Eight hours, five Little Bird refuelings, two mid-air refuels for the Chinook and the Black Hawk, and seven attacks later, everyone was still alive…except for her, of course. They’d recovered a team of SEALs out on the Gulf of Mexico and redeployed them in a staged attack against a “terrorist held” oil platform. And still she was “dead.” But even the attacks they hadn’t discussed previously as possible scenarios had gone off smoothly enough using tactics she’d helped create.
Danielle might not know what to do with people on the ground, but god she totally rocked it in the air, even when she wasn’t the one giving the instructions.
# # #
They settled to ground in a remote corner of Fort Rucker Army Airfield an hour before sunrise. It was the absolute center of all Army heli-aviation training.
The four helicopters of their flight clustered at the far end of the otherwise empty Ech Army Stagefield Heliport.
Pete stripped off his helmet and went blind. All of the information that had been feeding into his visor—flight data, engine status, tactical overlay, night-vision territorial view—was gone and now he was sitting in the dark.
He slumped in the seat and closed his eyes. Two days in Tibet, a day in transit, and an eight-hour graduation test flight. The exhaustion was past palpable and actually made him nauseous.
“Someone has it in for me.”
“Who might that be?” Danielle asked in that lovely French ripple of hers. He could hear her finishing the shutdown checklists. He should be helping but he was too damn tired.
“My money is on Colonel Cassius McDermott. Oh crap. You—”
“—didn’t hear that, I know. You must be more careful, Monsieur Rapier, so that you are not snipping your own thread.”
He stared out the broad windscreen of the Chinook at the blacked-out heliport, with only vague outlines of trees and a few stars showing. He’d been to Mother Rucker, as everyone called the Fort, innumerable times—for all Army pilots returned to the Mother throughout their career for everything from periodic tests with instructor pilots to advanced training. And the trainers were total motherfuckers in how hard they drove you, so it all fit.
The Fort had a dozen of these stagefields scattered about the local counties for training, but Pete had never used Ech. By the look of it, no one else had in a long time. He’d barely heard of it. In all his flights around the area, he couldn’t be sure he’d even passed over this field. Were all flights routed around it? There was an interesting thought.
Hanchey, Knox, Lowe, and Shell heliports all had a hundred or more tie-down spots for individual helos. Only the main airfield at Cairns had runways for fixed-wing aircraft. They all had lights and instrument approaches. The big Stagefields like Allen, Brown, and Runkie did as well. Not Ech.
Ech had nine tie-downs, five short runways appropriate for practicing rolling and emergency landings. There was one small building that had definitely seen better days and was barely big enough for a half dozen offices. Close beside it was a hangar that looked brand new—at least it had through the night-vision gear as they’d descended—and was big enough for a half dozen birds.
The heliport was surrounded by a curtain of trees and was three miles of narrow dirt road from the next nearest piece of Mother Rucker.
He looked out into the darkness but they were the only ones there. This was the last set of coordinates on the training document, so it was the right place. But it certainly didn’t say what to do next.
Shit!
That’s what he’d landed in, a total shithole. Right down the old crapper.
Spiderwoman clicked on a cabin light and pulled off her own helmet. He blinked at the surprising brightness, and then again at Captain Danielle Delacroix. He hadn’t been this close to her without her helmet on. Or if he had, he’d been blind. Her features weren’t merely fine, they were elegant. And when she dug her fingers through her hair, the helmet hair went away and the thick mane of dark brown flowed once more down to her shoulders.
He’d noticed her beauty before, he must have, but he’d seen her as a female burr upon his own existence. However, burrs upon his existence didn’t fly as well as she had. And about to be graduated trainees never ever functioned so cleanly as a team.
“You are staring, Monsieur Butler.”
Pete was. And he wasn’t having much luck stopping. That French accent of hers only added to the fine picture she painted. Let Spidey keep Kirsten Dunst, this was his idea of beauty.
She snapped her fingers right in front of his face and forced him to blink.
“Sorry,” he rubbed at his face and it made no difference. “It’s been three or four days since I slept and you’re gorgeous. And I can’t believe I just said that either.” He couldn’t read the reaction on her face. There was one, but he couldn’t read it.
“No more than you said the other thing which I have already forgotten. I truly think you should sleep more often, Major Napier.”
Just that simply she targeted and destroyed the easy mood that had settled over them during the flight. The teasing tone hadn’t particularly shifted, but the message had totally changed. His rank and name now stood between them, as did six years of flying for the Night Stalkers.
By the time they had the helos shut down, log books completed, and the crews had exited their birds, the first light of day was ghosting to life somewhere over the horizon toward Georgia.
They were the last ones to exit down the long length of the Chinook’s cargo hold, only the slightly pale square of the open cargo ramp guiding them forward. The heat was already oppressive and right in front of him, Danielle began peeling down the top of her flightsuit to tie the arms around her waist.
Her silhouette was clear against the backdrop of the open cargo ramp. As trim as her face implied, with curves that promised so much.
She’s a flight officer in the 160th SOAR, man. You aren’t supposed to notice that kind of shit.
She also had a heavenly scent of mountains in the fall. He’d grown up outside of Boulder, Colorado. How did a French beauty remind him so much of home?
He was tired enough that his reactions were wholly out of sync, he walked right into her when she stopped. He’d have plowed her to the deck if he hadn’t grabbed her around the waist and kept them both upright.
But he’d also underestimated her reflexes for she saved herself with a step-and-turn that brought them face to face the moment before they pounded together.
# # #
Danielle’s head rang with the aftermath of the hollow “clunk” that had resulted from their foreheads smacking together. The room…the Chinook’s cargo bay spun for a moment. The three round windows to either side swirled and the square portals for the M134 miniguns—two forward and one aft beside the ramp—appeared to bob and swirl as she struggled to regain her equilibrium.
When she did, she became aware that she was holding tightly to the front of Major Napier’s flightsuit. At least she’d tried to think of him that way; Pete made for far too intimate a sound inside her head.
Having a commanding officer tell you “you’re gorgeous” was a fast flash of a path to hell. She’d learned long ago that if she didn’t slam down the door, it led to unwanted gropes and casual caresses that made her want to both shower immediately—with a scrub brush and as much soap as possible—and break someone’s arm. More than once she’d had to shove her M9 handgun down inside their belt and offered to caress their balls with a couple of 9mm rounds before they backed off.
So she’d slammed the door on “Monsieur Butler” and transformed him back into Major Napier. But for once she hadn’t wanted to. She’d just spent eight hours sitting shoulder to shoulder with one of the best pilots in the Night Stalkers. And when they hadn’t been teasing each other, they’d both been stretching their tactical minds together.
One of his hands was on her hip and the other clamped hard
at the small of her back holding her hard against him with such force it took her breath away.
“I’m,” he leaned forward and took a deep breath with his nose buried in her hair, “really sure I’m supposed to say I’m sorry I ran into you.” He breathed her in again. “But I’m finding it difficult to feel that way.”
The last man who’d held her this tightly had earned a dishonorable discharge after she’d broken one of his feet and he’d almost broken her jaw with a massive punch before he collapsed to the floor. She’d used her Army boot to un-pretty his face but good.
But this time, the man wasn’t the only one holding on. Pete had left his survival vest on the copilot’s seat. Even through his flightsuit she could feel the strength of him. And also, that there was not a single thing to fear.
He hadn’t groped her. Or gone for a kiss. He’d simply saved her from what would have probably been a painful fall onto the steel grating of the deck and then…wrapped his arms around her.
She managed to unfist her hands until they were lying flat on his chest. A part of her, the part that had found a mind that was her match for the last eight hours, wanted to haul him in and see just what kissing The Rapier would feel like.
But her common sense intruded and she pushed lightly against his chest.
He shifted backward. She could tell that it was reluctantly, but even in parting, those big hands of his took no advantage as they slid off her. In moments they were standing as closely as they’d been when they whacked foreheads, but now their only connection was her hands resting lightly on his chest.
“Awfully forward for a butler,” she managed on a dry throat.
“Awfully forward under any conditions. But your web appears to have ensnared me.”
“My web?” As if this was all her fault?
He took a half-step back, enough that she could remove her hands but didn’t have to.
For the moment, she didn’t.
“I am unused to beautiful, intelligent, competent women in uniform. Especially Spiderwomen.”
Oh. Right. Her thinking was confused, so deeply embrouillé for her to have missed that reference.
Then he was gone, back into Major Napier and she lowered her hands. He bowed ever so slightly, stepped around her, and once more headed down the slope of the dim cargo bay.
The whole encounter had lasted perhaps ten seconds.
So why did it feel as if they had just moved past dating and meaningless sex right into courtship?
# # #
Pete had not just…
He couldn’t have with…a fellow officer.
No. He hadn’t. He hadn’t grabbed her except to keep her from a fall. Hadn’t brushed a finger across her brow to check for a bump where their foreheads had hit. His still throbbed, but when he rubbed at the spot, if felt more as if he was rubbing at the confusion within.
He had resisted the urge to dig his hands deep into that thick hair and bend down to see if she tasted anywhere near as good as she smelled.
He’d held her though. He could still feel her skin, the warmth separated from his palms by only a thin layer of cotton. The shape of her waist. It was easy to imagine how it would feel to be pressed against her, into her, plunging hard into pure heav—
Fellow female officer, goddamn it! He’d never crossed that line. Not once. He didn’t understand how the mixed-gender teams did it. It was cruelty when someone like Danielle Delacroix…
Not fellow female officer. Fellow officer. Period.
One who had probably busted her ass twice as hard as any male officer to fly with the Night Stalkers. And he’d wager it was a nice ass even if he hadn’t groped her to find out if…
Pete sighed with some relief when he reached the pale light at the foot of the Chinook’s rear ramp. He was a goddamn wreck. He needed twenty-four hours sleep and then needed to get back to where he belonged—half a planet away from Captain Danielle Delacroix.
With that plan firmly in place he took the last step off the lowered ramp and out onto the pavement.
The breaking daylight slowly resolved faces as the crew chiefs chocked the wheels and tied down the rotors so that they didn’t spin unexpectedly in the wind. At the moment it was only a gentle breath carrying the thick smells of Alabama, lush foliage soon to sweat with the intense humidity under burning skies.
The only thing missing were the sharp smells of engine exhaust and the piercing overtone of the kerosene in Jet A aviation fuel that usually floated around Fort Rucker mornings. They were far enough afield that there were only their birds, silent now except for the pings of cooling metal, and nature’s, now beginning to awaken and call from the trees.
Already the Frisbee was in flight between the various crew members. Check a wheel, catch and wing off the disk, check the other wheel. It appeared to work for them, so he didn’t comment.
There was a bright flash and roar from above as the flight crews finished up and gathered about him on the otherwise empty airfield. A descending blast of hot air sent the Frisbee tumbling aside.
In a blinding glare of white-hot jet exhaust, an AV-8B Harrier II Jump Jet descended out of the sky and landed on one of the nearby runways. The jet—with its vertical/short takeoff and landing capability—was one of the few fixed-wing aircraft that could land at Ech Heliport. Even a little private Cessna 172 would be hard pressed to get in and out of here.
Once down, the jet turned to taxi up to them. It was a two-seat trainer version and within moments of stopping, a man climbed down from the forward cockpit. He was barely clear before the jet was once again on the roll and lifting back into the sky with an earsplitting roar.
“Eight hours,” Colonel Cass McDermott looked at his watch as he strolled up to them. “You’re right on time, as I’d expect from Major Napier.”
There was a collected round of gasps and exclamations from the flight crews that had gathered around when they discovered they’d flown the entire night with The Rapier in command.
“Damn straight, Colonel McDermott.”
The sounds of surprise were cut off as they all snapped to attention and offered salutes.
“At ease,” Cass offered one of his rare, wintry smiles as left boots stomped a half-step sideways and flightsuits rustled as hands were folded behind backs. “Relax people.”
Again the shuffle as they shifted to as natural a stance as could be expected in front of Pete The Rapier and the regiment’s commanding officer. Pete echoed McDermott’s smile, but kept it between himself and his commander.
“Your assessment?” Cass prodded. “Or would you rather step aside to discuss it?”
“No need, Colonel. While unable to perform an in-depth analysis of each individual because of the situation, based solely on tonight’s flight I would be proud to fly with any of these soldiers.” Especially one, because, damn, Captain Danielle Delacroix was beyond good. So good that she’d managed to drag an entire class of trainees to excellence along with her.
“Good, because that’s your new assignment.”
He squinted at his commander. The morning light revealed nothing that would allow Pete to interpret this as a joke: foul, cruel, or otherwise.
Finding no answers there, he glanced over at Danielle. She offered a microscopic shrug of uncertainty.
# # #
Danielle had no idea what was going on, but Pete Napier wasn’t looking happy about it. They were trainees. No one had told them if this was it. Was there more testing? Had they graduated?
If the latter, then they would receive their assignments and be dispersed among the five battalions wherever they were needed. With only ten graduates and twenty-four companies among the five battalions, they might none of them serve together.
That sent a surprising pang of regret through her. She might still be the loner of the crowd, but she’d come to know and appreciate the skills of Rafe a
nd Julian and the others. She started being friends with Irish Patty and Rafe the Yank.
Though she had been hoping for the 5th Battalion D Company assignment. All of the previous women, who had become legends of the SOAR community, had ended up there. Chief Warrant Lola LaRue, Captain Casperson, Kee Stevenson the sniper, Sergeant Connie Davis the wizard mechanic and her giant of a husband…
Danielle turned slowly on her heel to face the two training crew chiefs who’d been along for the flight.
“Connie and Big John,” she spoke aloud in her surprise.
“What?” Pete spun to follow her gaze. “No way.”
They were the mythic mechanics of the entire 160th. Over half of all design changes sent to MD, Sikorsky, and Boeing factories originated with these two. They weren’t just cross-platform mechanics, they’d as good as reinvented all three platforms between them.
They nodded in unison and offered her smiles. Connie’s was slight and barely graced her quiet face. Big John’s smile was large and brilliant in the morning light against his dark complexion.
The other crew members, even Patty, shuffled to open up a space around the two sergeants.
“Told you I had a couple ringers for you,” Colonel McDermott sounded terribly pleased with himself.
This was like Babe Ruth and Willy Mays showing up on your T-ball team.
“I did it,” Danielle couldn’t believe it. “I really did it.”
“Did what?” Pete was looking at her strangely.
“I,” really need to not speak my thoughts aloud, “I made it. I flew with…” she waved a hand a little helplessly at Pete and the two mechanics. “I…” she looked at the rest of her fellow trainees and struggled to stop babbling. “We. Did it. We made it through SOAR training.”
“Yes, you did, little Lady,” the Colonel looked down at her. “Damn fine job the lot of you. You’re all cleared as Fully Mission Qualified per unanimous agreement of the Instructor Pilots who have been making your lives hell these last two years and were watching this flight from a half dozen following craft. We’ve never had a team pull together like this one. I’m guessing that you’ll be Pete’s Number Two. Congratulations,” McDermott held out a hand to Danielle who took it; though at the moment she wasn’t sure what to do with it. The Colonel gave her hand a good shake and she did her best to reciprocate.
Target of the Heart Page 5