I Own the Dawn

by M. L. Buchman

  Dilya sat behind her, light tugs on Kee’s scalp as the girl braided her hair. Either by touch, or perhaps the girl possessed built-in night vision. She never failed to find Kee either in the light or dark. The braids would be uncomfortable under her helmet, but Dilya enjoyed doing it so much Kee couldn’t bring herself to complain. And each braid was a different style. Sometimes to tease her, Archie would reach over and quietly undo a particularly complex braid. Patient as the sea, Dilya would start again.

  “I don’t dream. I like flying with Major Beale. I like the missions, of course. I like the sense of purpose. But I never looked much beyond the next assignment. Figured if I ever walked away, I’d work with Dad building boats. Maybe take over the business one day.”

  Kee turned her head enough to see his profile without pulling her hair from Dilya’s hands. He leaned his elbows back on the riser behind him and gazed up at the brilliant stars.

  Once again, he surprised her. She understood not dreaming when you didn’t expect to survive the streets. But was Archie so forthright that he never thought beyond what came next for himself?

  And boats? She could picture him working with his mom more easily than building boats. He was clearly the strategist of the helo.

  “I should say I never used to dream beyond that.” In that uncanny way of his, he found her hand unerringly without looking down and laced their fingers together.

  Kee could feel her skin tighten, her clothes needing a tug to once again feel right as her body responded to his simplest touch.

  He turned to look at her. His eyes invisible except for the slightest sparkle of reflected starlight. But she didn’t need to read them for the heat to wash over her face.

  “Me?”

  He hesitated, then a slow nod. And she could feel that slow, lopsided grin of his. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see it.

  Kee looked away. He dreamed of her? No one had ever done that. No one had ever pretended to.

  Sergeant Kee Smith stood alone.

  Faced the world in her own way at her own pace. And the Kee Smith she knew only had one pace—full speed ahead.

  Now an eleven-year-old girl braided her hair and a SOAR officer held her hand and spoke of dreams.

  She tried to breathe past the tightness in her chest.

  41

  President Peter Matthews stared at the screen on the Situation Room wall. “Tell me.”

  General Brett Rogers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood and strode to the screen.

  “The more our analysts chew on this one, the worse it looks. It started as a lead at a forward airbase south of the Hindu Kush. They kicked it to Fort Campbell, which bumped the problem to SOCCOM. We’re now twenty hours in and we know there is trouble, and we think it may be bad. Definitely international, potentially disastrous.”

  “First slide,” he called out to the room whose only other occupant was Daniel Darlington, the President’s Chief of Staff. An orderly hidden in the next room put a picture of a rugged soldier in his fifties up on the room’s center screen. A bio ran down one side.

  “Colonel James Evans has a long and distinguished career. He goes back to Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada, Desert Storm, every military action in the last thirty years, he’s been in it. Always at the front. We’ve used the man on several high-security missions. He isn’t trained Airborne, nor Spec Op. Not even Special Forces.”

  Peter shared a smile with his Chief of Staff, who looked as at ease here as he had when he’d been Chief Assistant to the deceased First Lady. They both knew Brett had been the Commander of Special Operations Central Command before being tapped as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He still defended his own, not that it would slow the man for a moment if someone in his former command actually screwed up.

  “He tried for Rangers and the Greenies a couple times each. Frankly, no one wanted him. He was a bit of a wild card. But he has a killer instinct we found useful and he also had a real habit of not ending up dead. Known for taking matters into his own hands too often, he finally hit the news a couple times. You may remember the forces who wanted to take Baghdad for President Bush Senior. Evans’ unit struck fifty miles past the Kuwait-Iraq border before we reeled him back in.”

  Peter hadn’t heard of it, but he’d been in junior high school and mostly thinking about girls. Daniel shook his head. Daniel was half a decade younger and had been learning how to add single digit numbers at the time. Peter did his best to nod sagely for the General to continue.

  Brett Rogers cleared his throat, not fooled at all. “Frankly, Mr. President, we’re worried. We’ve talked to his commander. Evans took an extended leave, hadn’t taken any in over three years, now he’s been on his own for over a month. No one that we’ve spoken to has any idea what he’s been doing. His personal effects are gone as well. No parents, no siblings, can’t find any girlfriends. He flat out disappeared.”

  “What are his most likely objectives?” Peter had slowly adapted to these Sit Room meetings. Being the youngest President in history didn’t make him any less the President. If he asked enough questions, the experienced people in the room gave him all the information he needed to make decisions.

  “That’s what bothers us. We don’t know. But the problem kept getting escalated because it has all the earmarks of a covert operation. Lower-level analysts kept bumping it up, hoping that it would eventually reach someone’s level of security clearance. But it never did.” He called out for a map.

  Northern Afghanistan popped up on the screen.

  “The pilot’s report placed him fifty miles short of the Uzbekistan border, but not on any road that we have on any map. We’ve redone the imaging with a couple of unmanned Global Hawk recon birds we had in the area. Four overflights in the last twelve hours. This is what we have.”

  Three images came up on the wall, the second two clearly close-ups of the first. A pair of tire tracks, starting from nowhere and descending down the mouth of a widening valley. That’s where he must have landed.

  The close-up scrolled rapidly along the tire tracks. They disappeared several times, but after a few flails, they locked back onto them.

  The image stopped abruptly enough for Peter to jerk forward in his chair.

  “A windstorm wiped the area clean beyond this point. We’ve searched for white Toyota pickups along this general heading for a hundred miles. Over forty have been located, they are the ‘camels’ of modern desert warfare. And also the vehicle of choice for any wealthy farmer or opium runner. In the last seven hours we’ve eliminated about half of the suspect vehicles. We could be chasing a ghost. If he changed vehicles, we’d never know.”

  Peter stared at the high-altitude close-ups of forty-odd white pickup trucks. Several had an animal tied in the back, sheep or goat. These had red Xs in the corners. A few had more men piled in the back than should be possible. Either working as a local bus, or a group of insurgents. Two had the clear profile of large machine guns mounted in the bed, their black outline clear against the white top of the cab.

  Each vehicle without an X had a number in red. A list on a side screen was scrolling through the analysts’ comments on each vehicle.

  “Boil it down for me, Brett.”

  “We don’t know where he is. We don’t know what he’s planning. We don’t know where he’s heading. But we have a general direction. Because it is Colonel Evans and because he used his single strongest covert operations connection to arrange a ride from SOAR to cross the Hindu Kush in a hurry, we know he has a definite target and a timeline that is now only two days away. Until we know more, we’re recommending a heightened alert to all embassies and bases throughout the region. And that requires Presidential authorization.”

  The long-range map came back up. White dots were scattered all over the map. Over half had red Xs. Others were far to the east or west of where Colonel James Evans had landed. As he watched, red Xs appeared on two of those vehicles and they blinked off the sidescreen list.

  �
�If he continued straight out of the valley and due north across the desert…” Daniel leaned forward to stare more closely at the screen. “There’s nothing there.”

  Brett scrolled the screen down. It was too large an area. There were too many possibilities. Eventually he’d pick up a road and then could go anywhere.

  Another pickup disappeared, then two more were added by analysts working away in the Pentagon.

  “We need more help.” And Peter knew exactly who to ask.

  42

  “Hey, Em.”

  “Hello, Mr. President.” The video occupying the center of the Sit Room screen showed Major Emily Beale. He’d seen her a few months ago at her wedding, but he’d forgotten how beautiful she was. She may have been his childhood friend, but the woman still took his breath away every time.

  “So formal with your Commander in Chief?” They had grown up next door to each other, after all.

  “My crew is here with me, Sneaker Boy. You want to go a couple rounds in front of them?”

  “Hello, Mr. President.” Major Mark Henderson leaned in over his wife’s shoulder.

  “Hi, Mark. How’s married life?”

  “How are we doing on Colonel James Evans? Something nasty if we’re getting a call from you, sir.”

  “You never were any fun, Mark.” For one thing, he’d captured the woman of Peter’s dreams. And he’d done it before Peter had been smart enough to figure that out. Actually, Emily Beale had done the choosing, and Peter knew from years of experience, nothing could change the woman’s mind once she made it up.

  “Nope!” Mark’s grin belied the statement. They’d had a particularly memorable bachelor party in the White House involving too many cigars, too much brandy, and an expensive poker game, which Mark had won handily—as you’d expect from a career Army officer. Peter had been totally outclassed and merely watched the last half of the game and surprised himself at how much he liked Em’s fiancé.

  “We tracked him out of the valley and forty miles north before losing his tracks to a sandstorm.”

  “That would put him close to the Uzbekistan border.”

  “Right. But we don’t know where he’s headed or why. Every hint of his past is a dead end. He didn’t have one buddy, nothing. A loner. And a damned skilled one. The second man is a dead end so far, but we’re still working on it.”

  Despite liking Mark, it was hard to look at the two of them, practically cheek to cheek in front of their camera.

  “K2?” A voice sounded from someone on Emily’s side.

  “Who said that?”

  Emily and Mark shifted back a bit, revealing a tall, thin man with a mop of brown hair and a short Asian-American woman by his side.

  “Captain Archibald Stevenson III, sir. We met at the wedding, my mother introduced us.”

  The son of Betty Stevenson, high recommendation. Personally, the woman scared the crap out of him. Her team’s insights into future geo-political alliances and reconfigurations were downright spooky in their accuracy. Their mid-range predictions frequently cost him more than a night’s sleep. And the long-range stuff occasionally so ugly he mostly prayed for it to be long range enough to happen during someone else’s administration.

  The Sit Room orderly splashed Stevenson’s picture and short bio up on a screen. He’d flown with Emily for a decade, an impossibly high recommendation.

  “So, what’s K2? I thought that was a mountain in Nepal. He can’t be heading there.”

  “Actually, sir, K2 is the second tallest mountain in the world and lies on the border of Pakistan and China about three hundred miles northeast of here.” The man didn’t even bat an eye at correcting the President. He was as formidable as his mother. “K2 is also what they call Karshi-Khanabad airbase in Uzbekistan. Our forces were there until 2005 when the Russians and Chinese convinced the government to throw us out.”

  An image came up on a side screen. It looked like any single-strip airport he’d ever seen.

  “Why there? What’s the connection?”

  “It is the only military asset in the area.”

  “Did he—” Emily started.

  “—Evans serve there?” Daniel finished.

  That always bothered Peter. They did that too often for his liking. Yes, he wanted a smart man for Chief of Staff. But he was too fast sometimes. Peter smiled and remembered his mother’s advice from her years as a federal judge. Surround yourself with people smarter than you and listen to them. Well, between Emily and Daniel, there were two very, very sharp minds working on this.

  Colonel Evans’ bio was returned to the screen and scrolled down.

  “Four years, Em. He served there from the day we took residence in 2001 right up to the shut down on May 29, 2005. Well done, team. Now, why?”

  43

  Emily looked at the people gathered around her. Mark close behind her. Archie and Kee practically attached at the hip. Did they have any idea how obvious they were? She’d have to warn them if any upper-tier officers came around. Had she and Mark been that obvious? Emily laughed. No, they’d spent too much time hating each other’s guts. Or at least her hating Mark’s. He claimed that he’d been besotted from the first moment he saw her but had been careful not to let her catch a hint. The fact that she’d done the same only made the joke worse.

  Big John and Connie hovered to either side like bookends, barely able to stand being in the same tent.

  The image on the laptop of K2 bothered her, but she couldn’t place her finger on why.

  “Could you zoom in to the right end of the airfield?” Archie asked and leaned in.

  Emily watched the screen closely. Jets, a lot of jets. Russian jets. Mostly old ones.

  “A lot of old MiGs. A couple of Yak bombers. And a few Sukhoi SU-24 Fencers.” Of course, Archie was first across the line, faster than the guys at the White House who were serving the images. Labels started appearing as the image continued to expand until the angular taxiways filled the screen.

  “What are those?” She pointed to the squared-off humps beside the taxiways. As she asked, she knew the answer. “Hardened bunkers. What’s tucked away in those?”

  More labels flashed on.

  “This is our latest intelligence.” General Brett Rogers’ gruff voice sounded clear across the encrypted link to Washington. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had offered to wrestle her father for the right to give her away at her wedding. Awfully sweet, and rather scary that the leader of the US military thought so highly of her.

  “Much of which dates back to 2005,” he continued, “when the SCO had the Uzbekistan government kick us out of K2. It was a damned useful base. Would save you boys, er, and gals, a lot of flight time if we could still station you there.”

  The labels that kept appearing were consistently older aircraft.

  “This is all second- or early-third-generation gear.” Archie leaned in for a closer look. “There isn’t a single fourth-generation fighter in view. This is like Davis-Monthan Air Force Base where we store our old fighters and bombers outside Tucson. High desert and dry, so the planes can be left there for storage because they don’t rot.”

  “New or not, I would wager that a lot of it still works.” Kee was thinking the same thing she was.

  “Hold on. Pan right please.” Archie this time.

  He and Kee were working in a kind of synchronicity. He’d always been tentative. Brilliant, but tentative. With Kee at his side, her old friend spoke with a clarity and confidence Emily hadn’t heard outside of actual combat in a decade of flying together. Sergeant Kee Smith had earned her place on Emily’s crew but still kept revealing more surprises.

  “MiG-29s. That’s a serious group of fourth-generation fighters—exceptionally efficient and highly maneuverable even at supersonic speeds.”

  A MiG-23 scared Emily enough, but her Hawk stood at least a slim chance against one. The half-dozen 29s was a different matter.

  “Our analysts here are saying they haven’t seen them move in over a de
cade.”

  “Pull way back.” Now Kee was taking the lead. “More. More. More.”

  “There!”

  And Emily saw it too.

  Each white pickup truck trailed a line of white dots as the analysts tracked them over the countryside. Most went in circles, taking the kids to school, picking up groceries, etc. A few went farther, running sheep to market or insurgents over the border.

  A series of four separate tracks stood out. The first was their known one, Colonel Evans’ Toyota, the one they wanted. They’d picked up another one nine miles into Uzbekistan, out in the desert far from any road. The four lines of dots weren’t connected, they were mapped as separate trucks. But the first two followed the same general line, as did the next two. The latest was on the road system now and headed straight for K2.

  “There’s our man.”

  Four images flashed up. A white pickup truck with nothing of note except a small bundle in the rear cargo area.

  “That’s where he stowed the camouflage net when we picked him up along with the cans of fuel. You can see, he’s discarded the cans he’s emptied.”

  Sure enough, the truck bed was emptier with each photo. The line was more broken than Emily would have expected, unless…

  “They hid under the camo net whenever they stopped.”

  Kee had proved herself to be an exceptional gunner and rock-steady under fire. But she fought against everything so hard that Emily had been reluctant to trust her. One of the biggest votes in her favor was the girl, Dilya. To engender such trust from a child spoke volumes about a person. And her association with Archie spoke volumes as well, though in a different language. Despite a presented attitude of promiscuity, she was proving herself loyal to one man.

  Kee Smith remained a puzzle to Emily. So rough, never finished high school, but ate up advanced Army training with scores she and Archie had trouble achieving. Trusting no one except herself. No, that wasn’t quite right. Once her loyalty was won, Emily was sure Kee Smith would die to protect you. But that loyalty wasn’t given without serious proof. Dilya had won that, but Archie didn’t look to be all the way there yet. Oddly enough, Emily thought maybe she herself had.