Bring On the Dusk

by M. L. Buchman

  “Wait a second.”

  “Girl is sharp.”

  Claudia ignored the sassy tone and studied the helicopter. Six-blade rotor rather than the standard five, and a highly nonstandard shape to the hull, though still matte black like every other SOAR bird. Even the weapons were encased in odd-shaped carbon fiber housings. The windscreen still had the slightly bulbous shape that always reminded her of a cross-eyed hamster, but that was the only familiar shape on the whole bird.

  It had to be a stealth rig, but she’d never heard of such a thing in a Little Bird helicopter. Everyone knew about the stealth bird that crashed in bin Laden’s compound when they took him down back in 2011, but that was all. The evidence of the one that crashed had said that there were at least two stealth rigs on that mission.

  She looked about the deck. Two of the helicopters parked here were the normal transport Little Birds—Dennis’s bird and the one other that she’d flown. A massive twin-rotor Chinook helicopter, the heavy lifter of SOAR, was parked in the stern-most position of the flight deck.

  Forward there were a pair of standard-looking transport Black Hawks and another Black Hawk that might have once been a Direct Action Penetrator weaponized bird but looked like nothing she’d ever seen. It too had an atypical number of rotor blades and the same radar-deceiving stealth shape.

  That was why she’d been able to see two of the birds on infrared last night, but not on radar. The 5th Battalion, D Company, in addition to being the best, was clearly the stealth arm of the 160th SOAR.

  “Holy crap!” What had she just landed in?

  “Pretty cool, huh? We used to have a second stealth DAP but Major Henderson crashed it right before he retired, something about getting its tail shot off on an exercise, which I’m not buying at all. I bet he was into something nasty, but I’ve never found out the story on that one. All hush-hush. I guess they decided that we didn’t need another one and gave us the Chinook and this sweet little stealth bird instead.” She patted the helicopter on the nose as if it were a puppy.

  Claudia wondered which one she’d eventually fly. Her specialty was Little Birds and there were only the three of them here. It sounded as if all three already had lead pilots. Maybe she was someone’s new copilot.

  “Now, let’s see you fly one. I already preflighted her.”

  Claudia wanted nothing more, but she wasn’t stupid. She just needed to figure out how to say it to this rankless woman.

  Straight out was the only way that came to mind.

  “Don’t take this wrong, but I don’t know who you are…” She left a pause that the woman declined to fill with an answer. “I don’t fly a bird I didn’t preflight myself.”

  “Be my guest.” The infuriating woman waved for her to proceed.

  Trisha stood and watched without comment as Claudia went over the Little Bird herself. As expected, everything was immaculate. SOAR always maintained their birds wonderfully. They had the highest operational availability percentages of any outfit in the U.S. Armed Forces, probably on the planet, and now she could see some of why. Even the Marine mechanics couldn’t match this level, not in an operational environment.

  This bird had seen some action—small swatches of hundred-mile-per-hour duct tape patched a number of holes like badges of honor. As she popped the engine covers for a visual inspection, she could see by some newer parts just what abuse this bird had taken in battle. She whistled silently. Two of the damage points must have made for ugly flights to get home. The bird also canted slightly to one side. The landing skid on the right was newer than the one on the left. She considered asking why but doubted she’d get an answer.

  She turned to face this Trisha. “Good to go.”

  “You’re crazy,” Trisha said with a smile that Claudia would give good money to wipe off her face. Maybe the petite redhead had a personal vendetta against blond captains. “Three things you missed.”

  Claudia reviewed both the physical checklist she’d carried around as well as the matching tally in her head. She hadn’t missed a thing.

  “You didn’t preflight the pilot.” Trisha pointed a slender finger at Claudia’s chest. “Barely awake is fine; that’s why we’re going aloft now to see how you’re doing when it’s the end of a long mission or an early alert. But tell me the last time you one: ate; two: drank water; or three: knocked back some electrolyte in this heat.”

  Chagrined, Claudia reached for the thigh pouch on her flight suit.

  Trisha leaned back against the Hydra rocket launcher on the shady side of the bird and waved for Claudia to sit on the edge of the copilot’s door. Again the woman waited with what Claudia suspected was uncharacteristic patience.

  She couldn’t think of what to say, so she tapped some electrolyte into her water bottle then sat and ate an energy bar. In the late afternoon, the Peleliu’s flight deck was unusually quiet; the two of them appeared to be the only life. A glance up and she could see a few shadowed figures behind their windows on the ship’s nav bridge.

  A lone sailor leaned on a rail and looked down at them from thirty feet above. For a moment he made her wish she’d chopped her hair back to Marine Corps short so that it wouldn’t be so obvious she was a woman. No, she was past that. Now she’d just pull up her Ice Queen cloak, and to hell with him or any man.

  When she was done eating and hydrating she felt better and, with a nod for permission, clambered aboard. Trisha circled around to the pilot’s side.

  “Captain, huh?” Trisha asked as Claudia began powering up the bird.

  “Yes, ma’am. And you are…”

  “A pain in the ass. At least so our commander keeps telling me.”

  Claudia wasn’t about to argue with that.

  Trisha waved for her to take the controls and pointed up and west.

  Claudia cleared her flight with the Peleliu’s air boss in PriFly—Primary Flight Control jutted from an upper story of the ship’s superstructure—and pulled up on the collective with her left hand. The Little Bird sounded different from inside, still loud but smoother somehow. She’d never listened to a stealth helicopter before. She knew the innovation was that the sound was directionless from the ground and the helo was likely to sound as if it was departing right before it landed on you, but she was surprised so little was changed in the cockpit. Trisha nodded that it was sounding right, so Claudia went with it.

  Just before they cleared the edge of the assault ship’s deck, a pair of men emerged onto the deck.

  “Damn,” Claudia couldn’t help exclaiming over the headset. “They breed them handsome out here.” She’d been exposed daily to the men of the nation’s best and fittest fighting corps, but these two guys would have stood out in any crew.

  “The pretty one’s mine,” Trisha announced in no uncertain terms.

  Claudia inspected the duo through the forward windscreen as she climbed the helo toward, then over them. The pretty one had to be the big guy, at least a head taller than Trisha. And he wore nothing but running shorts and a pair of sneakers. A scar ran down across his big chest. This must be her Delta Force husband. And he was indeed very pretty.

  Good.

  That meant his companion was not married to Trisha.

  The other one had definitely been the man beside Claudia on last night’s flight. Her vague memory of his face had been a complete underestimate.

  He was totally arresting.

  Significantly shorter than the big guy, maybe five-ten, and with a sleek frame that, like a greyhound’s, looked to be all muscle. He was perhaps the handsomest man she’d ever seen. His rich brown hair fell past his ears, but even at this distance his eyes were his knockout feature. Not the color, she was too far away to check her memory of darkest brown.

  It was the way they tracked her across the sky. She’d never felt so self-conscious before. Even when they were thousands of feet up and still climbing to the we
st, she could feel him watching her.

  That’s when the missing piece of last night clicked into place. A memory of being held in his arms. Of feeling for just that instant that she was perfectly safe from all that was changing around her.

  She shook it off.

  Safe was not real, didn’t exist.

  On top of that, Claudia reminded herself, he was also scary and bug-shit crazy.

  Oddly, those two details didn’t push her away as she’d expected. Still, there was no way she was going to be drawn in either.

  * * *

  Michael watched them aloft. Trisha wasn’t flying. She flew the way she did everything else, flat out. He knew instinctively who was at the controls. That steadiness and smoothness to her flight was as clear as a fingerprint. That her face looked as amazing as she flew…

  He wanted to laugh. Well, if the rest of her looked that good, he was totally screwed.

  A meet-and-greet, Bill had said. No one dragged a pilot aloft before breakfast, especially after the shape she’d been in last night; that was just plain cruel. No one except Trisha O’Malley. Flat out. The way she flew and the way she made love.

  Michael wondered if she’d told her husband that Trisha and he had been lovers briefly, a year before she and Bill met. Even if Trisha hadn’t, Bill would have to know. Wouldn’t he? Michael still didn’t have a clear answer to that, so he once again kept his mouth shut.

  They shared a glance and headed into the command tower. Michael had been doing some research while Bill was in the six-month operator training course at Delta. Didn’t matter if he’d been a SEAL for half a decade, he’d needed OTC to make sure he met Delta standards and shared the skill set.

  Now with Bill back, it was time to go sit with the ship’s commander and lay out his idea for the next mission.

  * * *

  Trisha was talking about everything except SOAR or who she was. She was laying down this whole story about fighting in the Boston gangs, with a posh Boston accent that Claudia thought had gone out of style with President Kennedy. Street gangs? Not likely. Was she even a pilot? Was this just a way to haze a new team member by conning her into a free ride?

  Claudia had a pretty good feel for the helicopter now. When she’d asked for permission, Trisha had simply replied, “Shake her out.”

  Well, if the woman wasn’t real, Claudia could claim ignorance. She’d grab any excuse to see what this bird could really do.

  Full power climbs, hammerhead stalls, nosedive descents, near-stall turns, autorotate… They were high enough to safely try all of the maneuvers without risk. Stealth had done nothing to inhibit this bird. It was still incredibly responsive, as all SOAR-specified Little Birds were. This was indeed a dream machine.

  Trisha had kept her hands and feet riding on the controls, but her touch was so light that Claudia could barely feel it through their shared controls, even on the more drastic maneuvers she tried. The linked cyclics—the joysticks between their knees that controlled pitch and roll—rode light and responsive in her right hand. The collective along the left side of her seat included the throttle and controlled the amount of the rotor’s lift. Trisha’s feet were even light on the rudder pedals that controlled which way they faced. There was just enough contact to give Claudia an intimate connection to the woman sitting beside her.

  As Claudia grew accustomed to the bird, she began to be more aware of her surroundings. The Gulf of Aden, two hundred miles wide at this point, stretched clear and blue in every direction. Long white wakes marked the tiny dots of container ships and tankers working through the waters. The sun was an hour, maybe two from the western horizon.

  “What’s that?” There was a dimness in the south that she couldn’t identify.

  “Haboob, dust storm.” Trisha didn’t even bother to glance over. It was as if she already knew what Claudia was thinking. Not a feeling she much liked. “Tower would have warned us if there was any risk out here. That’s what took down three of our birds during Operation Eagle Claw back in 1980.”

  As if Claudia didn’t know the history of her new unit. Actually Eagle Claw hadn’t been the Night Stalkers, but it was such a part of their history that she’d heard a lot of flyers take ownership of it. Both the good and the bad.

  The Night Stalkers were born from one of the worst maintenance disasters of any helicopter mission anywhere, ever. The attempt to extract the hostages from the Iranian embassy had left hardware and bodies scattered across the high desert. From that failure had been born the 160th SOAR, and no one was more conscientious about the condition of their craft.

  She could feel herself really not liking this woman much. However, this might be her commanding officer and the pilot who she’d be flying with for the next five years, so she’d better get over it. She wasn’t totally unbearab—

  Trisha collapsed forward onto the cyclic control. The two joysticks were connected together and Claudia’s slammed far forward and left. The helicopter pitched forward and down. She tried fighting the cyclic against the woman’s body weight. They did a sickening full roll and began losing altitude fast.

  As they entered inverted flight, Trisha’s body flopped against her. At least that gave her control of the collective, and she savagely twisted them back upright. This time she was ready as Trisha’s weight flopped back against the cyclic.

  She dropped the collective and grabbed the cyclic with her left hand. Reaching back with her right hand to the seat belt harness control at the top of Trisha’s seat, Claudia toggled it off release mode. Now, just like a seat belt locked up for a car crash, the back of Trisha’s harness could only get shorter rather than allowing her to lean forward as necessary.

  Using both hands, Claudia jerked back on the cyclic against Trisha’s weight, forcing the helo’s nose straight into the sky. Trisha’s body flopped bonelessly back in her seat, the harness retracting to hold her in place. Whatever the hell had gone wrong with her, Claudia would figure it out once they were safe—massive stroke or coronary failure by the look of it. If there’d been a gunshot, she hadn’t heard it.

  They were now falling tail-first toward the ocean. Claudia pitched forward, then grabbing the collective, cranked the throttle wide open and yanked up on it to regain altitude. She threw the Little Bird into an evasive maneuver just in case she was being targeted. She’d lost two copilots over her six years in the Corps—one out of the Corps and one all the way into the ground—and she felt sick that she’d just lost another, and on a training fli—

  “That will never do.” Trisha’s clear voice over the headset made Claudia jerk sideways to face her. The woman was inspecting the panel as if nothing had happened. She calmly reached over her shoulder to release her harness.

  “You lost over eight hundred feet in that maneuver. When my copilot was shot and collapsed forward, I had to recover in a hundred feet. Made it too, mostly. Hit hard enough that I kinda crunched up one of the skids and my butt was sore for weeks despite the shock seat. I’ll take her back. Pilot has controls.”

  “Roger,” was all Claudia could manage. Half of her was screaming about an unfair goddamn test. The other half was trying to figure out how she could have recovered in just a hundred feet.

  Trisha rolled the helo into an inverted dive and plummeted toward the ocean in a slowly winding inverted spiral. That in itself was an almost impossible maneuver.

  She now knew at least one thing about Trisha; she was an incredible pilot. Claudia struggled to form a coherent thought as she watched their eight thousand feet of altitude unwind at an alarming rate that was making her ears pop every five to ten seconds.

  “How did you do that in a hundred feet?”

  “Tell you the truth…” Trisha’s voice was calm as could be, despite hanging upside down from her harness and continuing their death spiral toward the sparkling waters of the Gulf. “I have no idea. I did it because it was either do it or auger i
n and make a big crater in central Somalia. Wasn’t much of a fan of the latter idea just on general principles.”

  “What was his name? Or her name?” His name. She’d have heard if one of the five other women in SOAR had died. Four women, now that Major Beale had retired when she got pregnant.

  “Chief Warrant 2 Roland Emerson, as fine a copilot as I’ve ever flown with. Same rank as me. Patricia O’Malley at your service.”

  Apparently Claudia had done well enough to have earned the honor of learning Trisha’s rank and name despite the eight-hundred-foot tumble.

  Trisha rolled out of the inverted dive just two hundred feet over the ocean as if it was the most natural maneuver in the world. The flight deck of the Peleliu lay a thousand yards dead ahead.

  Claudia had flown for the Marine Corps for a full four-year tour plus two more and then two years of training for SOAR. She rather doubted she could do what Trisha had just done without a lot of practice.

  That was it! She almost laughed aloud.

  “You bloody sneak!”

  “What?” Trisha sounded all sweet and innocent.

  “How many times did you practice that crazy inverted descent before you used it to make me feel inferior?”

  “Well…” Trisha’s smile was radiant. “I didn’t practice it special for you. I had this amazing commander back in the Screaming Eagles. I liked doing things to keep her on her toes.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Naw. Emily was way too good a pilot. She did some shit at the end of my rollout that almost had me crapping my pants instead.”

  Emily. That had to be Major Emily Beale, the first woman of SOAR. The one who broke the gender barrier with the Night Stalkers. The reason Claudia knew she could get in.