By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  Three.

  Kara wanted to trust him.

  Two.

  The Calamity Jane shifted direction. Not toward the Israeli housing, nor the main operations base of the air base. Instead, it veered toward the American Camp’s housing. Base personnel lived there. Families. Maybe children.

  One second.

  Kara centered the Gray Eagle’s targeting crosshairs on the Chinook helicopter.

  She selected all four Hellfire missiles and hit the fire button.

  Wilson gasped in shock or relief behind her; she didn’t care.

  She held the laser guidance on the center of the helo and counted seconds until impact.

  These weren’t some flares that would light up a hillside to spook the Turkish OKK during an exercise.

  Her heartbeat stroking slow and steady, counting seconds in perfect sync with the timer.

  A single Hellfire was a tank killer, able to punch through the heaviest armor.

  She kept a thumb near the abort-destruct switch that would destroy the missiles prior to impact and called one last time on the radio, knowing it was in vain.

  At fifteen seconds she removed her hand from the switch.

  Four Hellfires…

  At sixteen, she whispered into the mic that she loved him.

  …striking a thin-skinned helicopter…

  At seventeen, she still held the laser guidance steady.

  …were annihilation.

  At eighteen seconds, the Chinook disappeared from the sky in a massive ball of flame.

  Chapter 26

  Some part of Kara continued functioning. She didn’t know how.

  She fielded messages from the inserted team.

  Rousted Claudia from her hidey-hole two hours before sunrise.

  All focus from Ramon Airbase had turned to the destruction of three aircraft in the desert: two jets in the heart of the desert and a million tiny bits of an American helicopter close outside the air base’s perimeter fence.

  The eighty pounds of explosive and the eight hundred gallons of Jet A that the Chinook helo had carried—Kara could no longer stand to think of it as the Calamity Jane—burned long and hot.

  Four Hellfire missiles.

  Hopefully nothing identifiable would remain.

  She shied away from the thought.

  Kara guided the Maven II in across the desert, and Claudia extracted the four-person team more quietly than they’d arrived. Their job was done.

  Fifteen minutes after their departure, there was one more nasty surprise for the Israeli air base. The Humvee that had gone missing three weeks earlier had reappeared in a far corner of the base, on fire. The unusually intense vehicle fire killed four American soldiers who would probably get honorable burials back in the States no matter how little they deserved them.

  She let Sergeant Santiago Marquez solo the Tosca to provide a watchful eye over the Maven’s departure from the Negev and her return to the Peleliu. There was no need.

  Nobody was watching for the tiny stealth helicopter’s passage or the four shooters she carried back to safety.

  All the Israelis cared about was the graveyard in the desert.

  Time disjointed on Kara.

  Wilson was gone, pissed as hell about something. At her. At the dead pilot she’d just killed in a foreign land. It didn’t matter.

  The Maven was over the Negev. The West Bank. The Mediterranean.

  Santiago handed off the Tosca Gray Eagle to the Incirlik ground crew.

  And Kara watched the replay on the screen.

  Two Israeli jets descending back toward base after a fruitless search exactly as expected.

  Tracer fire from two miniguns arcing into their bellies as the Chinook climbed out of its hiding place among the ancient ruins of Avdat.

  The jets flaming, exploding, augering into the desert floor.

  The Chinook turning for Ramon Airbase. The long, long silence. Thirty-eight seconds from the final turn until it exploded. Until Kara killed…it.

  Gone.

  That simple.

  Gone.

  The helicopter.

  Her crew.

  Her pilot.

  Captain Justin Roberts dead in the desert.

  No body to deliver back to his mother. His mother who had begged her to protect her son.

  Instead she had killed him.

  Kara rewound the tape and watched it again, etching the images on her heart.

  At some point, Claudia arrived with Michael close beside her.

  She fought when they lifted her from the chair, but they overpowered her easily.

  They carried her to her cabin where Justin and she had—

  That’s when she broke and the tears finally came.

  Chapter 27

  Kara had no recollection of sleeping, but when she awoke, Claudia was still there. So were Lola, Connie, and Trisha.

  “What are you all doing here? Why—” And then she spotted the fifth woman crowded into the small room that was Kara’s berth.

  A tall, stunning blond.

  For half a moment, her mind still foggy, Kara was afraid that Annie Roberts was impossibly here and Kara was supposed to tell her something.

  Something bad.

  Then she recognized Tanya of Mossad’s Kidon counterterrorism unit and it all flooded back.

  Worse than bad.

  Kara had killed the only man she was ever going to love. Shot him right out of the sky.

  “Go away.” She wished they’d all go away so that she could curl up and die…

  Like Justin.

  What could have gone wrong?

  Someone took her hand.

  Kara would have shaken her off if it had been anyone other than Connie.

  The sympathy was worse than the pain. The pain was hers, but the sympathy made no sense. They didn’t know. They couldn’t know. Their husbands were all safe, all secure—probably down in the officers’ mess razzing each other.

  “Tell me.” Connie’s voice was barely a whisper, but it carried in the otherwise silent room.

  Kara was past decision making, didn’t know what was right, wrong, allowed… A glance at Claudia, then the woman from Kidon. Each nodded in turn.

  So Kara forced her body upright until she sat up on the edge of the bunk, still holding on to Connie for strength, and told them.

  Recounting each moment. Second by second.

  Clear.

  Cold.

  She’d been teased enough times by Carlo the opera singer about her heart being frozen against him.

  It was frozen now as she offered a chill retelling of the facts. If there were any emotions, she was past feeling them. Maybe later the pain would return, but for now it was banished into some steel vault deep within her. Lost behind the high fences that she had denied to Jus—

  Shove the thought aside.

  Continue the debrief!

  So she did.

  When she was done, she hung her head. Then she saw that she still wore the beautiful boots that Justin had given her.

  Kara tested for feelings, like poking cautiously at a sore tooth, but nothing happened. No regrets, no shock—they were simply pretty boots that someone had given her.

  Shock.

  She was in shock.

  Great. She absolutely needed another problem for her brain to work on at the moment.

  “I can show you the tapes. I have every second of it on tactical display down in the”—she couldn’t manage coffin—“ground control station.”

  “We’ll need to look at those,” Lola commented. “As soon as we can. I need to understand how we lost a fifty-million-dollar helo and her five-person crew.”

  Kara wanted to find offense. Wanted to find Lola more concerned about the money and equipment th
an the people, but even in her current condition, she knew better. Which told her something about her own mental state.

  “Let’s do it now while I’m still too numb to care.”

  Connie squeezed her hand, but it made little difference. Connie’s husband was still alive and waiting for her when this was over.

  Kara had finally learned exactly what it meant to forward deploy into a battle zone. The man closest to you could die between one moment and the next.

  But how many soldiers had pulled the trigger on their teammate themselves?

  * * *

  It was early evening as they all trooped down to the coffin on the Peleliu’s hangar deck. Somehow Kara slept through the day, her body shutting down to protect her.

  Well, for now her brain was still shut down and she was glad of it.

  Major Wilson was waiting for her. He went to pull her aside. “Kara, honey. I need to get into the ground control station and Sergeant Marquez wouldn’t let me in without your clearance. C’mon, let’s go.”

  Kara looked down at where his hand was clamped possessively around her upper arm.

  He turned to face the women who’d accompanied Kara from her berth. “Thanks for getting her here, but this is a secure area and secure information.” Wilson began dragging her over to the keypad of the door lock as if he was trying to hustle her out of the way before the women could react.

  Well, Kara still had her sidearm.

  Once again she had it out and the safety off before she knew what she was doing. She tucked it up under his chin and pressed hard enough that all he managed was a startled “Gurk!” as he tipped his head back.

  “Way over the line, Wilson. Now go away, honey, before I kill an officer. I’ve already done it once today.”

  He tried a protest that might have started with court martial, but he couldn’t speak past the additional upward pressure she applied.

  Major Wilson finally backed off, spewing imprecations about classified information and getting Lieutenant Commander Boyd Ramis down here to arrest her and confiscate all her data.

  As if Kara had anything left to lose.

  Once he was gone, she put away her sidearm and unlocked the door.

  “Shit, girlfriend.” Trisha clapped her on the back just the way a guy would. “Knew there was a reason I liked you.”

  The others laughed.

  Kara didn’t.

  * * *

  They watched the tape in silence.

  Then they went back and watched it again, discussing flight paths and angles of attack.

  Kara felt an itch.

  Halfway through the third replay, there was a pounding on the coffin’s door. She delegated the unwelcome intrusion to Lola as the leader of the 5D to go deal with Ramis and whoever else Wilson was dragging into this mess.

  Words she couldn’t quite make out. Ramis’s thoughtful ones, cut off by a spate of diatribe from Wilson.

  It started to sound ugly and then everything went quiet.

  Then Michael’s voice. Soft. Two words, but perfectly clear. “Back. Off.”

  There was no argument.

  Claudia sighed happily. “I do love that man.”

  The door clanged shut once more.

  Kara ignored the brief spurt of pain as Lola returned with Colonel Gibson in tow. Claudia kissed her husband, and Kara turned away to restart the tape.

  Trisha started back in making some point about the angle of attack.

  Kara cut Trisha off mid-sentence by rewinding the tape and letting it roll again from the moment of the attack.

  The shoot down.

  The helo’s passage over the crash sites as the miniguns continued to pound the downed aircraft.

  The slow, lumbering turn toward the air base.

  “What are you doing, Justin?”

  The others watched in silence.

  The helo didn’t twist like some goddamn light-footed rodeo pony.

  It—what was the word she’d just thought? Her brain was moving like mud. Just like the helo.

  “It’s lumbering. Justin never flew like that a day of his life.”

  The slow course change toward the American side of the camp. An overcorrection before landing back on course.

  She brought up the vector analysis routine and watched his speed increase. The acceleration was agonizingly slow for a SOAR pilot.

  “That isn’t Justin flying,” Lola said before Kara could. “I’ve flown beside him too many times.”

  “Nor Danny,” Trisha put in. “I took him up in my Little Bird for some cross-training and he’s pretty hot shit at the helm. Look, there. No dip down to follow the ground contour.”

  “Was he dazed?”

  “No.”

  “Path is too straight, no wobble. It’s just not a SOAR-level skilled pilot.”

  The voices were pinging around her.

  “One of the crew chiefs?”

  “Why would they fly to attack the base?”

  “It wasn’t Justin or his crew at all.” Kara’s declaration silenced the room. She wasn’t expressing hope; it was fact. They might have already been dead, bleeding out on the cargo deck of the Chinook, but no one from SOAR had been at those controls.

  None of the actions made sense. The flight style characteristics weren’t Justin’s. The murders of the IDF jets and their pilots weren’t the actions of a SOAR crew. Even if one of them was a sleeper agent, that wouldn’t explain the coordinated effort necessary to capture a Chinook, fly it, and kill the two jets.

  “How far back in time does your video go?” Connie asked close beside her, hand still on Kara’s shoulder.

  “All the way.”

  * * *

  Kara wound it back once again, jumping quickly to the moment of the attack and then slowing the rewind speed.

  She zoomed out to a wide view as the helo and the two jets retreated backwards across the sky. When the jets disappeared, reversing up the Central Negev, she followed the helo instead.

  Even in rewind, she could see that it wasn’t flown by a SOAR pilot. Whoever it was knew the craft and how to guide her, but while maneuvering they didn’t hug terrain or ease into deep wadis. They were keeping a ridge between the helo and the approaching jets, but they weren’t doing a very good job of it.

  Good enough, she supposed the two dead pilots would protest.

  A road. Some low buildings. The geometric shapes of limestone walls that she recognized as the Avdat World Heritage Site ruins.

  The helo reversed back into the courtyard, an awkward, uneven motion.

  The bright sparks of the rotor blade tips striking airborne dust painted two circles of light. As the rotors slowed, the circles dimmed, then disappeared.

  She let it run backward for a long time at ten times speed.

  “Can you zoom in any tighter?”

  Kara shook her head. They were looking at a tiny segment of the ScanEagle’s wide-angle video from four miles high. The whole helicopter was little bigger than her palm in the center of the image, one pixel per meter more or less. The walls of the courtyard made a visible square. Beyond that, nothing but dark, cold desert—black under infrared light.

  Everyone watched the unchanging image in silence until the rotor disks spun back to life and the helo was once again airborne backwards. The motion of the flight was wholly different.

  “That’s Justin,” she managed without her voice cracking. “He was still alive at zero-zero-eight hours last night when he landed there.”

  “So what happened between eight minutes after midnight and one-ten hours?” Connie asked. Her voice was so calm, it was the only thing that kept Kara from flying apart.

  She reached out to brush her fingers over the cold glass of the screen, but felt closer to Justin for the gesture. Past hope, it was perhaps as close as she’d ever
be to him again.

  Kara ran the hour and two minutes of video that the helicopter had spent parked on the ground at four times normal speed. For fifteen and a half minutes, the only sound in the coffin was the shuffling of feet.

  Nothing.

  She wound it back to Justin’s landing and let it play forward in real-time speed.

  “At this distance, it is unlikely that the camera can pick up an individual’s heat signature unless they are all gathered together.” Kara switched off the coffin’s lights so that she could see the main screen that little bit more clearly.

  She could feel the others gather more closely behind her. She tried to draw comfort from that but—

  “What’s that?” The silhouette of Trisha’s pointing hand was outlined against the screen, but Kara had already hit the pause and was rolling the pixelated image back frame by frame.

  “Pilot side,” Lola noted.

  Sure enough, the vague bright spot, sometimes two pixels across, sometimes one, shifted back toward the pilot’s side door as she rolled backward.

  His last steps?

  She flipped from infrared to normal light view, which should have shown nothing in the dead of night.

  The black helicopter disappeared into the darkness.

  But the bright spot grew brighter.

  Her heart beat for the first time in what felt like forever.

  Only one thing she knew of on the helicopter that would reflect starlight more brightly than it radiated heat.

  She began scrolling forward frame by frame, synchronizing the two views.

  Once again, Justin stepped away from the Calamity Jane.

  On one screen Kara placed the infrared view of the site. Heat signatures showed the cooling helicopter, the dark line of the ruin’s walls that had cooled faster than surrounding soil, and that elusive hint of motion by the pilot’s door.

  On the other screen, in visible light, she followed the one bright spot on a field of pitch-black as it moved away from the helicopter.

  A white cowboy hat.

  Chapter 28

  Justin felt a groan try to escape as he returned to consciousness and did his best to suppress the sound.

  He cracked open one eye cautiously and wished he hadn’t; a headache slammed to life and blurred what little vision he had.