Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers) (7 page)

Some people were still eating as they circled up on the Major. Tim remembered the last of his meal in his hands and took a big bite of one of his crackers. Chewed it a couple of times thinking about Lola. She was smooth, slick, like the way she flew. Sliding out from under questions.

He had to give her a break, she was new. But he’d thought they’d built some connection. And… he coughed.

Then inhaled.

And got a lungful of dirt just as the Major started speaking. He tried to suppress the reaction but couldn’t. He hacked up a tiny cloud of dust and spewed out half-chewed chunks of cheese-coated crackers now turned brown with desert dirt.

John’s thump on his back drove him to his knees. The Major ground to a halt and turned to watch. Everyone did, but Tim couldn’t stop.

Lola handed him her water. “Small sips.”

He hacked up another chunk of cracker and desert sand.

His instinct was to knock back the water, but he did what she said and the small sips worked. Softened the cracker, eased the dust-dry coating on his tongue and throat.

He hacked again and got the last of the cracker out, right between Lola’s knees where she knelt before him.
Attractive. Real attractive, Tim Maloney. Sure know how to impress a girl.

But she didn’t look grossed out. If he didn’t know better, he’d say she was on the verge of laughing. As if she’d covered his meal in dirt herself, which was impossible.

“You two done?” Clearly Major Henderson was done, so Tim had better be.

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” His throat was sore and ticklish, but he managed to swallow hard and stop the next cough.

The Major was being downright serious. Well, they hadn’t come here for the fun of it. Tim spit one last time to clear his mouth, looked like the spit dried before it hit the salt pan.

“Okay. Who knows what lies about six hundred klicks northwest of here?”

Everyone turned to face northwest. A dozen kilometers of salt pan and then the Iranian border. The only place on the whole planet that was more godforsaken than this was—

“Desert One.” Lola got there a beat before he did. And the Major was just nodding.

Tim looked at those around him, and they all looked a little sick.

You couldn’t be SOAR and not know every detail of Operation Eagle Claw. It was the birth of SOAR, or at least the event that had led to its birth. It was also one of the most public disasters in the history of the U.S. military. It had reshaped foreign policy and toppled a U.S. president.

The failed rescue attempt of the Iranian hostages in 1980.

Tim tried to make his voice light. “Bad juju there, Major. Let’s stay way clear.”

The Major stared at him levelly, the gaze steady through those mirrored shades he never removed. Scuttlebutt had it that he didn’t even remove them when making love to his wife.

“By tomorrow sunrise,” Major Mark Henderson said in a flat monotone of absolute authority, “we’ll be parked two thousand meters west of Desert One.”

They were at the drop-off.

No one had slept through the heat of the day, a doze was all Lola had managed. She knew none of the others on her crew were any better off. She and Major Beale had traded off the flying every hour so they’d be as fresh as possible.

A half-dozen kilometers northwest of Ravar, Iran, at one in the morning.
Viper
and
Vengeance
, the two DAP Hawks, stayed high. Well, forty feet off the ground, about where they’d been flying since crossing the border.

One of the Chinooks hovered nearby, her main purpose backup and the massive bladder of fuel sitting on her cargo deck. The days of a flock of C-130 tanker planes flying into the center of Iran undetected were long gone. The nation, which in 1980 had been without radar except at a few airports, was now one of the nine nations able to launch a satellite into space. The Chinook carried enough Jet A for four refuelings of the little fleet, and her guns were manned and not to be underestimated. Wrench, Captain Archie Stevenson, sat on that Chinook as the Air Mission Commander.

The other Chinook swung down, skimming an empty road in a low-speed pass. Her rear ramp lowered and the six D-boys spilled off it without the bird ever touching down.

Bicycles. Lola zoomed in the view projected inside her helmet, but they were gone so fast into the night she couldn’t tell more. They’d been mounted on electric bicycles. High-speed electric bikes. Small and lightweight, easy to hide and probably silent, they were moving at least twenty miles per hour and still accelerating as they moved out of sight.

Before they were gone, the choppers headed out to Desert One. There to wait until called for, at the very earliest, two days from now. Or rather two nights.

***

And now they were here.

Lola glanced back at the shallow valley among the dunes. The choppers hidden by their camouflage, guards in place.

Eight of them, most of the two DAP crews and Archie, stood atop the low bluff at the edge of camp. Captain Richardson had hung back at the camp with the Chinook crews and the Deltas.

Fifteen minutes walking across the low dunes, the desert so silent it made your ears ring and echo. The soft slide of sand underfoot the only indication that members of the U.S. military walked the Iranian night.

They climbed a final bluff barely outlined by the starlit night, and Desert One lay before them.

Lola looked right and left. She’d never met better nor flown with better. But how many would be standing six months from now, or a year? How many would a CSAR pilot come for? For how many would it be too late?

She was getting pretty morose, but the locale lent itself to that.

The moonlight revealed each true to their form. Connie leaning back against Big John for comfort. Kee holding hands with Archie but still standing a little apart, the woman always strong and independent and still riding Lola’s ass. It ticked her off, but she was coming to respect the contradictory woman despite that, the kick-butt soldier combined with the loving stepmother of an orphaned native kid.

Emily and Mark stood close, an arm loose around each other’s hips. Tim had planted himself close to Lola’s right, both hands jammed into pockets, looking down toward the empty plain below.

In 1980, the new Iran under their new Ayatollah took fifty-three Americans hostage. Operation Eagle Claw was an elaborate and poorly coordinated rescue effort of immense bravery that flew eight Sea Stallion helicopters and six C-130 tanker and cargo planes below radar and into history. A mash-up team of Navy, Air Force, Rangers, and Deltas made the effort.

A sandstorm tore their equipment apart. A busload of natives showed up at the remote landing strip by pure chance just as the aircraft landed at midnight. And then, on takeoff, a chopper lost in its own brownout of dust rammed a refueling plane. The inferno cost eight lives, seven helicopters, and one of the refueling planes. It also created an international political disaster of epic proportions that had cost President Carter any chance of reelection.

SOAR had been founded months later by a couple of fliers determined to never let such a travesty happen again. And it hadn’t. The 160th, one of the smallest and most specialized regiments in the U.S. Army, had become feared the world over by those few adversaries unlucky enough to know about them and still be living.

“Dad said it was like waking up in hell.” Henderson’s voice was rough, though not loud.

Lola glanced over at him, as did the others, including his wife.

There was the answer. With all of the desert in Iran to hide out in, why here. They’d want to be far away from the Deltas so they didn’t attract undue attention there. The planners must have also wanted somewhere well known, and Desert One was among the most carefully mapped sections of Iran in SOAR history.

And Henderson’s father had been here.

“Dad was Special Forces for the Navy. Not a SEAL yet, that came later. He came as a shooter. After too many helicopters broke down in the sandstorm and they declared a no-go on the mission, he said they climbed aboard the C-130, dumped their gear, and just lay down on the fuel bladder. Settling in to sleep the whole way home.”

Lola could see the layout. Each fuel plane with a couple of choppers pulled close for fueling. A bus of hostages parked nearby under guard. Deep, deep darkness of a moonless night.

“He woke up in the center of an inferno. Someone grabbed his collar and practically threw him from the fire. He said that the pillar of fire that lit the night would call anyone within a hundred miles to come see.

“They abandoned the plane. They abandoned the six choppers without waiting to destroy them. The Iranians got four of them running that we know of. They abandoned the bodies of eight of their comrades. They fled for their lives in utter defeat, fled from themselves without Iran having to raise a single finger.”

Henderson turned to face them. As if somehow he could see them each clearly despite the darkness.

Lola could feel when his gaze was upon her. A probing assessment of whether or not she deserved to be a part of such a legacy. Of whether she had the tenacity and drive to repay the past with committed action in the future.

This was hallowed ground, the birthplace of SOAR.

“Michael Grimm.” Lola spoke to fight the dark, making her voice clear and strong. “Bob Johnson.”

“Randy Cochran.” Tim picked up the note. He took her hand in the dark and squeezed it tightly. The surge of it shot through her. Knowing she was a part of something bigger, more important. Along with that surge came a heat upon her cheeks that she was glad the night hid.

Others continued, listing the founders of SOAR. A catalog of those who’d looked at defeat not as failure, but rather as the need for a stronger, more capable future.

Glad for the privacy because something else was opening up inside her. Not just her pride in flying alongside these people. No just knowing that she maybe, just maybe, was good enough to belong here. There was something inside her every time her orbit swung her too close to Tim Maloney. Something she didn’t know, nor want to know.

Whatever she felt when he was around, down in that deep core somewhere unidentifiably near her heart, was scaring the shit out of her.

But she didn’t release Tim’s hand as the litany of names continued. Didn’t want to. Wouldn’t simply because there lurked something that rooted her to the desert with fear.

She was SOAR and would face her fears.

They were SOAR. The 160th. The Night Stalkers.

They’d flown through three of the most dangerous countries on the planet in the last thirty-six hours, and in the next few days they’d be flying back out. And if they didn’t make it and the mission was needed, someone else would try again until they succeeded. That was their legacy.

“NSDQ.” Lola closed the circle of names with their motto.

Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.

Others answered in the dark, “NSDQ.”

Lola knew she would never quit again. Not quit on herself. Not on others.

But she couldn’t quite bring herself to look over at the man who still held her hand.

Tim called Lola over after their second night at Desert One. Dawn was just breaking with its achingly beautiful light, and its threat of blistering heat and brutally dry air within the hour.

One of the main problems with this part of any operation was staying sane. Boredom was killing her. There were only so many times you could check the dust seals on the aircraft. The entertainment of re-anchoring a camo net torn loose by the omnipresent wind waned after you’d done it enough times that you could do it in your sleep.

But she just couldn’t settle, couldn’t sit down with any of the trashy novels they’d stowed away. Because while she was busy bitching about being bored in the middle of nowhere in the Iranian Lut Desert, six D-boys were still after something. Something nasty a hundred miles to the south.

“Please God, Tim. Give me some damn thing to do.”

He grinned like a fool. She didn’t need to see his mouth hidden behind his scarf. Everyone had some fabric wrapped over their mouth and nose to fend off the dust. Nor did she need to see his eyes safe behind the shades they each wore against the desert glare.

It was simpler than that. Like he brightened somehow whenever she came around him. It wasn’t an effect she was used to having on anyone. Unless they were just trying to get between her legs. With Tim it might include that, but even if it did, it also included far more than that.

They hadn’t touched since holding hands out at Desert One. Even if she’d wanted to, there was no damn privacy squatting night and day under the same camo net with four flight crews. Sitting watch duty high atop the back of the Chinooks was the only break any of them had from each other.

But he’d been there for her.

Some piece of her heart had ripped open that night, and it was a piece she wasn’t so comfortable with. She had a past. One she’d spent her entire adult life pretending didn’t exist. But even before she’d been born, men had stood here. American helicopter pilots fighting for what they believed in. Fighting for their lives. And some of them losing that battle.

Lola just couldn’t quite wrap her mind around what was going on inside her. She’d always faked it. Didn’t know what she believed in for herself. Had been able to leave the thinking up to the Army. They were good at that. They liked giving you things to do. Keep you busy. That worked for her.

Except now.

Now she was bored out of her skull and thinking too damn much.

“Save me, Tim. I’m begging you.” Even if he was the one her thoughts kept circling back to.

He just kept grinning behind his mask.

“Well, if you’re gonna beg.” He took an odd sideways step and looked down at the ground behind him.

Nuts and washers. Aligned in a familiar pattern.

Then her focus shifted and she saw it.

Lola threw herself at Tim and hugged him tight. Gave him a good quick, hard kiss right through both their scarves.

Carved into the salt, right down to the last painfully long triangle, was a backgammon board.

***

“How?” Lola sat cross-legged on a small air mattress and stared down at the board. Tim had even etched a pretty scrollwork pattern into the salt surrounding the board. She rubbed a finger on the alternating dark brown and white points.

“I got the chocolate candy packs from a bunch of people’s MREs. Rubbed it into the salt. Made a nice brown.”

“Cool!” Good use of materials. No self-respecting Special Forces personnel would eat the candy in an MRE, especially not on an op. Guaranteed bad luck. Debates would occur whenever the MRE designers didn’t include candy in a particular menu, but shoved in an alternate treat. Does it rate as candy? Everyone agreed that a brownie could be eaten safely without hexing the mission. But what about pudding? Sometimes pudding came with a Candy III pack, so then it was safe, but what about as a stand-alone like Menu 23? The Chicken Pesto Pasta MRE was rarely packed on active missions because of that unresolved question.

Instead of dice, Tim had six quarters.

They talked about backgammon boards and stupid MRE menu designers through the first half of the game. Easy, safe topics.

Tim tossed the six quarters up in the air, let them fall on the salt.

Three came up heads.

“That’s a three.” He gathered them and tossed again.

Two more heads.

“And a two. And I am…” He drew it out dramatically. “So screwed.”

He was. It was about the worst roll he could have at the moment.

Lola crowed as she gathered up the quarters and tossed them. “A four!” She gathered them up and gave them a good shake in cupped hands. “Oh baby. Bring mama another one, just another measly little four.” She tossed the quarters high enough that the ever-present wind scattered them a bit.

“Yes!” She leaned over and fisted Tim’s shoulder hard enough to rock a lesser man over backwards. Tim just shrugged. She not only hammered two of his pieces, she also closed her home board. He wasn’t getting out of the trap any time soon.

“So, you refuse to talk about your past.”

Lola tried not to cringe. Hoped it didn’t show. Light and airy, that was the trick.

“Don’t have one.” She regathered the quarters. Tim wouldn’t get to move until she was forced to unblock her home board, and that was going to be a while as she had a pair of serious strays to bring home.

“Everyone’s got one.”

“Nope,” she assured him as lightly as she could, and she concentrated on her one-two toss. “I was born in 2005.”

Tim looked at her with a tilt of his head. “Not to be rude to the lady officer, but you look like you’ve long since passed through puberty. Very nicely I might add.”

Then Lola swore she could see him blush between the scarf and his shades.

Damn, he was cute. A guy hadn’t blushed around her… well, ever that she could think of.

“I was flying a supply and maintenance bird for the 225th Engineers out of Camp Beau, Louisiana. Just an old Bell Kiowa hand-me-down from the 6th Cavalry. Poor chopper was so old it might have dated right back to the Civil War.”

She tossed a four-six and a three-two before Tim spoke again.

“You were there.” His voice almost softer than the wind sighing around the helicopters baking and pinging in the mid-morning heat.

She nodded. No need to ask about “there.” During 2005 in Louisiana there would only ever be one “there.” Katrina.

“So were we.”

She looked up and was confronted by her twinned reflection in his mirrored shades. She looked a mess, worse than he did. They both wore shades and kerchief, were windblown and dirty. On Tim it looked rough and rugged, only making him even more handsome. Her hair looked as if it had been teased to twice any previous volume and cluttered about her head in a Medusan snarl. Guys got off so easy.

Tim had been there. Flown there. That demanded an honesty she typically did her best to avoid. “I flew the shoreline and the shrimp boats. And oil rigs. I flew to an awful lot of oil rigs, or the remains of them.”

“I’d just made it into SOAR.” Tim traced one of the chocolate-brown triangles of the board with the tip of his finger. She felt a shiver echo up her spine as he did so, as if it had been her body rather than the salt that he stroked so gently. “I was down at Fort Rucker for training when Hurricane Katrina slammed through. I flew out with Viper Henderson’s wingman, riding up and down the hoist for days pulling folks off of rooftops.”

Lola could only nod. Flying support from first light to last, with little thought of sleep or maximum allowed flight-hour rules. First, pulling people out. Later dropping food and especially water after it was no longer safe to send down a crew chief.

Never daring to come down close, to land. That would risk the bird being stormed by all of the desperate and the suffering. If a dozen people leaped aboard a machine designed to carry six, it could crash in a moment. Always lift them up with the long-line even if you could get close enough to hover. She’d had to let go of more than one long-line because four or five people would latch on to the wire and refuse to get off no matter what she said about the impossibility of her lifting so many.

“It was how I got hooked on CSAR.” Lola finally found her voice, somehow speaking past the death of a city. “Guess my commander recommended me upward because the U.S. Army sent round a recruiter a couple of weeks later.” She shook the quarters in her cupped palms a few times.

“No.” Lola listened to the memories among the tinkling of the coins. “That’s not quite right.”

She tossed the coins against her palm a little more, gazing over Tim’s shoulder. Then her eyes focused on the two Majors. Deep in conference over a flight chart pinned to the ground by the weight of their FN SCAR rifles.

“No. The recruiter had said a Captain Henderson had watched me flying rescue and thought the Army needed folks who could fly like me. The recruiter didn’t even blink about a woman flying a chopper for the Army. Though enough others did.”

Viper Henderson indeed. Did he even remember that he’d changed her life? That he’d reached down into the lowly National Guard and elevated a Creole train wreck of a woman to become a SOAR pilot? Did he even know the flight he’d admired had been done by a woman? If so, would he have cared? She’d guess not.

“I was born that day. This”—she pointed down— “this is where I belong.” She could feel the heavy weight of it. But also the truth of it. As if she’d slammed down the gauntlet for any who might dare challenge her. Her decision back at Bati that she wanted to fly with Major Beale had turned into a rock-deep core that anchored her in place for the first time in her life.

She’d flown Army. And almost five years from the day she’d joined, the minimum time requirement, a SOAR recruiter had showed up on base. Actually off base. In a local bar. She’d never thought before how unlikely that circumstance.

She glanced over at Henderson again. They’d followed her career. Followed her record. Made sure she ended up in SOAR’s ranks.

“You belong here?” Tim asked half incredulous.

“Yeah! Here!” She fisted her hands until the quarters were cutting in her palms.

“Really?”

She cocked her fist half back, ready to rearrange his jaw. And she’d been attracted to him for what reason? She wasn’t ready for the fury of betrayal that slammed into her as she realized Tim was just another misogynistic asshole.

“You belong on a backgammon board?”

***

Tim watched Lola look down startled and realize she’d pointed at the board when declaring where she belonged.

He thought about the stiff punch she’d delivered to his shoulder and the one she’d been readying for his jaw.

Back in his early days, he’d been on the receiving end of enough hard punches to know hers would have hurt. There’d been a time, back when he’d earned his Crazy Tim nickname, that he’d thought a big, messy bar fight was actually a good way to unwind after a tough mission and well worth the resultant time in lockup.

“Funny,” Tim said, finally pointing his finger exactly mirroring her gesture. “I belong on a backgammon board too. Crazy fates, hunh. You and me both belonging right here. Cool. Now we have to fall for each other. Absolutely fated.”

She pulled back her hand and continued to glare at him.

He grinned back at her.

“Well.” Tim turned so that his legs were stretched out to one side, leaned back on his elbows, and looked up at her. Even in shades and scarf the woman was bleeding magnificent. He wished to God he dared reach across the narrow gap and fool with her stunning hair, but she just might break his jaw. He figured it might be worth the risk, maybe he’d try it later.

“Back when I was a young punk of a two-striper, I was just known as Corporal Maloney.”

“Not odiferous?”

Tim laughed that she remembered Big John’s tease, though he wished she hadn’t. He decided to ignore the comment. Maybe if he could distract her with the story, he could make her forget the game he was absolutely going to lose.

Again Tim eyed Lola’s clenched fist.

Her fighting form was excellent.

Who was he kidding, her form was downright incredible! He resisted the urge to look down at that sleek, T-shirt-hugged torso of hers. He did his damnedest to suppress the memory of how awesome she’d looked yesterday standing on the salt pan in just that T-shirt and some of the skimpiest panties it had ever been his pleasure to observe. Plain white panties on Lola LaRue were far sexier than any thong he’d ever helped remove.

“Not odiferous, just stupid. Picked a fight with an entire Marine squad one night. John says I declared I could whip the whole squad buck naked and using only one hand. Can’t say as I exactly remember that part.” He remembered it perfectly, but there was a level of stupid that the average guy didn’t want to admit to.

Lola stretched out her legs in the other direction and lay on her side facing him across the board, her head propped up on one arm. The light pants and shirt flowed over her with sinuous perfection.

Focus
on
the
story, boy, unless you want to embarrass yourself.

“I made a pretty good showing of it until the MPs showed up and tossed all of our butts in the brig. Same cell. Even Big John who’d stayed out of it. Man, was he pissed.” Actually, he’d sat back on the sidelines laughing his ass off.

A shift in the breeze flapped the camouflage netting over the helicopters. They both looked around, but the anchors appeared to have finally been driven into the salt pan hard enough.

“Anyway, there I am in the cell with these idiot Marines. And the Gunny came over. Big damn guy named Bear Garry with one black eye swelling shut. Rather than beating the crap out of me”—though John had been cheering the Gunnery Sergeant on—“he dubbed me the craziest damn flyboy he’d ever met. Big John, the helpful jerk, tagged me with ‘Crazy Tim’ and it stuck. Then old Bear taught me to play backgammon for the week we all spent cooling our heels for brawling. So I really do belong on a backgammon board in some ways.”

Lola gave an appreciative laugh.

He’d left behind his brawling that day, or at least most of it. He still didn’t know what he’d been trying to prove or disprove. Big John had called it “taking up his man space for such a short shrimp.” But Tim was only short compared with man-mountains like his best friend and Gunny Garry.