I Own the Dawn: The Night Stalkers (13 page)

“Cinque Terre. Five Towns.” Archie pointed down the coast at little clusters of buildings perched along the magnificent green cliffs. “We will stop here for a day or two. You will love this place.”

Kee had yet to find anything to love. The first night, while still at the dock in Genoa, lack of sleep had finally smacked her down on a long bench at the dining table. She’d woken fourteen hours later, stiff, sore, and far too hot from the blanket someone had tossed over her. The only blessing, Dilya had been equally exhausted and slept as long.

Now they’d spent a long day rolling over waves in a motion her body didn’t like, flinging her against hard surfaces without warning. The boat was fast and light on its feet, but she couldn’t predict what it would do from one moment to the next.

The other dance, the one with the Professor’s mother, also proved unrelenting.

“She hates me.”

“It is not personal.”

Kee didn’t bother answering that. She pulled her shirt more tightly around her. The sun was hot, but she hadn’t been able to feel warm all day.

“No. I’m serious. She’s hated every girl I ever brought home, or rather that brought herself to my house with me in tow. I was never good with girls, and Mom hated them all.”

“Great. Your mom hates me, and you’re embarrassed to be seen with someone like me. If it wasn’t for Dilya and your dad, I’d have abandoned ship hours ago and swum to shore.”

Archie did something with the ship’s wheel and pulled on a sail’s rope when it began to make flapping sounds.

“What makes you think I’m embarrassed by you?”

She looked out to sea. She really couldn’t do this. Blinked hard against the wind stinging her eyes.

“Kee?”

Cinque Terre better have a train or plane, because she was on the first one out.

“Kee?” The light touch on her shoulder was too much.

She slapped it aside, hard enough to bruise.

“On the chopper I was fine. Good enough for you to put your hand down my shirt and kiss me like…” She choked on the words. Hated herself for them catching in her throat. “Kissed me like you meant it.”

“I did.”

She shoved him hard against the chest so he fell against the back of the bench.

“Then…” She waved a helpless hand to where she’d been standing when his parents put in their appearance. “Then you see me in front of your upper-crust parents and you want nothing to do with me.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“You blushed, you jerk. Blushed to be discovered by your parents with someone… someone like me. Dilya and me, we’re the outcasts, but we know it. We’re survivors. We can take anything the Street hands out. I know how to handle myself there. But for one lousy little moment, you made me think you wanted me as much as my body. And it felt so good.” Her eyes burned, be damned if she gave in to the pain.

“It felt so good to have someone want me like that. I won’t accept less. I deserve that. I deserve that and better.”

She stood and moved quickly to where Dilya lay at the bow of the boat and watched the water rush by beneath her. They hadn’t been able to budge her since the moment they rounded the breakwater and the Mediterranean had spread out before them.

All Kee could see were the distant towns. Maybe an hour at their present speed. An hour to land. Then what? In nine days they’d be back on the Hawk, separated by the thickness of his seat back and a thin sheet of the Kevlar armor that wrapped around most of the pilots’ positions. A transfer? Damn no! She’d barely arrived. Could she switch choppers with Crazy Tim? Get him back on Beale’s Hawk and she move on Henderson’s. But then she’d be letting the Major down. Why had it all made sense two days ago? No wonder there was a goddamn rule against fraternization. It was all screwed up and they hadn’t even done anything yet.

Dilya laughed aloud and pulled on Kee’s hand to get her attention. The girl’s gaze remained riveted over the bow. The moment Kee looked down, a dolphin leapt clear of the water in a glistening flash and, diving over the bow wave, disappeared back into the blue-green sea. Then she spotted another. Two of them dancing and playing back and forth across the slicing bow.

That was the answer. Hang on, and then she and Dilya would be clear and the two of them could go play.

***

Stupid train. It hadn’t come soon enough.

Kee could see the clock at the impossibly quaint Monterosso train station. No redemption by train for twenty more minutes, and her time had run out. The Professor’s mother had come searching. Archie must have sent them all out into the streets searching for her. To bring back the truant girl who was supposed to warm his bed. Well, to hell with him and his high-class parents.

She continued working on the string figure of Jacob’s Ladder with Dilya. They’d figured out a way to shortcut one step and they were closing in on shortcutting a second. Maybe if she didn’t look up, the woman would go away.

No such luck.

Beatrice Stevenson came their way. Kee kept her head down, but Dilya looked up and offered a cautious smile. If Dilya was brave enough to greet the woman, she’d look stupid and petty for not doing the same.

Soft blond hair. None of the beauty of her son or Major Beale, just an average-looking, well-tended woman. White slacks with perfect creases up the front. A cream silk blouse. Sandals that probably cost more than a week of Army pay.

“May I sit?”

Kee shrugged but couldn’t bring herself to speak.

She did her best to return to the game as the woman sat on the bench beyond Dilya. College kids with backpacks walked around, joked, took pictures of each other standing by the tracks, swigging American sodas and eating Snickers bars, and looking not the least bit anxious about the train’s failure to arrive ahead of schedule. Hard to believe they were within a couple years of her age. They came from another planet.

“I’ve never found it easy.”

“What?” Kee asked without intending to.

“I wasn’t home for most of Archie’s childhood. My family’s business kept me on the road. He and his father are very close, but I…”

The woman seemed to run out of steam.

Something in her attitude finally drew Kee’s full attention. The woman wasn’t angry, she was sorry about something. She was sad.

Kee fished out some Italian pocket change for Dilya and pointed toward the newsstand with a fair spread of candy in plain view. Making her choice would keep the girl out of trouble for several minutes at least.

Now she sat partly turned toward Betty Stevenson with several feet of empty bench between them. And she waited.

Betty took a deep breath. A hard breath. A painful one. Kee knew what it looked like when a woman was reaching deep. Knew the pain, and felt her own anger easing.

“I became vice president of my family’s business, Blair Research, when Archie was five. I was president before he was ten. CEO when he went to college. His father’s a good man and a fine sailboat builder. Even though I could support us ten times over, he chose to work. He has twenty employees, but always made time for Archie. At his shop, if nowhere else. The two of them love their sailboats. Steve understands the burden when my father left the business to me, but I could never bridge the gap to Archie. Oh, he loves me. I know that. But neither he nor his sister, Becky, know what to do with me.”

The woman inhaled deeply, “No more than I know what to do with either of them.” Her spine stiffening as she sat more erect and gazed off into the distance.

Kee heard it, too. The low ground thrum of a train rolling along tracks, still far enough off to be more felt than heard. But coming now. Time suddenly urgent. Betty turned to face Kee directly. Those blue eyes staring into hers.

“I just wanted to ask you to stay. I never know what to say to the few girls he’s brought home. I don’t know what to say to you. But whatever passed between you two has devastated him as clearly as I see it has hurt you. You appear to be a sensible young woman. Your care for the orphan girl, Archie told me her story, is a wonder to see. You give so much love so spontaneously, so easily. A skill I lack completely.”

The train now rattled down the tunnel loudly enough for the backpackers to pop their heads up and grow even more animated.

“If not for him, can you come back for me? I don’t want my son to think I drove you off. He is out looking for you right now, but can’t imagine that you’d just leave. It isn’t in him, he’s too nice a boy. I knew where I’d go, so I understood where you went. I’ve thought of doing it a thousand times, but then where would I be? Still with myself.”

The train rattled and rolled into the station, and Dilya returned with a bright blue-wrapped candy bar labeled Ferrara. The white nougat was half gone, and her smile was huge at the newly discovered flavor.

Backpackers spouting a dozen languages milled about.

Somewhere in all that, Betty Blair Stevenson slipped away.

Dilya plopped down on the bench and inspected Kee as the train emptied and filled, but appeared to be fine watching the world go by with those wide, brown eyes.

Kee gave love so easily?

In the cockpit, Archie jumped to his feet and cracked his head on the underside of the main boom. He doubled over, clamping his hands over the sharp pain radiating outward, creating sparks of light in his tightly closed eyes.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

He stumbled over something. Heard his father give a surprised laugh, but he squinted his eyes open enough to move out of the cockpit, where they’d been sitting in pained silence over a glass of wine, and up onto the deck. Where the safety lines had been dropped, he jumped down to the pier and almost pitched over into the water on the far side.

Blinking furiously he stumbled to a halt at the head of the finger pier. He touched his head and checked his hand briefly, no blood. It only felt that way. He put his hand back atop his aching head.

Kee and Dilya stood side by side at the head of the finger pier. Kee with her plain black civilian’s backpack slung over one shoulder and Dilya with her luminescent orange-and-green eyesore that she’d chosen herself.

He opened his mouth. And closed it. Opened it again. Fish out of water. Head stinging so badly, he couldn’t think straight.

“I never… I wasn’t… I’m… a complete idiot.” He hadn’t meant to say that last part out loud. He turned away as Kee watched him. Turned back. Unflinching, no reaction. Nothing to be read in those dark, dark eyes.

“I…” He glanced over his shoulder, but his parents were mercifully most of a boat length away and clearly doing their best not to watch or listen to the only drama going on in the area.

Still the blank stare. Dilya as quiet and sober, mirroring Kee’s mood. What was he supposed to do with these two women? Give him a helicopter and a whole line of power-mad warlords with RPGs any day of the week.

“I…” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I wasn’t ever embarrassed by you.”

“What then?” He wasn’t facing a hurt woman as he’d thought. He was facing a sergeant who’d spent five years facing down men much tougher than him. Every single shield in place, far stronger than Kevlar body armor.

“I…” He really needed to find another pronoun to start his sentences. “I was embarrassed that my parents could somehow see all of the things I’d hoped to do with you.”

“To me or with me?”

“With you. I’ve never… There’s not been…”

She held up a hand to stop him, and he shut his mouth because he didn’t know what else to do.

“You’re at a loss for words.”

“I’m what?” What on Earth was she critiquing his language usage for?

“You always have the right words. You never do that. Are you that flustered by me?”

He opened his mouth and she held up her hand again.

He closed it.

“Just nod yes or no.”

He nodded yes emphatically. The bursts of light in his eyes from the pain had him squeezing them closed for a moment and holding the top of his head again.

She tipped her head to one side and then the other as she inspected him. Dilya mimicked the move with sidelong glances to see if she was getting it right.
Nailed
it
on
the
first
try, little one
.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I’ll give you another chance. But don’t f—” Kee looked down at Dilya. “Don’t mess up again.”

“I will,” he managed.

“Try or mess it up?” This time a smile cracked that terrifying facade.

“Both.” He hung his head in frustration at his own pitiful failings outside the helicopter context.

Then she laughed and it ranked as the finest sound he had ever heard. She had the greatest laugh. It came from the gut and passed straight through her heart.

“I’ll bet you do both as well.”

***

Kee didn’t intend to spend the night with Dilya. Archie’s parents slept in the aft cabin, reached from main cabin below but actually behind the cockpit at the stern of the boat. Except for a narrow hallway, they might as well have been on another craft entirely.

Dilya had fallen in love with a tiny cabin to the left of the stairs. She’d spent the whole evening after dinner playing quietly in here while the adults sat around the main cabin, sipping tea and eating cookies Steve had brought aboard. Slowly getting to know each other.

“Pilot’s berth,” Archie had informed Kee. It wasn’t all that much bigger than the Professor and Major Beale’s cockpit on the Hawk, but it was elegant in its simplicity. A wide single bunk with triangular-bottomed drawers. It took Kee a moment to realize they couldn’t be squared off because they would hit the outside of the boat.

Then she peeked out one of the three, metal-clad circular windows and made a horrifying discovery. The water outside the boat came above her waist as she stood in the cabin. If she lay down, she’d actually be sleeping below the water’s surface.

Turning deliberately away, she watched as Dilya happily demonstrated the room’s other features. A trim little desk with a fold-down chair. A reading light and a fair collection of novels in English, French, German, and Italian. Rigged for tourists. She’d have to dig up a couple of kids’ books in English next time she went ashore. What she’d taken to be a small closet turned out to have a flush toilet, with a foot pedal, a long handle to one side, and a set of instructions that were graphically clear if somewhat complicated.

When she’d gone to join the other adults in the main cabin, Dilya had kept hold of her hand and pulled her down to sit beside her on the bed.

She opened a small drawer in the desk. And pulled out two sheets of paper with pencil drawings on them. Faces. Very well-drawn faces.

Kee prepared herself to make admiring sounds, but stopped herself as she really looked at the faces. Dark expressions, foreboding eyes. One big and square, the other darker, narrow and spare. She wouldn’t want to meet either one.

She glanced at Dilya.

“
Kishi.
People,” she pointed at the drawings, “make mother father dead. The Kee
qilmoq
dead.”

Kee stared at the two faces. Dilya had seen her parents’ killers. Seen them well enough to draw these pictures. They were clear enough that if they were matched with the right men, there would be no question.

“
Ha.
” If she ever met them, she wouldn’t hesitate. “The Kee
qilmoq
dead,” she promised.

Dilyana snuggled close against her. Kee folded the pictures carefully and slipped them into her pocket. There was no chance she’d find those faces among the millions in Afghanistan, but she’d watch.

The girl held on tightly even as sleep dragged at her eyes. She’d probably never slept alone, except for several terrifying nights beneath the stars before they’d found her on that mountainside. She’d certainly never had her own private room.

Kee’d stretch out with her until she fell asleep. Then maybe she’d go find Archie, or maybe she’d find another cabin as small and cozy as Dilya’s and sleep there.