Dawn Flight

by M. L. Buchman

  The television, her only friend through the sleepless night, told the story of massive power outages sweeping far and wide across the Pacific Northwest, though none had hit Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

  A hundred times through the day she’d thought how nice it would be to curl up with Jack Slater, make love while the wind roared and the rain battered—and a hundred times she’d had to push it aside.

  Late within the time she was supposed to be asleep, about three in the afternoon because they were now fully on a nighttime schedule like most Night Stalkers, she’d finally forced herself to start thinking.

  Why had she reacted so strongly?

  Because just like her mother—who had never remarried and maybe at long last Diana understood why—she’d fallen in love.

  Diana had sighed and wished she wasn’t always so goddamn honest with herself. But it was true. Without even noticing, she’d fallen in love with Jack Slater.

  But Jack had made no promises.

  He’d always been appreciative: of her flying, her mind, and her body. He had an uncanny ability to fully focus on each aspect of her. When they were discussing a mission, he wasn’t leering at her body, he was a hundred percent on profile. And when they were making love…he made the rest of the world cease to exist.

  Except for her initial info dump about her father’s death, they’d never discussed their pasts, not even that she was illegitimate. Past missions, training, even schooling, sure. But there’d been a barrier when they got back to family that neither of them had been willing to breach.

  Well, the three-minute trip in the back of the SUV that raced them across the airfield was not the time to discuss it.

  That was the moment when Diana decided that she wasn’t ready to give up on them yet.

  She wanted Jack. She wanted him long-term. He was already in her heart the same way that her father was in Mom’s.

  Forever.

  A hundred yards to the hangar, she did the only thing there was time for, the only thing she could think to do.

  She reached out and took his hand.

  He didn’t turn to look at her, didn’t react in any way.

  Except to nearly crush her fingers in his powerful grip. He held on like a drowning man for every single one of those seconds.

  She’d take that as a good sign.

  12

  “Dungeness Spit lighthouse,” Lois shouted at them over the roar of the storm. “It’s out on a sand spit in the middle of the Strait of San Juan de Fuca. All of the Coast Guard helos are scrambling on emergencies out in the shipping lanes. No way to get a boat out there quickly and they’ve passed the call to us. Civilian caretaker, heart attack. His wife radioed it in.”

  Without a word, he and Diana had prepped the Black Hawk. A base medic and Master Sergeant Hamlin piled aboard.

  “What about you?” he asked the Major.

  She shook her head.

  She’d never told her story, but she was a damn fine pilot with or without two real feet. And she was perhaps the tactically smartest person he’d ever met, definitely about CSAR. There was only one other woman he’d want beside him more.

  Again the Major refused. “I don’t fly enough myself to have the needed edge. And if I go and can’t fly, I’d just make everyone crazy.”

  She made it sound funny, but the pain on her rain-soaked face was enough to send him clambering aboard, because he knew it would be even worse if he said even another word. She gave so much, but she’d lost a lot too.

  Less than three minutes later they were hammering aloft. Usually the hazards were man-made when he flew: bullets, RPGs, missiles. Tonight was much rougher, the storm slashing in from the Pacific was ripped apart by the tall mountains of the Olympic Peninsula then recombined in harsh and unpredictable ways.

  There was no time to talk. Eighty miles should be an easy twenty-minute flight, instead it was a nightmare of blacked-out chaos, battering winds, tall mountains, and numerous aircraft corridors for the four major airports from here to Everett—the last requiring careful navigation to avoid being eaten by a hundred tons of airline. It took everything they could muster to get through the storm.

  Some of the gusts were fully half the speed they were able to fly. And the wind came from all different directions, including vertical. They’d jump from ten thousand feet to twelve and then fall back to eight faster than he could recite the nursery rhyme to remind himself, “Jack be nimble.”

  If the flight out was bad, the approach to Dungeness Spit off Sequim, Washington was insane.

  The Strait was a twenty-mile wide pipeline aimed right at the heart of the storm.

  Sequim was blacked out, of course, except for anyone with a generator.

  Five miles offshore, the lighthouse was a bright beacon, which only made it all the more visible how their helo was being battered about the sky.

  Whole sections of the thin spit of sand that connected the mainland to the lighthouse were being swept by towering waves. He turned on the landing spotlight and they could see drift logs a hundred feet long being tossed about like a game of pickup sticks.

  He monitored the engine and navigation data, and kept his hands on the controls to help when needed.

  “God but you’re good, Wonder Woman,” he told her over the intercom. Why he hadn’t said a word until they were approaching the worst part of the flight was beyond him. That simple hand clasp had given him something incredible. It had given him hope. He wasn’t sure yet hope for what, but it had flooded through him and it was a feeling he didn’t want to lose ever again.

  “Thanks,” he could hear how tight she was holding on, how hard she was working.

  “Take a breath, Diana.”

  She exhaled out hard, then again.

  “Been holding your breath for the whole flight?”

  “Maybe,” some warmth came back into her voice. “We Wonder Women can do that.”

  “Haven’t found a thing you can’t do yet.”

  13

  Diana could. She couldn’t win the heart of Jack Slater. And she didn’t know why. After she’d exposed herself in the car by taking his hand, he hadn’t said a single word to her that wasn’t calling out a flight vector or an engine status.

  At least now he was talking.

  Right when she couldn’t; she had to concentrate.

  The lighthouse itself sat in a broad meadow that rose barely above sea level. The lighthouse and keeper’s cottage crouched at the center of the meadow a hundred meters from the ocean to both the north and south, but if its elevation was five meters, she’d be surprised. Huge logs had been washed up close to the lighthouse to either side.

  There was a helipad, and it was awash. It was also too far from the caretaker’s cottage. But she didn’t dare get too close either or she might catch a rotor blade.

  Everything else faded into the background, storm, waves, even Jack. There was only her and her target. The MH-60M Black Hawk had become merely an extension of her will, as much a part of her as the clothes she wore.

  She fought her way down, a side gust almost flipping her over, but she wrenched the helo back aloft, missed the lighthouse by mere feet over a rotor’s diameter—far closer than she’d meant to come—and tried again.

  She had the feel of the gusts. How each massive wave, rising to attack the seaward shore, momentarily blocked the rush of the wind right at ground level.

  Finally there was a moment…

  “Hang on!” Diana shouted over the intercom and used one of the unusual capabilities of the Black Hawk, its impressive ability to survive a crash.

  From five meters up and driving ahead hard into the wind, she slammed the collective down and yanked back on the cyclic.

  The Black Hawk fell like a brick. The rear wheel hit first, then, like a belly flop, the helicopter hammered down on her main wheels. Diana was slammed down
into her seat, but they were designed to take it, even if it didn’t feel like it at the moment. Her teeth clacked together hard.

  The helo bounced, but not high. That’s why Diana had slammed down the collective. The Black Hawk was now pinned to the ground by the rotor blades still trying to descend even though they were on the blowing grass of the meadow.

  “Beware the low rotors!” The attitude of the blades would be sucking their tips closer to the ground than was normal for a Black Hawk, from eight feet to perhaps six.

  Sergeant Hamlin yanked open the big cargo bay just as a big gust slammed into them. Moisture, air thick with salt, and cold assaulted her.

  She heard a cry and a foul, “Damn it!” from the medic.

  “What?” She twisted around but couldn’t see anything.

  “Hold on,” it was Hamlin and he grunted as he spoke.

  Diana watched the mission clock count out five seconds and was about to repeat her shout when Hamlin spoke again.

  “Doc stepped out and caught the bad gust. Think he broke his ankle.”

  “Shit, sorry!” The medic’s voice came back on the intercom, wrenched in pain. “Maybe a sprain, but I don’t think I can walk on it.”

  “I got this,” Jack laid his hand over hers on the collective for a moment and squeezed her fingers. He mouthed something else she couldn’t see in the darkness; damn him!

  He opened the copilot door and there was a great flurry. With an open passage now completely through the helo, the wind grabbed anything that had been left loose in the cargo bay and ripped it out the copilot’s door, all of the detritus battering at Jack. Under the barrage, he rolled out on the gust and then fought his door closed. Ducking low around the nose, he raced around to grab the other end of the stretcher that Hamlin was wrestling with.

  She watched Jack and Hamlin disappear into the storm, then reset the mission clock and began watching it count the seconds. The medic lay in back, thumping around and cursing for all the good it did anyone.

  Outside the windscreen, the wind was heaving miscellaneous detritus across the low island. Waves were tossing logs ashore. Smaller pieces that broke off tumbled along the ground. The helo’s bright landing light showed each wave that lifted, far taller than the Black Hawk. Then it crashed down on the beach so much closer than she was comfortable with.

  “Hurry, goddamn it!” she shouted to no one in particular.

  The lighthouse’s beam, shining from twenty meters above their heads, caught the hint of something other than water moving in its far-reaching light. She waited for it to sweep around and cast its light on the nightmare scene once more.

  “I’m sure they’re—” the medic started.

  The light swung to light the waves once more and—

  “Hang on!” Diana shouted and yanked up on the collective. It wasn’t even a thought, it was now trained into pure instinct. She was aloft by the time a dinghy had tumbled from the waves and crossed her previous position. The little boat was snarled in a fishing net that was floating up and billowing on the wind as if it were an evil ghost net hoping to ensnare her. If even an edge of it snagged the rotor, it would bring the Black Hawk down hard.

  She cleared it by mere feet.

  More detritus passed by: plastic barrels, those big orange boat bumpers, another dinghy. There was a boat in real trouble out there.

  She shouldn’t be flying without a copilot, but she didn’t have a whole lot of choice. And riding this weather alone was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

  “Damn you twice, Jack Slater.”

  Not daring to land yet, Diana eased forward into the storm, but found no big fishing boat battered in the surf.

  “Hey! Where are you?” a shout came over the radio.

  “Coming back to you,” she called over the radio. “Stay by the lighthouse until I’m in.”

  She repeated her crash landing with less drama than the first time, courtesy of a momentary lull in the storm.

  They had the lighthouse keeper on the stretcher and his wife aboard in seconds.

  Jack didn’t risk coming around the front of the helo but instead entered by the cargo bay and climbed over the radio console, dripping water everywhere, to get to his seat. She didn’t look at him, she was far too intent on what might be flying her way next.

  “Let’s go, Wonder Woman.”

  She waited on the wind and then jerked aloft in the midst of a strong gust that would give her a lot of lift.

  With a patient to work on, the medic was done cursing his ankle. Hamlin was still talking down the near-panicked wife.

  “He’s responding well,” the medic reported.

  Diana could hear a machine now beeping in the background.

  “We need to get him to a hospital, but the wife is requesting Seattle and he’ll be good for that long.”

  “Roger,” Diana acknowledged, then she switched off the intercom to the rear of the helo.

  Instead of turning for Seattle, she took one more pass out over the beach.

  “What is it?” Jack looked like a drowned rat, a big, very handsome one.

  She’d never been so happy to see anyone in her life. It had finally sunk in that because she’d flown away from the lighthouse without telling him why, that a ghost net could ensnare him and drag him away into the permanent darkness.

  Another lesson, okay to leave the ground, but don’t leave your team without a warning.

  She nodded forward and down, “Look.”

  “Nothing on infrared or radar,” he began working the radio.

  Then she spotted it in the first faint hint of dawn beyond the black clouds. A forty-footer, belly up. Caught in the shallows well off the spit.

  She quartered the waves several times, but there was no one there. A final pass along the beach, no one in the surf or washed up. It would be a grim job for the Coast Guard after the storm died.

  Jack called it in and she turned for Seattle, climbing and laying down the hammer.

  “Dead,” Diana swallowed hard and tried not to think of her father. “That fast.”

  “I know. Nothing we can do to help them.”

  She slewed past Port Townsend and turned south for Seattle. “That’s not the point.”

  Jack gave her his attention, another thing to like about him.

  Into that silence she spilled out her past, or more accurately her mother’s. A man beloved and then dead. All that he’d left behind had been a child and a woman’s heart so full of love that there had never been room for another. She’d dated, but never loved again.

  “You really believe that?” he asked it softly.

  “What?”

  “That a heart can do that? That one person can fill it for a lifetime?”

  Diana could hear the deeper question behind it, even if she didn’t know the details.

  “Better than believe. I’ve seen it. If you were to meet Mom, you’d see it too. It shines out of her.”

  His silence was different this time, though no less deep.

  She had to handle the radio calls to Harborview Medical Center Heliport in Seattle. The winds were mostly at thirty knots and dropping, she could land well enough in that. The morning’s light was slowly revealing the city—the perimeter lights on the helipad were barely needed anymore.

  They off-loaded the man and his wife to the waiting med team. The medic decided his own injury was a sprain, so he stayed on board to deal with it at Lewis-McChord.

  They were aloft again for the short flight back to base before Jack spoke again.

  “I have no experience with anything lasting. The only thing that’s ever lasted in my entire life has been flying for the Army.”

  This time it was her turn to remain silent.

  “But what you make me feel, Wonder Woman,” and she could hear the joy back in his voice, that joy that had ra
diated from him since the moment she’d first met Jack-the-Giant-Killer.

  Oh god how she wanted to be a part of that joy.

  “I don’t have the words for it though I spent all last night looking for them. Whatever it is, I want to feel that every single day of my life.”

  All she could think to whisper was, “Me too.”

  She kept her right hand on the cyclic, but moved her left one off the collective. He did the opposite, keeping control of the collective with his left. Between them, their outside hands had control of the aircraft.

  They finished the flight back home, flying together through the quieting storm over the terrain glistening in the first rays of sunlight.

  And holding each other’s inside hands tightly as they flew.

  About the Author

  M. L. Buchman has over 30 novels in print. His military romantic suspense books have been named Barnes & Noble and NPR “Top 5 of the year” and Booklist “Top 10 of the Year.” In addition to romance, he also writes thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction.

  In among his career as a corporate project manager he has: rebuilt and single-handed a fifty-foot sailboat, both flown and jumped out of airplanes, designed and built two houses, and bicycled solo around the world. He is now making his living as a full-time writer on the Oregon Coast with his beloved wife. He is constantly amazed at what you can do with a degree in Geophysics. You may keep up with his writing by subscribing to his newsletter at

  www.mlbuchman.com.

  Target of the Heart

  -a new Night Stalkers team-(excerpt)

  Major Pete Napier hovered his MH-60M Black hawk helicopter ten kilometers outside of Lhasa, Tibet and two inches off the tundra. A mixed action team of Delta Force and The Activity—the slipperiest intel group on the planet—piled aboard from both sides.

  The rear cabin doors slid home with a Thunk! Thunk! that sent a vibration through his pilot’s seat and an infinitesimal shift in the cyclic control in his right hand. By the time his crew chief could reach forward to slap an “all secure” signal against his shoulder, they were already fifty feet out and ten up. That was enough altitude. He kept the nose down as he clawed for speed in the thin air at eleven thousand feet.