Light Up the Night (18 page)

Trisha spotted Lola Maloney on the deck of the
Peleliu
as soon as she stepped off Dennis's chopper. Billy nodded to her and turned for his quarters. Trisha thanked Dennis and met Maloney halfway across the deck.

“Hot as a bitch here, Chief,” she called out when they were close enough. After New England, it was scorching. They traded salutes.

“You're back?” Maloney came up to her.

“Yes, sir.”

Maloney held out her hand and Trisha shook it, the relief coursing through her body. Hoping this was going to work, though how she still wasn't totally clear, she'd rather feared this moment. Lola gave her hand another squeeze before letting go, making it okay.

“I'm glad. You know, you're even more of a pain in the ass than I was, and that's saying something.”

“You were?” Trisha suddenly felt out of balance. Lola Maloney was a company leader for a significant and important operation. Air Mission Commander Archie Stevenson might be a captain, but he was in command only during flight operations. The company aboard the
Peleliu
belonged to Maloney.

“Yep! Beale reamed my backside but good. Did the same to Kee and Connie, truth be told. I guess you count too, now that I passed on that tradition. Sorry you never knew her. She was incredible.”

Trisha had sworn Billy to secrecy on that point, threatened him with blood and murder and withholding sex. But she felt as if, by stepping back on this deck beneath the blazing Gulf sun, it no longer mattered so much how she got here. What mattered was that she was here.

“We spent two years together,” she told Lola. “In the same company with the Screaming Eagles. Busted asses together through Green Platoon. She…” Trisha looked back up at the achingly blue sky and blinked hard. “She's the one who made me who I am. She's how I got here.”

Lola shook her shoulder in a friendly fashion. “She'd say that you're the one who made you who you are. But I know exactly what you mean.”

Trisha couldn't speak and just nodded her head.

Lola stepped back and snapped a salute. “Welcome back aboard, Lieutenant O'Malley.”

Trisha returned the salute at rigid attention despite her civilian clothes. “Glad to be here, sir.”

Then they both smiled and Trisha shouldered her duffel. When she stood, Lola tucked her hand through Trisha's arm, much to her surprise, and they headed toward the down ladder together.

Lola leaned in and half whispered, “All any of us got from Beale was a bloody distant nod of acknowledgment. I thought welcoming you back might be better.”

Trisha tried to process what she was feeling, but it was too big and it wasn't working, neither externally nor internally. So she kept it simple.

“It is better.”

And it was.

***

“We didn't have much to work with.”

Trisha couldn't get her jaw working. They had bombed her quarters on the
Peleliu.
Connie, Kee, and even little Dilya stood in the small space between the foot of her bed and the closet.

“It's amazing!” Stars were cut out of light green and pink Navy requisition forms and taped all over the walls. Paper plates, bearing drawings of helicopters with dragon wings and spitting fire, dangled from threads that had been duct-taped to the ceiling. A cleaning bucket filled with ice and sodas sat on the desk, along with bags of chips and a stack of cookies. “But why?”

“Well, each of us has been through the ‘Emily talk.'” Connie actually shuddered, her soft brunette hair fluttering.

“And”—Kee took Trisha's duffel and chucked it into the bottom of the closet as if it didn't weigh much at all—“we'd all stepped back up to the plate, so we figured you would. Though none of us took a damned week to do so.”

“I…” Trisha still could believe what she was seeing. No way was she going to cry, but she might start giggling at any moment. “I had some things to work out.”

“Tell me about it!” Lola sounded totally disgusted as she took a Dr Pepper and a bag of peanuts before dropping down on the bed. “So, tell us a Beale story from before.”

Connie and Kee looked a bit startled at the comment.

“I flew with her for two years. We did Green Platoon together.”

Connie whistled in surprise and settled with a soda and a cookie on the desk chair. “No wonder she wouldn't go near you during Assessment Week and left it to me to do your interview.”

Kee just nodded. “That explains why you're such a goddamn good pilot. I should have seen it, but you're too different. She was a rock.”

“Whereas I'm a nutcase?”

Kee grabbed a Diet Coke and toasted her with it. “Absolutely. Welcome to the club.” She sat on the floor beside Dilya, who was drawing another dragon-chopper.

“She's good,” Trisha complimented Dilya, but she was too busy drawing to notice. The thing looked like it could actually exist.

Kee nodded. “So give.”

Trisha shrugged. She didn't really know how to act in a room full of women. She'd been an outcast in Catholic school. And at NYU she'd never been much of a joiner. She'd run with Vinny's gang, but the girls there were even tougher than the guys in some ways. And regular Army was mostly men. Beale had been her only female friend. Ever.

Kee grimaced at Trisha's hesitation. “Either a Beale story or…” She looked at the others as if eliciting support. “Or you can start with that handsome hunk of a SEAL. You know we'll get to him sooner or later.”

The others all nodded in agreement. Trisha settled on the bed beside Lola Maloney and leaned back against the wall.

“Well, there was a time in Sri Lanka when Emily and I—”

“Spoilsport!” Kee's grin was easy. “Don't think we're gonna forget about the SEAL.”

Trisha settled into her story.

The time-zone jump worked out. Flipping back from daytime living to nighttime flying, Trisha slept that day and flew that night.

Sweep patrols. Nothing special. But she flew. And rather than jumping ahead of the flight line, she told Dennis and Max how she did it, and now they all surged ahead in unison. Many nights they sat in the ready room for hours, all dressed up with nowhere to go as the drones swept over the endless sea. Other nights they worked back and forth around the Horn of Africa checking dozens of boats, some of which were indeed those of night fishermen. Others had heard enough about the patrols to throw their weapons overboard rather than risk having their engine shot off and their leader killed. “Oh no, we're just innocent Somali fishermen who happen to be carrying AK-47s and grappling gear for boarding large ships.”

For an entire week Trisha behaved, flew in formation, and chatted pleasantly at meals. Sometimes she ate with Billy and Michael and LC Ramis, sometimes with the Little Bird crews, and more than a couple of times with the three other women. They were getting to know each other and it was becoming comfortable. Another place she belonged. She and Dilya actually got into the dragon-chopper drawings. They started doing technical designs, recruiting Connie on the tricky parts. The kid had a real flair for it.

And by the end of that week, she wanted to hit something…really, really, really hard. Not that she had a whole lot of options about where to express her frustrations.

No way to take it to Lola. The Chief Warrant was too damn pleased with her first attempt to step into Beale's shoes in the fine art of breaking women to the SOAR team. Trisha knew intellectually that wasn't what was going down, but she couldn't stop the feelings.

Trisha didn't want to disappoint Kee and Connie. They'd become friends and wouldn't understand that she still had doubts and fears and frustrations. Especially frustrations.

Roland, Dennis, Max? Not so much. Instead, Trisha simply flew and fumed and didn't show it to anyone though it festered deep inside until it actually hurt, leaving her stomach in knots for hours after a flight.

She needed to tell someone, but even when she tried to say something to Billy, it just choked off. She'd lie awake after Billy had fallen asleep and they'd each sated their apparently bottomless need and joy for the other. She'd review every maneuver from that night's flight in the Little Bird, wondering if she'd messed up a flight somehow or let down a team member or judged something wrong or who the hell knew what. Constantly second-guessing herself took the joy out of flying.

No question that Billy would assume that she could just fit in now. They were a group, a team of f'ing homies. That was his idea of comfort. It was her idea of a garrote about to be cinched tight around her throat.

“What is it?”

“What is what?” Trisha had thought Billy was once again safely asleep.

“Whatever is keeping you awake and fussing these last nights.”

“Nothing.”

Billy went silent at that.

Didn't the man know when a woman wanted to be prodded for information?
C'mon, Billy, save me from myself here.

“You sure?” That was his idea of prodding? How lame was he?

“Yeah.” How lame was she? He'd given her an opening, a weak-ass lame one, but an opening. And she turned it down anyway. “God, we're a pair, aren't we?”

“I just figured you'd say what you had to say when you were ready to say it.”

“Oh, like you talk so much.” She tapped a finger lightly where the scar crossed over his sternum.

His shrug was eloquent.

“Don't you get sick of doing what everyone says to do?” Maybe if she came at it sideways.

“But I don't.”

“Tell me one single time that you didn't follow the rules. I'm not talking about jumping aboard a Delta mission to rescue an oil tanker from pirates, even if you did great. Tell me about one time that Lieutenant Billy the SEAL did one thing that wasn't for the good of the team but rather for the good of himself.” Trisha didn't know where the heat was coming from, but she couldn't keep it from her body or her voice. She sat up and looked down at the naked man still sprawled half-covered on her narrow bunk.

Billy went silent for a while, staring so intently at the plain gray steel of the ceiling that she actually glanced up to see if there was a spider or a stray thermonuclear device that had somehow caught all of his attention.

“Can't come up with one, huh?”

“I'm thinking.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I'm thinking of telling you to mind your own damned business.”

Trisha felt the slap as surely as if he'd actually struck her. She'd never told anyone the things that Billy knew about her. Even Emily Beale didn't know about her parents. Chief Maloney had the decency to tell no one other than Kee and Connie, not even Dennis who had taken Trisha off the ship, why she'd gone on an emergency sabbatical. But Billy knew. And now he was…

She climbed over him out of the bed and began dragging on her clothes.

“Where are you going?”

Trisha yanked down her green T-shirt with “ARMY” emblazoned across it. She could take strength from that. “Looks as if I'm boldly going nowhere, just like us.” And she stormed out of the room.

She heard him scrabbling for clothes before following her, so she headed off fast and light toward a section of the ship she'd never explored. Across the empty mid-shift mess room and out the other side.

How had she ended up in this place? Aboard a Navy ship so thick with Navy regulations that they disapproved of the arrogance of the U.S. Rangers and the “mavericks” of SOAR. Stuck in a Night Stalkers company where she'd be in trouble if she colored the least little bit outside the lines. Her lover, a Navy SEAL for crying out loud, was the biggest conformist of them all.

And now where was she supposed to go on a ship barely eight hundred feet long? There was a big lummox of a SEAL swimming between her sheets so her cabin was off limits. Go for yet another run in the helo hangar? He'd definitely find her there. Explore yet some other lost corner of this empty, echoing ship carrying a quarter of its normal crew and sounding just that way? A thousand or so Marines on board and she'd be able to find some interesting way to get into trouble. Without them, the ship's emptiness was immense indeed.

So, it was the middle of the day, which was supposed to be the middle of her night, and she was wide awake and roaming the corridors.

She nearly ran down the girl when she turned a corner into one of the bunk rooms at the aft end of the ship.

Dilya stood there with her ever-present e-tablet tucked in her arms, staring up at the tiers of bunks in the empty room. The room was the width of the ship by eighty feet long. Bunks rose in stacks three and four high. Each one had its mattress rolled up and tied at the foot of the steel springs.

“Where are all the people?”

“We, uh, don't need them for this trip.” It was a little spooky, like a ghost ship, or at least this part of it was. The
Peleliu
had forty or fifty years' worth of ghosts. Trisha didn't think they'd seen any major action, but she wasn't sure. Wherever the men were who had filled these racks, they weren't here now.

“Even Dragonriders get their own rooms, mostly. And they're much nicer than this.”

Trisha didn't remember the stories of Pern that well. She'd just been helping to design dragon-copters.

“Except for the holdless. They had to live out of doors despite the thread falling from the skies.” Then she turned those green eyes on Trisha, made even more shocking by her dark hair and complexion. “If there were dragons, would they be more powerful than helicopters?”

“Uh, they're kind of different. Dragons can throw flame, but just a little way. With helicopters we can throw our… We can throw them a long way.”

Dilya nodded as if filing away that information for future usage. Then she perched on the edge of the lowest bunk. So, for lack of anything better to do, Trisha did the same across the aisle. Their knees didn't quite touch.

Trisha continued. “Helicopters are faster than dragons but we can't go between to other—”

“You kill peoples?”

“Uh,” Trisha scrambled to shift gears. No point in lying to the kid. “People, sometimes. When it's needed.” And she sure wasn't going to debate with a kid when death was needed and who decided. Either they were shooting at her, which was an automatic black mark in her book, or someone in command had decided that a certain target had to go down.

“So does the Kee. I don't do that anymore.”

“Anymore?”

Dilya answered her with silence. The kid was like what, twelve maybe? And she no longer killed people? That meant she had. What a hell of a life. That set Trisha to remembering Vinny's gang as they ran through Southie. Death was rare among the gangs, rare enough that it was always a shock, frequent enough that it felt as if it never stopped. And it certainly wasn't done by ten-year-old kids, at least not in Vinny's gang. Or that she'd ever seen. Bill had at least been fourteen, as if that made it all okay.

“Why?”

“Why what?” Trisha really hoped that the kid wasn't asking what she thought was being asked.

“Why do you kill peoples? People.”

“I never thought about it that way.”

Dilya looked at her as if Trisha were the idiot child.

“I don't just go out and do it. There are a lot of bad people out there, and it is my job to go out and do my best to stop them.”

“Even if it means making them dead?”

“Even if it means making them dead.” How in the world had she ended up in this conversation? And in such a surreal setting? Fifteen hundred U.S. Marines had been stationed on the
Peleliu
at any one time. They had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. They'd evacuated people from volcanic eruptions in the Philippines and helped out at Hurricane Sandy with rescue efforts after New York was slammed. The
Peleliu
had even been here in Somalia twenty years before during Operation Restore Hope, the minor success before the disastrous Operation Gothic Serpent and the Battle of Mogadishu.

And somehow she was the one that the kid had to ask.

“I fly to help people, to help keep them safe. To help keep you safe.”

“The Kee already do that when she kill Dog One and Dog Two.”

Clearly some story Trisha knew nothing about, and Dilya wasn't elaborating so she dropped it. The problem with the platitudes was that they didn't sound like platitudes.

Sure, Trisha had begun fighting because it's just what she did. She could even see now that it was in reaction to who her parents were.

Had her father really meant that about Trisha scaring her mother to death? Maybe she had. In retrospect, so much of what Trisha had done was fighting back against a past she didn't want any part of. If all her life to date had been built on reaction against something, maybe it was time she started acting on her own behalf.

And her first step was that she'd better find Billy and apologize for storming out. He was definitely someone that she wanted to keep around for a while. How long? She had no idea, but a while anyway, which was a step forward for her.

“Thanks, kid.”

Except Dilya was gone. Trisha sat alone in the bunk space. How long had she been snarled up in her own thoughts? Had the kid even been here? Yes, Trisha decided. Either Dilya had been there or Trisha was really losing it.

***

Halfway back to her cabin, she ran into Roland headed the other way at a narrow hatchway where one of them had to give way.

“You going to the show?” Roland asked her as he passed.

“What show?” She hadn't heard anything about a show.

“Rangers vs. Navy. They cleared a wrestling gym down on fourth deck, forward. Put some matting down in one of the empty bomb storage lockers. It should be good fun to watch.”

“Young-buck Rangers and old-hand Navy defending their own ship.” A passing fuelie, Navy flight-deck service guy, stopped to join the conversation.

“Hey, Sly,” Trisha teased him, “almost didn't recognize a grape without his jumpsuit. Does it come with booties?” When on the flight deck, all Navy personnel wore color-coded clothing. Because he worked with fueling aircraft, Sly wore a bright purple vest, hence the “grape” nickname. You'd think red meant fuel, but that prize went to the munitions guys.

“And a little flap door in the back. You betcha, O'Malley.” They both knew that no matter how hot the weather was, he spent his working shift in a full-body Nomex fire-retardant suit, just like a smokejumper. “We're gonna be putting some Ranger face into the mats tonight.”

“Going to be doing that personally?”

“Might be. Might be.” He was a big guy and Trisha saw that he moved well. Powerful, even dangerous, but too heavy on his heels.

“Maybe I'll come watch that.” But she wanted to find Billy first.

The grape headed down ladder. At a signal from Roland she waited. Once Sly was gone, Roland turned back to her, keeping his voice low.

“Don't wanna intrude, but if you're looking for that SEAL, I just saw him. He headed down as soon as I told him about the matchup.”

Without even searching the ship from stem to stern looking for her.

“He looked some kinda frustrated when he asked if I'd seen you. Didn't make a big deal of it. Wouldn't have thought anything of it, the way he did it, but since I knew you two were…” Roland shrugged.

Trisha thought she and Billy had been a bit more subtle than that. The women hadn't thought so, and neither had Roland. She glanced at her watch. Three hours. It had been that long since she'd stormed out of the cabin. Long enough for her to cool down. And, she made a wager with herself, probably just enough time for Billy's slow temper to heat up. Good thing they didn't both flash hot at the same rate, or they'd murder each other one of these nights.