Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers)

by Buchman, M. L.

  She gripped the cyclic and collective controls even tighter, crushing them in her frustration. Her first flight in-country and she was already letting the Major down. The cyclic wiggled in her hand. Then wiggled again hard enough to rock their helicopter a bit side to side. Right. Pilots fly with a loose wrist.

  “Ease up, LaRue!” The order transmitted as clearly through the controls as if it had been shouted in her ear.

  Lola did. Flexing her fingers a moment and feeling Emily Beale’s sure and reliable control take over.

  The Major had risen in just a few short years to be one of the most highly successful officers in the U.S. Army’s 160th. Lola had almost killed herself trying to get on Beale’s crew, and now she was busy screwing up by not measuring up.

  Lola could feel Sergeant Kee Stevenson sitting directly behind her, glaring at the back of her seat as if she could punch holes through the Kevlar armor built into Lola’s chair.

  She shook her head to clear the thoughts and glared down at the battle scene spread out below and around them.

  The Hindu Kush mountains of northeastern Afghanistan punched upward like a madman’s drawing of a nightmare. Impossible crags of barren rock with an upside-down forest ecology. Down below was arid desert. Here, high on the ridges, holly and oak trees of impossible size loomed out of the near-vertical cliffs, just dying to snag an unwary helicopter’s rotor and send them crashing into the valley far below.

  That would be bad enough without the added distraction of the bloodthirsty Afghanis, spending every penny that should have been spent on food for their families on ammunition, just so they could pour it into helicopters that were trying to protect them from the Taliban they hated even more and from… she didn’t even know what. She was just getting more pissed off the more times gunfire pinged against their hull.

  The two crew chiefs behind her were using the opportunity to unleash their miniguns against anyone foolish enough to show up on their threat detectors. Fire at a DAP Hawk and your likely position of fire was fed directly into the crew’s visors as targeting information. It was about the deadliest choice you could make on the entire planet, shooting at a DAP.

  Not her worry. Her concern was the Little Birds, and damn, she’d now lost the other one.

  There, roaring out of a cleft with a stream of fire chasing its butt. Without even thinking, Lola sighted up the cleft, the target sight on her visor lining up with the location that the Little Bird was zipping away from. A moment’s pause to make sure that the tactical display didn’t place any other friendlies on the ground there. Not a one. The few remaining Afghani soldiers were huddled deep inside the remains of their firebase.

  Lola fired off a salvo of three Hydra rockets.

  They roared a dozen feet over the Little Bird, briefly illuminating its bulbous windscreen and tiny cabin with their trails of hot fire. The rockets slammed into the cliff with a very satisfying explosion.

  A nice little rockslide started above the impact site and erased anyone marginally lucky enough to have survived the initial explosion.

  “Splash one!” she called out. Not quite right, they hadn’t just dropped an enemy jet into the ocean, but rather a half-dozen Taliban into their Maker’s keeping forevermore, but it sounded good. Felt good too. A half dozen down probably meant an equal number of U.S. troops would be going home in one piece.

  She glanced over at Beale. No word. No nod of acknowledgment. Not even a glance toward where she’d just axed some of the baddies. The woman had a reputation for being made of cold steel, and Lola hadn’t seen anything different. Didn’t even know why she expected anything else.

  A quick scan of engine and airframe reports said that if anything had been hit, it wasn’t critical enough to show up… yet. Constant vigilance was something beaten into her by a dozen instructors and a hundred missions. And the woman beside her demanded no less than perfection. Not by her words, but by her actions.

  Lola again thought back to that emergency CSAR mission into the heart of Poland. Six months ago, three quarters of the way through her training, she was the closest asset when they’d called for a rescue flight.

  She’d been sent to fetch Major Beale who had just flown twelve hours, the last part with a serious concussion and bleeding from where she’d been shot up. The Major had been worried first about her crew, then her bird, then their precious cargo. Never about herself.

  Lola had helped shove the barely conscious woman onto a stretcher, had to strap her down so that she didn’t get up to check on her crew herself rather than take anyone else’s word for their well-being. That was the kind of woman Lola wanted to fly with. The kind of woman she wished she could be. The kind of woman she knew she wasn’t. Anyone she fooled otherwise simply didn’t know the real Lola LaRue.

  But no one really did know her. Not with Mama Raci dead and gone. She’d be best off if she could just keep flying below everyone’s radar.

  The Major backed off the DAP Hawk, not enough to be out of the action but enough to give the Little Birds room to maneuver and to provide Lola with an overview of the mayhem that was tonight’s firefight.

  The local militia had decided to shoot up a forward base and tear the Afghani army a new one just for existing. The U.S. Army had been trying for a dozen months to turn the battle against the Taliban over to the Afghani regulars, but they couldn’t stay organized long enough to stay alive. So now, instead of the troops doing primary protection and wide-perimeter patrols that were standard around a U.S.-run base, the Taliban were able to slip in until they were right on top of the Afghanis, dug in wholly undetected before they opened fire.

  That left it up to the U.S. SOAR 160th, the Night Stalkers, to come in on emergency call and do the heavy cleanup that should never have been needed, if the Afghani regular army had done it right to begin with.

  At long last Major Beale jerked up and back on the cyclic, flipping them from close hover support through about the smoothest roll maneuver Lola had ever seen, and twisted them back toward base. The collective and cyclic controls in her hands were hard-linked to the Major’s, the pedals beneath her feet as well. Lola had felt every tiny adjustment of the maneuver, and she still had no idea how the woman did it.

  The four Little Birds—she counted them twice to make sure they were all accounted for, then counted them once more to be sure—danced and zipped just ahead of them. The Major kept their speed down so that they didn’t overrun their flock. Little Birds were more agile but not as fast as a Black Hawk.

  Lola was drenched with sweat inside her flight suit. She was used to the deceptively hard work of sitting in a copilot’s seat and wrenching around ten tons of helicopter. And she’d been in enough firefights to not flinch at a spray of rounds smacking into the forward windscreen right at eye level.

  What she wasn’t prepared for was the exhaustion from the hyper-focus required by close-in battle flying. A couple years of flying forward patrol support with the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne hadn’t prepared her for tonight’s flight. The Eagles hung back and depended on the superior reach of their rockets, 30 mm cannon, and whatever other nasty armament they were carrying for that flight. They also flew far more often in the daylight than the dark. At night they sent the 160th.

  When she’d flown in a search and rescue bird, she’d sat yet another step behind that. Most of the time. There was a reason for the C in combat search and rescue. It meant going hot into heavy situations to pull out the wounded. It was the C that had hooked her out of CSAR.

  Flying forward combat rather than SAR meant she’d be saving guys before they were already injured. She could fight the battles and prevent the troops being injured in the first place. But she’d never flown consistently this close in during combat.

  Major Beale had rarely been more than a dozen rotor widths—the fifty-six feet from one tip to the other of their main rotor blades—away from the action. It was easier to
think in “rotors,” especially when trees or power lines were always reaching out to snag you.

  Anyone who thought that airborne battles weren’t up close and personal had clearly never flown with Major Beale.

  “Quiet night.” One of the crew chiefs. Sergeant Kee, of course, spoke calmly over the intercom.

  The woman had to be bragging for Lola’s sake to make her feel even more incompetent.

  “Didn’t even use up two cans,” the Sergeant continued. Two cans of ammo through their miniguns. That was an immense amount of lead they’d fired in just, Lola checked the clock, forty-five minutes. She checked the clock again. It had seemed like six hours. Their fuel still showed enough to get home without a midair refueling. The battle had been so intense that she’d lost all track of time.

  “Clean and green,” the head mechanic, Connie Davis, announced. She could have been a prerecorded machine voice for all the emotion she portrayed.

  Lola wanted to shove up her visor to wipe away the salty sweat that was trickling into her eyes and stinging. Would have, but she didn’t want to embarrass herself even more than she already had in front of the Major.

  She tried to resist glancing over at the woman. Barely a foot separated their shoulders. A foot and about a thousand miles. Not a single comment. Not a gesture. No feedback at all on how she’d done.

  “Take us home, Chief Warrant.” Major Beale’s voice was quiet over the intercom. Real quiet, in a way that didn’t bode well.

  “Aye, sir.” Damn! “Ma’am.” She couldn’t even get that right. In the old Army, the way it had been when she’d signed up just six years ago, all superior officers were “sir” regardless of gender. Now it was shifting and you never knew. The older women still expected a “sir,” but the younger ones wanted a “ma’am.”

  Hard to believe that Major Beale was only a year older than Lola. Made Lola feel like a total slacker. Like that comedian had said, “When Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for three years.”

  She followed the Little Birds and checked her heading for the Bati soccer stadium. Just concentrate on getting them back in one piece. She could fly that well at least.

  Chapter 5

  “Let’s go!” Tim Maloney stood from the chow table but didn’t head off.

  “Go where?” Lola had just finished breakfast, for which she’d had dinner, as the sun set, and they were about to have a whole night off. No missions tonight, which was good. For a whole week, all Lola had done was prove that she’d been a total idiot in signing up for SOAR in the first place.

  Now, with nothing to do for a whole night, she dreaded what she knew was going to happen. She’d overthink every action for the last week, each flight, each maneuver. She’d dwell on them until she’d spiraled into a place of depression and self-disgust at her own incompetence. She’d land in a place that reminded her far too much of living with her father. A helpless downward spiral of crashing self-esteem that she’d always been powerless to stop once she got caught in the downdraft.

  “Go where?” she repeated when Tim didn’t bother to explain.

  He just gave her enough of a light punch on the arm to get her moving. She shrugged. What the hell, why not? Maybe he’d keep her from dwelling on how badly she’d screwed up her career. Two years of training and now she was flunking out. Not in testing, not in training; it was the real world where she wasn’t good enough. Well, that didn’t come as such a surprise. After all, it was right on track with the rest of her life.

  Tim rousted the rest of the table, snagging the Majors and the D-boy colonel along the way. A couple of the Little Bird crews tagged along and enough Rangers that soon twenty or so of them were trooping out into the dark of Bati air base. Probably a trip into town. It was dangerous to go with less than a squad, but they were nearer a platoon now, and that was too big and would just tick off the locals.

  Tim had scooted ahead. Just outside the chow tent he was handing out old second-generation NVGs. The monocular night-vision goggles were monstrous by today’s standards. Where in the world had he dug up these dinosaurs? They were heavy and covered the face from tip of nose to top of forehead to block interfering light. A single lens stuck out like a stubby misplaced unicorn’s horn right over the bridge of the nose.

  Soon everybody had one and Tim was gesturing to put them on.

  Lola decided to play along. He was the only reason she’d felt welcome at Bati. Every day he found something to amuse her or help her out. He’d showed her where a pretty decent weight set had been gathered in the back of a supply tent, complete with a couple of benches and enough iron to keep a half-dozen grunts happy. When he’d discovered she played backgammon, he’d turned a couple of games into a daily morning ritual between breakfast and sack time. They were fairly well matched, which kept it interesting.

  She pulled on the NVGs, adjusting the straps so that they settled not too uncomfortably. With the goggles on, she could see that Bati field was brightly awash under a half-dozen infrared lights. Shadows of helicopters were sharp-edged and overlapping against the bright green wash. A small flag stood in front of her with a number 1 on it.

  Tim held out a golf club. No, it was a golf putter and a ball with a strip of infrared reflecting paint and the letter S on one side, a 1 on the other.

  “I knew color wouldn’t show up,” Tim said loudly enough for everyone to hear. “So your balls are marked for your group.”

  A number of vulgar jokes were tossed back from the crowd as Tim distributed putters and golf balls. A couple of the ruder remarks were aimed her way. Typical. Army grunts always tried to see if they could offend or embarrass the women entering their ranks. Lola knew from watching others in the past that once you showed the least weakness, they’d drive it home until you wanted to curl up and die. But she’d spent a lot of her teen years working the kitchens at Mama Raci’s, nothing was offensive after that. And years of search and rescue had long since cured her of any squeamishness.

  “Just ’cause I got no balls, mon,” she shot back at one of them, “don’ mean I ain’t gone kick you in yours.” That got the expected laugh and they eased off.

  A D-marked ball for the colonel and the two other D-boys. A dozen R’s for the rangers. S for the rest of SOAR. He fished into his bucket and came up with A balls for a couple of Army folks who were there in support roles—three armorers and a couple kitchen guys. Tim even had little scorecards and stubby pencils. Where the hell had he gotten all this?

  Only when everyone was outfitted and people were knocking around their golf balls on the rough dirt of the hard-packed running track did Tim continue.

  “Twenty bucks!” he called loud enough to stop conversation. “Twenty bucks each into the kitty. Three prizes: a half, a third, and a sixth. Cough it up!” Some grumbled, though most pitched in with good humor. With Tim cajoling them, no one walked away and he soon had five hundred bucks stuffed into his pocket.

  Tim set them off down the course in pairs. Eighteen holes around Bati stadium. Obstacles were rough ground; some oddly placed boards; a ramp that led four tiers up into the bleachers, thirty feet along the narrow seat ledge, and back down; and the undercarriages of helicopters and service gear. He must have worked on this through the whole day when the rest of the crews had been sleeping.

  She and Tim ended up together as one of the last teams. Just before they teed off, Colonel Gibson came up. Even with the NVG covering most of his face, there was no mistaking the man. The smooth movement, the lower jaw marked clearly by a broad scar that looked piratical rather than disfiguring.

  Without saying a word, he took the ball out of Tim’s palm and dropped his own in its place. He glided back down toward the tee-off for the second hole.

  Tim laughed quietly. “Didn’t think I’d get that by him.”

  “What?” Lola watched Tim as he fished out another ball with an S on it.

  He glanced around, but they
were alone at the moment. He took the two balls, the S- and the D-marked ones and rolled them together on the ground. The one with the S bounced and gyrated over the rough ground, but went generally straight. The one with the D wobbled, then stabilized into a long, curving track. They came to rest a dozen feet away and several feet apart.

  He gathered them up and dropped the one with the D back into the bucket with a few other leftovers.

  “Saw them in one of those party game catalogs. Couldn’t resist.”

  Lola looked at him aghast and then glanced down the course to make sure that no hoard of angry putt-putt golfers was fast approaching. “You gave rigged balls to everyone?”

  “Everyone except SOAR.” He held up his S for her to see. “Gotta keep our reputation in place.”

  “And if the Rangers figure it out, they’re gonna beat the shit out of you.” Even as she said it, she thought over the start. Tim had only paired SOAR with other SOAR. Everyone else was paired with someone with a rigged ball. They’d attribute all of their problems to the rough course. She shook her head in grudging admiration.

  “You really are Crazy Tim.”

  Tim shrugged negligently. “Seemed worth the risk. Besides, they’re just Rangers. How would they ever know?”

  ***

  And they didn’t. Lola patted the eighty-five dollars in her pocket for coming in third. Henderson won, not a big surprise, and Colonel Gibson placed second with his S-marked ball. She’d finished only a stroke ahead of Tim and Major Beale. Kee was three strokes back and was laughing about it right until Lola finished and tallied up a winner. Well, screw her. Lola had had fun.

  More than just the game, though. She’d really had fun because of the time with Tim. For a couple of hours she’d forgotten herself. Laughed a bit. Laughed a lot.

  Tim told stories of his prior escapades. He’d done everything from the dumbest stunts to the most elaborate. Offering around pepper chewing gum for Marines the moment before his chopper had dumped them in central nowhere for a weeklong, deep-country survival training class.