He tried to picture the milling crowd, panicked by the gunshots and also by the abrupt departure of their helicopter. The crowd stirred and swirled in circles leading nowhere. Nowhere for them to go but the desert. Nothing but miles and miles of dry, arid desert. But all he saw was the girl and the warrior.
6
Major Beale hadn’t said a word on the flight back.
Not a word until immediately after they landed back at the stadium. She stopped in front of Kee as their fuel was topped off by the ground crew.
“You can either shove her out the front gate or you’re responsible for her until the next humanitarian mission comes through.”
“When’s that?” Kee glanced around. Felt a pinch between her shoulders as if they were already coming behind her.
Major Beale did the screwiest thing. Always so damn military, she turned up the bottom of her foot and inspected it as if the Red Cross might be hiding there. Shaded her eyes and looked straight up at the sky for a half-dozen heartbeats, long enough for Kee to glance skyward herself. She then squatted down to look beneath her helicopter.
The major shrugged and went to check on the crew topping off the tanks.
Did the woman have a sense of humor?
They hit the flight line a half hour late.
Kee had tried to apologize and been brushed off in the hustle to get moving. Settling Dilya back on Kee’s cot for the night had taken longer than it should. The phrase book hadn’t helped when Kee couldn’t focus her eyes, couldn’t shake the awful image of that camp. Finally, she’d pushed Dilya onto the cot, pulled the blanket over the still shaking girl, and walked out.
She’d had to pause in the darkness outside the tent and work on her own breathing. The pressure of that place. No L.A. mission ever stank so of fear. No halfway house had been so panicked. More noise than a full-on street riot, cops and all. Even worse than a firefight in the Colombian jungle. But she was late—and broke herself loose of the nightmare that threatened to overwhelm her and bolted for the helo.
The silence of the night was deafening. Tonight their mission profile was backup—big surprise. The pair of monster, double-rotored Chinook helicopters were taking a couple teams of Rangers and Green Berets in to deal with an import problem. Arms were flowing across the borders to the militias. They didn’t know from where, but tonight they hoped to uncover the destination. If all went well, they’d capture the weapons and be able to start tracing back to the source of the flow.
Their flight profile placed them in a high-circling station, twenty klicks from the target. Five minutes out in case the ground op went bad. Midair refueling every three hours to keep the tanks topped up for action. Too high to bother manning the guns. Nothing to do but sit and wait.
The silence ate at her. Ate at her from the inside. She’d let the commander down twice in the last few hours. Not getting Dilya dealt with, and being late for a mission. Didn’t matter if she was a real legend or a fake one, Major Beale had been square with her and Kee owed her. Kee didn’t like owing anybody.
“Major, I wanted to say—”
“Are you quitting on me, Smith?” The major’s voice was sharp over the open intercom. Any possibility of humor nowhere on the radar.
“Night Stalkers Don’t Quit,” Kee replied without thinking. That’s one of the reasons she’d wanted to join in the first place. NSDQ was more than their motto, it was their first rule of life. SOAR fliers never quit. She never quit.
Beale swiveled in her seat until she was staring back at Kee between the two pilot seats. In the dim instrument glow of the night-flight cabin, Kee could see Beale’s face. A way she hadn’t seen it before. Not pretty, nor with that rare open smile that lit her up. Her face was the dead serious of a seasoned SOAR flight commander.
“You quitting on that girl?”
Kee gritted her teeth and glared back at Beale, eye to eye.
“Night Stalkers Don’t Quit!”
“Right. Until you do, we don’t have a problem.” Beale turned back to her console.
Big Bad John flashed one of his broad smiles at her. “Told you so,” he mouthed.
Right. Major Beale was someone you survived. She gave him the finger.
He laughed silently and gave it back.
In harmony, they both turned back to stare out into the dark and wait.
Dilya squatted and watched the sky. Familiar but not. She knew the stars. Jawza the twins. Asad the lion. Her friends shone down on her.
It was when she looked to the Earth that the world became strange and unfamiliar. A few helicopters were scattered across the field, but many had left at sunset, flying into the night.
The elder with the strange name, The Kee. Was it her name or her title? It sounded like an ax on hard firewood or the cry of an angry hawk cheated of its prey. She had attacked Dilya. Attacked her, dragged her onto the helicopter, but then given her food. The next day, The Kee had taken her to the city of fear, walking forward when everyone else ran away. Didn’t she understand danger? Couldn’t she smell it?
Why had they gone there? To exchange a salute and then to run away? She could make no sense of that. Dilya had held on tight because she didn’t want to be left there by accident. No safety there. Nowhere to hide. Everyone desperate. Nowhere to steal food, because they wouldn’t have any.
And back on the helicopter, the elder had held her tight. So tightly it hurt. But it hurt good as well. The Kee had held her so hard, that she’d squeezed out Dilya’s first tears since she’d lost her parents. They had burned on her cheeks.
Now she sat on the highest row of the stadium, near one of the guards, but not too near, and looked at the friendly sky. She fingered the bread roll she’d hidden in her sleeve but decided to save it. For two days they had fed her. Maybe, if they came back down from the night sky, they would feed her again.
7
Kee spotted while Big Bad John benched. Crazy Tim curled free weights—big ones. They’d led her to the iron stash way at the back of the parts-and-supplies tent, out of the sun. Not much, but there were three benches and enough weights to satisfy the strongest grunt.
Mr. Big Bad was only jamming his own weight, but when he passed twenty reps, Kee knew he was serious. At thirty, he started blowing wind. At forty, she braced to catch a drop, if she could. At fifty, he grunted hard and managed to slot the bar back into the hooks without assistance.
“Good for a warm-up.” His voice sounded pretty steady, considering how his body must be sizzling. His statement ignored the fact that they’d been working their program for over half an hour in a companionable enough silence.
“You’re in my way.” She shed a fair stack of iron off the bar to get down to her own weight. She considered matching him one for one. Fifty reps, she might pull it off. But it wasn’t her usual workout. Full body weight was for building raw power. She’d learned on the street that power didn’t count much past a certain point, what mattered were endurance and speed. Her training goal had always been to outlast everyone around her.
She dumped another forty pounds on the ground. John offered a sneer. Tim watched but didn’t say a word. She ignored them both.
At twenty reps she felt the burn start in. Nice and smooth. She kept the bar clanking up and down at about twice the rate John had used, her standard second and a half per rep.
At forty, she found the groove and settled in to do a workout.
At eighty, the sweat was running down her cheeks. At a hundred, she clanged it back into hooks.
John stood in spot position but hadn’t bothered to brace for a serious catch. Of course he was strong enough, he could probably snag her light bar one-handed.
“You’ve done this before.” Was all the praise he offered. It felt good.
She sat on the bench and knocked back half a bottle of water before checking on Dilya. The girl crouched on the floor playing with a piece of string she’d scrounged up somewhere. She’d tied it into a loop and was playing a game, flipping it back and forth o
ver her fingers to create different designs.
“So, Mr. Big Bad.” Kee studied the tattoo revealed right over his heart when he’d peeled his shirt to mop his face. A winged Pegasus with laser-vision eyes—the flying horse emblem of the Night Stalkers—done in white to stand out on his dark skin just like the emblem.
“Major Beale? The legend is for real?” She hadn’t intended it to be a question. Her mind had put a scoffing tone on it, but her survival instinct had turned it into a merely derisive question.
He shook his head, picked up a pair of forty-pounders, and started doing forearm work. “Don’t get it, do you?”
“So I’m slow.” She wasn’t.
But the major was something other. Nothing about her fit. She should be having tea with her girlfriends before going shopping at Saks Fifth Ave, two kids off with the nanny, husband off to Wall Street. Or maybe, with the way she looked, working the runway and magazine ad world.
“She comes from people.” John would know what she meant. “People” were somebody. Money, power, luxury. Not street. Not Average Joe or Jane. Not Kee Smith.
Crazy Tim dropped the bar he’d been curling. Dropped it hard. Stepping over it, he left without looking back.
“No clue, Smith. No damn clue.” She wasn’t shut down so easy.
“You’re saying she tweaked a bunch of noses when she went Army?”
“West Point. And I repeat, you have no clue.”
“Heard that.” She’d met enough officers whose only claim to fame was graduating from the Point. Didn’t make you a soldier. “So, you gonna make me guess?”
He switched from reverse curls to flyaways. Made his muscles stand out so nice, she’d always liked that particular rep. But this time, instead of any interest, she found herself comparing them to Archie’s runner’s build. Favorably on the Professor’s side of the scale. That was new.
She waited Big John out.
At fifty reps he swung ’em down and dropped the weights back on the sand. He toweled his face and chest before reaching for his shirt, which he threw over his shoulder.
He leaned in until their faces were a foot apart. In the blink of an eye, the workout buddy disappeared and was replaced by a staff sergeant of the SOAR 5th Battalion.
“A couple months back, Major Emily Beale earned the Silver Star, third highest combat decoration of the military, fetching a D-boy colonel out of a hellhole perched a thousand feet up a sheer cliff. Made me wanna crap my pants. Me!”
He thumped a fist against the flying horse on his chest.
“We took over two hundred rounds in the twelve seconds she saved his life. And if the towel heads had been decent shots, we’d have taken ten times that many. A friggin’ sheet of lead was raining down and she sat there, holding the helicopter three feet from rotor to cliff—on two sides—crammed up this narrow-ass ravine and waited for him for the longest twelve seconds of my life. She is the best pilot you will ever fly with; Major Henderson says so too. You strolled into the most coveted berth in all of SOAR because you’re a woman. Crazy Tim…”
He jabbed a finger in the direction the man had gone.
“He got shoved aside to make room for you. You can’t believe how hard that man is working every time he so much as talks to you without going nuts. His gettin’ moved to Henderson’s bird, because Henderson’s gunner took a round, is the only reason he ain’t beating your ass every damned day. And if you cross Major Beale, if you so much as let her down one tiny inch, I will pound the shit out of whatever she leaves of your carcass. Then Crazy Tim will start in. Clear?”
Kee’s mind struggled to shift against the hammerblow of his sudden rage and disdain, not that she’d let it show. She’d answer his anger the same way she always did. With anger burning up from deep inside, a deep well roiling with a heat and fury she understood all too well.
She shoved up from the bench until they stood toe-to-toe. She craned up her neck to stare at him. She’d been through too damn much to get here.
“I earned that seat, Mr. Big Bad. I didn’t stroll in. Clear? I’m the best gunner you’ve ever seen.”
“Words, Smith. Prove ’em!”
“If we stopped flying back patrols, I would.”
8
Forward patrol. About time. Kee considered skipping chow after the briefing to go and check over her gun and the rest of the helo’s armament. She wanted to do the preflight check now, though it would be over an hour early.
She forced herself to go find Dilya. The girl was asleep in her cot, curled up in the tight ball she always slept in. She looked so small that Kee could imagine picking her up and putting the girl in her pocket to keep safe.
Kee had to shake Dilya awake, and she dragged her feet all the way to the mess tent and through the chow line. Kee could feel her own nerves climbing toward that high, steady plane of a pending mission. She always felt calmer when they were headed into a storm. What drove her crazy was all the sitting still in between.
“Sergeant Smith?”
“Yes, sir.” The Professor’s tone set her back on her military heels for a moment. She’d been trading firefight stories with Crazy Tim, trying to make up a bit for pissing him off. She only belatedly realized that Captain Stevenson had called her name twice. Had she forgotten something?
He tipped his head toward Dilya, who drooped beside him, no other word fit her look. She drooped. The hamburger on her plate had only a single bite out of it. And she hadn’t taken any fries or salad. Up until now, her appetite hadn’t slacked for a moment in the four days since they’d rescued her.
“Dilya?” The girl looked up at her. Her eyes half closed. Sweat stood out on her forehead. Sick. What was the word for sick? Kee groped in her pocket, but the phrase book was back on her cot.
She imitated throwing up. Placed the back of her hand against her mouth, making the ralphing sound that had once bought the girl’s laughter.
“Dilya, ha?”
Dilya nodded her head, then pushing her food aside, laid her head on the table.
Before Kee could do more than rise to her feet, Archie scooped up the girl.
“Go find Mackenzie. I’ll take her to the hospital tent.” She found Mac coming out of the showers and dragged him to the med tent half dressed.
It took Mac about thirty seconds. He pressed his fingers down on Dilya’s lower right abdomen. Dilya groaned. He released his fingers quickly and she cried out.
“Appendicitis. Pretty advanced. Hid it like an animal might. Had a golden retriever named Jasper, never knew he was hurting until one day he stopped running after tennis balls. He was dead two days later.”
Kee grabbed the side of the gurney. “Dead?”
“Yeah, cancer. Riddled with it. Nothing we could do.” He poked at Dilya’s abdomen while he talked, eliciting varying whimpers that cut at Kee until she wanted to scream for him to stop.
“Loved that dog.” He said it as calmly as if he were talking about the last magazine he’d read.
“I think it’s intact, but I need to do this right away. She’s hid her pain to this point, that’s a strong kid.” He stroked a hand over her hair as she lay there with her eyes closed, sweat running off her forehead.
Big John came in. “How’s the kid? Hey, not looking so good there, short stuff.”
“Appendicitis.”
“You got it covered, Mac?”
“Yeah, I think so. Haven’t ever done it on a kid, but I don’t like the idea of transporting her this far advanced.”
“Good, ’cause we’re outta here. They moved the op up.”
“Op?” This time Kee’s grip on the gurney wasn’t enough, and she sat abruptly on one of the nearby chairs. “Op?”
She couldn’t fly. Not with Dilya in surgery. She had to—What? She couldn’t think.
When she looked at Big John, he raised his hands palm out, no part of it.
Archie had stood quietly in the background through all this. Now he looked at her. He kept his gaze on her when he finally spoke, “
How long, Mac?”
“Don’t know until I get in there. The surgery itself should be under an hour. I’ll roust Jeremy, knock out the girl. If all goes well, we could be done in three hours including pre- and post-op. Complications if the appendix bursts could get us to six.” He left the tent.
Again that silent gaze of assessment, a question she couldn’t answer. She couldn’t leave. It didn’t matter that she had to.
Archie nodded to her. “I’ll talk to the majors and see if we can get cover personnel for this flight.”
She nodded her head without speaking, it was all she could do. She tried to say “thank you.” Swallowed hard several times to clear her throat.
By the time she managed, she sat alone with the young girl nearly lost in the great expanse of the gurney.
9
Dilya had come through clean in three hours flat and was resting well.
Kee leaned back in a metal chair placed beside the cot in the recovery tent, close enough for Dilya to touch her if she woke. The chair dug at her back.
She should have flown.
She knew it. Archie knew it. John knew it.
But she’d stayed.
She’d stayed for Dilya, but Dilya wasn’t a Night Stalker. The girl needed her, but had she? Mac and Jeremy had prepped her for surgery while Kee held her hand.
Once Dilya was out, there was nothing for Kee to do except feel guilty and worry. She didn’t know who’d flown in her place. Or had the mission scrubbed? Probably not. No one had come in to check on her.
“Smith!”
She snapped her eyes open in time to catch the yellow case with a large red cross on it that Mackenzie heaved in her direction. It thudded against her with a body blow that practically knocked her backwards out of the chair.
I Own the Dawn Page 6