for moments like this. They were here, ready to go, move on.

He cleared his throat.

Looked off to either side, but the two nameless people in the room were keeping their silence as well.

“Before I continue, I need to reemphasize the priority of secrecy on this mission.”

“Then perhaps, Mr. President…” Emily didn’t quite cut him off, but it was a close thing. “Perhaps some introductions are in order.”

The President nodded.

“Daniel Drake Darlington is my Chief of Staff.” He looked like a blond, blue-eyed poster boy for a surfing club stuffed into an impeccable three-piece suit. But Connie could see his eyes roving the room and inspecting them one at a time. When his study reached her, she had the impression that the complete detail of her Army file flickered through his memory. Perhaps verbatim. Might be interesting to compare notes as she made her own assessment of him.

The Commander-in-Chief. Self-confident, assured, or trying to appear so. His glance traveled a little too often down to Emily’s end of the table. The President looked worried and found some comfort in seeing his childhood friend in the room.

“I’ll let Daniel make the rest of the introductions, as he did the last three months of footwork with our other guests. Except to say this. Gentlemen…” He addressed the two outsiders. “This is the very finest the U.S. Special Forces has to offer. I would trust them with my life. Actually, I have a couple of times.”

Connie looked down the table at the two Majors. For once Emily Beale’s face was completely unreadable, but her husband acknowledged the compliment with an easy smile. She knew Major Beale had saved the President’s life, had done it on national TV. But that Major Henderson had been involved hadn’t made the news. And neither had ever said a word. A prior black-in-black operation?

The President sat back and Daniel leaned forward.

“To my left, your mission specialist, Dr. Thomas Williams.”

The small, round-faced man waved cheerfully across the table.

A civilian. She didn’t need to see anyone else’s look to know what must already show on her own face. The risks of the unstated mission had just doubled, at a minimum. Towing along a civilian on a military operation simply didn’t work.

“My name,” the last unidentified man’s accent was deeply Russian, though his English was clear and fast with British overtones, “is Aleksander Rodchenko Fyodorov Stepanov.”

Connie didn’t need any further introduction to the man. Short dark hair, suit impeccable, he was a fit man in his fifties. He was also one of the power elite in the Ukraine. Not currently in power, but a major player.

“I am the one in need of your help. My task is twofold, though yours, because your President is a pigheaded politician who underestimates his enemies, is only one.”

The President nodded politely in answer to the slur, but it was a good thing they weren’t playing poker at the moment. The tension in the hand the President was dealing clenched his jaw too tightly for the polite smile he wore.

“Before he continues,” Daniel leaned forward, “I must emphasize that Mr. Stepanov was never in this room. You’ve never met him. He’s never been seen with the President of the United States except in the company of many others during the daytime conferences occurring here at the hotel. Right now it is near midnight and Mr. Stepanov is asleep in his suite on the third floor. Are we clear?”

Mr. Surfer-Boy Daniel was suddenly almost as fierce as Major Beale when she was in a mission briefing. Connie merely nodded her head as others did the same around the table.

Mr. Stepanov pointed his finger at Dr. Williams beside him and then swung it slowly around the table indicating each of them. His assessing gaze followed his finger until he had completed his circuit.

“I need you, each of you.” He sat back in his chair for a moment.

“Only together can we stop the next holocaust.”