By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  “This reminds me of a story,” Justin started out.

  Kara rolled her eyes. “God, you are so Texan.”

  “Thankee, ma’am.”

  It earned him the short laugh he’d been hoping for. Between launching her Gray Eagle from Incirlik in time to arrive over Israel at full dark and then flying back after dawn, his and Kara’s days in the GCS coffin had been long and their personal time together had been nonexistent.

  Justin kicked back in his chair. “I was drinking with this old Navy hand one night, and we got to talking about coming down in the sea.” About the worst nightmare for a helicopter pilot. “Turned out he was a submariner, and he started telling me about the emergency alert buoy on those boats.”

  He did his best to shift his voice so it would sound as if he were the narrator from Moby Dick gone old and crotchety.

  “We only kick that thar boo-yay loose if we knows we’re dead.”

  Kara laughed, so he must have succeeded. Man, oh man, did that lady ever have a wonderful laugh. Her heart was right in it every time.

  He made his voice even squeakier. “See our job in the missile boats is to go out there and get lost for six months at a time. No one is supposed to know where we at. So, if we go down, they never find us without that thar boo-yay. You can bet for dang sure we’re gonna hit that if it’s the last thing we ever do. Otherwise ain’t nobody gonna ever fin’ us’n.”

  “Sounds about right,” Wilson agreed.

  Michael simply nodded.

  Tago looked as if he’d fallen asleep in his chair, but Justin now knew there was no way the sergeant would lose vigilance until he handed Tosca off to the ground crew at Incirlik. He was like a gamer on drugs, completely at one with the RPA for the long flight back to the American air base in Turkey. They couldn’t exactly move the Gray Eagle team to their normal base inside Israel. Ironically, they would normally be stationed at Ramon Airbase, the one they now were patrolling—without permission.

  “So, why would a submarine stay silent if it was in trouble, other than—” Justin didn’t have a chance to finish.

  Kara, who’d been slumped deep in her pilot’s seat, jerked upright. “Other than if they were hunkered down so close under the bad guys’ noses, they wouldn’t dare let out a peep.”

  She leaned forward, and for a second, he thought she was going to hug him right in front of everybody. Instead she slapped his knee harder than he’d whack a reluctant horse.

  “Well done, Cowboy!”

  He wished he could read her better to know if there had been a hug there. It was one of the strangest things he’d ever done—kiss a woman and then not have even a single second of privacy for three straight days together.

  There’d been a few moments, sort of, where Michael and Willard had wandered off to get some food and Tago had rushed off to the head. But they still hadn’t been alone because Kara Moretti had been so connected to the Gray Eagle that she was barely in the room.

  She was one focused gal when there was a mission on. And he was finding that was something he really appreciated in a fellow officer, even if the woman was frustrating the hell out of his libido.

  “So…” He really needed a mental subject change. “If they are tucked down so tight—”

  “—then there’s no way they’d risk a high-power signal sent to reach my Gray Eagle.”

  “Why—”

  “—doesn’t matter. That they don’t dare transmit a strong signal is all we need to know.”

  “We need—”

  “—my little ScanEagle. We take it in fast and low, below the Israeli radar sweep. We nestle in so close to Ramon Airbase that we could hear the guys whisper.”

  “But—” Justin wondered if it was even worthwhile trying to finish a sentence when she was in this mode.

  “But”—she smiled at him to prove that she knew exactly what she was doing to him—“we’re too far away for my little bird. Michael, you have to get Ramis to move the Peleliu. We have twelve hours. I need to be five hundred kilometers closer. They can do that in a high-speed run.”

  Michael was shaking his head no.

  “What the… Why not?”

  Michael raised his eyebrow at Justin who grinned back at him.

  “Because, Kara”—Justin turned to face her, wondering how much of a clue she’d need—“that’s—”

  “—RPA thinking, not Air Mission Commander thinking.” She thumped him on the arm hard enough to really sting.

  Apparently “not much of a clue” was the answer. Damn but she was impressive.

  “You’re absolutely right. I’m outta here. Gotta find Ramis. Tago, don’t crash while I’m gone or we’ll both be in a heap of hurt.”

  And just that fast, the men were left alone in the cargo container.

  “That woman is something else.” Willard shook his head. “And, brother, she likes you even more than she hates me—and that’s saying something.”

  Justin massaged his arm and wondered if that was true.

  Michael’s thoughtful nod made it hard to doubt.

  Tago’s flinch and the resultant tumbling of the RPA’s view of the world confirmed it. Perhaps not in a good way there; his big brother protectiveness of Kara was pretty transparent.

  What did that make him?

  The RPA lost over three thousand feet before Tago regained control.

  Justin knew exactly how the poor little Gray Eagle felt, like someone had just hit his cyclic control—hard.

  Chapter 8

  All day the Peleliu had raced south, the poor old ship proving that her bones were still good and powerful. Kara had avoided the many questions from SOAR and Navy personnel alike by retreating to her cabin and doing a face-plant that didn’t begin to recover what the last three sixteen-hour days of flying had taken out of her.

  When she finally climbed out of the sack, Lola and Trisha were headed for a pre-breakfast run…so Kara headed for the showers. She really didn’t need questions at this point, especially ones she suspected she wasn’t allowed to answer. She swept through the breakfast line taking anything portable—carefully not looking toward Connie and Claudia at one of the half-filled mess tables—and headed for the GCS container.

  Once inside, she pulled down the black case from the top shelf, keyed in the security code, and opened it.

  There at the workbench, she ate as she prepped the ScanEagle with the instrument packages she wanted. With only seven and a half pounds of useful payload on the RPA, she had to be very selective.

  So, she had to figure out how to put aloft the best package, with no idea of what she needed ahead of time.

  A day-and-night camera, but not the hi-resolution gear because it weighed too much, and imaging radar.

  She was tempted by the radiation and bioweapon sensors, but that would only satisfy her own curiosity about what The Activity might have been hunting.

  The rest of her payload was given over to a high-speed ELINT package. In addition to receiving radio signals from the team, it would gather any Electronic Intelligence on a broad spectrum of frequencies and could even provide limited signal jamming of the “enemy” if necessary.

  When she was done, Kara tucked the ScanEagle back in its crate and locked it. Instead of being three feet square by twenty-five long and weighing nearly two tons when loaded for flight—like the Gray Eagle’s coffin—the ScanEagle’s crate was a foot square by five long and weighed less than her rucksack loaded for a 10K hike. Despite the military having switched over to metric, it was still easier to think in feet than in meters.

  The four of them now stood out in the fading sunset, the first one she’d seen in days. They were on the huge aircraft elevator that moved helicopters between the flight deck and the hangar deck. The steel platform stuck five meters out from the side of the ship and was half again as long. The elevator had been lowered to t
he hangar deck position.

  No need to go up on the flight deck and expose her little baby to inquiring eyes. It was a funny juxtaposition to launch such a tiny aircraft from such a massive ship.

  “This little beauty is something few folks get to see.” Kara triple-checked that they were the only personnel in the area.

  Justin hovered close behind her, just like Michael and Willard. Kara felt as if she were center stage, rather than standing on the aircraft elevator platform that stuck out the side of the Peleliu.

  Justin had helped her wheel out the ScanEagle’s launching platform. It was a light trailer with a single center rail. It looked much like a heavy-duty crossbow tilted up at the sky.

  She snapped open the case, lifted out the main body, and set it on the rail.

  “As far as I know, there are only three other black box ScanEagles and they’re all in SOAR. I heard hints that there was one more in use by some wildland firefighting outfit. How’s that for a crazy rumor, huh?”

  * * *

  Justin noticed that while Willard laughed, Delta Operator Michael Gibson was even quieter than usual. Wasn’t that interesting? Justin tried to imagine why a wildfire outfit would need what he was looking at and came up blank.

  He’d worked with a normal ScanEagle before. It was as long as a manure shovel and as big around as a horse’s muzzle—and about as lumpy. A pair of delicate, swept-back wings stuck out five feet to either side.

  In three minutes, Kara had the wings pinned on, the little vertical winglets sticking up from the wingtips like exclamation points. The ScanEagle sported a rear propeller with a diameter no longer than his elbow to his fingertips.

  All of that was normal.

  But the body wasn’t thin-sheet aluminum. He rapped a knuckle on it, black composite laminate. And the body was all strange angles. Even the ScanEagles in the 5D were stealth.

  This fascinated Wilson in a way that the inside of the GCS coffin hadn’t.

  And clearly his interest and obvious attention was being soaked up by a Kara eager to teach willing pupils.

  But there was more than that.

  And Justin wasn’t enjoying it much.

  He could see Kara warming up to Wilson.

  And Justin could feel that weird edge that some guys had, the ones who only dated married women…or tried to take a woman as soon as they saw she was with someone else.

  Worse, she was falling for it. He’d thought her too smart for such ploys and found the bitter taste of disappointment a harsh reality.

  Justin considered tossing the guy off the railing—they were still ten meters above the ocean and no one would really miss him, would they?—or nudging him into the propeller that Kara had just started on the little RPA. Then he could spend the rest of his shipboard “visit” in sick bay—assuming the blade didn’t catch anything vital.

  Instead, he awaited his moment.

  Kara warned them, then hit the launch switch, and the ScanEagle zipped aloft and was quickly lost to view in the settling twilight.

  “Normally, it auto-launches to a thousand feet up and circles, waiting for me. This time I have Tago scooting her away from the Peleliu just as fast as she’ll go.”

  Willard cut Justin off by stepping forward to help return the launcher back inside the hangar deck. Justin bit the inside of his cheek rather than smashing a fist into Willy Wilson’s.

  They all turned for the GCS coffin.

  Justin held the door while waving Willard and Michael inside, and then he shut it in Kara’s face before she could enter.

  The hangar deck was otherwise empty. The fading daylight, combined with the distant work lights, made soft shadows. Through with her speed run, the Peleliu’s engines were back to an idle. It was almost peaceful. Justin’s pulse was anything but, hammering against his skull so hard he wondered that it didn’t echo around the hangar deck.

  Justin hadn’t put his hands on Kara the first two times. This time he did.

  He slipped a hand around her waist and pulled her tight against him. And when he leaned down to kiss her, she turned out to be more than ready; she was unexpectedly eager. Her arms went around his neck and hung on.

  What he’d intended as a reminder of their first two kisses and a promise of more to come roared right into full flight.

  She pulled him in and took a step back until she landed against the container’s door with a thump without breaking their connection. He didn’t need more of an invitation to pin her body there with his. Her curves fit against him in wonderful ways that made him think of…nothing. His senses were on full overload, and his brain was not receiving any blood at all.

  His hand, with no guidance from his disconnected and dying brain, decided on its own to find out how soft her hair was. The other scooped down to her behind and encountered hard muscle in that ever-so-feminine curve that had been shaped perfectly to fit his palm.

  Her mouth was as sweet as her lips, and her hunger was as ravenous as his own.

  When she slid a leg up the back of his thigh, he forced himself to pull back until he had a palm on either side of her head against the steel door.

  She brushed her hands over his chest.

  His entire body vibrated with need for her, but she wasn’t looking up at him. She was looking at her hands stroking over his T-shirt and driving him crazier than a stallion separated from a herd of mares by a ten-foot fence.

  “He is a little obvious, isn’t he?”

  Willard.

  “Aw shoot! I shoulda known.”

  “Known what?” She finally looked up at him. Her dark eyes glittered with amusement.

  “Captain Kara Moretti doesn’t miss a thing.”

  * * *

  Kara looked back down at Justin’s chest, not so much to admire it—though she could feel that exceptional fitness through the thin T-shirt, right down to six-pack abs—but more to hide her own thoughts.

  She hadn’t meant to set up Justin to be jealous, though she was flattered that the situation had done so. More than flattered, she wanted another kiss like that one the way she craved a slice of New York pizza or a corned beef sandwich from Fierro Meats down on Carroll Street when she’d been deployed too long between leaves.

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Mess up my hair.”

  “I already did.” He made brushing motions at it.

  She liked the way it felt, could imagine him doing that after they’d made love. Huh! When did you decide you were gonna do it with this tall Texan, girl? Didn’t matter. She was going to. Same unit or not.

  “No, Justin, I mean mess it up for Willard. Be quick though.” And rested her forehead against his chest. Oh God, she could nestle in right here and never leave.

  Instead of just scrubbing his fingers over her hair, he dug his fingers in deep and drove them upward along her scalp. He turned it into a head massage with a delightful scritching by his fingertips.

  Then he planted a kiss right on the top of her head and stepped back.

  “You now look like a woman who has had something wholly inappropriate done to her.”

  “Next time I want you to actually do something wholly inappropriate.” Kara shoved her mussed hair back over her shoulder and then ran a hand down her front, wondering quite when her heart had started beating so fast.

  “That”—Justin moved to hold the door for her as soon as she keyed in the entry code—“is something I can promise to deliver at the earliest opportunity, ma’am.”

  * * *

  Willy’s disappointment was obvious, but then he shrugged and clapped Justin good-naturedly on the shoulder. Best man won and all that crap.

  Justin managed not to flatten the asshole, instead offering him a friendly smile—the kind a coyote offered right before it tried to eat you. Then Justin turned away and caught Michael looking at him.

  It was a whole di
fferent look.

  Justin wondered if Michael was about to flatten him.

  But Colonel Gibson had married Claudia Jean Casperson of SOAR and in the same unit that Michael was Delta liaison to. Why would he cut up so stiff?

  Duh! Because it appeared as if Justin really had done something inappropriate—without caring if he embarrassed Kara.

  Justin tipped his head toward Wilson’s back—the man had moved forward to stare at the ScanEagle’s flight track on the screen—and tried to indicate that they were baiting him. Or at least that Kara was.

  Michael looked at Wilson, then Kara, then back to him.

  Finally, he offered a slow nod.

  A nod that told Justin exactly how carefully this particular D-boy was going to be watching the way he treated Kara. Going forward from here, Justin knew he was on probation at best. Then Michael turned his silent attention back to the multiscreen displays as if nothing had happened.

  Justin wondered if learning to be scarier than a mad bull under full steam was a standard part of Delta training. Even if it wasn’t, Justin had no question who would win if Michael Gibson faced such a beast.

  No way did Justin want to be ticking off that man.

  Chapter 9

  “Oh brother. These must have been some very bad men.” Kara watched the feeds from the tiny ScanEagle zipping low over the central Negev at sixty knots.

  “My guys? Why?” Major Willard Wilson had done a whole macho You win thing with Justin that had almost earned them both a broken nose. No, not Justin. He was playing the “guy” game; he was simply playing it too well for her taste. Then she had spotted the look that Colonel Gibson aimed Justin’s way and actually felt sorry for him. Still, punching Major Wilson, even if he was a superior officer, was a tempting prospect.

  “Well, your guys too, just for being associated with you. But I was referring to the Israelis. What evil did these guys do to get assigned to a goddamn nowhere place like Ramon Airbase? There isn’t shit growing out here. Just desert and rocks. Probably failed to suck up and kiss ass to some officer about as wonderful and kind as you.”