Sound of Her Warrior Heart

by M. L. Buchman

  When they were two steps apart, she fired a single round into the Moldovan general’s heart. Delta would have placed two there.

  On her next heartbeat—in his face. It caught him before he was over the surprise of the first shot.

  For the last shot, she picked a Russian guard standing behind the Russian general and put a round through the meat of his thigh.

  At his scream, the Russian general yanked out his sidearm as he spun. He then shot the first Transnistrian guard he spotted. In moments, all of the Transnitrian locals were gunned down—including the high-ranking official.

  Someone must have forewarned the police—at least enough so as to make them station a team nearby. They swarmed out of the office building and had the Russian general, his troops, and the helicopter pilot under arrest within moments.

  Katrina eased her weapon back in through the plane’s canopy and waited, but no one so much as looked in their direction. Who would attack from the middle of their own airfield when the perpetrator was so obviously caught red-handed?

  The Russians were going to have very poor relations with Transnistria for some time to come.

  And Delta? They’d never been here at all.

  Chapter 8

  “Can’t we just walk out?” Katrina waved past the canopy at the deserted airfield. Darkness had come and shrouded the only signs of what had happened today: bloodstains on the sun-bleached pavement and an abandoned Russian helicopter.

  It was awkward, twisting in her seat to see Tomas’ lips with her NVGs. He said something that she couldn’t follow.

  “What?”

  Trust me, accompanied by one of his smiles. She’d learned about them. They were full of promises—ones that she hoped, no, that she knew he would keep. It made him impossible to argue with. She just wished that she could imagine his voice as anything other than harsh and cold, but it was all she’d ever heard from him.

  She turned back in her seat and tightened the cross-shoulder harness.

  “Why walk when you can fly?” She finally worked out that was what he’d said.

  She’d had the mandatory basic training and could survive as pilot in a half-dozen different aircraft—survive. Her only hope was that his skills were far more practiced than her own. Thankfully, the Yah-18 was a trainer: pilot in the rear, student in the front. It meant she didn’t have to touch anything.

  No one bothered them as the engine caught and spun to life on the darkened airfield. It shook the plane, momentarily filling the cabin with the acrid bite of exhaust fumes but, at least to her, it was painfully silent.

  Tomas taxied them to the blacked-out runway. Then, unleashing a mighty vibration that she assumed was accompanied by a massive roar, the single engine awoke and pulled them down the abandoned runway. The plane jounced and wobbled, but they were aloft before it could shatter her spine.

  Once in the air, Tomas turned them south with a confidence she knew she lacked. Safe in his care. Safe in his arms.

  The irony wasn’t lost on her for a moment. Tomas’ very careful attempts to not treat her differently, to not show her his feelings, had only served to enhance them.

  She now understood his prior silences. And those in turn had made her more aware of him. It had made her notice what a standout soldier he was. And their distance had probably driven him even harder to excel, which had only made her notice him all the more.

  Yet she’d already been deaf the first time he demonstrated his feelings. Even if the damage was permanent, there was no questioning the truth of them—not of the man who had thrown himself over her so that the mortar might somehow kill him but spare her, and not of the man who now flew the old Yak from close behind her.

  A half hour later, they slid out of the sky and landed on a long sandy beach. The plane jolted, but not too badly. As always, Tomas knew exactly what he was doing.

  They sat together on the sandy shore of a Romanian park along the Black Sea. Small waves broke on the sand in clean white lines as they watched the night together. Tomas had radioed for a helicopter from an American helicopter carrier that was cruising offshore. It would pick them up soon—and drag the old plane out to sink in the depths of the Black Sea erasing the last evidence of anyone interfering at Tiraspol. Now it would just be a plane gone missing on a much more newsworthy day.

  They sat close, hip to hip on the sand.

  “What if my hearing doesn’t come back?” Their NVGs were pushed back on their helmets, so she might as well have been talking to herself. She wouldn’t be able to read any reply on his lips.

  But she wasn’t alone. He pulled her tight against his side and kissed her on the temple.

  Not alone.

  She’d always been alone. The family’s black sheep, the first one ever to enter military service. One of the first women to qualify for front-line combat. Again one of the first into Delta Force. Delta had accepted her, even welcomed her, but she’d been the only woman on her team. It was a lonely existence.

  Tomas continued to hold her close. Rather than going for the kiss, that she would have gladly welcomed, he somehow knew she needed something else even more. Instead, he just held her.

  The fear began to slide away.

  The fear of the mission—always there during but already fading fast, as usual.

  The fear of not being good enough to be a woman in Delta. Even if it was her final mission today, she’d proven that she belonged.

  The unrealized terror that she’d always be an outsider, always alone. All she had to do was breathe in the warm, earthy, and slightly sweet smell of Tomas Gallagher that reminded her of lying in a vineyard beneath the ripening grapes.

  One fear remained. A fear worse than never hearing again. A fear that—

  Then she became aware of something. It was so foreign that she couldn’t make sense of it for a moment. It had been going on for a while.

  “Hey!”

  She could feel Tomas twist to look at where she lay tucked inside the curve of his arm.

  “I can hear the waves on the sand.” Whatever her body had done to protect her during the explosion had released its hold on her hearing.

  “Really?” Now she would forever know what his voice could sound like—soft, kind, and filled with wonder.

  “Really.” And then her last fear slid into the night. The fear that she’d never get to hear Tomas Gallagher say, “I love you.”

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  Target of the Heart (excerpt)

  Major Pete Napier hovered his MH-47G Chinook helicopter ten kilometers outside of Lhasa, Tibet and a mere two inches off the tundra. A mixed action team of Delta Force and The Activity—the slipperiest intel group on the planet—flung themselves aboard.

  The additional load sent an infinitesimal shift in the cyclic control in his right hand. The hydraulics to close the rear loading ramp hummed through the entire frame of the massive helicopter. By the time his crew chief could reach forward to slap an “all secure” signal against his shoulder, they were already ten feet up and fifty out. That was enough altitude. He kept the nose down as he clawed for speed in the thin air at eleven thousand feet.

  “Totally worth it,” one of the D-boys announced as soon as he was on the Chinook’s internal intercom.

  He’d have to remember to tell that to the two Black Hawks flying guard for him…when they were in a friendly country and could risk a radio transmission. This deep inside China—or rather Chinese-held territory as the CIA’s mission-briefing spook had insisted on calling it—radios attracted attention and were only used to avoid imminent death and destruction.

  “Great, now I just need to get us out of this alive.”

  “Do that, Pete. We’d appreciate it.”

  He wished to hell he had a stealth bird like the one that had gone into bin Laden’s compound. But the one that had crashed during that raid had been blown up. Where there was one, there were always two, but the second had gone back into hiding as thoroughly as if it had never e
xisted. He hadn’t heard a word about it since.

  The Tibetan terrain was amazing, even if all he could see of it was the monochromatic green of night vision. And blackness. The largest city in Tibet lay a mere ten kilometers away and they were flying over barren wilderness. He could crash out here and no one would know for decades unless some yak herder stumbled upon them. Or were yaks in Mongolia? He was a corn-fed, white boy from Colorado, what did he know about Tibet? Most of the countries he’d flown into on black ops missions he’d only seen at night anyway.

  While moving very, very fast.

  Like now.

  The inside of his visor was painted with overlapping readouts. A pre-defined terrain map, the best that modern satellite imaging could build made the first layer. This wasn’t some crappy, on-line, look-at-a-picture-of-your-house display. Someone had a pile of dung outside their goat pen? He could see it, tell you how high it was, and probably say if they were pygmy goats or full-size LaManchas by the size of their shit-pellets if he zoomed in.

  On top of that were projected the forward-looking infrared camera images. The FLIR imaging gave him a real-time overlay, in case someone had put an addition onto their goat shed since the last satellite pass, or parked their tractor across his intended flight path.

  His nervous system was paying autonomic attention to that combined landscape. He also compensated for the thin air at altitude as he instinctively chose when to start his climb over said goat shed or his swerve around it.

  It was the third layer, the tactical display that had most of his attention. At least he and the two Black Hawks flying escort on him were finally on the move.

  To insert this deep into Tibet, without passing over Bhutan or Nepal, they’d had to add wingtanks on the Black Hawks’ hardpoints where he’d much rather have a couple banks of Hellfire missiles. Still, they had 20mm chain guns and the crew chiefs had miniguns which was some comfort.

  While the action team was busy infiltrating the capital city and gathering intelligence on the particularly brutal Chinese assistant administrator, he and his crews had been squatting out in the wilderness under a camouflage net designed to make his helo look like just another god-forsaken Himalayan lump of granite.

  Command had determined that it was better for the helos to wait on site through the day than risk flying out and back in. He and his crew had stood shifts on guard duty, but none of them had slept. They’d been flying together too long to have any new jokes, so they’d played a lot of cribbage. He’d long ago ruled no gambling on a mission, after a fistfight had broken out about a bluff hand that cost a Marine three hundred and forty-seven dollars. Marines hated losing to Army no matter how many times it happened. They’d had to sit on him for a long time before he calmed down.

  Tonight’s mission was part of an on-going campaign to discredit the Chinese “presence” in Tibet on the international stage—as if occupying the country the last sixty years didn’t count toward ruling, whether invited or not. As usual, there was a crucial vote coming up at the U.N.—that, as usual, the Chinese could be guaranteed to ignore. However, the ever-hopeful CIA was in a hurry to make sure that any damaging information that they could validate was disseminated as thoroughly as possible prior to the vote.

  Not his concern.

  His concern was, were they going to pass over some Chinese sentry post at their top speed of a hundred and ninety-six miles an hour? The sentries would then call down a couple Shenyang J-16 jet fighters that could hustle along at Mach 2 to fry his sorry ass. He knew there was a pair of them parked at Lhasa along with some older gear that would be just as effective against his three helos.

  “Don’t suppose you could get a move on, Pete?”

  “Eat shit, Nicolai!” He was a good man to have as a copilot. Pete knew he was holding on too tight, and Nicolai knew that a joke was the right way to ease the moment.

  He, Nicolai, and the four pilots in the two Black Hawks had a long way to go tonight and he’d never make it if he stayed so tight on the controls that he could barely maneuver. Pete eased off and felt his fingers tingle with the rush of returning blood. They dove down into gorges and followed them as long as they dared. They hugged cliff walls at every opportunity to decrease their radar profile. And they climbed.

  That was the true danger—they would be up near the helos’ limits when they crossed over the backbone of the Himalayas in their rush for India. The air was so rarefied that they burned fuel at a prodigious rate. Their reserve didn’t allow for any extended battles while crossing the border…not for any battle at all really.

  It was pitch dark outside her helicopter when Captain Danielle Delacroix stamped on the left rudder pedal while giving the big Chinook right-directed control on the cyclic. It tipped her most of the way onto her side, but let her continue in a straight line. A Chinook’s rotors were sixty feet across—front to back they overlapped to make the spread a hundred feet long. By cross-controlling her bird to tip it, she managed to execute a straight line between two mock pylons only thirty feet apart. They were made of thin cloth so they wouldn’t down the helo if you sliced one—she was the only trainee to not have cut one yet.

  At her current angle of attack, she took up less than a half-rotor of width, just twenty-four feet. That left her nearly three feet to either side, sufficient as she was moving at under a hundred knots.

  The training instructor sitting beside her in the copilot’s seat didn’t react as she swooped through the training course at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Only child of a single mother, she was used to providing her own feedback loops, so she didn’t expect anything else. Those who expected outside validation rarely survived the SOAR induction testing, never mind the two years of training that followed.

  As a loner kid, Danielle had learned that self-motivated congratulations and fun were much easier to come by than external ones. She’d spent innumerable hours deep in her mind as a pre-teen superheroine. At twenty-nine she was well on her way to becoming a real life one, though Helo-girl had never been a character she’d thought of in her youth.

  External validation or not, after two years of training with the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment she was ready for some action. At least she was convinced that she was. But the trainers of Fort Campbell, Kentucky had not signed off on anyone in her trainee class yet. Nor had they given any hint of when they might.

  She ducked ten tons of racing Chinook under a bridge and bounced into a near vertical climb to clear the power line on the far side. Like a ride on the toboggan at Terrassee Dufferin during Le Carnaval de Québec, only with five thousand horsepower at her fingertips. Using her Army signing bonus—the first money in her life that was truly hers—to attend Le Carnaval had been her one trip back after her birthplace since her mother took them to America when she was ten.

  To even apply to SOAR required five years of prior military rotorcraft experience. She had applied after seven years because of a chance encounter—or rather what she’d thought was a chance encounter at the time.

  Captain Justin Roberts had been a top Chinook pilot, the one who had convinced her to switch from her beloved Black Hawk and try out the massive twin-rotor craft. One flight and she’d been a goner, begging her commander until he gave in and let her cross over to the new platform. Justin had made the jump from the 10th Mountain Division to the 160th SOAR not long after that.

  Then one night she’d been having pizza in Watertown, New York a couple miles off the 10th’s base at Fort Drum.

  “Danielle?” Justin had greeted her with the surprise of finding a good friend in an unexpected place. Danielle had liked Justin—even if he was a too-tall, too-handsome cowboy and completely knew it. But “good friend” was unusual for Danielle, with anyone, and Justin came close.

  “Captain Roberts,” as a dry greeting over the top edge of her Suzanne Brockmann novel didn’t faze him in the slightest.

  “Mind if I join ya?” A question he then answered for himself by sliding into the opposite se
at and taking a slice of her pizza. She been thinking of taking the leftovers back to base, but that was now an idle thought.

  “Are you enjoying life in SOAR?” she did her best to appear a normal, social human, a skill she’d learned by rote. Greeting someone you knew after a time apart? Ask a question about them. “They treating you well?”

  “Whoo-ee, you have no idea, Danielle,” his voice was smooth as…well, always…so she wouldn’t think about it also sounding like a pickup line. He was beautiful, but didn’t interest her; the outgoing ones never did.

  “Tell me.” Men love to talk about themselves, so let them.

  And he did. But she’d soon forgotten about her novel, and would have forgotten the pizza if he hadn’t reminded her to eat.

  His stories shifted from intriguing to fascinating. There was a world out there that she’d been only peripherally aware of. The Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR weren’t simply better helicopter pilots, they were the most highly-trained and best-equipped ones on the planet. Their missions were pure razor’s edge and black-op dark.

  He’d left her with a hundred questions and enough interest to fill out an application to the 160th. Being a decent guy, Justin even paid for the pizza after eating half.

  The speed at which she was rushed into testing told her that her meeting with Justin hadn’t been by chance and that she owed him more than half a pizza next time they met. She’d asked after him a couple of times since she’d made it past the qualification exams—and the examiners’ brutal interviews that had left her questioning her sanity, never mind her ability.

  “Justin Roberts is presently deployed, ma’am,” was the only response she’d ever gotten.

  Now that she was through training—almost, had to be soon, didn’t it?—Danielle realized that was probably less of an evasion and more likely to do with the brutal op tempo the Night Stalkers maintained. The SOAR 1st Battalion had just won the coveted Lt. General Ellis D. Parker awards for Outstanding Combat Aviation Battalion and Aviation Battalion of the Year. They’d been on deployment every single day of the last year, actually of the last decade-plus since 9/11.