I Own the Dawn: The Night Stalkers (18 page)

The mild heat of the Mediterranean had spoiled Kee. The desert heat of the soccer-stadium air base hammered against her brain as it cooked the briefing tent.

She looked around the scattered chairs and benches again, trying to fill in the missing pieces, but it wasn’t making sense. In an area where the entire company of eighty or so pilots, copilots, and crew could meet, there were six people.

The liaison was there for the C-130 Hercules tankers, which provided midair refueling. She and Archie. Clay, the pilot from one of the transport Pave Hawks, sat on Archie’s other side. A couple rows up and over, a decent-looking white chick. A trim brunette who wore the fatigues of a warrior with the looks of the sitcom stunning girl next door. Clearly newly assigned to the forward base, she looked all perky and fresh minted from the factory. Who was she clerking for that she’d gotten stuck out here?

No Beale. No Big John or Crazy Tim. And Major Muscle Henderson wasn’t the briefing officer. What the hell?

“Good evening. My name is Colonel Jeff Isaacson.” A bird colonel. At Bati. Something bad was up. He stood at parade rest at the front of the tent, facing them as if there weren’t six rows of chairs separating him from his reluctant audience. A big man, the way the regular Army grew them. Bigger than Major Henderson. Not quite Big John, but nobody was. Arms the size of Archie’s legs—

Bad
analogy, Kee
. She didn’t want to think about his legs or how it felt when she sat across them or—She almost slapped herself to clear the image.

One thing for sure about the briefing officer. He wasn’t SOAR. He stood wrong. But he had a thick graying beard that hid much of his face and his hair hung a month or more past Army. Only folks who could get away with that were SEALs and Deltas and SOARs. Something still wasn’t right, though he was clearly one tough son of a bitch.

“Sorry to interrupt your vacations, but we have an immediate mission. It should be simple and quiet. As a matter of fact, if it isn’t, I’m screwed. That’s why I asked for you SOAR folks.”

The Colonel with his regulation stance and his regulation attitude didn’t strike her as an operator. For one thing, she’d never heard a SEAL say so many words in a row. And D-boys talked even less than SEALs. Maybe not even Green Beret. This guy must be a Ranger. Or, her mind slipped over to worst-case scenario, maybe he really was Regular Army. More rank than common sense.

Kee raised her hand.

He gave her a crisp nod. “Sergeant.”

“Where’s the rest of our crew? Who is manning the other helicopter?” Helicopters always flew in pairs for support and for rescue if something went wrong.

She could feel Archie’s attention, though the two of them still hadn’t spoken since Italy. So damn petty, shunning her for her past. If he had to live even half of her reality for ten lousy minutes, he’d run screaming in the other direction.
Accept
it, Kee. Just as useless as a civilian. He’s been fun, but he can’t handle you. He’s history. Toss him back into the pond
.

Back to the problem at hand.

“This,” the Colonel indicated with a nod of his head rather than breaking parade rest enough to wave a hand, “is all we need. There will be on-call support in case of problems, but they aren’t to be aware of this mission until absolutely necessary.”

Kee scanned the room again. That creeping sensation of something out of place slid up her spine and lodged there, sharp like a knifepoint.

***

The flight felt wrong.

They’d arrived at sunset, and been in and out of briefing in twelve and a half minutes.

That’s when everything started to slip just a little sideways.

Clay Anderson and Archie were in the cockpit of Beale’s DAP Hawk. Clay flew a Pave Hawk, and he flew it well. But that was a transport bird, not an assault chopper.

And the new chick, Connie somebody, who looked like she should be on a damn cooking show laughing it up with Rachael chirping Ray, was preflighting the Hawk. Kee shadowed her as she checked fuel, armor, tires, climbed up to open the engine covers and visually inspect for leaks as if everything were normal. More than once she pulled a wrench from a thigh pocket to make sure everything was tight, as if Big John would leave his bird in less than perfect shape.

She poked into every corner of the bird until Kee felt stripped naked just watching her. But for all that, Kee couldn’t see that she’d missed anything. She even checked Kee’s minigun just fine, but what was this woman doing on a SOAR flight?

No answers. Kee had to scramble at the last second to make sure her own gear stood ready to rock and roll. The woman looked over as Kee checked inside her sniper rifle case. Kee kept the lid only partway open so that Ms. Nosy couldn’t see in. Everything shipshape, gleaming in the evening light from the fine sheen of oil she’d wiped on when she’d finally done the cleaning. Kee closed and locked the case. Ms. Nosy didn’t ask, merely blinked and looked back to her own gear.

That blink gave her away. She’d been creeping Kee out far more than merely being a woman on the wrong helicopter. Connie Davis, that was the chick’s name, reminded her of Anna. If you took her friend, turned her into a brunette, gave her soldier’s shoulders and added a few inches of height, you’d have Connie Davis. What Kee’d first thought to be a vacant look, she now recognized as one of intense concentration held behind a facade of the dispassionate observer.

Anna had possessed an immensely clear view of the world, one Kee felt lost without, even to this day. But Anna too had generally kept it to herself. Kee learned to read when Anna was processing and storing something in her neatly ordered mind. And this Connie woman had just done the same thing. Except Anna had been born to die on the streets. Connie Davis clearly came from some ordered and safe world.

It’s not as if they could possibly be related, but the painful reminder of her friend sat across the cargo bay from her as Clay and Archie lifted the DAP Hawk into the night sky. The Colonel sat alone at the back of the cargo bay, clipped to the rear cargo net.

Kee’d seen Dilyana running toward them even as they lifted off. She’d meant to track the girl down before they flew, but Isaacson was in an all-fired rush and she wasn’t about to argue with a colonel. They’d grabbed a quick meal together, but she usually tried to leave a hug behind whenever she flew off. She waved, but Dilyana, stumbling to a halt outside the dust cloud of the rotor’s downdraft, didn’t wave back.

The cold chill spread along Kee’s nerves.

Per orders, they flew to a nowhere spot in the southern foothills of the mountains. Two hours into the nothing almost due north, though the action typically lay northwest. There, at the outer slopes of the Hindu Kush, under a desert camo net, sat an old, white Toyota 4x4 pickup. It was scuffed and dented. Looked like a thousand other vehicles kicking around the theater of operations. War liked reliable trucks. Afghan and Pakistan military used Toyotas as often as the Taliban and other insurgents. Perfect ground transport for going in-country. It would blend in anywhere.

But what did Colonel Isaacson need it for? And why had he stashed it way out here?

They hovered a few feet up. Isaacson jumped out, gathered the camo net, and bundled it under a bungee cord in the truck’s bed, along with a dozen five-gallon gas cans. He attached the four-point harness to lift points on the chopper, which was already rigged for lifting.

Kee clicked on the intercom. “We’re not the heavy lifters.” She whispered her complaint even though Isaacson was still outside the chopper.

“The big Chinooks are both down for scheduled maintenance,” Archie reminded her. “We are the only bird in the theater with the M-mod. No one else has the bigger engines to get him over the mountains. I am not all that sure how well we can.”

“Great.”

Within thirty seconds of arrival, they were lifting the truck off the sand. It came reluctantly, as if unhappy about leaving the solid safety of terra firma.

For the first time since she’d been saved by that long-ago SOAR flight, Kee didn’t want to fly either.

***

Dilyana raced after The Kee. She’d waved from the helicopter, but Dilya had been too late. The wind from the blades had pushed Dilya back in a cloud of sand and dust. By the time she could see, they were gone. No lights, just the outline of their shape against the stars, disappearing over the north wall and already moving fast.

She’d tried running up to the top of the bleachers, but The Kee and the String Man were long gone by the time she stood beside the Ranger sentry. He’d offered her a smile. She forced herself to return it. This one sometimes shared a candy bar with her.

She sat down to wait, watching in the direction they’d gone.

Afraid, she could only wait. Wait and hope they came back.

***

The first leg, up through the second midair refueling, was all at altitude. Nothing for Kee to do but sit there and wish for more of the Mediterranean sun while freezing at night over the Hindu Kush. To sit there and dream of how Archie had looked at her as they’d sat together on the stone wall that probably dated back to the Romans. To feel his hand holding her life in where she’d been shot in the side three years before. To taste his kiss that—

A clunk and whirr of motor noise sounded through the deck beneath her feet, more felt than heard over the rotor noise. Kee shook herself and looked out the window around the minigun. They’d extended the midair refueling probe. It now reached to the edge of the Hawk’s rotor sweep. A Hercules tanker flew ahead and slightly above, dragging a long fuel line with a basket on the end. At over a hundred knots, Archie slid the Hawk forward and dead-centered the basket with the probe on his first try. Mated up, the Hawk started sucking down fuel.

Well, Archie was good at mating up. Damned fine in the sack and out in the Italian sun atop that hill. Why did he have to be such a jerk? They’d been so good together.
Shit! Stop it!

The intercom had been silent for the whole trip. Ms. Connie whoever hadn’t said a word, not in briefing, not in preflight, and not now. Clay and Archie hadn’t talked more than to double-check status of their flight plan.

Their high elevation, combined with the heavy load, had the bird sucking down fuel like a mad drunk. Two refuels en route.

As soon as this second refueling was complete, they were supposed to go low. Below radar, but not NOE. Apparently this mission had no need for the chaos of a Nap of Earth routine. Which was a good thing, especially with a ton of pickup truck dangling thirty feet below the Hawk. On this leg of the flight, all their profile called for was to stay down in the valleys and cross the ridges low. Which was good. With this kind of load, they couldn’t climb over the truly tall stuff. Probably couldn’t even do the mission if not for the DAP Hawk’s engine and rotor blade upgrade.

Kee kept her attention out the window once she’d made sure that Ms. Newbie had her hands on her gun and her own attention outside.

She did, but there was nothing going on except frozen wasteland.

The Colonel didn’t say a word either, hadn’t bothered patching his helmet into the intercom system. All quiet.

Not even a single stray shot from someone suddenly surprised by their overflight. No one hanging out around here to get their jollies. They were way off in the mountains, cruising down valleys that perhaps no man had ever lived in. Slipping up over passes that had never been walked, and so on into the next and the next. They were so far off the edge of the map, there was nothing to see. And who knew how far back their backup flew if something went wrong. Kee definitely didn’t want to think about that.

She did her best to watch the refueling tanker dumping a hundred gallons a minute into their tanks without watching the frozen passes and the jagged peaks of the western Karakoram mountains that stretched in every direction below.

Connie stayed focused, but Kee’s attention kept slipping. At first, wishing she knew if someone was keeping an eye on Dilya. Second, what was going on here. Third, what the hell was wrong with Archie anyway? Couldn’t he see a good thing when he was buried up to his ears between her breasts? What was wrong with that man?

The instant they disconnected from the tanker and it had turned back for friendlier locales, Archie brought the chopper down until they could see the glacier crevasses far too clearly in the moonlight.

As they descended, the Colonel shed his helmet and flight gear to reveal native dress beneath. She watched him from the corner of her eye and saw him stash a weapon she’d never seen outside of training, a Russian Makarov PM handgun. Then he dragged an AK-47 from a kit bag and slung it over his shoulder. He leaned in close to Kee and jabbed a finger at the bag he’d clipped to the cargo net across the rear with all his U.S. Army gear jammed inside.

“Burn it!”

He maintained his glare until she nodded her assent. She’d burn it, once she’d gone through all of his pockets very carefully.

He kicked a fast rope out the cargo bay door and climbed down bare-handed. Even D-boys used gloves, of course, they slid down these ropes to land on the ground, not hand over hand toward a pickup truck spinning lazily back and forth a hundred feet in the air. He’d climbed out while they flew at 150 miles an hour.

Connie snapped out of her seat and latched a monkey harness to the ceiling. Enough leash to move freely about the cabin, she moved beside Kee to stare down at the mad Colonel as he buffeted about in the winds below the chopper.

He slammed brutally into the side of his pickup truck. But rather than losing his hold and falling to his death, he managed to wrap an arm through the open driver’s window. He crawled off the rope and into the vehicle.

Then his arm stuck out the window and waved upward. Did so again until Kee pulled up the rope and recoiled it.

The man ranked certifiable.

Archie kept them low enough that she watched carefully to make sure they didn’t leave the pickup dangling on some rocky spire. He might not be as hotshot a pilot as Major Beale, but he was still damned good.