Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers) (3 page)

He turned to help her with her gear, but she pulled on fifty-plus pounds of pack and slung her duffel over one shoulder with the ease of a soldier’s long practice. Slender and strong. Stunning and funny.

Tim was so screwed.

Big John was gonna laugh his ass off.

The mess tent was, well, a mess.

Lola dumped her gear by the tent flap and followed Tim toward the chow line along the back wall. She could see the territorial boundaries laid out like an airstrip.

Far right taxiway belonged to the U.S. Army Rangers. Crew cut and muscled up. A lot of them had their green berets on. One guy had a T-shirt that proclaimed, “Rangers—often mistaken for the wrath of God.” They were a rowdy lot with a lot of back slapping and stories flying between them. Good guys when you needed a hammer blow.

Down the left taxiway guys huddled around a couple of quiet tables. Three things made them stand out. Their motions were small, precise, tightly controlled. Some had long hair, others a beard or mustache. And they were speaking in whispers that wouldn’t carry to the next table, even if the rest of the tent were silent.

D-boys. No mistaking them anywhere, except in public where they were frickin’ invisible. You’d pass them on the street and never notice them. She hadn’t known Delta Force was encamped here. That meant there was some seriously nasty shit going down here.

Lola was good with that.

Deltas weren’t muscled like Rangers, though they trained longer and harder. Tricycle and NASCAR again. Rangers might rock ‘n’ roll, but D-boys were the best warriors on the planet. Even the SEALs gave them respect.

Like the SEALs, Delta operators also let their hair grow to civilian lengths, making it easier for them blend in. They looked like, well, any guy. They’d be hard to pick out of a crowd, hard to remember them even if you did.

SOAR made a career of moving Rangers into battles, D-boys and SEALs into clandestine tactical situations, and getting all of them back out. It’s what she’d signed up for. And after two extra years of training required after making SOAR, she was ready. Beyond ready.

Down the middle of the chow-tent runway, SOAR. No more chance of mistaking the Night Stalkers than the Delta operators. Many had arm tattoos of a sword-wielding Pegasus, a flying horse of death. Quieter than Rangers, of course everybody was. Their stories were more focused but still physical, planed hands swooping to demonstrate a flight path, a jabbed finger to indicate rocket fire. Some crew cut, most not.

She liked that about SOAR and had let her hair start growing the day she’d signed up. She liked the implied companionship with the D-boys. The most lethal fliers carrying the most lethal fighters.

“Hey, c’mon.” Tim snapped his fingers in front of her face to get her attention.

Lola had come to a stop to observe this first assignment card she’d drawn. There’d be a thousand missions and a hundred camps and bases, but this was her first as a SOAR copilot and it looked as if boredom was not going to be an issue.

She followed Tim down the chow line. He loaded up on dinner. It was the end of her day after all, but Lola had always been a fan of breakfast for dinner. She also didn’t feel right eating a burger and fries at six in the morning. Despite the base’s remoteness from any other signs of Western civilization, the cooks here obviously tried, since they were serving both meals. She went for a short stack, bacon, juice, and fruit.

Tim led her over to a table where she recognized most of the two crews. Clearly this was where the DAP Hawks chowed down together. She counted seats and came up one short. Nowhere for her to land without taking someone else’s.

Tim must have read her mind, he nodded to the corner. Not far from the D-boys, the two Majors sat at a table with one of the D-boys. She watched from the corner of her eye just long enough to observe everyone giving that table an extra-wide berth. Even the Delta operators swung wide.

“Who?” she mouthed at Tim. The extra guy looked rugged and tough. Then he smiled at something one of the Majors said. The rugged remained, and the tough, but it looked right on him.

“Colonel Michael Gibson. Medal of Honor and all that.”

Lola glanced over at him one more time. They had a D-boy colonel stationed in a tiny camp like this? Clearly they were not in any normal place.
Duh, Lola. You’re at an unreported camp in the middle of the Pakistani deser
t
,
fifty miles, about fifteen minutes, from the Afghanistan border.

Without the Majors they’d have a chair to spare at the SOAR table. Not sure where to land, she ended up at one end of the table across from Tim, shoulder to shoulder with Big John. Connie Davis, the mechanic she’d flown with in Poland, sat on John’s other side. Might as well be a mile away with that wall of man-flesh between them.

A tall and lean man slid in next to Tim and began setting his table. Taking napkin and silverware off his tray. Even setting knife and spoon to his right, fork on napkin to his left, with plate and water glass in place. No insignia, already showered, and wearing civvies. Uptight priss by the look of it.

A hardback book thumped down on the table beyond him. A small, dark girl in white native garb jumped onto his back and wrapped her slender arms around his neck.

He ignored her. Continuing to set his place as if he sat alone in the whole tent.

The girl covered his eyes. “Guess who?”

The guy stopped, tilting his head one way and then the other, not trying to shake the small hands loose, rather considering. Then he proclaimed solemnly, “President Peter Matthews. What are you doing in Bati, Mr. President?”

Lola recognized the voice. Took her a moment to place it. Air Mission Commander.
Wrench.
The voice that had called them about Major Beale’s flight being in trouble. The married AMC. Well, he’d gone native and his kid had completely favored her mother, there was no sign of the AMC in the elfin face grinning over his shoulder.

“Need see my best peoples.” She lowered her voice as far as a young girl’s could go.

“People.”

The girl repeated it dutifully but still in her pretend-adult tone.

A woman arrived bearing two trays. Must be the AMC’s…

Lola looked at Sergeant Kee as she ground to a halt toting two trays of food. Glaring at Lola as if she shouldn’t be there. Kee stayed still long enough that the little girl took one of the trays from her hands and set it beside her book.
The
Secret
Garden.

The Sergeant finally set her tray down with a sharp snap.

Lola was glad Kee sat at the other end of the table, down with Connie Davis and Henderson’s silent copilot, Richardson.

“Where’s Terry?” Kee asked loudly.

“Packing his gear,” the mountain man next to Lola rumbled out. “Now that we got our new copilot, he’s stateside for R-and-R, then some training.”

So Lola had counted the number of seats and crewmembers right, but she hadn’t known about the kid.

The kid. She’d arrived with the Sergeant but latched on to the AMC. They were a family. What in the hell was the kid doing on a forward air base?

Lola bit down on her tongue rather than make whatever was between her and the Sergeant even worse.

Besides, a forward, secret air base in one of the nastiest little wars in history was probably safer than the house Lola had grown up in.

Chief Warrant 2 Lola LaRue leaned forward to get a better view through the DAP Hawk’s forward windscreen. It was pointless, all that existed out there was darkness. Anyway, the image was across the inside of her visor, not out the windscreen, but she couldn’t help the body reaction.

She’d lost sight of one of the Little Bird choppers they were supposed to be guarding. The two-seater attack helicopters barely weighed a tenth as much as her Black Hawk and were so quick in tight spaces that it was hard to keep track of them. You spent one lousy moment trying to find where some raghead bad guy was pinging your windshield with rifle fire, and the Little Bird slipped into hiding.

Major Emily Beale, who sat to her right in the pilot’s seat of their Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk, pointed casually down to the left just in time for Lola to spot the Little Bird swinging into sight from behind a pillar of rock. How did the woman know what Lola was missing even before she did?

She gripped the cyclic and collective controls even tighter, crushing them in her frustration. Her first flight in-country and she was already letting the Major down. The cyclic wiggled in her hand. Then wiggled again hard enough to rock their helicopter a bit side to side. Right. Pilots fly with a loose wrist.

“Ease up, LaRue!” The order transmitted as clearly through the controls as if it had been shouted in her ear.

Lola did. Flexing her fingers a moment and feeling Emily Beale’s sure and reliable control take over.

The Major had risen in just a few short years to be one of the most highly successful officers in the U.S. Army’s 160th. Lola had almost killed herself trying to get on Beale’s crew, and now she was busy screwing up by not measuring up.

Lola could feel Sergeant Kee Stevenson sitting directly behind her, glaring at the back of her seat as if she could punch holes through the Kevlar armor built into Lola’s chair.

She shook her head to clear the thoughts and glared down at the battle scene spread out below and around them.

The Hindu Kush mountains of northeastern Afghanistan punched upward like a madman’s drawing of a nightmare. Impossible crags of barren rock with an upside-down forest ecology. Down below was arid desert. Here, high on the ridges, holly and oak trees of impossible size loomed out of the near-vertical cliffs, just dying to snag an unwary helicopter’s rotor and send them crashing into the valley far below.

That would be bad enough without the added distraction of the bloodthirsty Afghanis, spending every penny that should have been spent on food for their families on ammunition, just so they could pour it into helicopters that were trying to protect them from the Taliban they hated even more and from… she didn’t even know what. She was just getting more pissed off the more times gunfire pinged against their hull.

The two crew chiefs behind her were using the opportunity to unleash their miniguns against anyone foolish enough to show up on their threat detectors. Fire at a DAP Hawk and your likely position of fire was fed directly into the crew’s visors as targeting information. It was about the deadliest choice you could make on the entire planet, shooting at a DAP.

Not her worry. Her concern was the Little Birds, and damn, she’d now lost the other one.

There, roaring out of a cleft with a stream of fire chasing its butt. Without even thinking, Lola sighted up the cleft, the target sight on her visor lining up with the location that the Little Bird was zipping away from. A moment’s pause to make sure that the tactical display didn’t place any other friendlies on the ground there. Not a one. The few remaining Afghani soldiers were huddled deep inside the remains of their firebase.

Lola fired off a salvo of three Hydra rockets.

They roared a dozen feet over the Little Bird, briefly illuminating its bulbous windscreen and tiny cabin with their trails of hot fire. The rockets slammed into the cliff with a very satisfying explosion.

A nice little rockslide started above the impact site and erased anyone marginally lucky enough to have survived the initial explosion.

“Splash one!” she called out. Not quite right, they hadn’t just dropped an enemy jet into the ocean, but rather a half-dozen Taliban into their Maker’s keeping forevermore, but it sounded good. Felt good too. A half dozen down probably meant an equal number of U.S. troops would be going home in one piece.

She glanced over at Beale. No word. No nod of acknowledgment. Not even a glance toward where she’d just axed some of the baddies. The woman had a reputation for being made of cold steel, and Lola hadn’t seen anything different. Didn’t even know why she expected anything else.

A quick scan of engine and airframe reports said that if anything had been hit, it wasn’t critical enough to show up… yet. Constant vigilance was something beaten into her by a dozen instructors and a hundred missions. And the woman beside her demanded no less than perfection. Not by her words, but by her actions.

Lola again thought back to that emergency CSAR mission into the heart of Poland. Six months ago, three quarters of the way through her training, she was the closest asset when they’d called for a rescue flight.

She’d been sent to fetch Major Beale who had just flown twelve hours, the last part with a serious concussion and bleeding from where she’d been shot up. The Major had been worried first about her crew, then her bird, then their precious cargo. Never about herself.

Lola had helped shove the barely conscious woman onto a stretcher, had to strap her down so that she didn’t get up to check on her crew herself rather than take anyone else’s word for their well-being. That was the kind of woman Lola wanted to fly with. The kind of woman she wished she could be. The kind of woman she knew she wasn’t. Anyone she fooled otherwise simply didn’t know the real Lola LaRue.

But no one really did know her. Not with Mama Raci dead and gone. She’d be best off if she could just keep flying below everyone’s radar.

The Major backed off the DAP Hawk, not enough to be out of the action but enough to give the Little Birds room to maneuver and to provide Lola with an overview of the mayhem that was tonight’s firefight.

The local militia had decided to shoot up a forward base and tear the Afghani army a new one just for existing. The U.S. Army had been trying for a dozen months to turn the battle against the Taliban over to the Afghani regulars, but they couldn’t stay organized long enough to stay alive. So now, instead of the troops doing primary protection and wide-perimeter patrols that were standard around a U.S.-run base, the Taliban were able to slip in until they were right on top of the Afghanis, dug in wholly undetected before they opened fire.

That left it up to the U.S. SOAR 160th, the Night Stalkers, to come in on emergency call and do the heavy cleanup that should never have been needed, if the Afghani regular army had done it right to begin with.

At long last Major Beale jerked up and back on the cyclic, flipping them from close hover support through about the smoothest roll maneuver Lola had ever seen, and twisted them back toward base. The collective and cyclic controls in her hands were hard-linked to the Major’s, the pedals beneath her feet as well. Lola had felt every tiny adjustment of the maneuver, and she still had no idea how the woman did it.

The four Little Birds—she counted them twice to make sure they were all accounted for, then counted them once more to be sure—danced and zipped just ahead of them. The Major kept their speed down so that they didn’t overrun their flock. Little Birds were more agile but not as fast as a Black Hawk.

Lola was drenched with sweat inside her flight suit. She was used to the deceptively hard work of sitting in a copilot’s seat and wrenching around ten tons of helicopter. And she’d been in enough firefights to not flinch at a spray of rounds smacking into the forward windscreen right at eye level.

What she wasn’t prepared for was the exhaustion from the hyper-focus required by close-in battle flying. A couple years of flying forward patrol support with the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne hadn’t prepared her for tonight’s flight. The Eagles hung back and depended on the superior reach of their rockets, 30 mm cannon, and whatever other nasty armament they were carrying for that flight. They also flew far more often in the daylight than the dark. At night they sent the 160th.

When she’d flown in a search and rescue bird, she’d sat yet another step behind that. Most of the time. There was a reason for the
C
in combat search and rescue. It meant going hot into heavy situations to pull out the wounded. It was the
C
that had hooked her out of CSAR.

Flying forward combat rather than SAR meant she’d be saving guys before they were already injured. She could fight the battles and prevent the troops being injured in the first place. But she’d never flown consistently this close in during combat.

Major Beale had rarely been more than a dozen rotor widths—the fifty-six feet from one tip to the other of their main rotor blades—away from the action. It was easier to think in “rotors,” especially when trees or power lines were always reaching out to snag you.

Anyone who thought that airborne battles weren’t up close and personal had clearly never flown with Major Beale.

“Quiet night.” One of the crew chiefs. Sergeant Kee, of course, spoke calmly over the intercom.

The woman had to be bragging for Lola’s sake to make her feel even more incompetent.

“Didn’t even use up two cans,” the Sergeant continued. Two cans of ammo through their miniguns. That was an immense amount of lead they’d fired in just, Lola checked the clock, forty-five minutes. She checked the clock again. It had seemed like six hours. Their fuel still showed enough to get home without a midair refueling. The battle had been so intense that she’d lost all track of time.

“Clean and green,” the head mechanic, Connie Davis, announced. She could have been a prerecorded machine voice for all the emotion she portrayed.

Lola wanted to shove up her visor to wipe away the salty sweat that was trickling into her eyes and stinging. Would have, but she didn’t want to embarrass herself even more than she already had in front of the Major.

She tried to resist glancing over at the woman. Barely a foot separated their shoulders. A foot and about a thousand miles. Not a single comment. Not a gesture. No feedback at all on how she’d done.

“Take us home, Chief Warrant.” Major Beale’s voice was quiet over the intercom. Real quiet, in a way that didn’t bode well.

“Aye, sir.” Damn! “Ma’am.” She couldn’t even get that right. In the old Army, the way it had been when she’d signed up just six years ago, all superior officers were “sir” regardless of gender. Now it was shifting and you never knew. The older women still expected a “sir,” but the younger ones wanted a “ma’am.”

Hard to believe that Major Beale was only a year older than Lola. Made Lola feel like a total slacker. Like that comedian had said, “When Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for three years.”

She followed the Little Birds and checked her heading for the Bati soccer stadium. Just concentrate on getting them back in one piece. She could fly that well at least.