Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers) (11 page)

Lola was reaching for the salt and trying really hard not to look at Tim when Viper Henderson appeared at the end of their table.

He spoke softly, clearly for their ears only. “Twenty minutes. Full gear. We’re gone. Dilya, you’re okay with us for stage one.” Then he was gone as if he’d never been there.

Lola could feel her heart beat two, three, four times before anyone reacted. Then they stood up, not all at once, but rather as if just going about normal business, dumping half-full and full trays at the cleanup station. A quick pass up the chow line, this time for fruit, energy bars, and maybe a sandwich that could be demolished while they headed for their tents. Dilya moved with similar grace and speed. A little trooper who knew the drill.

Lola followed close behind Tim; they were the last ones to clear the tent. No one had paid them any mind.

Just at the exit from the tent, Tim hurried his pace and bumped square into a Ranger while pretending to look the other way. They’d been clear, then Tim had purposely drawn attention to his hurried departure. Lola hung back trying to figure out why.

“Hey.” The Ranger made sure Tim was steady on his feet. “There a mission to fly?” It had been a quiet couple days for the Rangers and they were getting itchy for some action.

Tim leaned in and whispered something that Lola couldn’t quite catch.

She sidled in and caught the end of Tim’s spiel. “We’ll call from fifteen minutes out. Promise not to tell anybody before.”

“I swear on yo mama!” The Ranger held up what might have been a Cub Scout salute. Then he hurried into the chow tent, clearly excited to spread whatever news he’d just been sworn to secrecy about.

Lola moved up beside Tim as they headed for the tents to pack their gear.

“Alright, what was that?”

“That, oh nothing.” Tim waved a hand as if it didn’t matter. “Told him we just got a secret call to fly down to Peshawar. Carrier was sending in twenty gallons of ice cream and we had to be there whenever it arrived or we’d miss out.”

Ice cream.

“That was so cruel.” Lola knew that Bati air base had never in its history had ice cream. Troops mooned over it on the blistering hot days, talked about favorite flavors, got into fights over waffle versus sugar cones just to have an excuse for a brawl to break the boredom when times were really slow.

She looked back over her shoulder. They’d wait for hours. Twenty gallons would be enough for everyone on base to have two or three bowls. They’d wait all night rather than sleeping as they normally would.

“The fifteen minutes warning.” Tim sounded terribly pleased. “That was really the cherry on top.”

“I don’t get it.”

Tim just smiled as if he really had just eaten the cherry.

“Oh.” Lola got it. They’d have tables and bowls and spoons all set out and lined up within minutes of the helicopters taking off. And then a couple dozen Rangers, and about fifty base and SOAR personnel would wait. And wait.

When the ice cream never showed up, everyone would pound on the poor, dumb Ranger who’d bought Tim’s line. With one sentence he’d stirred up several days’ worth of entertainment.

Almost a pity that they’d miss it.

***

In ten minutes flat, they were all at the DAP Hawks in full flight gear and stowing their duffels. Tim felt far better than he had in days. Nothing as fun as deep-sixing a Ranger; they were almost too easy for target practice, but still fun.

He and John kicked into high gear on the preflight.

Dilya was coming, so that meant weapons shouldn’t be needed, but Tim checked them anyway, while John preflighted the engines, fuel, and exterior of the craft. Captain Richardson, the copilot, was already on the avionics. Tim made sure that fresh belts were laid into the miniguns and the Vulcan 20 mm cannon. He grabbed the nose of each Hellfire missile and gave it a good shake to check the seating of the clamps. He checked that the reds, the armorers easily identified by their red vests, had indeed refilled both 19-tube FFAR rocket pods.

At twenty minutes from the warning, Major Henderson climbed aboard and thirty seconds later they were airborne. Tim glanced to the side in time to see the
Vengeance
rising up in their wake. The knife-edge desert sunset slashed the day from night, darkening the arena even as they cleared the stadium’s rim.

Right behind them, the big Chinook, which had the captured truck aboard, lifted clear. Only after they were airborne did the ring of Delta Force who had been guarding the chopper disperse.

Tim wondered what the hell the Delta Force operators had dug up out in the Iranian desert. An itch between his shoulders told him that his first guess was wrong. He was going to find out.

***

With the sole instruction of “Full force protection, follow
Viper
,” Lola found her mind free to wander. It was dark night now, but
Viper
was a clear beacon on the projection against the inside of her visor. Four rotor diameters ahead and one to the side, allowing for concentration of force while also providing clear forward vision and an open field of fire.

Their heading made no sense, but that wasn’t a first.

And there was no question what they were to be protecting—the laden Chinook floated along right behind them.

They had a child aboard a fully armed, secret military helicopter, which was a new one for her, but she could shrug that off if others could. And Sergeant Kee could be a bloody pain in the ass, but she guarded over the kid with her whole heart. No chance she’d put the kid in harm’s way.

Lola was starting to see the woman’s strong core through all of the rough edges. Could see that Kee had clearly grown up like a wild weed running loose on the streets. Word around camp said East LA, which was a hard road to be sure. But it was as if she and Kee came from rival gangs and no quarter could be granted, ever.

Well, that wasn’t how Lola had pictured SOAR. She’d pictured camaraderie. She’d pictured a tight team that flew together, partied together, kicked ass together, and unquestionably had each other’s backs. Lola would lay safe ten-to-one money that Kee wouldn’t even miss Lola if she fell over dead this instant.

The feeling was mutual. If Kee was shot, there was no chance that afterward Lola’d be wishing it had been her instead of Kee.

Then she glanced to her right and eyed the Major. Not that you could see anything beyond the helmet not much smaller than an astronaut’s, the full flight suit, survival vest, and FN SCAR carbine folded across her chest, but she sat there like an absolute rock. An icon to her crew.

Lola wanted that. Suddenly wanted it so bad it was like a knot in her chest. So sharp that if she didn’t know better, she’d think she was having a heart attack. But it wasn’t.

Nor was it envy.

It was hope. A hopeless hope. She knew the combination well, and the diagnosis was easy—she was totally screwed. She could dream of being like Beale all she wanted. She could strive all she wanted.

And in the end she’d choke on it.

Then Major Beale took her hand off the collective control, not a problem as Lola was pilot-in-control at the moment and Beale was just feathering along out of habit.

But what she did was rub that hand gently across her belly despite all of the heavy gear. A gesture Lola had seen many times in Mama Raci’s Storyville kitchen. When some working girl would come in, scared to death and knowing she was—

Beale jerked her head around at Lola’s gasp and then punched mute on the intercom. Not just for her station, but for the whole chopper. She never did that. Major Beale always kept all of the comm channels open so that her crew was always informed.

Lola agreed wholeheartedly. She didn’t like her first trainer who had insisted on isolating the back-enders from strategic chatter with other birds or the Air Mission Controller. Kee and Connie had their butts on the line just like Lola and the Major, so they deserved to know what was going on at all times.

It took Beale three tries but she finally managed to set the intercom so that only she and Lola were in the circuit.

“Not one word!” With that tone, Emily’s voice could have commanded a battalion to fly into the valley of death. “I’m late is all. I’m just late. Not a word to the crew. Not to Mark. Not to anyone. Do you understand me? Not one word.”

“Yes, sir!” Lola snapped it out instinctively even as Henderson began curving his helicopter down toward a landing in the middle of nowhere. She checked the charts again, truly nowhere southwest Pakistan.

“May I ask one question, Major?”

Beale paused before suddenly puffing out a breath and in a much quieter voice saying, “Go ahead. Ask it.”

“If you’re not ‘just late,’ are you to be congratulated that there will be another generation of Viper in the world? Or not?”

Again the silence and the long puff of breath as Lola landed in desert-nowhere-in-particular, close behind Major Henderson.

If the rotors hadn’t already been winding down and the cabin growing quieter with the last of the descent, Lola would not have heard the expectant mother’s response despite the intercom feeding her voice directly to Lola’s helmet.

“Damned if I know, Chief Warrant. Damned if I know.”

Lola reached across and squeezed the hand of the Major, who clutched at it convulsively. Lola’s left hand on the collective, the Major’s right hand controlling the cyclic, they descended the last few dozen feet together.

“It’ll be okay, Major.”

“How do you know?”

Lola laughed and tightened her grip to match the Major’s.

“Damned if I do, Major. But it’s what Mama Raci always told the girls who came into her kitchen to tell her they’d just ruined their livelihood.”

“Was it okay?” The Major’s voice was a bit thin and breathless. Grasping for hope.

All Lola could do was shrug and tell the truth as the wheels touched the ground. “Not often, but sometimes. Sometimes it was definitely alright.”

***

Beale waved Lola off from the shutdown, so she jumped down to see what they were doing out here in the untracked desert. She peeled her helmet just in time to get a face full of dust from the big Chinook that landed right behind them.

Once their rotors began winding down, she heard Major Henderson’s call from where he stood by the other Hawk, “Wrap ’em up tight.” Well, that answered that. They weren’t going to be staying anywhere local, nor returning soon to Bati. They were headed beyond the range of a simple chopper flight.

In moments Connie and Kee had closed the cargo bay doors, exposing the footholds built into the side of the chopper behind the door. They scrambled up onto the top of the fuselage. Lola grabbed a monkey-line strap from where it hung inside her door.

The two women up top shoved the rotors around until the fixed blade lined up with the tail, then they set to work unpinning the remaining blades one by one from the rotor’s head.

Lola went to the end of the blade they were working on and heaved the strap up and over its tip.

“Walk ’er in,” Connie called out softly, and Lola grabbed the two strap ends and began towing the released blade around on its pivot, dragging it toward the tail. When she got it nearly to the tail, she slid the strap free and the blade swung home under its own momentum, nestled against the blade already lying in place.

Lola still wasn’t used to the five-blade rig. The blades were quieter and the rig let them fly faster than the standard four-blade Hawk. She was starting to learn that because the blades were shorter, she could slew a turn about ten percent harder. The DAP Hawk with the five blades and the bigger engines really did make her feel all-powerful when she flew.

So why did she feel so powerless in the face of this crew?

Major Beale arrived at her shoulder, and they watched the two crew chiefs finish buttoning down the blade and start unpinning the next one.

Without turning to Lola, the Major whispered, “Not a soul.”

Lola only had to think a moment to realize the comment wasn’t about the mission, but rather about the possible change to the Major’s future. Lola raised her right hand in a three-fingered salute. “Scout’s honor.”

“You were a Girl Scout?”

“No.” Lola grinned at some of the memories. “But I tripped more than my fair share of Boy Scouts. Does that count?”

Beale laughed aloud. “God, it feels good to laugh. We were careful. We were always so damned careful.”

“Nothing’s a hundred percent. How long have you known?”

“Yesterday. Maybe.”

Lola could hear the tentative in the Major’s voice. “Not a lot of pee sticks in a forward operations theater. The military still isn’t used to women.”

“I know. Ticks me off.”

Lola could think of a thousand things that ticked her off about how the military didn’t understand women, but that was something you signed up for. You had to outfly, outfight, and outsmart the men, especially in the lower services. By the time you got to SOAR, the worst of the jerks had been winnowed out, a surprising number actually.

It was just surreal that the ones she was having problems with were the women. Lola towed the third blade around for the crew chiefs before returning to the Major’s side.

“You do recall that I used to fly CSAR?” she asked the Major.

“I do. Remember you saving my butt. Literally.”

And Lola had. “Wasn’t sure you remembered that. You were pretty far out of it by the time I came along.”

“Not that far.”

Again Lola’s respect for the woman went up another notch. Concussion and pain and way too much blood loss, and the Major had not only completed the mission but remembered the medical crew who had come for her. No, more likely she remembered the pilot who had finished flying her helicopter home when she was no longer capable.

“Well, I’ve restocked our med kit knowing we’d have four women on board. I’ll get you a couple EPT sticks the next moment no one is around.”

“You stocked a military bird, a DAP Hawk, with early pregnancy tests?” Lola could feel the woman’s smile in the dark. “Thanks, Lola. I’m really glad you’re aboard.”

Lola laughed but couldn’t hide the bitter edge to it. “That makes you and nobody else.”