The Ides of Matt 2015

by M. L. Buchman

  “Right, my apologies, ma’am,” his tone which had thinned a little under the pain had shifted back to more solid. “I was just a bit perplexed is all. By our current situation. It’s awkward to be bumping hips and, uh, other things with a beautiful woman under such circumstances.”

  “Which are?”

  “Ms. Swallow Hill, I don’t even know your name.”

  Before she could answer, he hurried on.

  “But your voice, you could make a man die happy just to hear such a thing over his grave. So sure and confident and female. It’s an amazing thing, I’m telling you. And then when I finally saw you,” he let out a low whistle. Not a wolf whistle, but rather one of deep appreciation. “I didn’t know anyone built women who looked like you. One who stood as tall and straight as a ballerina but shaped like a goddess.”

  “Huh!” She tried to pull herself together. She really did. It wasn’t working. “That can’t be.”

  “But it’s truth.”

  “But it can’t,” and she felt about as naïve as a swallow first leaving its nest.

  “Tell me why?”

  “Because…” She didn’t even know why. “Because—” she tried again with no more success, having to raise her voice as the fire’s roar built. “Because I’m no more ballerina than goddess. I guess the confident part is right…maybe. It must be, because it pushes men away like mad.” And he saw the dancer in her? She could still feel that deep inside, but no man had ever said such a thing to her.

  “Then you have been—and please don’t take this wrong, Ms. Swallow Hill—spending your time with a bunch of fools.”

  She reached out in the dark, lost for a moment in the disorienting darkness, and tentatively brushed a hand down his chest. It felt safe and right, huddled together in here as the fire burned toward them. She suppressed a shiver against the cool water.

  “Living in my glass tower, can’t say I’ve been spending time with much of anyone.”

  “I like the sound of that even better. Less competition for me. Not so long ago I swore I was going to get to know the lady of Swallow Hill before this summer was over.”

  Marta could feel the heat rising to her own face and was glad for the darkness. “I, uh, might have made a similar swear about this certain deep-voiced pilot I know.” Which she couldn’t believe she’d just admitted. “Say something else. Anything else.”

  “Well…” he tried to keep his tone light despite the tension she could feel where her hand still rested against his chest. A good man to have around in a bad situation. “The skinny dipping wasn’t a completely idle suggestion. I have a pal with a big ranch down in Texas. Horse ranch. Do you ride?”

  “Willing to learn,” she didn’t let loose the bubble of a laugh building in her throat for fear that it would emerge as a babble of panic instead.

  “Some fine places there to take a lady,” Tyler continued resting a hand over hers, “if she’s of a mind. Fine places. Not another soul for miles in any direction.”

  “I might be open to that,” Marta slapped her free hand over her mouth. “I can’t believe I just said that.” The heat flashed back into her cheeks.

  Then her face kept heating.

  And heating.

  Their breathing air was—

  “Okay, Swallow Hill. You listen close,” Tyler’s smooth and calm disappeared and he started speaking quickly. Dead serious now. “It’s going to get hot in here, unbearably hot. And then it will get hotter. You hold down the corners of the fire blanket, keep its edges under the water. I’ll do the same with my end. You’re going to want to rip off the blanket. Don’t! Our lives may depend on that.”

  Marta ducked her face down into the cool water, which only made the air feel twice as hot when she surfaced. She reached around Tyler, grabbed one end of the foil fire shelter and held it firmly behind him under the water. He did the same behind her. They were embracing…to save their lives. Don’t get stupid, Marta!

  “It all depends,” Tyler continued hurriedly, “how fast the concrete and the water heat up. But do not pull the blanket aside until I tell you. No matter what. Do you understand? Do you…”

  She nodded, which was pointless in the dark. They were going to be boiled alive. But she couldn’t speak.

  The concrete wall she was leaning against was no longer cold, it was comfortably warm. She shifted away from the wall, the warmth was creepy, felt dangerous.

  Bumped into Tyler, chest to chest, but there was nowhere to go.

  “Kiss me.”

  “What?” She had to shout to be heard over the building roar.

  “I want to have kissed you before we survive this.”

  She wished she could see his face, his eyes, how he was looking at her.

  The wall behind her was definitely warm now.

  But she hadn’t needed to see him before this moment. She heard his voice, just as she had all season; it became the center of her thoughts.

  She leaned in and kissed him as the roar deafened her. She clung to him as long as she could, but she had to break apart to get air.

  It was so hot.

  She dragged in a breath.

  The air was fire in her lungs.

  “Scream!” He shouted at her. “It’s okay!”

  The wall behind her was now hot when she bumped it. The water was starting to warm up. She held onto Tyler. Held onto their fragile shelter where it had been pulled down behind him. The air inside the small bubble of the fire shelter inside the concrete cistern was so hot it scalded her lungs. It—

  The scream that ripped from her chest was echoed by the scream from his as the fire rolled over them.

  9

  At some point Marta stopped screaming.

  The pain had eased.

  The agony of each breath.

  She floated in the dark, wrapped tight around a man. Around Tyler. Her end of the foil shelter was still tight in her fists.

  “Am I dead?” Then a horrible thought struck her and she gasped out, “Are you dead?”

  His soft chuckle reassured her infinitely.

  “Can we open the shelter yet?”

  “Not yet,” his voice was a whisper.

  “But the fire’s roar…” It was gone.

  “The area around us is still too hot. Give it a few minutes. Besides…”

  “Besides what?”

  “I wouldn’t mind kissing you after we survived this.”

  Marta decided she wouldn’t mind either, not with a man who kissed as well as he did.

  They only had a few moments, that she thoroughly appreciated, before the heavy pounding of an approaching helicopter sounded loud outside the cistern.

  Tyler broke off the kiss, but didn’t release his tight hold on her.

  “That, Ms. Swallow Hill, is how we know it’s cool enough to leave.”

  Together they pushed the blanket up against the heavy steel lid and levered it open. It dropped aside with a loud clang of steel on concrete.

  They tossed the foil blanket over the hot concrete and she pulled herself up to sit on the broad rim, and then helped Tyler up to join her. He flinched when he banged his broken ankle against her, but remained stoic. A good man to have beside you…beside her. A Black Hawk was settling onto the flat spot just below the tower. Everywhere around them was black char. The fire had burned every living thing in its path. Even now, other helicopters and a pair of tankers were battling the flames farther down the slope.

  The tower!

  She looked up. It still stood. The soaking Tyler gave it right before he crashed had saved it. The swallows swooped in, complained that the box was gone, had been burned away, and then all flew off again.

  “I’ll bring you a new one next year,” she called after them.

  A silence settled as the Black Hawk’s engines wound down.

  �
�You’re all red, Ms. Swallow Hill.”

  They only had moments before his friends arrived from the helicopter.

  She was worried about facing Tyler. They had been through the heart of a fire together. They didn’t know each other—but they’d said things. Shared things.

  Be brave! She forced herself to look at him.

  “You too.” Bright red. His skin flushed brighter than a sunburn though she could see it was easing already. “Cooked like lobsters.”

  “Could be our first dinner date,” he noted in that dry tone of his.

  “Not a chance. Never had lobster and now I never will.” Then she thought that, of course, she should have known—her Mama was always right. She nodded up toward the tower, “But you come visiting and I’ll make the best spaghetti sauce you’ve ever had.”

  His smile was deep and proved that rugged and handsome could definitely be on the same face.

  “Tell me one thing, Ms. Hill.”

  Her courteous, deeply-voiced Coloradan was back. With his easy humor and very good face. A man she wouldn’t mind getting to know much, much better.

  What secrets could she keep from such a man?

  Tell him one thing?

  “Anything,” and she knew it was a promise.

  “What’s your name, Ms. Swallow Hill?”

  “I offer you ‘anything,’ and that’s the best you’ve got?”

  She tried to shove him back into the tank, but he caught her up in his arms and gave her one of those deep, desperate kisses. Just like when they’d been at death’s door, except now he was just doing it because he wanted to.

  Because she wanted him to.

  Flight to Fight

  Flight to Fight was written as a bonus story to my newsletter subscribers. It was a side visit back to the USS Peleliu, the semi-retired Landing Helicopter Assault ship. My Night Stalkers have taken it over from the Marines.

  I was also having run researching parts of Special Operations Forces training. It is very common for SOF soldiers to speak multiple languages, making it easier to infiltrate and scout different parts of the world. And I was reading about the common practice of watching online newscasts in their study language to hone those language skills, especially in the common words that are used by news reporters all over the world.

  This story was written during the brutal aftermath following the “Arab Spring.” General news reports out of Egypt were abruptly cut off after a very short period of time and replaced by government-approved news.

  I’m often told that it feels as if my stories are ripped right out of the headlines, and this is one that was. Or rather, it was ripped out of the sudden lack of headlines.

  1

  Sergeant Lee Ames had been cornered and didn’t appreciate it in the slightest. Night Stalkers were not supposed to be cornered; they were supposed to rule the night. He’d been flying for three months now with the most kick-ass helicopter company aloft. And in three months of almost nightly missions based off the U.S.S. Peleliu he’d been cornered a total of once—tonight. Lee didn’t care for it.

  He wasn’t “supposed” to be in the Sinai any more than the person he was here to extract. The Egyptian government would be very unhappy if they knew a helicopter of the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment was parked in a dry wadi less than five hundred meters from the Suez Canal. His Little Bird might be the smallest helo in the military, but because it was an AH-6M assault bird, it was also heavily armed and absolutely lethal.

  He checked his watch. 22:37. Three minutes later than the last time he’d looked, which did nothing to calm him down. Normally he was fine with waiting; patience was one of the deep skills learned during a decade in the Army. Hurry-up-and-wait was only the first-level talent, one possessed by every grunt who’d ever served. By the time he’d hit his third tour, he had the second-level down; waiting as tactic—a battlefield choice of inaction versus action.

  The Night Stalkers had taught him the top-tier skill: waiting is. Waiting wasn’t something you endured or used. A non-judgmental time of primal consciousness. It was that time during which there simply was no proper action, so you waited. And when the time was over, you stopped waiting. In Special Operations waiting had become a simple state of being in between moments of action at a level most people couldn’t imagine, never mind sustain. There was a reason U.S. Special Operations were at the top of the world’s military pyramid.

  Except right now the person he was supposed to be exfiltrating was two hours late. Captain Kara Moretti—watching from her drone circling six miles above—had told him to stay put as long as possible.

  Waiting is he sighed, wholly unconvinced.

  He’d assumed that a few hours before dawn, he’d have to leave whether or not his extraction subject had arrived. However, a firefight had broken out nearby and was now raging on the flat desert surface of the Sinai above his hiding place. Which might explain his contact’s delay, but was definitely going to trap him here for a while.

  About an hour after he’d landed, he’d heard the distinctive crack of a supersonic bullet ripping through the air a half dozen meters above his helo. Then he’d heard the rumble-boom of artillery to the west. The Suez Canal ran half a kilometer to the west.

  Lee had left his helo and crawled up the west side of the wadi—so familiar from the Arizona arroyos he’d played in as a kid that he had a weird déjà vu moment. The dry river bed was deep enough that his helicopter rested almost twenty feet below ground level, though only wide enough to leave a few yards to either side of his main rotor blades. He lay on his belly with his night-vision goggles just peeking above the sandy rim of the dry wash. Unlike the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, a careful scan east revealed nothing but the boundless wasteland of the Sinai Desert. Not even a saguaro cactus reaching its arms up to the star-filled night.

  To the west rose the high berm of the Suez Canal, with its dredgings of yellow sand piled up several stories high. Bright flashes from a battle flickered over the berm. He could see the upper structures of the ship moving along the canal. Gunfire lashed out from atop the berm and was returned hard from a ship he could see only by its superstructure.

  At least he wasn’t the target. But if he took flight and exposed himself above the wadi, he would be fast enough. For now, he and his helicopter were trapped here.

  ISIS? One faction of the Egyptian government fighting another? Or an attack on a specific ship?

  Didn’t matter. It wasn’t in his mission profile. His profile had been arrive, wait, extract, and do not, under any circumstances, be seen. That was the Night Stalkers’ specialty.

  Except no one had told him that his clandestine rendezvous point was going to end up in the middle of a battle. Even though it wasn’t in the mission brief he knew that revealing a piece of heavy U.S. military equipment and involving it in any local conflict would be disastrous.

  He turned, as he had a hundred times during the last hour that the fight had raged, to check in all directions to make sure he was alone.

  This time he wasn’t.

  A heavily-burdened lone figure was moving stealthily up the wadi; from rock to hump of sand. The figure’s long thawb robe would have blended perfectly into the night if it hadn’t been for Lee’s night-vision goggles.

  Sliding quietly down the slip face of the wadi’s side wall, Lee came up behind the person when they were still fifty meters from his helo.

  “Tawaqaf!” he said quietly in Arabic. Then clicked off the safety on his FN-SCAR rifle to reinforce the command to stop.

  The figure froze. Either too well-trained or too panicked to turn.

  “On your knees,” he continued in Arabic. The man settled awkwardly, but didn’t protest even though it would drastically limit his ability to attack or run.

  Lee made a quick scan, but there appeared to be only the two of them in the steep-walled dry river be
d.

  “What are you carrying?”

  “Golden potatoes,” his captive said in a muffled voice.

  It took Lee a moment to recognize first that it was said in English and second that it was the pass phrase for the person he was supposed to be extracting.

  “Stay still,” he ordered. Exchanging his rifle for his Glock handgun, he moved up close behind and began frisking the person.

  Through the linen thawb, Lee could feel neither knife or handgun at ankles, calves, or thighs. No ring of explosives at the slender waist. And just as his hand cupped what was not a shoulder holster but undoubtedly a woman’s breast, a small face rose from over the kneeling woman’s shoulder and looked up at him.

  In a tiny, scared voice, the girl mumbled, “Baba?”

  2

  Lee managed to finish checking both the woman and the child. They were clean.

  “Apologies. I was not expecting a woman,” he continued in Arabic as he backed away and kept his sidearm loose in his grip.

  Nor had he been expecting a small girl to ask for her father.

  “I understand,” the woman said in perfect English as she rose awkwardly and turned.

  Lee resisted the urge to step forward and help her to her feet. This was not the situation he’d been counting on and he wanted to maintain a clear field of fire for the moment.

  “I was told…” he shook his head and switched to English. “I was told to expect…” A person. He’d assumed male, but that had never actually been stated. Had it even been known?

  There was only so much that he could see through his night-vision goggles. All colors were green, painted in shades based on varying degrees of heat. He pushed them up and blinked hard to adapt his eyes to the darkness.

  “Close your eyes for a moment.”

  He flicked on a small flashlight. Both woman and child were traditionally dressed. Their robes were dirty as if they’d spent a lot of time crawling. They were both Egyptian dark in complexion. The girl blinking at him still had a baby’s round face framed by a tangle of brown hair.