Target of the Heart

by M. L. Buchman

  For her, she’d been pissed at having to take all the classes that certified her as being human and having rights. As a trained and armed Special Operations Forces soldier she could damn well enforce her own rights.

  For him…that’s why they’d written the imbécile courses in the first place. The attempt to evolve him from Neanderthal to Early Cro-Magnon had clearly been a gamble that had only marginally paid off. That he was a nice-looking asshole with a quirky sense of humor and the education to use it well didn’t change the base noun despite the assorted adjectives.

  He hadn’t even set the intercom to automatically include the crew. She preferred to run an open channel throughout the craft, but Monsieur Imbécile hadn’t set it that way when he was done with the radio. No, it wasn’t his doing. It already had been set to isolate the cockpit and she hadn’t changed that during preflight. And since he wasn’t helping her, she couldn’t free up a hand to change the setting.

  She crossed the two-lane security road of Nightstalker Way, edged over the Fort Campbell back fence, and rolled up the hills to the tree line. She chose a path that kept her rotors above the trees but slalomed her aircraft’s body down among the treetops. Special ten-foot dispensation for her Chinook? To hell with that.

  He did nothing to assist her flight, which made the Chinook a huge challenge. It was a complex craft that required two experienced pilots, especially if she was planning to survive a long distance Nap of Earth flight. NOEs required perfect concentration and fast reflexes…and on a Chinook MH-47G moving at a hundred-and-fifty knots, it required two goddamn people.

  “Did you say something?” His Imperial Namelessness asked over the intercom.

  “Not a word,” at least she didn’t think she had. But now that he mentioned it, “How about you start doing your goddamn copilot’s job, sir?” She led the flight of four helos west until she picked up Kentucky Lake. Ten feet above the water she turned south and crossed into Tennessee.

  “All you had to do was ask,” suddenly he was all le chevalier Sir Sweetness-and-Light. In moments he’d cleaned up a half-dozen settings, adjusted the throttle sync on the two Honeywell T55 turboshaft engines so that the irritating beat frequency of their slightly different speeds became far less annoying, and rested his hands on the controls as a backup to her own motions.

  “Damned lucky I need both hands to fly this thing,” she muttered to herself.

  “Or you’d be snipping my thread?” he returned jovially.

  She really needed to learn to keep her mutters to herself. Or first make sure that no one was there to hear. “I thought I was Spiderwoman. If that was truth, you’d be lucky that I need both hands to fly or I’d plaster your face with the stickiest web I could come up with.”

  “She both spins threads and cuts them. Half Spidey and half Atropos. You got a name, pilot?”

  “Only if you do.”

  He laughed.

  Who knew the taciturn bastard could laugh. It was a good laugh and she liked it despite being fairly convinced that she hated him thoroughly.

  “Pete.”

  “Not Peter?”

  “Not even on my birth certificate. Parents named me Pete.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if your name was Peter Parker then—” she cut herself off before she could sound even more stupid about how she’d have to marry him.

  “Major Pete Napier at your service.”

  Danielle almost bobbled the controls at that. She’d been teasing Pete “The Rapier” Napier? He was notorious throughout the five battalions of SOAR and beyond, right into her former Falcons—10th Mountain Division, Combat Aviation Brigade, 3rd Battalion, 10th Regiment. She’d worked to get assigned to the 10th of the 10th because they flew the same three birds as the Night Stalkers, less advanced versions but still it had let her learn what all three types were truly capable of.

  But The Rapier?

  “Captain Danielle Delacroix at your service, Major,” she managed to keep her voice neutral.

  She’d studied his techniques almost as much as those of the legendary Majors Beale and Henderson. Major Napier was one of the top pilots in all SOAR. He sent back techniques to be added into training that were nearly irreproducible…and he’d come up with them while flying combat which made them downright miraculous.

  Unlike Beale and Henderson, who were famous within the SOAR community, notorious was the proper adjective for Major Napier. Notorious for being a total hard ass. No one flew farther out on the edge than Pete Napier.

  He was also the reason she’d ultimately given in to Justin Roberts’ attempts to get her to switch to the Chinook; Major Napier was generally acknowledged as the master of the MH-47 throughout SOAR. Keep it light, Danielle. Keep it light.

  “Napier?” she managed to say his name as if maybe it was French or, if not, perhaps it should be. Though if she’d been a teenaged boy, her voice would have cracked horridly in a total fan-girl moment.

  Kentucky Lake had led to the Tennessee River. She rode through the sharp oxbow bend at Waverly and watched how the others were keeping formation on her. Rafe’s Black Hawk held tight as did Quinn’s Little Bird. “Tighten up, M&M.” The second Little Bird pulled in closer until they were a flying wedge of death.

  “M&M? I thought of him as Energizer, like the bunny because of how he moves.”

  “Lieutenant Manfred Malcolm. M&M.”

  “He’ll be in trouble if he ever makes my rank,” Major Napier’s voice remained deadpan.

  “Napier?” mangling it with a Italian accent this time. “Jack or the butler?” Let’s see if he was half as sharp as he thought he was. Jack Napier had been The Joker’s name in the Michael Keaton Batman movie. Alan Napier had been the actor who played Alfred the Butler in the original TV series.

  “Oh, I dare say, madam,” Pete made his voice butler-pompous, but no Michael Caine-English accent which would have been inappropriate for Alan Napier. “I am not cruel.”

  Unlike his reputation.

  Well, The Rapier wasn’t known for cruelty, not exactly. It was more a combination of vicious and lethal. His battle-plan attacks consistently struck at the very core of the enemy with an overwhelming force, even when the core was deceptively hidden. He had a strategic sense that made his attacks master strokes that the enemy could not evade.

  Danielle kept low to the water, made sure everyone was well inside the training envelope of three rotor diameters. But mostly she watched the terrain map inside her visor for stray bridges and water-crossing power lines…and potential enemy surprises. This was a training flight, perhaps their final one, and there were bound to be at least one or two engagements to test their mettle.

  Napier yawned loudly into the intercom and she remembered the exhausted look as he’d arrived from Command.

  “When was the last time you slept, sir?”

  “Before Tibet. Shit! I did not just say that,” he scrabbled at the communication system and then huffed out a sigh of relief when his finger tapped against the switch set to isolate the cockpit’s intercom. “You, Captain, are not authorized for that information. Are we clear?”

  “I can only assume you were hunting for a blue flower at the base of a mountain topped by a league of evil assassins.” And now that she’d evoked the image, she wished she hadn’t. Christian Bale had been seriously hot in Batman Begins. And only now did it register quite how much Napier looked like Bale. She’d certainly gotten an eyeful when he’d stripped down to change into his flightsuit back at Fort Campbell. Bale had worked out for the role, whereas Pete the Rapier had done soldiering for a career and the difference showed. He was remarkably fit; that was a safe word for a commanding officer wasn’t it? Very remarkably—

  Keep your mind on your flying, girl!

  Knowing he had his hands on the controls, she released the collective for a mome
nt and set the intercom to the whole aircraft. The sounds inside her helmet expanded to include the crew chatting quietly on the other circuit, making sure they were staying sharp. It also served to inform Pete the Rapier that she wouldn’t be pursuing his unintended comment.

  Didn’t mean she couldn’t think about it though.

  Tibet, huh? A politically impossible mission, because even a whiff of American military on Chinese soil would have created a major international incident. Things certainly weren’t going to be dull once she’d passed into the Night Stalkers. If this was the graduation exercise, it meant that her real missions were about to begin. Finally!

  While it was easy to file away thoughts of Tibet, the image of flying with Pete the Rapier dressed only in his briefs as her personal butler wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.

  # # #

  Pete kept an eye on the pair of Little Birds as they were refueling in a swamp along the Black Warrior River watershed of northern Alabama. The ground team would report on just how well they did, but they looked good from where he sat forty feet up and a hundred yards to the side in the Chinook. SOAR training had made sure these people were good or they would have long since been washed out.

  But were they good enough?

  The attack came a quarter mile after they left the refuel point. He knew it was inevitable even if he didn’t know when.

  The trainees hadn’t a clue.

  Two AH-64 Apache gunships waited side by side around a bend in the river. At the far edge of the tactical display he also spotted an F/A-18E Super Hornet jet coming down from fifty thousand feet, at least it wasn’t moving at supersonic speeds. Still, a nasty scenario. Personally, he might have added another helo coming from behind.

  Danielle burped the radio, “Craft please identify.”

  What came back from the Apaches in response were a pair of missiles, at least simulated ones.

  “Flares and up,” she called on the encrypted frequency.

  “Up” was not a choice he would have made, especially with the jet descending from above. Clearly she hadn’t spotted the jet out at the very edge of the display.

  Of course with “Down” they were under twenty feet from hitting the soggy soil. Most students went to the sides which exposed their bellies to the Apache attackers and also counted as a kill.

  All four choppers rolled upward. As they hit vertical they all triggered their flares. Bright flares shot out to the sides of each helicopter which would hopefully distract a heat-seeking missile. The helos climbed in such a tight formation that the flares created a veritable wall of shining light between their four helos and the attacking Apaches.

  For the moment, the Apaches’ night-vision gear would be overwhelmed.

  As Danielle pulled vertical she called, “Jules, two away on the jet.”

  So she had seen it.

  The Black Hawk unleashed a pair of simulated Hellfire missiles and sent them streaking directly up at the diving F/A-18E Super Hornet. The fake missiles fizzled after a hundred yards and would fall harmlessly to the swamp where a follow-up team would recover them. But the jet’s computers decided it was dead and out of the game.

  “Mighty and M&M,” was her next call, with no additional instructions and Pete could only wait to see what they came up with.

  The Chinook and the Black Hawk continued their loops, but rolling over sideways as they did so. Instead of flying onto their backs, they were once again upright and diving back down to the riverbed the way they’d come.

  The two Little Birds had done the opposite. Hidden behind the wall of flares, they’d climbed and then nosed over until they were diving on the Apaches from above. They burst clear of the bright wall painted by the flares, firing simulated chain guns. The Apaches’ sensors registered that they were destroyed just moments later.

  “Maximum height during engagement?” Danielle called out.

  “Shit!” one of the Little Bird pilots swore.

  Pete double checked the readouts. He’d told them that the plan was fifty, they’d be on probation over one hundred and fifty feet and would fail over two hundred feet. A total lie. After two years of training, SOAR didn’t discard pilots that lightly, but he wanted to see what they could do.

  The swearing Little Bird pilot had hit a hundred and thirty feet as he nosed over. The other bird hadn’t even crossed a hundred. Clearly Danielle had held them to a higher standard.

  “Re-form. Continue mission,” Pete snapped out trying his best to sound irritated.

  In silence they formed up around her once more and continue to roar south along the Black Warrior River.

  “Mighty?” he asked over the Chinook’s intercom to avoid complimenting Danielle on the exceptional maneuver. Plus he wanted to prompt her into speaking more. He generally appreciated a closed-mouth pilot, but that French accent of hers was about the only thing keeping him sharp…he could listen to it all day.

  “The big Alaskan guy, Mickey Quinn. We call him The Mighty Quinn from the Bob Dylan song Quinn the Eskimo.”

  “I thought of him as Dozer.”

  “The Mighty Dozer? Bet he’d like that.”

  Pete didn’t want to be as impressed as hell, especially not by a bunch of trainees, but he was anyway. He’d flown with new teams before and they didn’t function the way this one had. Hell, he’d flown with fully qualified teams that couldn’t do that last maneuver…or would think to.

  There was the difference to this group and he’d bet that he knew its source.

  # # #

  “All craft.”

  Danielle had already learned enough about The Rapier’s tone of voice to know that bad news was incoming.

  “During the last engagement, Captain Danielle Delacroix was critically injured. I am a Chief Warrant Two only RL2 on the Chinook platform.”

  Which meant he could fly well enough, but don’t depend on him to complete the mission.

  “The mission is critical, continue on profile. Out.”

  “I’m not—”

  “I need to see how much they rely on you, Delacroix, because I’m betting that whole last piece was you’re doing.”

  “But they need to know I’m not—”

  “Shut up, Spidey.”

  A bark of laughter over the Chinook’s internal intercom told her that she’d better like that tag because she’d just become stuck with it—at least for a while. Maybe a long while.

  She wanted to argue, but it was true. The jet had been unexpected, but by chance she’d penciled out everything else about this exact scenario a few months ago and they’d made it a mental puzzle over dinner. That it had come off so seamlessly made her damn proud of the team, and more than a little surprised at herself. She hadn’t really expected it to work so neatly in the real world.

  Rafe “Yank” Grant, the Black Hawk’s pilot, took command.

  He’d been tagged the day he told how his slave ancestors had chosen their last name after Ulysses S. Grant had freed the South—despite his thick Georgia accent. Yank shifted the Chinook back into the pocket with himself in the lead and a Little Bird to either side.

  “Is ‘Yank’ the tall white one or the little black guy?” Napier asked her.

  “The little one,” she replied. Yank was shorter than she was, but she’d never thought of him as little. He was solidly broad-shouldered, serious, and an exceptional pilot. They were constantly pushing at each other. “Kenny flies copilot.”

  When Rafe asked for Pete’s name—she was still the only one who knew who was flying with them—Napier simply replied, “Call me Butler.”

  Unintentionally, her snort of laughter went out over the air. She could feel the others relax, see it in how they flew. And if “The Butler” didn’t like that she’d just revealed she was uninjured, screw him.

  “Did you consider having your Black Hawk drive straight ahead through
the flare wall?” Pete asked her as if they were all hers to order and command. Yank led them once more along the Black Warrior River and passed the “dead” Apaches who rocked side to side in a wave before turning for home.

  She hadn’t. “That seems a desperate maneuver. The Black Hawk would take severe damage.”

  “Think about it. There are times when enemy air traffic radar is only a hundred feet over your head and you couldn’t have done your little climb.”

  She’d never contemplated sacrificing one of her crew. Of course, the 10th Mountain Division wasn’t about being subtle, it was about being so obviously overwhelming that the enemy turned tail and ran or was destroyed in place. The 10th Mountain was likely to throw twenty or more helos at a battle—backed up by a dozen M1 Abrams tanks along with other odds and ends—to humble the enemy into submission.

  SOAR was all about subtle and would send two or three. The seven, or perhaps eight, that they sent against bin Laden had been a massive campaign by Night Stalker standards.

  She continued to do the flying and Pete The Rapier continued to bring it down on their heads. But with each engagement he would ask her one or two questions that would force her to completely rethink the scenario. He was so good, and so far inside her head, that he knew exactly what she’d missed.

  It wasn’t just a one-way flow of information though. His voice was always sharper when the crew did something he hadn’t expected. He dug after every nuance of her thinking about those situations, and always followed her last answer with a, “Huh.”

  At first she thought she was being accused of screwing up. Then she understood that he wasn’t being aggressive, he was learning. From her and the team. He pursued each morsel of knowledge as if it truly mattered. The other trainees had appreciated—eventually—the results of her obsessive “beating the facts to death.”

  Pete was the first pilot who she couldn’t leave behind in that mental pursuit. He was right there with her and it was…completely the wrong thought…sexual in its power—the back and forth as they both strove to be better.