Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) (3 page)

They made it with twenty-eight minutes to spare.

John flexed his hand again, wincing at the pull across his barked knuckles and the long scrape that ran from wrist to elbow.

Twenty-eight minutes. Enough for a shower and a shave. Time to stuff his gear in his duffel and grab something better than the energy bar he’d stuffed down midday. He strolled toward the chopper in the evening light with his kit on his back, a stack of salami sandwiches in his hand, and a cold Coke in one of his thigh pockets.

Beale and Clay had pitched in where they could, but for the most part an officer’s usefulness on a repair was measured by their increasing distance from the job. Front-seaters knew how to fly but were trouble beyond that. Major Beale had West Pointed in, never even working as a back-ender other than in training.

Every now and then a noncom made the jump to front seat like Clay, but no chief in his right mind would ever let them touch anything mission-critical again. Sure they thought they still knew, but they were wrong. Without constant study, no mere officer could keep up with all of the technology required to keep a Black Hawk humming.

Even if Clay Anderson had stayed qualified, a DAP Hawk was a whole different bird beyond that. Newbies thought the mods designed by SOAR couldn’t be that drastic. But the Direct Action Penetrators were custom-built for SOAR and SOAR alone. Built from the ground up on a Black Hawk frame, but that and their name was about all that remained the same with the most common helicopter on the planet. There were whole layers of gear and electronics that no other helicopter had ever carried.

John stood now at the entrance to the hangar and admired their handiwork as he bit off another chunk of his first sandwich.

Fewer than twenty DAPs were spread across five battalions, among the rarest and definitely the most lethal weapons ever launched into the night sky. Also one of the most complex. Seventeen separate software systems, eight in the weapon systems alone, networked across four different media. And that was only if you didn’t count the beamed-in ground reference, the satellite imaging systems, or the new drone feeds they’d recently installed.

The Major had made sure they were towed into the one Rubb shelter at the base. Covered in desert camo, the towering temporary hangar kept out most of the sand and all of the sun, making the desert midday heat merely intolerable rather than potentially lethal. The hangar also offered a ceiling-mounted crane that had been essential to the repairs.

John patted the side of his bird. She’d done good getting them home, and it still pained him that they’d been unable to complete the cosmetic repairs along with the critical ones.

The Hawk squatted, looking lethal even sitting still. In the air his baby looked downright terrifying. The squat and wide profile of the main fuselage was augmented by the weapons pylons reaching outward to either side from the midsection’s roof. Two mounting hard points each, they presently held a nineteen-round rocket pod, a 30 mm Vulcan cannon good for punching fist-sized holes in anything less armored than a main battle tank, and two four-racks of tank-killing Hellfire missiles just in case you did run into one.

And she was good to go. Still needed calibration and testing, of course, but all of the chopper’s working pieces were back where they belonged and operational.

No matter how Connie dug under his skin, he had to admit he couldn’t have pulled it off with a lesser mechanic. Even Crazy Tim, who’d chipped in from time to time, hadn’t come close. John felt bad for even thinking the thought. He and Tim had flown together since Basic. A decade in the air, mostly in the same bird. He knew Tim was a rock-solid gunner in any situation and a better-than-average mechanic. But Sergeant Davis operated on a whole different level.

Each tool he’d needed, Connie had slapped into his hand even as he reached for it. Even when she was deeply involved in rebuilding the flare launch system, the right part waited where he could reach it when he needed it most.

Where he’d have applied brute strength, she applied leverage, though she wasn’t shy about asking for his help when his power was needed. Not that she spoke more than ten words in the dozen hours they’d sweated over the job. She’d simply preset, align, and then assume his strength would be applied at the required moment. She made it easy.

And those fine hands of hers. At first they pissed him off as they reached into places where he’d have had to pull panels and equipment to gain access. He didn’t really appreciate them until he’d grunted down the FLIR camera head. Not just the forward-looking infrared radar had been blown to smithereens, but most of the network bus behind it. In a dance of those fine fingers, she’d repaired in an hour what would have taken him six.

The rotor had been the worst. They’d finally dismounted the whole thing and laid it out on a couple of tables hijacked from the chow tent. Standing on either side, they’d torn it down to the bearings and put her back together again.

All in silence. They both knew what to do. Four hours to tear down and paste the rotor head back together—less than half the time projected in any manual. Two hours faster than his and Tim’s best. She was incredible.

He’d tried filling the silence with questions, but most barely elicited a single-word answer.

Her homes had been a list of military bases.

Her training had been her father and a list of jobs starting with Sikorsky, the Black Hawk’s manufacturer, and moving through several of the primary electronics vendors before she joined the Army.

Connie’s family… That one bothered him the most. Those questions had been answered with silence.

***

Connie took a sandwich from Big John’s open hand. He didn’t startle the way he normally did around her.

She hadn’t had time to grab any food or a shower. Halfway through packing her gear she remembered something she’d seen. Not directly, but from the corner of her eye. It hadn’t taken her long to place the image, and it sent her scrambling back to the chopper, her kit bag banging against her back.

She’d uncovered the port-side turbine engine and there it was. As neatly snipped as if done with the finest shears, a quarter-inch of pressure-feedback-loop fuel line simply wasn’t there. No bend or flex to draw attention to the damage.

A round must have passed within inches of her face during the firefight. She’d never heard the one that almost got her. Instead, it had come in the gunner’s windows, missed her and the minigun, and punched through the cabin roof, drilling the neat 7.62 mm hole her mind had noticed, even if she hadn’t. It had continued upward with enough energy to remove that tiny section of the main fuel system.

They’d been running on the auxiliary feed, part of a standard back-and-forth use of systems to make sure everything kept working. Last night no one had noticed, but tonight they would have the moment they tried to lift off, running again on the primary fuel system. They’d be facing an engine fire in the first few minutes of flight.

She bit into the sandwich, heavy on the tomatoes and mustard. Just the way she would have made it for herself.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” John’s voice was a low rumble.

They headed to the chopper together, moving with that same harmony they’d been working in for the last thirteen hours. She’d never met a man so easy to be with since her father. Perhaps not even him.

They flew the two hours to Kabul high enough that John and Connie didn’t need to man the guns. They could leave the flying to Beale and Clay for this trip.

First thing in the air, they ran systems tests and some calibrations that could only be done in flight. But when it took John three tries to punch the right keys to run the wideband satellite-ground tactical system loopback test, he knew it was time to bag it.

“Major,” he called on the intercom, “we’re hammered.”

“Crash out,” was all the response he wanted or needed. He released his harness, snapped in the monkey line out of habit, even though the cargo doors were slid shut, and stretched out on the hard deck.

“Connie, let it go, girl.”

“In a minute.”

He watched her in the instrument glow, hunched forward, focused. Even in helmet, flight suit, and full SARVSO survival vest, there was no mistaking her for a man. She wasn’t like the Major, too willowy to be a man, or Kee, too generously proportioned to be masked by a mere flight suit. Connie’s standout feature despite full gear: she simply moved in a way that no man would, or could. A neatness. A lack of wasted motion. A… He wasn’t sure.

He puzzled at it as sleep overwhelmed him and took him under.

***

Connie stretched, and every joint popped or cracked. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d been this tired. Not since the month-long hell of Green Platoon training. Or perhaps during her SERE course. She’d survived, evaded, and resisted for the two full weeks of the field test. She’d never been captured, so she hadn’t needed the fourth letter of the acronym, escape. She also hadn’t slept more than thirty minutes at a time in fourteen days.

She leaned back in and squinted, but her eyes were too tired to determine if the readout was a “4” or a “9.” She gave it up.

“Let it go,” as John had said.

Glancing forward revealed Major Beale in rear quarter profile. Clay was invisible in his armor-wrapped copilot seat just six inches forward from Connie’s right shoulder. She could just lean on the back of his seat and she’d be asleep in seconds.

The Major rarely spoke as they flew. Emily Beale ran a quiet ship, which was fine with Connie. The air waves were silent as well. They were just ferrying to Kabul. Too high to be susceptible to enemy ground fire. If there had been a briefing about their mission, she’d missed it while working on the chopper.

As if sensing her attention, the Major turned to face her through the gap between the seats. With a sharp nod, then a soft shrug, she communicated her thanks for fast repairs and her lack of knowledge regarding the reason for the move. No briefing missed. All communicated without risking waking John by using the intercom.

She turned to look at John.

He’d stretched out, his feet propped on their duffels strapped to the rear cargo net. His head reached most of the way to his seat. You could fit a stretcher and a doctor in the space he took. Maybe two.

But there was room beside him. Not as much as you’d expect in the cargo bay of a Black Hawk. If it weren’t for all of the mods and extra ammo for a DAP Hawk, you could fit a dozen troops, or half a dozen with some serious in-country gear. But even with the DAP’s unique load, there was room for her. She could see that he had moved to the side before passing out. Leaving more space.

For her.

She felt uneasy sitting there, looking down at the open space left by the kindness of a man still in helmet and full gear, unrecognizable if not for his physical scale.

But she didn’t sleep well beside others. Too much of her life alone. Mother gone early, Dad on assignment. Her fading grandmother had made sure she was fed, but the rest of her life had been up to her. To her alone.

Even in the Army it was easy to be alone. To just be quiet. Stay out of the jokes, the pranks, the incessant rivalry to be the best at something. You could be accepted for your proven skills, the only test that really mattered once you were past the lowest units, and not have to interact or often speak.

Women were almost always afforded more space to sleep in the Army. Often cots when guys had hard ground. Or at least they were put with other women. And her time hadn’t been frontline hardship. Except for frequent weeklong exercises and war games, most of her career had been in helicopters. Choppers almost always returned to a base at night.

If your bird was parked in the wild, you didn’t sleep. You hunkered down wide-eyed and watched for bad news crawling through the high weeds.

Her body begged her to lie down beside him.

Finally too tired to think, she did stretch out beside the sleeping Staff Sergeant.

Hard against the opposite cargo-bay door.

A hand reached for her. It was a hand Connie knew like no other.

It reached for her, begging for help. Only the hand showed, reaching through a tear in the skin of a shattered helicopter.

The heat of fire brushed her cheeks. And she breathed in the stench of kerosene igniting as Jet A fuel poured from a sheared gas tank onto the fire.

Her hands were too heavy. Too slow. Too weak.

Even as her fingers reached out, the hand slid out of reach. The helicopter’s carcass falling away, tumbling earthbound while she remained trapped in the sky.

Trapped where…

Someone shook her shoulder. Shook it again.

By reflex, she grabbed the hand’s ring finger and flipped it back hard, eliciting a sharp yelp. Her attacker withdrew rapidly, tumbling away to get clear of the pain as her instincts continued to drive the finger up and back.

Tumbling like a helicopter falling through a perfectly blue sky.

A big finger, a big hand.

She didn’t know this hand.

It wasn’t her father’s.

Then she was awake and instantly knew the hand. Had been impressed by its combination of strength and finesse throughout the long repairs, its ability to make the finest adjustments or bend a panel by hand to custom fit an airframe that had been through too much battle to easily fit factory-fresh parts.

Connie let go immediately and tried to stammer out an apology as Big John began to massage his hand tentatively, as if he weren’t sure it were safe to touch.

“We’re landing in five.”

Major Beale’s voice sounded over the intercom.

Five minutes. Kabul air base.

Connie leaned forward and offered to inspect John’s hand.

He withdrew it quickly and banged his elbow on the cargo door frame.

He hissed out a sharp breath.

“Everything okay back there?”

“Fine, Major.” His answer rough and abrupt. “Banged my goddamn funny bone. Zinging like hell.”

Again Connie could only sit and watch. Retreating meant she didn’t care. Assistance from her clearly wasn’t wanted or welcome. Helpless once again, she could do nothing but sit and watch as they touched down.

***

“They’re waiting to load us now,” Major Beale announced before John could stop clutching his elbow and cursing.

“Who?” He looked at his hand and flexed the fingers. That was going to sting far longer than his elbow. Connie didn’t look like a fighter. He had to remember that you didn’t get to SOAR without being the very best. Minimum five years in the Army and two years of SOAR training before being declared mission qualified, if you survived the entrance exams. A weeklong interview that he remembered with abject horror. It almost made the month of Green Platoon testing seem survivable.

“Try looking out your window.”

He hitched himself up to his knees and looked out the shooter’s window. He could feel Connie move behind him to peek over his shoulder. An absolute awareness that made him think thoughts he definitely shouldn’t about a woman serving beside him.

He didn’t see anything but a curving wall of gray.

Connie slid open the cargo door as the rotor wash eased and the engines wound down. Kabul, with its own unique odor of spiced lamb, too much mint, and fresh sewage.

Then his brain got the perspective.

Not a gray wall, but rather the side of a C-17 Globemaster III. Not a C-5, but still three stories tall of aircraft the length of half a football field.

What it also told him was that he had to wake up fast. Before the hour was out, he was going to wish he’d found some way to wake Connie without touching her. He flexed his hand again before unsnapping his monkey line, stowing it neatly, and stepping out of the Hawk.

He was assaulted by the typical mayhem of a military airfield.

The C-17 loomed above them, a towering mass in the night, each of her four jet engines about the size of the Hawk’s cabin area.

Viper
, Major Henderson’s bird, had landed on the other side of the jet’s tail. Even as John watched, the lower part of the tail unhinged and a massive ramp swung down to the ground. Two DAP Hawks on a jet transport meant something nasty was going on, that was for sure. And if they were ready to load… It was time to hustle and ignore the armament and fueling crews already swarming toward their birds.

John reached back into the cabin for a wrench. One slapped into his hand. Connie had already assessed the situation and was on the move with a wrench of her own.

He hated morning people. Even after a decade in the Army, he preferred to take a quiet half hour, maybe an hour. Get some coffee, and a plate of eggs and bacon, English muffin with strawberry jam, and a short stack if he was lucky, before he ever really considered being awake. Didn’t happen all that much, but that was his preference. Now, he’d slept three of the last thirty hours and had to prepare his bird for transport.

He climbed up the toeholds leading to the top of the Black Hawk just as he had twenty-four hours earlier. At least here at Bagram Air Base, there was less chance of someone shooting you from the top of the nearest dune. The first order of business was folding back the rotors. Thankfully without having to saw off the blades this time.

They rotated the fixed blade until it was aligned with the still-battered tail section. Next they broke free the second blade’s pins and swung it alongside its companion. As they tackled the next blade Connie actually spoke.

“How’s the hand?”

John flexed it and tried to ignore the twinge that ran up the length of his arm.

He offered a noncommittal grunt.

By the time the next blade swung into place she spoke again.

“I don’t like being touched.”

“I guessed.” Actually, he’d been worried. When she slept, the chill facade she usually wore—no, not chill. Aloof? Remote? Anyway, it had slipped off her like a shield set aside.

He’d woken to find her asleep beside him. And he’d watched her face. No longer so carefully expressionless. No longer under the fierce control she always wielded. Her sleeping face reflected her sleeping thoughts. A gentleness that spoke of the woman more than the mind within. Then, after he’d studied her enough to know he’d not forget a single aspect of her face any time soon, not the high cheeks, not the ever so slightly flattened tip of her nose, not the surprising length of her lashes, unobservable under the impact of those sharp, assessing eyes when they were open.

Then an abrupt shift: worry, strain—horror! He’d shaken her then to break her free from whatever so shrouded her features in terror.

And nearly had his finger dislocated as a reward.

Who knew what would have happened to him if he’d followed his first instinct and gathered her sleeping form into his arms.

“I’m sorry. I was—”

John left her the space of silence as they broke the double-pivot free and swung the forward blade back in line with the tail. It was perhaps the first time she’d voluntarily started a conversation, rather than responding to a direct question.

“I’m sorry.” She moved away to fold down the tail rotor.

John reinserted the pin bolts before climbing down.

Down onto a pallet.

A pallet of parachutes. Big ones.

Shit.

He hated parachutes.