Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers) (25 page)

“Too many hours. You’ve already flown your birds too many hours today. You are not cleared for flight.” The flight-line officer tried to block their path.

Lola considered punching him or busting a kneecap.

Major Henderson moved until he was toe to toe with the lieutenant. “Can you read my lapel, mister?”

“Yes, sir, Major, sir.”

“Good, remember that the next time you try to give an order. Now, if you didn’t get our birds refueled, you have a C-135 tanker meet us at the shore. We’re airborne in five minutes.”

Lola had stopped along with all of the others to watch the show.

Viper glared over at them, no question what mode he was in at the moment as his command rang out. “You, too. Move your asses.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” They shouted in unison and sprinted for the birds to run preflight.

The two D-boys lagged behind to make sure the flight officer didn’t offer any other interference.

Tim shot her a cheeky grin as she peeled off toward
Vengeance.

“Well.” She sent a thought to Dilya thankfully safe in Washington, D.C. “Let’s see just how bad vengeance can be.”

Both birds were airborne in three minutes. All armor checked, all lights green. Luckily for the flight-line lieutenant’s continued well-being, he’d already had both Hawks fully refueled.

Ten minutes later, they blew past the coast and out into the darkness of the Gulf of Mexico at night.

“Keep low and—” Viper’s voice cut off with the grunt of a high-gee turn. “Watch out for ships.”

Trailing a half-dozen rotors behind, Lola barely had time to correct past the stern of a fishing trawler. She popped up to ten meters above the waves and retuned the radar for ocean clutter. The Gulf was an obstacle course of ships moving about. She’d forgotten how busy the seaway was here. In the Air National Guard, you flew a hundred or more feet up to be clear of the shipping. But who knew what was watching for them at the moment.

“Okay, Chief Warrant.” Major Henderson’s voice still had that ring of command that no one could ignore. That tone he’d taken the moment she’d identified the transport method.

“Care to explain to me what we’re doing redlining across the Gulf at two in the morning? And why we’re visiting an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf at this time of night? I show you have twenty-eight minutes until contact to explain this to me.”

She checked her own mission clock and agreed. Tipping the nose ever so slightly down and right improved the airflow to the engine intakes, causing the navigation computer to recompute. That would save her another thirty-five seconds.

It was only now that she realized the Majors hadn’t questioned her. She’d said where and they’d gone at a run. They trusted her and her instincts.

She glanced over at Beale who simply flew with one hand riding lightly on the cyclic. The Major’s other hand didn’t hold the collective as Lola’s did. Instead it rested on her belly. Perhaps sensing Lola’s glance, Beale shifted her hands to the proper position, but there was a hesitation, a reluctance that worried Lola. A pilot couldn’t afford to have split attention in combat. And Lola had little question that’s where they were headed.

“Chief Warrant?” There was no avoiding Henderson’s demand for an answer.

“Prior to Katrina, New Orleans had a history of being the deadliest city per capita anywhere in the U.S. Worse than Detroit. For six months after, it became an amazingly safe city. Why? We’d exported all our criminals along with all of the other refugees.” Lola corrected around a container ship, clearing it by a half rotor of distance.

She felt an unexpected resistance on the controls. She slanted a glance over, moving her helmet as little as possible. Major Beale’s hand was now clenched tightly around the cyclic control. Lola wiggled the stick slightly, just as Beale had done to her on their first flight, and the Major eased her grasp immediately.

“It took a couple years, but they’re back. Having left behind nasty little nightmares in Houston, Nashville, and Little Rock, they came back in force. Scared judges, or ones that are just plain lazy, make it easy to hit the streets, often within hours of an arrest. Some of them were just dug in from the beginning and never left. My father started out as a cop, accepting bribery from and later running whorehouses in Storyville.”

Mama Raci’s hadn’t been one of his, the reason Lola had chosen it as a refuge at first. Later because Mama Raci was the first person who’d set standards and expected her to live up to them.

“His control grew and so did his greed. Who needs a warlord when you have him for a deputy sheriff?”

“So what did he say on the phone?”

“I quote, ‘Heard from a buddy that Pikes has a rig expecting some inbound traffic tonight. Something hot and quiet.’ The way he said it, he was pissed that he didn’t have a part of it.”

She’d not mention that he asked who the hot rod was that had called about marrying her and how much was she getting paid an hour for it? She couldn’t imagine what he’d said to Tim.

But Tim’s answer had been to propose to her.

And she’d turned him down.

“Well done, LaRue. Glad to have you aboard.”

For a moment she’d thought he was saying she’d been smart to turn down Tim. Then she realized that Major Henderson was trying to pay her a nice compliment. A compliment for her dedication to SOAR and its mission.

But it didn’t offset the chill that threatened to consume her. The chill that maybe her rejection had been too well done and Tim wouldn’t ask her again.

They came in low, five feet off the waves. They swung wide and came at the Pikes oil rig from opposite sides.

“Be careful, Major,” Lola called over the radio. “This is a GVA 4000 model rig, not a lot of extra space around the helideck.”

Just as they swooped up from wave tops at two hundred klicks per hour to a full stop six stories up, Lola once again felt resistance on the cyclic. Knowing exactly what it was, she flicked the control, hard, knowing she’d lose a little momentum on the climb. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Major snatch her hands off the controls, an uncharacteristically dangerous action.

But now the controls were free and it was all Lola could worry about at the moment.

Just as her nose cleared the edge of the platform, an RPG streaked by not ten feet in front of her windscreen, thankfully passing between the spinning rotor blades. If she hadn’t hesitated to knock the Major’s hand clear, she’d have taken that right in the belly.

“Steel!” she yelled into the headset. “We Deal in Steel” was the motto of the Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawks, and almost before she could finish her call, the two crew chiefs were laying in as only a DAP Hawk could.

Twin arcs of green death lashed out of either side of her helicopter. Kee’s hand-steerable minigun was throwing three thousand rounds a minute, pouring death into the control cabin where the RPG had originated. It sounded like a monster buzz saw driven by a Peterbilt truck engine, that sound of pure, lethal power.

Connie’s opened up on the other side, having found some appropriate target.

Lola spotted the other Black Hawk.

“
Viper
’s hit. Going down on the deck. Give him cover.” Her training let her register the event and react before she’d even focused on it.

They’d clipped his tail and he was trying to auto-rotate onto a platform not much bigger than his bird with a six-story drop to the ocean on two sides and a nightmare of helicopter-eating cables and structure on the other two.

She moved in right above him, using the Hawk’s ADAS camera which projected what was going on around her ship across the inside of her helmet visor.

Viper
made it down. Hard, skidding to the edge, sheering off his blades against some low steel structure, but he did it without tumbling off the edge and into the ocean below. He came to rest right side up. A quick burst of green fire lancing out of the wreckage showed that at least one of his crew chiefs was still functioning.

Left side. Tim was okay. At least okay enough to keep fighting.

No time for real relief, just acknowledgment that his continued survival was a very good thing.

Lola twisted her fuselage so that she was turned a quarter turn from the Black Hawk on the deck below her. Now between his crew chiefs and her own, they could cover a full circle of fire.

A sharp patter of gunfire across her windscreen drew her attention up.

Bright flashes from the control room dead ahead. They’d clearly dug a nest in there, one that Kee’s gun hadn’t been enough to eradicate.

Lola sighted and, pressing a safety on the collective, she thumbed the fire button on the cyclic. No way to miss at fifty feet.

Thankfully the Hellfire missile bored deep into the room before it went off. She tipped her nose down to hold her position above
Viper
as the shock wave rolled over them, scattering bits of glass and metal at her like ten thousand angry hornets. Lola could feel the wave of heat despite the windscreen and all of her helmet and flight gear.

Two men, their clothes ablaze, ran from the fire only to fall to their deaths when they slammed into and over the walkway guardrail. Another staggered free of the flames, an RPG launcher still clutched loosely in his hands. Colonel Gibson dropped him where he stood with a shot through the forehead. He must be leaning out the cargo bay door.

Lola’s visor showed no more incoming threats, the area appeared clear. Neither she nor anyone on
Viper
moved for a full sixty seconds as the control room continued to burn under the searing heat of the nano-thermite reaction.

“You guys okay down there?”

“Richardson’s down. The rest of us are okay. Nice work, dear.”

Henderson must be rattled at how close a call he’d just survived if he hadn’t noticed it wasn’t his wife’s voice on the radio.

Lola glanced over. Beale was jammed back in her seat, both hands over her belly, completely immobile. Catatonic.

Lola keyed the mike back to command-and-control, which routed all the way back to the Situation Room on this one.

“Captain Stevenson, you there?”

“Here, Chief Warrant.”

“We have a Hawk down on the Pikes rig. Will need an airlift to fetch it. We need a medic and a fire control team before this thing lights off and another rig burns into the Gulf.”

“Roger, already en route.”

Right. Mission cameras would be running a live feed to the Sit Room.

Henderson called up. “Chief Warrant LaRue, I think you’d better land. We’ll offer cover.” At least his head was clear now. Clear enough to know his wife wasn’t flying this mission. Beale remained unmoving as Lola shifted carefully toward the far edge of the helideck, dangerously close to a crane hoist.

“Roger, sir. Stay on your toes, Chiefs,” she called back to Connie and Kee.

She brought the Hawk down, ready to twitch if her chiefs called out any corrections.

Even before her wheels touched the deck, Henderson yanked open Emily’s door, had her snapped out of her harness, and had her sitting on the deck. He began twisting and turning her to check for injuries.

“I’m fine. I’m fine. Stop that.”

***

Mark stopped his searching hands, finding no blood on his wife, no telltale stain like the one running down Richardson’s chest from where an armor-piercing round had punched through windscreen and visor to remove most of his face. Four years they’d flown together, and in an instant the man was gone.

Yet all Mark had been able to think as he’d watched the
Vengeance
descend from the night sky was that his wife had never flown a Hawk that way.

Lola climbed down to the oil rig’s helideck. The broad white circle and large
H
in the center shone bright under the remaining floodlights. Most lights flickered or were gone, but a few remained here and there about the rig, outlining it in the middle of the night darkness. Oil rigs, at least when they weren’t shot up and on fire, smelled mostly of the ocean. People expected the stench of heavy crude, but rigs were designed to be very clean. The last thing you wanted was oil dripping into the water below.

She watched Major Beale’s knees let go, and only her husband’s assistance kept her from collapsing completely. Though she did bat at Henderson’s hands as he checked her over for wounds one more time.

The Delta operator from the
Viper
sat on the deck beside the downed bird. His leg at a grotesque angle, clearly snapped in the middle of the shin. But his rifle was at the ready as he scanned the oil rig structure towering above them. Colonel Gibson was already disappearing toward the burning control room, light as a cat, his rifle at his shoulder.

The four crew chiefs were standing loose. Perhaps unable to believe that Viperess Beale lay on the deck. Lola couldn’t look down at her, because there was something wrong with a universe that could cause the Major to react the way she had. Or maybe something right. That need to protect new life against all comers had overridden a decade of training in a single moment.

Lola swept her hand to get the crew’s attention. When she did, she pointed two fingers at her own eyes, slapped the FN SCAR rifle strapped across her own chest, then indicated John and Tim should patrol up through the rig and Connie and Kee downward.

They snapped into action like windup dolls suddenly released. Rifles at the ready, they were in full soldier-mode between one heartbeat and the next. As they faded into the shadows cast by the still blazing fire and the rig’s few remaining work lights, Lola unslung her own rifle and started scanning the rigging through the night scope to provide cover for the two officers.

Major Beale was clambering back onto her feet. Lola could hear the Major’s voice but didn’t stop her scan.

“I don’t know what happened. All I could think about was what if I was shot in the gut. It won’t happen again.”

The Major was still as white as a sheet. At least she’d unslung her rifle from across her chest and held it two-handed, but her eyes were glazed over. In her present condition Beale wouldn’t see a terrorist at five meters.

Lola spotted the Delta Force colonel slipping along below the sill of the blown-out control room windows. Every few meters, he’d pop his head briefly up to glance into the inferno blast of heat for a quick scan. Once, he swung his rifle into place and fired a quick double-tap round before ducking back down. A distant scream of agony that Lola hadn’t really registered before cut off abruptly.

“Friendly!” Kee shouted as she ran back up from below.

Lola covered her with her rifle as another figure came up behind her making the same call.

John and Tim slid down the wire rigging from higher in the rig announcing “all clear” as they descended.

“There are three dead guys in oil worker clothes,” Connie shouted in between gasps for breath after running up six flights of stairs between the water and the helideck. “A small twenty-foot runabout boat with a civilian still bleeding out in the driver’s seat.”

“And cut ropes on the boat dock. There was another boat. It’s gone. We’ve gotta go,” Kee managed to finish for her.

Major Beale started toward the chopper, pulling her arm out of Henderson’s hand. He didn’t move, perhaps too startled to stop her.

Lola stepped into her path. “Where do you think you’re going, Major?”

“You heard her, we have to fly.” Beale tried to push past her, but Lola grabbed her by her vest and shoved her backwards into Henderson’s arms.

“Emma, you can’t—”

Beale cut Henderson off with an elbow to the gut.

Lola pulled back and sucker-punched the Major right on the point of her chin.

She flew backward, almost taking her husband to the deck when she fell into him.

“You can court-martial me when you wake up.”

Lola looked up at Major Henderson. He could take her down right now. End her career for striking a superior officer.

He concentrated on the woman limp in his arms for a long moment before looking up to inspect Lola.

He mouthed, “Thank you.”

She turned away to face the four crew chiefs and Colonel Gibson staring at her slack-jawed.

“Okay, I’m taking over now. You and you.” She jabbed fingers at her two crew chiefs. “Get aboard. You two”—she indicated John and Tim—“which of you would make a better forward gunner?”

Big John slapped Tim on the back hard enough to send him stumbling toward the chopper. “She’s talking to you, buddy boy.”

Henderson went to step forward, but she held up a hand to stop him.

“Your mind is here, sir. Do the math. Right now I don’t want you on my ship. John, you make sure they get out of this alive and in the meantime find a fire hose for that damned mess up there. Colonel, you’re the only other mobile shooter whose thinking I trust at the moment. You need to stay here, watch John’s back, and make sure this crazy rig is clean of hostiles and nasty chemicals. You know what to look for.”

He nodded.

“And the rest of the rig’s original crew may be locked up somewhere if they’re still alive.”

He faded out of sight in that way that only a D-boy could do.

Tim had stopped short of the copilot’s door. Though the controls were identical, the copilot usually ran most of the forward weaponry from the left seat and the pilot flew from the right seat. But she didn’t want to have to adjust her thinking at the moment and opted to stay in her current left-hand position at the identical controls. And she didn’t want to sit in Emily’s seat.

She aimed a finger at Tim’s chest and jerked it toward Beale’s door. He could fight just as well from there.

He went.