Authors: M. L. Buchman
“I’m sorry, sir. I know I shouldn’t have discharged a firearm in camp. I’ll replace the computer, but I’m a pilot and those news guys didn’t…”
He stopped and turned to look at her. Not a word.
“I just…” She looked very small and insignificant in his mirrored shades. Twice.
“Captain?” His voice flat and neutral.
“I… Dammit! I’m a pilot, sir. They had no right. No bloody, blasted stupid right to do that to me. I—”
“Don’t care.”
Her tiny, twinned reflection dropped her jaw.
Then Major Mark Henderson did the strangest thing. He reached up a meat cleaver-sized hand and pulled his glasses down his nose. Now she knew she was screwed. She’d never be able to joke with the guys again about the major not having eyes.
Steel gray. As hard as his body. The most dangerous-looking viper she’d ever seen.
Then he smiled. She almost fell as she dropped back a step. The smile reached his eyes and turned them the soft, inviting gray of a summer sunrise.
“Do you think I give one good goddamn about a lousy piece of hardware or about what CNN thinks? In my command, only one thing matters: are you the best flying? Period.” His voice was firm, but soft and friendly. Almost teasing.
Then he shoved his glasses back in place, and the smile clicked off in the same motion. He turned back for the tent.
She tried to follow. Really she did. But two thoughts rooted her in place.
First, had The Viper really just smiled at her? Been pleasant? It would prove he was human, which didn’t seem much more likely than him pulling down his sunglasses.
Second, her body felt weak and ravished by his simple gaze, though it had not raked over her like the news camera. Those gray eyes, especially when he smiled… What would she have to do to have them look at her like that again?
It still pissed her off a bit. How would he like to be called the sexiest major flying?
She got her feet moving again.
He’d probably love it—he was a guy, after all.
***
By the time Emily followed him into command, Major Henderson sat at a small table spread with a large map for sector 62-15. He waved her to a stool.
Her butt hit the seat before she noticed the third man at the table.
The D-boys could do that. The ghosts of Special Forces. There were Rangers, then Green Berets and SEALs, then there was Delta Force. No one knew how many. Few of them spoke to anyone outside their own unit. She’d once heard someone call the man now seated at the table “Michael.” She’d flown support for him a half-dozen times and never found out his rank or his last name. But one thing was certain: if he sat at the table, tonight’s mission would not be dull.
“Operational Engagement,” Henderson pointed at a narrow notch on the topographic map, “O. E. Mole.” The elevation lines crowded so tightly together that the valley walls must be vertical cliffs. He spun a satellite photo in front of her. Those large hands, light and fast. She’d always been partial to big, strong hands. The way they could hold— She shook her head to clear the image and focused on the photo.
Classic Hindu Kush, the mountains of northeast Afghanistan. The desert lay below, desperately dry and hot in the wide valley. But as you climbed the cliffs, holly and cedar trees cluttered the skyline. In some places, because of the branches, flying down was almost safer than flying up, except then the enemy on the high, forested ridge could shoot down onto you.
Helicopters didn’t appreciate being shot any more than the next aircraft, but they definitely didn’t appreciate being shot at from above. Most of the armor ran below and up the sides.
“Recon Team Mouse identified a cave up this notch. They have reason to believe there is intelligence inside that cave that must be recovered intact, along with several high-level unfriendlies we’d rather speak to than kill. This is tonight’s target.”
He pointed at Michael. “Three Little Birds will take twelve of his men to the back side of the ridge. It will take Delta a few hours to penetrate the site, so I’m having Bronson set up a FARP a dozen miles out where we can top off fuel.”
Twelve Delta Force operators. If you had a crisis on your hands, you sent four of them, a disaster, six or seven. A full squadron of twelve told her exactly how important this target had been deemed by command. Bronson could handle a forward arming and refueling point, so that worked for her.
“Where am I?”
“You and I…” Both DAP Hawks. It had been weeks since a mission called for both of their heavy weapons platforms in the same place. “And Clay’s pair of MH-60K transport birds. We run a noisy search-and-destroy here,” Henderson put a finger on the map at the far end of the valley, “and here.”
***
Mark watched her carefully as he laid out the mission, indicating key features of the terrain on the map and the tactical requirements.
Captain Emily Beale showed no surprise, no hesitation. She captured the entire scope in a single gulp and appeared ready to go.
Michael, commander of the Delta Force group on the base, had expressed some concern about assigning Beale to a key role.
Every bit of Mark’s training agreed. Except for one minor point: the way she flew. Sure, he’d heard the reports from her trainers at Fort Campbell. Even talked to her CO back in the Screaming Eagles, the 101st Airborne Assault. Hearing about the first woman who had SOAR-qualified was one thing; flying with her was quite another.
For two weeks, he’d flown her into hell as his copilot and she hadn’t flinched. For the six weeks since he’d assigned her to her own bird, he’d fed her increasingly nasty missions. Her success ratio was astonishing. And when paired with Lieutenant Stevenson, who she’d insisted on having as her copilot, they were already the sharpest team he had. They’d flown together since West Point and it showed.
As far as Mark could tell, Emily and Archibald Stevenson weren’t an item. That was good because of the fraternization rules in the Army Code of Conduct. There was no spark between them, just incredible flying.
The D-boy had acquiesced to Mark’s judgment, but even now Mark could see him observing Beale carefully.
Mark looked at the trim blond and did his best not to think about what else he was feeling. He almost hadn’t assigned her to this mission for a very different reason than the military stakes.
Mark didn’t want to risk her on a dangerous mission. Could hardly stand to assign her where the personal stakes were so high.
To be fair to her, that was the factor that finally tipped the assignment in her favor rather than against. Because his mother had raised him better than that. In his command, there never had been and never would be any gender bias. He was known for that, and had probably factored into Captain Beale being assigned to his unit.
And he’d live by that, even if it would risk rather than protect Emily Beale.
Six miles and two minutes’ flying time from the D-boys’ drop point, Captain Emily Beale unleashed her gunners.
“Steel!”
Big Bad John and Crazy Tim laid into the hillside with their miniguns.
The Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk motto was, “We Deal in Steel!” No one had ever placed a chopper in the sky more lethal than SOAR’s DAP Hawks.
They’d hit it lucky and spotted a couple of heat signatures walking along the ridge. No innocent shepherd would walk these hills at two in the morning. Nor start firing rifles as they broke into a run.
“Two down,” Tim reported.
John chimed in. “Four ducked behind a ledge, three hundred yards at two o’clock low. Small-arms fire incoming.”
She twisted the Hawk, and Archie let fly with one of their high-explosive, 2.75-inch rockets. The explosion hit the cliffside above the position. A boulder avalanche tumbled down on the bad guys and swept them away into the valley.
Big John’s shouted, “Yes!” confirmed the kill. Six on the move at night would have spelled serious pain for the local 10th Mountain company in the morning. It also probably meant more were on the move.
Emily’d been keeping her eye out for the Little Birds but still barely spotted them, even with her night vision gear. Their rotor tips painting faint circles in bright green traced their static discharge on her equipment’s eye. The Little Birds slithered in behind the ridge with the cave opening in it. Two D-boys per side sat on their little benches. At thirty meters up, the tiny helicopters checked their mad dash. She couldn’t see them at this distance, but the D-boys would wrap one hand around the fast rope and slide down only feet apart. Five seconds to place everyone on the ground and drop the ropes. On cue, the Little Birds’ two-man crews turned to run for the FARP and wait.
Once the Little Birds were gone, she and Henderson slid in perfect unison over the ridge on their side of the valley. Let the cave dwellers think the fight had moved on. Archie, her copilot, killed a couple rocks with rounds from the 30 mm cannon just to sound busy.
At two hours and twenty minutes, they ran the back side of the ridge. They took a few miscellaneous rounds shot by baddies stupid enough to underestimate a DAP Hawk. The sound of each passing bullet was instantly computer analyzed and revealed the shooter’s position on the tactical displays. Big John and Tim took turns pouring a couple hundred rounds from the miniguns right back down their throats. Second volleys from the ground rarely happened.
At two hours and thirty minutes, she and Henderson roared back over the ridge with the hammer down. At 180 knots, more than 200 miles an hour, they crossed the valley in ninety seconds flat and probably weren’t audible until the last fifteen. By nursing her attitude to maximize the inflow for the turbines at this altitude, she managed to arrive three full seconds ahead of Henderson. She kept her smile to herself but felt pretty damn good about that.
Emily scanned back and forth. Archie would worry about the condition of the Hawk, she kept her focus on the collection of choppers suddenly cluttering the sky.
They started taking some heavy rifle fire from down in the valley, and Henderson peeled off to deal with it. Per plan, she stayed high and back to protect Clay’s birds and the three Little Birds who had returned from Bronson’s refueling layover.
All went according to plan until they started loading. Twelve D-boys came out of the cave exactly on schedule, but now twenty-six people streamed from the cave mouth onto the narrow ledge that formed the only possible pickup point. Two D-boys and seven baddies, the practical limit at this altitude, piled into each of Clay’s transport Hawks as they hovered a foot from the ledge. They also loaded some hefty cases and an armful of laptops.
The Little Birds dodged in and grabbed seven of the eight remaining D-boys while a cloud of fire rained down from above. Their jobs now were to be safe and far away. Two D-boys were hit but continued to return fire upward from their bench-seat perches as the Little Birds scampered along with Clay’s flight.
One more Delta operator knelt in the cave mouth, busy at something. The walls were so steep that he was being shot at from almost directly above and the Hawk had no way to bring weapons to bear. She could climb up and take them head on, but there was still the one D-boy marooned and no one left to fetch him before someone else found a good angle on him.
A loud “krump” and a massive updraft shook her bird. Henderson must have found the shooters directly below and dropped a couple Hellfire missiles in their laps to make that kind of shock wave. The gunfire from below evaporated.
She kept her eye on the D-boy as she slid forward into the narrow defile. He still knelt, safe from above just inside the mouth of the cave. The spatter of small-arms fire sounded from behind her. Her gunners had switched to their new handheld FN SCAR machine guns and were leaning out the doors to shoot upslope. Not the best, but it was all she could give them.
The rain of bullets from above meant that the D-boy would never survive a trip to the pickup ledge. Time to find another solution.
“Kick a rope.”
Archie spared her a glance as Big John kicked a thirty-meter-long fast rope out the door. Anchored on a short door boom, the two-inch-thick woven rope dangled for a hundred feet below the Hawk.
Nudging the chopper forward, the sound of her rotors echoed off the walls, walls far too close on either side. The rope still hung twenty feet shy of where the D-boy crouched, now facing her from under the cave’s protective overhang. Small-arms fire from above hemmed him in on three sides, the cliff wall on the fourth. In moments, someone would find the right angle and he’d be done for.
She edged in until the tips of her rotor blades couldn’t be more than five feet from the cliff wall on either side, still too far.
“Spot the rear rotor for me.”
Big John swore over the headset.
Emily leaned into the right foot pedal as softly as she could. The defile was too narrow for the Black Hawk to fit sideways, but she could swing the rope a little closer to the cliff wall by twisting a bit.
“Fifteen, ten, five. Damn it, Captain. Trimming trees.”
For an instant she stared down through the Plexiglas window by her feet at the D-boy perched on the cliff edge ten feet from the rope and twenty feet below her. The rocks around him sparked with rifle fire from above.