Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  Major Henderson laughed. “Still pissed about losing at poker, are we?”

  “I’ve been playing more lately, like a chance to win a bit of my own back.” There was some other level going on here that Connie couldn’t follow, but it appeared to be ticking off Major Beale. Never a good choice.

  “Only if my crew can play as well.” Henderson winked at Connie over the President’s shoulder.

  They’d played twice since the flight. Even without Henderson’s wife behind him, Connie had won neatly, pocketing fifty of his hard-played dollars each time. It didn’t anger him, rather it intrigued him. She didn’t like being thought of as a puzzle to be solved, but it was a way she’d found to fit in with the people around her and she’d not give that up any more easily than the Major gave up his money.

  “It’s a date.” The President.

  Wait a minute. She was supposed to play poker with the President?

  Then the Commander-in-Chief faced Major Beale. “I’m coming, Em. Now can we get this mission under way?”

  The Major clenched her jaw for several moments, turned to her husband who merely shrugged.

  “The President’s as stubborn as you are, honey. I wonder which one of you learned it from the other.” He took one step farther from her. “He’s nicer about it, though.”

  He hadn’t moved far enough. Emily’s four-finger jab caught him in the ribs before he could block. He winced as if it really hurt.

  Damn, she was fast.

  Chapter 21

  John checked the last of the weapons. Their armament was all in place. For this exercise they’d dismounted one of the big machine guns. Now they had a rack of four Hellfire tank-killer missiles, a nineteen-rocket pod of Hydra 70s, the Vulcan 30 mm cannon, and a laser where they would normally hang a 20 mm chain gun for cockpit control. It would let them fire harmlessly at friendlies busy playing an unfriendly role.

  His and Connie’s miniguns were locked and not loaded, though spare ammo lay close at hand. Instead, a laser had been mounted in tandem with the six barrels for simulated warfare. For the twentieth time he checked the two observer seats now rigged in the center of the Black Hawk’s cargo bay. Standard combat seats. He’d half expected them to put in airliner seats; this was the President after all. But they’d left in the ones used by the vendor’s technicians during testing and calibration.

  Connie finished the preflight check of the non-weapons systems and arrived outside the cargo door.

  “Here.” She handed him a stack of barf bags.

  “Good one.” He slid them into the elastic ceiling mesh where he or Connie could grab them easily for distribution.

  She paused there. She had something more to say.

  He waited. He’d learned that offering her a bit of silence was pretty much the only way to get her to speak when she was unsure of something.

  “ADAS cameras. Stealth rotors. President riding along.”

  As she always did, she’d used the minimum number of words to set his thinking on a whole new track. He’d been excited by the new technology. And figured the President was just coming along for the ride.

  Not Connie. She’d connected the pieces and just given him the heads-up that a major mission was in the works. One that needed a quieted helicopter, which meant going somewhere they weren’t supposed to be or perhaps had never been before. The new cameras meant they were going somewhere deep where other feeds, like high-circling command platforms, wouldn’t be available. And the President. That meant it was going to be damned serious.

  A deep breath and a bit of a shrug, though John felt the pre-mission tension settle on his shoulders. It was what they’d signed up for when they went SOAR, but heavy missions always carried their own pressures.

  He didn’t question her conclusion for a second; he knew better than to do that. Always thinking, that girl.

  Watching her, he’d learned. At the last poker game, he couldn’t beat the Major, but he could read Connie. At least on occasion. He didn’t yet know how, but his intuition usually warned him when she was way out in the wind on a hand.

  He could read her a bit, except when she looked at him. What he’d at first thought was a blank stare, he now knew to be an intensely analytical process of assessment and review. But when faced with the wonder of those eyes, he couldn’t tell what she was thinking at all.

  Since their second kiss, she had returned to Sergeant Connie Davis mode. Calm, steady, the safety back in place, all weapons secure. He liked to think there was something more there, something more behind those steadily assessing eyes. Did they see some shortcoming in him? He and Connie hadn’t found a moment alone. But was it because they hadn’t tried or because they were crashing into their racks at night as exhausted from training as they had been from combat just a week before?

  Before she could move away, he whispered her name, “Connie?”

  Those dark amber eyes turned upon him. And Sergeant Connie Davis was nowhere to be seen despite the flight suit and survival vest. Instead, the woman who’d kissed him twice now stood just two feet away.

  “Yes, John.”

  Then she turned and was gone.

  It took him a moment to realize that she’d made it a statement and thereby answered his question. The one he hadn’t known he was asking.

  Yes, she was thinking of him. And with the way he was discovering her mind worked, maybe she was thinking of him even more than he was thinking of her.

  That was hard to imagine.

  Chapter 22

  The takeoff still sounded odd to Connie’s ears. The new rotors and blades had made the Black Hawk sound different. Over a hundred yards away, they’d be almost unidentifiable directionally. The noise signature had been changed drastically, and large caps over the rotor hubs would significantly decrease their radar signature.

  “Half-stealth,” the Sikorsky techs had called it. There hadn’t been time for a major overhaul—replacement of all the skin panels, radar-deflecting enclosures for the weapons, wheels that folded into the fuselage, and so forth—but the Hawks were now significantly quieter. She liked the feel of that.

  That they’d only taken the time to install “half-stealth” said that a real mission wasn’t merely pending, but rather that it was pending soon. A hot one.

  “Okay, Vengeance.” Major Emily Beale’s voice was clear over the intercom. “We still don’t know what’s coming, but we know it will be over hostile and unfamiliar terrain. It will probably be longer than a typical mission with multiple refuelings. This flight is intended as a shake-out of new equipment against friendly forces before we face the unfriendly. So let’s show them what SOAR is made of.”

  A round of “Yes, sir!” echoed back. Connie looked past the back of Clay’s copilot seat next to her shoulder and far enough around to see the Major in quarter profile. Her thinly gloved hands rested lightly on the collective and cyclic controls. Her attention was straight forward, all of the woman hidden by her armor, vest, and helmet. She was the consummate commander and pilot.

  Connie twisted far enough to glance at John seated back-to-back to her, his shoulders so broad that one brushed the back of Beale’s seat. Already he was watching out the far side of the chopper, even though they were barely off the Fort Campbell tarmac.

  Right. She faced her own window and stared out at the falling night. The place they always attacked was where you felt safest. She flicked on the ADAS feed to her visor and the night was replaced with a thousand shades of gray. A quick glance to the rear showed the Fort Campbell field falling astern. They were moving fast at barely fifty feet up. A narrow road slipped by below. Connie glanced down to see her spot by the fence—hers and John’s.

  Even as she considered that she’d like to try a third kiss with John, she spotted the figure. A bright thermal image, nearly white against the colder ground. Just outside the fence line, standing, shifting to follow their flight.

  “Sniper low!” she called out.

  Beale hammered the chopper to the side
as a dazzle of red light from the ground, shown by the loose evening fog, missed her face by mere feet, a dazzling red dot on the ceiling of the cargo bay. Connie zapped the target with the laser alongside her minigun. The sniper held his rifle to the side in defeat. May have even waved before the trees blocked him and her section of fence from view.

  Major Beale continued pushing the Hawk hard as they flew west on the mission profile. Slipping the bird one way, then the other. Rise and turn. Working it. Training her body until the different reactions of the modified Hawk were once again second nature.

  The next attack came a long time later, so long that complacency would have slipped in before Connie went through SOAR training. A hundred different lessons had beaten all the way down to her subconscious that there was no such thing as “safe” when you were in flight. Right after they passed by Jefferson City, Missouri, bright-green tracer rounds slashed across Connie’s helmet display, intentionally wide misses but close enough for the targeting computer to trace back to their origin and provide her with a moving bull’s-eye on her display. In a second the laser mounted on her gun was hot and she shot off a quick three-round burst to where her helmet identified the most likely source.

  She glanced at the upper-right corner of her helmet’s visor to read the information scroll. They were over the Skelton National Guard Training Site. Never heard of it. A report flashed in, briefly lighting the lower-right corner of her vision.

  “Kill confirmed.” That meant she’d landed at least one shot within ten meters of the target vehicle that had fired the tracer. With a minigun at full fire, she’d have sheeted the area with flying lead.

  She heard a sound, someone clapping.

  She turned to it, and all she saw was Major Henderson’s Black Hawk flying tight on their tail and thirty degrees to the side in close formation. Shifting her focus from the ADAS display to the reality beyond her visor, she saw the President’s hands returning to his lap.

  Another shot, an out-of-focus blur across her visor, and she was too late to target it.

  Thankfully, the Major rolled them down into a gully between two low hills, moving them out of range. The training system didn’t mark them as hit.

  Connie turned away, determined not to be distracted again. Civilians were a real problem.

  The flight continued with little change.

  At Nickell Barracks Training Center in Salina, Kansas, they swooped a dozen feet over a very startled guard shack, pulled up, and slid to an abrupt halt. The two Black Hawks each touched one wheel down on the sloped rooftop of Nickell Hall. Fourteen seconds ahead of schedule, they waited until zero time and left twelve seconds later, long enough for a whole squad to pile aboard each bird.

  That close, the rotors were loud enough to draw people outdoors to see what was happening. But the choppers had been too quiet for anyone to think of them as being right on their roof. As the Black Hawks disappeared into the darkness, she could see in the ADAS that the soldiers below were looking in every direction except the right one.

  She’d stood on the ground at Fort Campbell as the DAPs had been flown overhead with their new blades, and even though she knew the sound was unusual, she had trouble crediting the poor reactions of trained soldiers.

  Three times they rose up for midair refuel. This was a real stretch of a flight. Usual Black Route protocols were a thousand miles, two refuels, and five to six hours of flight time. Tonight, they were profiled to arrive at the Nevada Test and Training Range after sixteen hundred miles of flight and eight hours in the air. In full fighting trim.

  As they rose above the Utah-Nevada border for the fourth and last refuel, Connie glanced forward. On the lower edge of her vision, she saw the refueling probe extended forward, reaching out to just past the forward edge of the rotor blades. This was something she’d never seen clearly from the backseat of a helicopter.

  A KC-135 Stratotanker trailed a pair of long umbilicals from the tip of either wing with target baskets at the end. Even as she watched, Major Beale drove forward and dead-centered her target with the 454 pounds of force needed to latch into the fueling system. A glance to the right past John, through the hull and past the weapon’s pylons, revealed Major Henderson doing the same; two Hawks, each trailing just behind either wingtip of the Stratotanker. With the valves interlocked, fuel would be roaring down into their tanks.

  She turned to check on their passengers. Secret Service Agent Adams’s jaw was locked, perhaps a little too tightly. It was unclear whether he was fighting air sickness or still upset at the President’s “needless exposure to undue hazard” he had voiced before the flight.

  The President appeared to be in fine health, though his demeanor was much more serious.

  “Sergeant Davis, is this what every day is like?”

  “Well, Mr. President, first, I’d point out that it is night.”

  A bark of laughter from Major Beale sounded over the intercom.

  Connie hadn’t meant to be funny but could see how it could be taken that way, now that she thought about it.

  “And second, there’s a difference here. We know this mission. We also know that those targeting us have been instructed not to hit us. Short of a mechanical failure, there are few unknowns and little hazard.”

  “Can you describe the difference to a layman?”

  She puzzled over that.

  John answered for her.

  “Imagine, Mr. President, that you are going down the Grand Staircase of the White House. You’ve done it a thousand times, but think back to the first time. I expect it felt foreign or a little peculiar.”

  “Are you kidding? Lincoln trod those same stairs. Wilson, Truman… Scared the hell out of me.”

  “Good, better. Now, imagine that you’re taking that first-time walk down those stairs and you’re surrounded by the best protection ever designed by man.” John patted the inside of the Black Hawk’s fuselage.

  Connie could see the President nod to the agent seated beside him. This was probably the least protection the President had traveled with since the day he was nominated. A single agent, and he’d chosen this man. That was high praise indeed.

  “And imagine that maybe, just maybe, someone is waiting to kill you on the first landing and you can’t see them coming.”

  Another bark of laughter sounded over the intercom from Major Beale. “He doesn’t need any imagination to picture that, does he, Frank?”

  The Secret Service agent merely growled in response as the President laughed.

  John paused, but no one was explaining the joke.

  “Now, sir,” John continued after a moment in that deep voice of his, “imagine those two feelings combined for hours at a time. That monotony of climbing and descending those steps a thousand times, knowing that despite your training and your protection detail, the next instant may hold death even if you’re good enough, even if you’re fast enough.”

  The President was silent for a long moment.

  “Is that the way it is, Em?”

  “He pretty much nailed it.”

  Connie would never have thought to couch it in such terms. Never thought to describe it in the President’s world. Never would have thought about the other person’s point of view.

  John did. He always did. For the hundredth time she was taken back to that ridiculous story he’d told her at the fence. When she couldn’t find herself, when the pain was winning, he had reached out and told her that sometimes the world didn’t have to make sense, at least not from one point of view. Those eighty soaked grunts on the ground had their worldview shattered in that moment, safe and dry one moment, just hanging out and resting up while the drill instructors did what drill instructors do. One of the comforting touch-points of Army training, being yelled at by your DI.

  Until the blue heavens had opened with a deluge. And the drill instructors, who had “stood up through much worse,” laughed.

  “But why?” the President asked. “I’ve asked Em, but I still don’t get it. You, Davi
s, why do you do it?”

  There was a silence on the intercom. She could feel the others turning to her. Of course, they would know this about each other. She wanted to say something flip like Crazy Tim would toss off or funny but heartwarming like Big John. Something wise and thoughtful like Major Beale, with that touch of inner passion and spine of pure steel.

  She searched for any answer other than the only one to be found.

  “The best man I ever knew, my father, was murd—killed by one of these machines. I need to conquer it to prove that a Davis can’t be beaten by a machine.”

  She turned away to face the night outside of the aircraft. Blinked hard against burning eyes. The silence that followed was almost harder to bear than the speaking of it.

  She focused on the changing feel of the Black Hawk’s flight as it gulped down a ton of Jet A fuel. Focused on testing her memory of the wiring diagrams for the ADAS and how those systems juxtaposed the underlying networks. And how the data systems aligned with power and control wiring. And that with fuel and hydraulics.

  By the time she could see the entire Hawk’s overlapping systems in her mind’s eye, the entire Hawk’s nervous and circulatory systems, her physical eyes no longer stung. Her vision had cleared. Once again she could glance forward and see the Hawks disconnect from the tanker and the refueling probe withdraw and tuck back into its casing, retracting out of the ADAS view.

  Once again her field of view was clear.

  Chapter 23

  Major Beale concentrated on keeping her rotors clear as she backed off from the Stratotanker. A blink revealed nothing but darkness beyond her windscreen so she blinked back to focusing on the clear image projected on her visor of the tanker reeling in the two dangling fuel lines.

  The additional fuel made the Black Hawk maneuver differently because of the additional mass in the tanks. The Major’s body adjusted automatically to the change, leaving her free to consider Sergeant Davis’s last statement.