Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) (28 page)

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Authors: M. L. Buchman

BOOK: Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers)

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Chapter 73

They clambered aboard the Black Hawk. Gibson stayed down to guide the sling over the bomb and hook on the attachment points. He climbed back up the fast rope more quickly than the most agile squirrel. As if the very devil was on his tail. Or a nuclear bomb.

The Major called out, “Ten minutes.” And laid down the hammer.

Connie sat in the left front seat. She could look back between the seats and see John’s back, his hands tight on the handles of the minigun. Colonel Gibson would be sitting directly behind her in Connie’s seat, also watching the side and rear.

Gerta sat in the cargo bay with the other D-boy. Behind the cargo net lay Clay’s body, forgotten for now.

Connie returned her attention forward, letting her hands ride lightly on the controls. Getting the feel for it. Even the most mundane action the Major did had something different about it. A nuance, a finesse that made Connie feel less and less competent with each passing moment. Then, as she recognized some of the techniques and she could pretend her hands were making the motions, she grew more confident. Not enough to fly, but enough to help.

The count rolled down.

All hell was going to break loose in Ukrainian airspace in about sixty more seconds.

Fuel was going to be dicey. They’d burned their reserve getting here. If they got into a dogfight, they weren’t going to make the Polish border. Who was she kidding? If they got in a dogfight with her at the weapons controls, they were going to be dead.

And if they kept moving at this speed, they weren’t going to make it there either. Burning fuel too fast as they pushed ahead just below redline on the turbines.

But Connie didn’t complain. Until the explosives destroyed the underground factory, farther away was the only place she wanted to be.

***

Connie glanced back inside the helicopter. The D-boy and Gerta were leaning their heads out into the brutal wind. John looked at the stern of the helicopter when she glanced back, clearly studying the ADAS view.

She spun her control to display straight back.

Connie saw the flash.

“Stage one, the floor beneath the chopper,” the Major announced over the intercom.

Even as she finished speaking, the flash bloomed higher.

“Stage two, that should now be a flaming Hind Mi-24 falling through the hole.”

Then a blaze of light roiled upward obliterating the darkness, momentarily overloading the ADAS cameras.

For a moment Connie feared there’d been another nuke that they’d missed and just triggered.

“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” the Major sounded very pleased with herself, “is two hundred pounds of good American explosive and half that again of Russian helicopter. And that’s not counting the fuel in the chopper or the missiles. Hope you enjoy the flight. Tonight’s forecast is for smooth sailing and low turbulence. Because if we don’t have that, we’re going to run out of fuel and fall out of the sky with a nuclear weapon strapped to our belly.”

They saw the occasional jet or helicopter flying high and fast toward the explosion. But not one of them noticed the DAP Hawk, blacked out and running silent in the other direction while carrying a nuclear weapon ten feet off the ground.

Chapter 74

Connie couldn’t remember the last hour of the flight. She knew that forevermore it would be a hazy time of high adrenaline and near panic. As they’d moved through the Ukraine wilderness, she slowly picked up more and more of the flying. Not good enough to do it on her own, but she was doing the heavy motions and Major Beale the finer tweaks.

It felt like some maddening video game. At best-fuel cruise speed of one hundred and fifty knots, trees, houses, whole hills popped up in endless, mind-numbing succession. An unending slalom, every object requiring instant attention because at less than a hundred feet up, they were constantly less than a second from becoming a hole in the ground. One thing for sure, Connie knew she hadn’t been built to be a combat pilot. Ever.

She’d tried speaking to the Major, but that distracted them both. Their communication was completely silent, transmitted from control stick to control stick, from woman to woman.

Connie felt the trust grow with the flight. The Major was letting her do more and more, but was always there to correct before her missteps became too dangerous.

The last fifty miles, Connie had also been holding hard to keep the Major from overcompensating on her corrections. A strong hand to steady the increasingly erratic shifts Connie could feel through the controls, see through the ADAS display.

Together, they settled softly by the refueling truck.

She called over to the CSAR craft and the crew swarmed toward
Vengeance
.

Connie only had a moment with the Major before she was lifted out and onto a stretcher. They’d stripped off their helmets and looked at each other.

Emily’s face was white as paper, her eyes blinking constantly for focus and sweat running freely off her brow.

“We there?”

“We’re there, Major.”

She snaked out a hand, pulled Connie over by the lifting ring on the front of her vest. She kissed Connie on top of the head.

“You done good, Connie. You got us home.”

“No, you did, Major.” Then they took her away. “No, you did, Emily.” The name felt right even though there was no one to hear her. Emily Beale had gotten them home, shot up, and probably with a concussion, but she’d done it.

And Connie had sure helped. She’d “done good.” Having a woman she respected and liked as much as Emily Beale say that was quite something. Connie would be holding that close for a long time.

“Hey, y’all.”

Connie startled as the long, slender brunette from the CSAR team swung into the Major’s seat. Her smile was huge and bright. Perfect teeth in a magazine-ad face. No wonder Tim had been so gob-smacked by her. She was stunning.

“You gonna fly us home?”

“I, uh…” Connie stumbled on the words, knocked back a bit by all the cheerful energy that suddenly filled the seat of the quiet and thoughtful woman who just might be becoming her friend. “I can’t fly.”

“Not what the Major says. She says you did great. Willing to fly copilot for me, too?” She stuck out a hand, not waiting for an answer. Her hands were fine but her grip was Army strong. “Lola LaRue. I know. Couldn’t you just die? My daddy always joked that he’d hoped I’d grow up to be a stripper. Men are such jerks.”

Connie knew one man who wasn’t a jerk. Not by a long stretch.

“It’s gonna take them a good twenty minutes to fuel us up if you wanna go stretch your legs. I haven’t flown the DAP in a while, so I’m gonna check some things over if you want a break.”

Connie released the harness and stepped down, her legs nearly folding under her.

Colonel Gibson stood close by her, doing something to the satellite phone they’d used.

“Nice job, Sergeant.”

“Thank you, sir.” Connie wondered how much more undeserved praise she’d get over this before she could stop it. “What are you doing there?”

“Making a copy.” He slid an adapter into the phone and two green lights started blinking. When it stopped, he pulled off the adapter, unplugged a small USB drive, and handed her the phone.

“I’m sure Dr. Williams will want the full-res images on this.”

She slipped the phone into a pocket. “Who gets the copy?”

“The President did mention that it would be awful if a copy of these images fell into the hands of someone, perhaps the Polish Army, along with instructions to leak the images. It just might help our Ukrainian friend find his way to power. The President felt we would owe him that if we retrieved the bombs.”

Connie nodded. “The President is a good man.”

Gibson nodded. “I heard you say your father went down in the service.”

“Yes, sir. Sergeant Ron Davis, Screaming Eagles.”

“Well, you did him proud today.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Gibson moved a few steps away, then stopped abruptly and turned back to face her.

“When did your father die?”

“His chopper burned just over ten years ago.”

Colonel Gibson looked at her closely.

“Burned.” He left the word in the air between them.

“That’s what I was told. Crashed and burned, no remains.”

The Colonel looked off into the night for a long moment. In profile, the soft light from the refueling operation revealed a soldier old beyond his years. One who had fought too many battles, seen too many friends die.

Then he glanced around before indicating she should follow him into the darkness away from the others.

She could see John coming over, but she sent him a hand signal to stay back. Colonel Gibson was clearly not interested in a crowd, no matter how much she just wanted to curl up in John’s arms and let the shakes of nerves and adrenaline roll through her.

Gibson moved quietly and evenly. She idly wondered if dance was part of a Delta operator’s training. His motions were so smooth that the frozen grass barely moved.

Twenty paces from the chopper, they turned to watch the CSAR bird carrying Emily Beale lift off and head north into the night.

“Sergeant First Class Davis?”

She almost corrected him. She was sergeant, but not first class.

“Oh, yes. He was my father.”

“Request permission to shake your hand, Sergeant. I didn’t know. I should have seen it.”

Connie held out her hand but barely returned a proper handshake in her confusion.

“It is an honor and a privilege to fly with your father’s daughter.”

Her expression must have revealed her bewilderment.

Again he gazed off into the night for a moment before reaching some decision and refocusing his attention on her.

“I was on his last flight. We went down hard. And dirty. Where doesn’t matter, but it was very, very unfriendly.”

He looked up and over her shoulder, watching a different place. A different time.

“My squadmate was dead, along with the copilot. The pilot was out with a nasty head wound, and with my broken leg I wasn’t going anywhere too quickly. Your father hid us and walked out. Two days later, long after I assumed we were going to end up dead, a farmer’s truck rattled up and he waved us aboard.

“Your father got us out. What we didn’t know was that he was shot up worse than any of us. Dead from internal damage before we reached the border. He stayed alive long enough to save our lives, no matter what it cost him. Maybe he knew he was dead already and was simply too stubborn or dedicated to die until he got us out safe. He didn’t burn, ma’am. He went down standing tall.”

The Colonel refocused on her. He snapped a sharp salute.

“An honor and a privilege, ma’am.”

Connie numbly returned the salute.

He tossed the USB lightly in the palm of his hand. “I’d better go make sure this accidentally falls into the wrong hands.” Then, he moved away into the night with his light, dancer’s step.

Connie’s knees finally let go and she sat down on the frozen grass with a soft crunch.

John moseyed up and sat down beside her. Just a breath of night air between their shoulders. Quiet. The way he was sometimes. When he was happiest.

When he was with her.

Where was she happiest? Flying in her father’s footsteps? That had shifted tonight. Not when Colonel Gibson finally answered the long-lost question of how her father had died. That was good to know, good to finally put to rest, but seemed less important than she thought it would be when she had imagined discovering the truth a thousand times over the years.

No. The moment when it all had shifted had been standing in the hangar of a Ukrainian bomb factory. It had been in that moment. Facing death. With her fingers in the heart of a nuclear bomb. When the least mistake would bring the death she’d always expected. Make it all finally come true forever after.

But then she’d looked up and seen John’s face.

She’d seen another woman.

Another Connie.

She’d seen the one loved by a man. The one that someday would bear his children. And while she watched their grandchildren lie in his strong arms, Connie and Noreen would look at the fifty-year coin, now a hundred years old. The coin Connie still had buttoned in her pocket.

She had seen herself with a future. With John.

Clay might be gone. But she was alive.

Connie pushed to her feet and dusted her hands together, brushing the bits of grass to the ground.

“Yes, by the way.” And she strode off toward the chopper.

“Huh? Yes, what?” John stumbled to his feet and came after her.

“The answer is yes, I will marry you.”

She got three more strides, two more than she expected, before he grabbed her arm and spun her back to face him.

“You will?”

“Of course I will. I love you, John.”

His eyes rolled closed as he pulled her against his chest. That broad, marvelous chest.

She heard the pilot call that they were ready to go.

“And, John…”

“Yes?”

She got a step clear, partly turned away on her heel.

“I will bear your children.”

The stunned look that flowed over his face told her that her work here was done. It put a real bounce in her step as she returned to help fly the chopper home.