Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  So, Connie was Ron Davis’s girl. She hadn’t connected that, despite seeing his name in the Army file. Davis’s file hadn’t mentioned that the man named in the “father” box had also been a highly decorated sergeant first class. A chief mechanic for the 101st Airborne’s Combat Aviation Brigade, the Screaming Eagles.

  Useless. Army files, never the right information.

  Emily had only flown with Sergeant Ron Davis once, one of her first Army training missions when she was still a wet-behind-the-ears second lieutenant fresh out of West Point. It had been just weeks before his flight was lost. He hadn’t mentioned having a daughter. Nor much of anything else.

  She could see the core-deep quiet of the man in his child. But did she have the heart? The heart that had taken Emily aside after that long-ago flight and told her how to fly her best. A lesson she’d never forgotten.

  “Get out of your head, Lieutenant.” Ron Davis had stopped them to stand out in the driving, chill rain that had hammered Fort Rucker flight school that night, where no one else would think to pause. As good a place as any for privacy on the busy airfield. Or maybe he was so focused that he didn’t notice the weather.

  “I’ve sat as a back-ender on a thousand flights and you’re a goddamn natural. But until you get out of your head, you’re gonna be just another chopper pilot. Some flight jocks crank rock ‘n’ roll to chill out that part of their brain. Some pick fights when they’re on the ground. Some meditate. Some never shut the fuck up. Some kill the chopper and their crew by holding on too tight. You, you’re a goddamned pillar of strength. I’ve never met a woman so tough who was still a woman. Accept that. Fly from that strength.”

  He’d cracked a smile, as brilliant as it was brief.

  “And do me a favor. Any bastard who doubts you, fly his ass straight into the ground.” She’d flown by that simple motto for the decade since and it had served her well.

  Emily glanced over her shoulder to see how her newest crew chief fared. One of John’s big hands reached across and rested for a moment against the center of Davis’s back. Between one moment and the next, she shifted from head hanging down, fingers clamped on the handles of her minigun, to upright, a deep breath visibly taken as if she was starved for air until that moment.

  Emily wished she could turn far enough to see John’s reaction.

  But maybe she didn’t have to. Davis nodded without turning. John’s hand patted her lightly between the shoulders, then withdrew from Emily’s field of view.

  She turned back to descend from behind the tanker. Their flight profile had them entering the Nevada Test Range from the southeast, so she and Mark had agreed to go true nap of earth and circle to the northeast corner through Tikaboo Valley. See if the ground testers were ready for what Vengeance and Viper were ready to hand out to them in the dark of the predawn hours.

  ***

  Her equilibrium restored by John’s kind gesture, Connie quickly checked her equipment and her surroundings. No one seemed to have noticed her lapse, her momentary teetering on the brink, something that had never happened to her before during a flight. Nor would she let it happen again.

  She glanced back once more and, through the ADAS display, spotted a blur straight behind them. It shifted as Major Beale adjusted the trim, changing their flight line ever so slightly. Not an illusion of the new system. A fighter coming up on their tail fast. Nothing on the threat detector. Stealth. They were throwing a stealth jet at them as they came off the tanker. Never let down your guard when you’re going to be somewhere predictable. Another five seconds and it would all be over.

  “On our six,” was all the warning Connie needed to give.

  Without even taking the heartbeat to check for herself, the Major slammed over into a high-gee turn with a trust that still startled Connie. If her crew chief said something, that was now good enough for the Major. Warmed by the unspoken praise, Connie armed the laser and raked it across the flight path of the approaching jet.

  Her own sensors rattled and chittered, near miss. Head-to-head now. Connie slid the gun forward on its mount and leaned forward until her arms and head were outside the gunner’s window. She kept her fire as Clay fired the main laser, which would shoot a broader light in keeping with the increased threat presented by his larger weapons.

  Someone groaned over the intercom, but Connie ignored it. No live rounds in this exercise, so no one was suddenly shot and bleeding out.

  The jet’s control wavered as some critical system decided it had been damaged enough to go off-line, but the jet kept coming. Not down yet.

  “Viper,” Major Beale called to her husband. “They’re playing dirty.”

  He keyed his mic three times, two short and one longer. Two eyes and a grin, his electronic version of a smiley face. The Morse code for the letter U, the upward smile.

  Connie hung on as Vengeance jinked high, low, left, then right to make a tougher target. But they remained in a general line head-to-head with the jet, firing the whole way in.

  Another groan.

  Connie knew from experience that the Hawk’s crew flew in silence, so that would be the President or agent Frank Adams.

  A glance up through the ADAS showed Viper in a high loop and roll. A quick trade of speed for a couple thousand feet of altitude and then he was plummeting nose down from above.

  The lead jet faltered and dove to return back to base as a casualty. A second jet, which had been hiding directly in his leader’s wake, never knew what hit him as Major Henderson shot his metaphorical tail off from straight above. With helicopters that flew at barely a quarter the speed, they’d just nailed a pair of America’s stealth fast-movers.

  “Ready to play?” She could hear the Major’s smile in his simple question over the radio.

  In answer, Major Beale just rolled Vengeance half over so her rotor was pointed straight at the ground and they were hanging upside down from their seats, then she cranked all the lift her bird could muster. They accelerated straight down while in inverted flight. Time to get where there wasn’t so much open space. Jets didn’t do nearly as well close to the ground.

  Connie reveled in the free fall and braced her gut muscles for the roll-out at the bottom of the descent.

  Chapter 24

  John heard the moaner shift to gagging. Without taking his attention off the skies, he fished out a couple of the barf bags and held them out. They were snatched from his hand.

  A loud retch blasted the intercom.

  “Goddamn it!” Emily cursed. “Shut off your mic, Sneaker Boy!”

  “Not me,” was the response, though the President’s voice wasn’t all that steady. “Frank’s having a tough time. There,” a loud click on the intercom, “I got his mic switched off.”

  “Fine! Now shut up. We’re busy.”

  At five hundred feet, the Major turned their dive into a long roll, leveling out and pulling damn near max gees.

  John huffed out a breath to decrease the pressure and tighten his gut even further. Heard others doing the same.

  It drove him down hard in his chair and made him glad they’d had a week to break in the new rotors and blades while practicing with the new gear. He’d hate to trust a maneuver like that to new blades. The fact that they were a different blade type, stealth designed, continued to worry him. The Major hadn’t killed him yet despite doing much harder stunts over the last year, a good sign for their continued survival. But as her chief mechanic, it was his job to worry.

  He looked out his side of the chopper, and a rock wall was flashing by at barely two rotors out. Two widths of their main rotor away, an irregular, craggy, chewed-up cliff whipped by at nearly two hundred miles per hour. It was weird to see the whole wall of it through the ADAS, rather than just what he could spot around the sides of the minigun. He tried to gauge real versus apparent distance to find some camera distortion effects. But in the dark, the cliffs looked impossibly close when they were visible at all. The camera offered the only really usable view.


  He glanced down between his feet. Fifty feet above a dry stream bed. She must be flying extra high to keep the President safe. They’d all have to compensate for that, the extra height making them more likely to be in the radar of some damn ground-pounder playing at unfriendly.

  They broke out of the canyon, and he scanned the skies out his side of the craft and made sure to include the stern in his scan. Connie had looked astern and spotted the fast-mover; he should have spotted it as well. He wouldn’t forget again.

  He also tried looking straight up and straight down.

  “AA, two o’clock, very low.”

  The Major rocked sideways with a twist and put John’s window square on target. The registers ticked off a couple of laser hits inbound, but not enough yet to declare them injured. He lit the laser rigged to his minigun and raked it back and forth in a swirling, flattened figure-eight pattern guaranteed to lay down the most damage in the least time with an extra twist at the center that Kee had taught him. He had the satisfaction of seeing the antiaircraft truck flash a red “destroyed” light within moments.

  They were all a little twitchy about AA since Major Henderson had been shot down a couple months back.

  ***

  Connie let a part of her mind drift as she always did in battle. Not much, but enough. If she didn’t, she’d lose her focus. But her dad had taught her that sometimes a little distraction went a long way.

  Part of her mind always kept a running tally of the high-stress maneuvers so that she could anticipate failures. Major Beale was laying it on for President Matthews, though he’d pulled an iron jaw so far, pretty good for a civilian. Once the Secret Service agent had bagged his dinner, he didn’t look quite so green.

  Or maybe Major Beale was just having fun. There were things you could do at two thousand meters in freezing air that you couldn’t pull off at the same altitude in Afghanistan’s high and hot. The air got too thin at a hundred degrees for a helicopter to do much of anything interesting.

  So Connie knew that she’d be checking the collective linkages and the swash plate sooner rather than later. She also wanted to keep an eye on varying wear due to the five blades and their strangely articulated tips that made them so much quieter.

  In another track of her mind she also kept a running assessment of her own responses to the ADAS. The first problem with the ADAS became rapidly clear, as it had in testing—it was too damn good. It made you stop watching other indicators. She had to consciously remember to look inside the cockpit as well, because watching the projected world on her visor was so spectacular.

  Enhanced infrared, it showed as black and white inside her visor, but she could see just how close the Major flew to rocks and trees to stay out of the sight and target range of possible threats. The pilot and copilot would have selections of heavy weapons targeting and terrain flashing across their visors. Another feed would include status of mission profile, planned versus actual position, and feeds from ground and airborne surveillance systems.

  She and John had their own array of threat detection, engine status, and all the information from HUMS. The chopper’s health and usage management systems provided extensive information and alerts to be filtered and managed. She flipped down into the subscreens for a moment, but all indicators were showing green. She knew from experience that HUMS was a little slow to pick up on sudden damage, such as being shot. It hadn’t reported the damaged rotor blade in the Hindu Kush until the blade actually broke free. But for general wear and tear, it was a nice backup to her mental tally.

  They passed over a small ground squad wearing the infrared reflectors that showed them to be friendlies. It took training to not reflexively pull the trigger when spotting armed squads deep inside hostile territory. Even with all her years of flight, Connie still had started to depress the trigger, but had resisted the instinct to hammer it down.

  The copilot, Clay, took out another troop that didn’t wear the badges, with John doing a little cleanup to be certain, as the Major slalomed through the snow-capped mountains of Nellis Air Force Base’s test and gunnery range.

  Connie also usually ran one more channel in her mind. Music. With Mozart or Bach or Handel. Her dad had played the oboe. It was her alarm clock for a thousand mornings, that sharp squee-squaaa of him warming up an oboe reed, even at the far end of the house. She’d never thought to ask him why the oboe and now she’d never know. At twelve, she hadn’t thought yet to ask him all the questions a grown woman needed to know about her father. By thirteen he was gone, taking all of his answers with him to an unknown grave.

  She sought one of Vivaldi’s soaring tunes from her memory and relaxed into its familiar embrace which allowed her thoughts to focus on—

  A flash came up on her helmet visor, intelligence from Major Henderson, peeking over a ridge about five kilometers to the east. The little glyph was almost lost in the sea of information, but not quite. A row of four tanks waited just around the corner, bunkered in, ready to score on Vengeance as they cleared the next ridge.

  “Major?” She voiced the question to make sure that Major Beale saw it.

  “Yep!” Emily Beale was on it, and those tanks were gonna go home dry. It wouldn’t be happening for them tonight.

  “Honey?” Beale called over the radio. She was definitely enjoying herself.

  “Yes, dear?” Henderson was having a good time, too.

  “How about shooting one of your cute little tank killers at the ridge in front of us?”

  “In five, four…” Henderson interrupted himself, “Gonna hydrate ’em, dear?… One. Stay low… And it’s gone.”

  Eleven and a half long seconds. Connie counted them in her head. Eleven and a half seconds while the tanks would be desperately trying to locate the deceptively muted blades of the choppers echoing strangely off the canyon walls. Stealth rotors sounded almost as if they were flying away, not toward their line of flight.

  Eleven and a half seconds. An eternity in battle, though all they were doing was hovering behind the safety of the ridge. A Hellfire missile crossing five kilometers and traveling at Mach 1.3 would impact the other side of the ridge precisely…

  She heard the krump followed by a rising cloud of dust as nine kilos, twenty full pounds of high explosive, smithereened the rock of the cliff face with deadly accuracy. Hit a tank with one, and there was gonna be a hole that started on one side and didn’t end until it came out the other, no matter what or who it ran over in between.

  As the cloud of dust rose above the ridge, Major Beale slid them up and forward into its shadow. They’d played this game many times in Afghanistan. When a dust storm came, you couldn’t see much through it, but you could certainly use it, assuming you could stay out of its hot-and-blind kill zone. But here the dust was mostly cold, and those tanks sitting in the dark of the frozen desert were blazing hot in comparison to the surrounding landscape. Easy to spot.

  “Half salvo away. Definitely going to rain on their parade.” In moments, nine 2.75-inch Hydra 70 rockets were spread out in a slashing array. Small but mighty, the multiheaded serpents of mythology pounded into the earth a hundred feet in front of the whole line of dug-in tanks. Tall billows of sand and rock shot up into the air right in front of them.

  “Think they all know they’re dead yet?” Mark’s Texas drawl was back, worse than in a poker game. “Let’s jus’ go on down thar and find out.”

  As Vengeance rode through the settling cloud of shattered cliff, Connie could look forward through the helicopter as if it wasn’t there.

  Major Henderson slipped up behind the farthest tank, its occupants still too startled to respond. No rotation of the turret, no one managing the turret machine gun. He hovered just above the top-center loader’s hatch and began easing his Hawk’s nose up and down, smacking the tank repeatedly with one of his front wheels. Inside the tank, it must sound like the fist of God knocking at the door.

  Chapter 25

  “Now what are you really doing here, Peter?” Major Beale f
ired the question they were all thinking directly at the President. Connie was still shocked at how they spoke to each other.

  “And why the sudden, rush upgrades to our birds?” That was unusual enough to worry Connie significantly. She’d checked every enhancement a dozen times, but the changeover was still too fast for her comfort. She glanced down the table and wondered what each of the members of the two crews thought. She’d like to ask them and find out, but it wasn’t her place.

  They sat around a large dining table in a secure conference room at the Tonopah Test Range Airport. Flags lined one wall: U.S., Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine, Coast Guard… A banner for each fighting force that defended this country.

  And for a hundred miles south and a hundred and fifty to the east ran the Nevada Test and Training Range. Nuclear tests and secret aircraft. Area 51 UFOs and Red Flag aerial combat training. Where Skunk Works had tested the fastest and the nastiest jets ever launched into the sky. U-2 spy planes and the SR-71 Blackbird had roared aloft here. The F-117 stealth fighter had been born in this baking desert. She’d cut her Special Forces teeth flying war games up and down this stretch of desert.

  The President sat at the head of the long walnut table with Beale and Henderson to either side. Viper’s crew ranged down one side, Dusty, Captain Richardson, and Crazy Tim. Connie, John, and Clay sat down the other side. No Secret Service, not even Frank Adams. No assistants. The remains of a fine Mexican meal of tamales, enchiladas, and as rich a beef caldo stew as Connie had ever eaten were scattered about the table. The food had been spicy enough to make her sweat, and her mouth still burned despite the sweet dessert.

  President Matthews toyed with the last of his tres leches cake for a moment.

  “I wanted to see what you keep telling me about my lack of understan—”

  “Cut the bull, Sneaker Boy. This is me you’re talking to.”

  John leaned in to whisper in Connie’s ear, “Friends back when they were growing up. Wonder if they fought so much back then.”