By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  The darkness was near complete. Light that might have been sunrise or sunset was either barely begun or spent for the day.

  A lamp flared, a small oil lamp; the sudden brightness made his head hurt even more. He closed his eye and tried to assess. Gagged. Bound feet. Hands as well, thankfully in front. Lying on his side. No obvious point of outside pain. Intense inside pain.

  His last memory? Holding Carmen in a loose choke hold because she’d completely deserved it for teasing him about setting a wedding date.

  Justin had let her loose, then looked up into the barrel of a rifle centered on his face.

  Behind him, someone stuck a needle in his neck and the world went away.

  Drugged equals headache. He’d have to remember to request a different sedative next time.

  He’d been within a dozen steps of the helicopter. How in the world had they gotten past the outer patrol?

  Because Raymond and Danny had been down before Justin had even exited the Jane.

  Please God, don’t let him have lost another crew. He’d rather be dead himself.

  He risked the one eye again.

  The man who’d lit the lamp was staring right at him. So much for subterfuge.

  Justin shrugged his chagrin and the man nodded in what seemed to be a friendly way, or at least an understanding one.

  Black face mask and a green headband with foreign writing. Justin didn’t need his handy-dandy terrorist guidebook to recognize a Hamas militant. The man also was wearing a SOAR vest and had several weapons dangling about his neck, probably including Justin’s own.

  Justin tried to rock himself upright.

  The guard didn’t threaten to shoot him.

  Once Justin was up, the headache redoubled, but he could see more of his surroundings.

  They were in a chamber made of stone. Old stone, dry laid without mortar. Above them were four curved arches of stone spanning twenty or more feet and equally high. Pretty impressive engineering actually, each block angle cut, each a meter square and probably weighing a ton or more. Over the arches lay a tarp that would block any searches from above.

  The Baptistery at the head of the colonnade. He recognized it from Kara’s briefing. He was still at the Avdat World Heritage Site.

  There was only one entrance to the chamber, beyond the guard. Through the open stone arch, Justin could see that the tarp had been folded aside and now the last of the daylight was fading in the quick desert twilight.

  If they were still here, then the Calamity Jane was parked nearby. If there was some way they could get back to it… He filed that idea for later.

  They!

  The thought finally pounded its way through his headache.

  His crew!

  On the rough stone floor around him lay four bodies.

  Bodies… Please God no.

  A pained groan had to be the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. Danny sported a livid black eye, but he was alive.

  The others… He could see Talbot wincing and Raymond breathing.

  His crew was alive.

  For how long was a different question that he’d worry about later. They were all alive for now.

  Weren’t they?

  He kicked Carmen’s boot.

  She kicked him back.

  Justin tried to remember the last time he’d been so happy.

  * * *

  Kara nursed the two-pixel white dot across the black terrain of last night’s video. It disappeared for long moments. Maybe he kept tipping his head. Then she’d find it again a dozen feet on and moving away from the helicopter.

  “There, upper left,” Tanya called out.

  Kara didn’t know whether to chase them all out so that she could concentrate or bless them every time someone spotted Justin’s hat a moment sooner than she did.

  She re-centered the screen before shifting to the next frame. The problem was complicated by the circling view of the ScanEagle on its automated orbit high above. She prayed that they didn’t drift off the edge of the image. Direction had become meaningless.

  For the moment, only the hat mattered. Bless the man for such a ridiculous habit.

  It took an impossibly painstaking hour to trace the hat across the site. They’d gone through archways, down passages between courtyards that were impossible to see into, but the hat always emerged from the other side eventually.

  The mission clock on the video showed that less than five minutes had passed for their hour of tracing him, but now he was on the far side of the temple from where he’d landed in the heart of the Byzantine fortress. They’d passed through the second-century Roman temple and the Nabataean temple to King Obodas. Justin had walked through eight centuries before being lost in the colonnade that had long ago greeted the spice caravans as they crossed from Petra in Jordan over to Gaza.

  “Did he walk under his own power or was he force-walked? Or was he carried?” she asked herself and hated the final image.

  “Hard to tell.” Michael spoke for the first time. “Can you play the whole sequence in real time without the image rotating?”

  Kara made a note to stop talking aloud to herself when the ground control station was packed, but she had the playback set up in a few moments, overlaying the map of the temple she’d found while researching the site.

  She started the video, tried to imagine Justin going for an amble among the ruins, his long legs stretching out in front of him with each step.

  Kara couldn’t make it work.

  He moved in fits and starts. The white dot reached an archway and stopped. Then moved through a passageway, but with a stop on the other side. A few of the halts were a full minute in duration.

  Finally they lost all trace of him in the colonnade.

  She stopped the run.

  “Lights,” Michael said.

  She found the switch and flicked it on.

  Many in the room shaded their eyes and groaned.

  “He was carried.”

  Kara’s worst-case scenario.

  Michael appeared unaffected by the sudden change in illumination. Did they teach Delta Force tricks to instantly adapt their eyes to changing light conditions? The more she knew him, the more mysterious Colonel Gibson became, rather than the other way around.

  “My best estimate,” he continued, “is that he and his crew were moved at the same time by an insufficient number of attackers to move them all at once as a unit. The timing would work for three groups of two individuals moving the five crew members. Initially slow to collect them from various points where they were taken or shot—”

  Kara gasped at the idea. She didn’t know why. An hour ago she’d firmly believed that she’d murdered Justin and his crew. But the idea of him being alive and now dead again left her emotions in chaos.

  “I’m inclined to assume the former. If they were shot, there would be little point in taking the time to move them. If alive and captive, then the scenario makes more sense.”

  Kara had pulled up her legs without realizing it until her knees were against her chest, her heels on the edge of the seat, and her arms wrapped around the soft leather of her new boots.

  “Alive eighteen hours ago. I’m going to hold you to that.”

  Michael offered a grim smile in acknowledgment.

  “Now we must find out whether he remains on the site.”

  “How are we supposed to do that?”

  Connie pointed at a side screen. “Isn’t that the ScanEagle’s engine readout? You’re still aloft.”

  Kara spun back to face the ground control station, her booted feet hitting the floor as she did so.

  There it was.

  She’d been too fried last night to remember to bring the ScanEagle home. It was still aloft, circling on autopilot over the Central Negev with its engines and its cameras running. It still had
seven hours of fuel.

  Kara zoomed the image back enough to be able to see the parking lot and fast-forwarded to sunrise.

  “No vehicles arrived during the night. Now let’s just hope that if they moved them, they didn’t move them far. I’m only scanning about ten square kilometers.”

  * * *

  Justin didn’t want to reveal that he spoke some Arabic, just in case there was anything to overhear. But with sign language he managed to get permission to pull his gag, though he made no effort to unbind his hands.

  The man kicked a canteen in his direction.

  Justin sipped only the smallest amount, in case it was all they were getting. He moved slowly to each of his crew, pulled their gags, and gave each of them a sip of water.

  Danny looked as if he’d been hit upside the head with a rock. There were scrapes and scratches all around his black eye. He’d lost some blood, but not much. He nodded that he was okay, then winced revealing he was sorry for having done so.

  “Don’t try singing,” Justin whispered to him.

  The guard hissed, but Danny’s wry smile was worth the risk.

  Raymond had had a much rougher time of it and was still out. He looked as if he’d been taken down by a band of jackals.

  “A good fighter, that one,” the guard said in Arabic.

  “Eh?” Justin asked him.

  The guard shrugged and was silent again.

  The others were okay.

  Was there one man or a dozen guarding them? If one, they had a chance. If a dozen…

  The chamber they were in was twenty feet square. The walls reached up nearly eight feet before the four arches soared overhead. There were gaps between them, the ancient roof no more than a memory. The walls were rough enough to climb easily, if he and his crew weren’t bound and guarded. And Raymond wasn’t going to be doing any climbing soon; he was still out cold.

  The guard sat twenty feet away with a FN-SCAR rifle held casually across his lap. It had a magazine in and Justin could see the safety was off.

  Mr. Guard didn’t have all of their gear either. Two vests and three rifles were unaccounted for. Which probably meant at least two more guards.

  “Y’all don’t need even three guards when one could stop us’n just fine,” he spoke his conclusion aloud to warn his crew.

  The guard mimicked his own earlier “Eh?”

  None of them were likely to survive a charge into a fusillade of 7.62 mm rounds.

  For now, it was time to sit and wait.

  He moved back to his original spot and leaned against the wall. Nearby he spotted where his hat had been knocked off. He dusted it off as well as he could with his hands bound and tugged it back on, felt much better for doing so.

  He wouldn’t mind a song just to cheer up his crew, but what he really wanted to do was let Kara know he was alive.

  She must be worried sick.

  * * *

  “What we know…” Kara turned away from the console and faced her team. “One, no vehicle transported them off-site last night.”

  Her team. She liked the sound of that, because she really needed them right now.

  “Two, no obvious transport during daylight hours. Three, our last estimated location for Justin’s hat…”

  That earned her a few chuckles.

  “…is in the Baptistery at the head of the colonnade. This area is masked by a tarp, but the tarp is showing higher-than-ambient temperatures right now, suggesting that there may be multiple people under it. Recommendations?”

  “You’re the boss man, lady.” Trisha spoke up. “You tell us.”

  Yeah, right! Kara almost said, appreciating the irony. But it wasn’t ironic. These were some of the most skilled fliers and, between Michael and Tanya, operators in any military. And they were looking to her for a mission plan.

  Her.

  She was about to send a combined Delta-SOAR-Kidon team into the fray to recover Justin and his crew, combined as she saw fit.

  Every minute that passed increased the danger to the captives and the chance they were about to be moved.

  What was needed was clear, at least to her. And she was the Air Mission Commander, so her plan was going to be it—even if she still wasn’t used to the idea.

  “Fine. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  But this time she wasn’t going to be sitting in some quiet little corner.

  Chapter 29

  Kara sat in the back of the DAP Hawk cargo bay with a ScanEagle portable command station set up in front of her.

  Lola piloted the heavily weaponized Black Hawk with her husband, Tim, as copilot and weapons specialist. The DAP was unique to SOAR and about the deadliest damn machine imaginable…deadly to the enemy.

  Connie and Big John sat at the two side-mounted miniguns at the front of the cargo bay.

  Kara liked having all of that wrapped around her.

  Michael was aboard Claudia’s Little Bird Maven II along with Tanya.

  Trisha and Bill, the other SOAR and Delta couple, were in the May.

  All three craft were stealth modified and moving at top speed mere feet off the dirt of the Negev.

  Kara had watched hundreds of flights from on high. In SOAR training, she’d ridden along on a number of familiarization missions aboard each of the 160th’s crafts.

  Never before had she flown into a battle zone where everyone was putting their lives on the line. And this time they were doing it based on the belief that her intelligence analysis was accurate and her action plan sound.

  It wasn’t just her desire to finally participate in the fight that had sent her aloft. Her nerves hadn’t let her stay aboard the Peleliu. She didn’t know why, but they were jangling there.

  Of course the team hadn’t told LCDR Ramis that they were flying a mission; what the Navy didn’t know wasn’t going to get them court-martialed. In fact, no one aboard the ship knew that Kara was even aboard this “training flight.” Not Tago and definitely not Wilson. As a precaution, she’d even changed the coffin’s security code so that Wilson couldn’t browbeat Tago into providing him access. If she died on this mission, well, it wouldn’t be her problem to figure out how to break back in without triggering an automatic all-systems erasure.

  There hadn’t been time to prep and fly the Tosca the three hours down from Incirlik. The ScanEagle was a much simpler craft. It had no payload other than its cameras and comm gear. No Hellfire missiles, no signal jammers, complex navigation systems, or other heavy-duty systems. It didn’t even have landing gear; recovery required snagging a rope line with a wingtip.

  It was designed to fly and peek without being spotted; and the stealth modification made it very good at that.

  She circled it down from twenty thousand to ten thousand feet, doubling her image resolution.

  The arched room of the Baptistery still registered warmer than the rest of the structure. At this altitude, she should be able to see an individual person in motion out in the open.

  The flight of helos was still twenty-five miles out when she spotted trouble. She clicked on the intercom.

  “I have a truck arriving at Avdat parking lot. It’s big enough to move the whole crew and a number of guards.”

  “Any chance that it’s normal traffic?” Lola asked.

  “Four hours after the park closes and it’s too dark to see your own nose? Get a grip.”

  “You are from Brooklyn, aren’t you?”

  Kara reviewed her words. They didn’t sound that rude to her, but maybe they were. How was she supposed to know?

  “Brooklyn, New Yawk!” She did her best to channel Justin. “Best dang city in them there union of states.”

  “Your accent sucks, Kara,” Big John rumbled from his minigun. Right, the big man was from Oklahoma.

  “So, I’ve been told.” And she was just go
ing to keep believing that she’d be seeing the man who’d told her so real soon. “We’re twenty miles out. If we jump to never-exceed velocity, we’ll cut nine minutes down to six.”

  “We can’t outstrip the Little Birds,” Lola informed her, but Kara could feel the helicopter nosing down to gain speed. “They’re carrying our snipers. I’m accelerating to their V-max. As a result, we’re all going to be flying several feet higher. Hope the Israeli radar is watching the other horizon.”

  Kara knew the Little Birds would assess the DAP Hawk’s changed flight and adapt rapidly without the need to risk a radio transmission.

  She watched the truck’s leisurely approach. Reinforcements would not be a good thing right now. But neither would firing a long-range missile and risking blowing up a World Heritage Site if they missed the truck.

  The truck eased up to the gate.

  “Come on, guys,” Kara encouraged them softly. “Get into an argument over who has to climb down and open the gate.”

  Which appeared to be exactly what they did.

  They repeated the act at the second gate and began driving up the winding road toward the temple. The road switchbacked sharply, which the driver had difficulty following in the dark.

  She wanted to scream for Lola to hurry up, but the SOAR pilots were the very best people at doing their job, so rather than watching over their shoulders, what should she be doing?

  Watching the air base!

  She spun her cameras to look east.

  No jet patrols.

  Except for the two jerks roaring down the runway and up into the air.

  She held her breath and clicked her boot heels together three times.

  It appeared to work; as soon as they were aloft, the two jets turned away toward the Egyptian border, moving away from them and the Avdat site as if on a routine patrol.

  SOAR continued its invasion of Israel without any notice.

  She spun her view back to the truck. Old enough that even the low grade at the front of the temple appeared to be slowing it down.

  * * *

  Justin listened to the truck grinding up the hill toward them. Full dark, you didn’t need to tell him they were in trouble. As long as they were at Avdat there was a chance of getting back to the helo. Or of someone finding them.