Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers)

by Buchman, M. L.

  “He’s an arrogant son-of-a-bitch. Dangerous, but he’ll trust his strength. If they give him a choice, he’s going for shore.”

  She traced arcs back and forth across the ocean to make sure she didn’t miss any of his most likely routes back. Keeping her attention split between looking for a small police boat with enough biocide to kill millions and not running headlong into a container ship was making her head hurt. Normally the tasks would be divided between pilot and copilot, but Tim wouldn’t have the honed skills of a trained copilot. This meant she had to fly even more slowly.

  Each mile from the rig, she had to swing wider and wider to make sure she didn’t miss his possible paths back to the shoreline. At this rate, he’d be there while she was still carving aerial arcs back and forth over the waves.

  A glance over showed Tim checking his weapons, getting his hands used to the unfamiliar position of the forward weapon controls. Clearly, he’d practiced a lot because his hands settled rapidly without applying more than stray pressure to the flight controls.

  She returned her attention to the Gulf. This was familiar. This she could do. With the Air National Guard she had flown hundreds of missions over the Gulf traffic. The subtle bob-and-weave of boat tracks as they crossed the rolling waves. The rigs as brightly lit as cities, dotting across the surface of the ocean, promising oil and prosperity to the region.

  A bit of relief eased over her as she fell into the practiced regimen of the search part of search and rescue. Lola hadn’t been aware of her own shock at Beale’s reaction. It was like waking up one morning to discover that the sky was purple and the earth was made of cream cheese, simply too wrong to comprehend.

  Yet it made some sense, as Lola made her turn from a northeasterly track to a northwesterly one. It was like a flight crew. Any one of them would rather be shot than see a crewmember shot. Command was crazy, the baddies were crazier, but your crew lay as close as your heartbeat.

  Lola had felt it before, but never like this. Could she imagine standing in front of Big John or Captain Stevenson and telling them their wives were dead? Could she face Cara and Jackson to report Tim’s demise? She’d rather take the round herself any day. No one to tell. No one to care if she died.

  Except maybe this crew. And Tim.

  She turned back northeast, continuing her shoreward sweeps. The widening out of each pass would soon have her running farther side to side than forward. Damn it! Nothing.

  Beale. It was impossible to imagine that anything could make Beale fold. This crew was her lifeblood.

  But it wasn’t. Or rather she’d discovered a higher call, the life growing within her. No wonder the woman had gone catatonic. Her world had shifted far more suddenly than Lola’s. In one instant she went from one of the top fliers in SOAR to feeling absolute terror for her child’s life. Having crossed the threshold, she might have been safe to fly now, but her reactions would still be dulled, hesitant, and they couldn’t afford that right now.

  Would that happen to her someday? If she were carrying a child? The shock of the thought was only exceeded by a clear image of it being Tim’s child. If it was Tim’s child, she might well react as Major Beale had.

  “Look!” Tim called out. “Two o’clock going north-northwest.”

  Lola stared ahead, glanced over at Tim, and looked forward again.

  Nothing.

  “Look through the visor.”

  Lola’s attention had been wholly focused on the camera feed across the inside of her visor. The projected view of the dark night world outside the helicopter as if she flew free of any mechanical structure. The illusion was broken by tactical readouts, targeting information, radar and satellite feeds, and a submenu of the Hawk’s mechanical well-being.

  She shifted her focus through the visor and saw it clear as day. A long line of phosphorescence striking northwest like an arrow. No need to check her instruments to see that it drew a straight line from the Pikes oil rig to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Algae, a cold light, so no heat signature to show up in her visor.

  “Good one, Tim.”

  Now that she had a path, she climbed to five hundred feet to clear any boat traffic and lay down the hammer. The DAP Hawk leaped forward like an eager dog hot on the scent.

  Her father had clearly hot-rodded his boat for him to have gotten this far. But the track continued, growing brighter every minute due to the fresh turbulence exciting the algae.

  “Okay, everyone. Game time. Get ready to burn ’em.”

  “Chief Warrant?”

  Her title sounded strange in Tim’s voice. “What?”

  “We should try to take them alive.”

  “Why?”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “Why?” All she could think about was the excuse to bury the bastard in a couple thousand feet of cold ocean.

  “We need the information. Maybe to make sure this is the only shipment.”

  He was right, and she hated that he was right.

  She took a deep breath and did her best to let it out slowly.

  “Okay.”

  But it still wasn’t. She could feel she was holding on too tight and loosened her hands on the controls. But she couldn’t shake out the knot between her shoulders.

  “Okay. Kee, get out that rifle of yours and get over to Connie’s side. Tie yourself in there. You’ll try it the nice way, but Connie, you be ready to bury their asses with your minigun. Tim, keep your finger on that Hellfire. If it gets ugly, we’ll need to incinerate this chemical but good. If it goes aerosol, it could still sweep ashore in an invisible wave of death.”

  Five more long minutes before anything showed. She followed enough phosphorescent tracks over the years to know this was unusual. Even the big cigarette boats should have been in view by this time. When she finally spotted the boat, it took another two minutes to catch up with it.

  Then she saw why it had taken so long to catch. Painted the blue and white of the Harbor Patrol, the offshore race boat was skipping wave top to wave top in a mad dash for shore. He was running toward a lost bayou backwater.

  “Tim, lay some fire across his bow.”

  Tim chose a trio of FFAR Hydra rockets that augered into the waves just ahead of the boat and fountained three geysers of water fifty feet into the air. The boat powered right through the spray as Lola swung wide to get clear of the towering columns of sea water.

  As she came clear of the water and could see the boat once again, Tim shouted.

  “RPG!”

  Even before the threat detector went off.

  What the hell? No time to think.

  She slammed the cyclic forward and down and rammed in the left pedal. In a moment they were tumbling and the black ocean was coming up fast.

  Connie and Kee were squawking in protest, trying to compensate.

  Lola slammed the cyclic back and right, presenting a minimum profile, most importantly aiming the whirling rotor disc edge on. The RPG flew by so close to the cabin that Lola could almost taste its bad breath.

  She managed to recover before they plunged into the waves. Tim’s sharp lookout had saved them.

  So, they were playing it that way.

  They?

  Her father might be a maniac, but there was no way he’d shoot at an Army helicopter. So there was definitely someone on the boat with him. If he was still alive, he might well be captive.

  Whoever they were, they thought shooting at a U.S. Army helicopter was fair game.

  She climbed back into the air until she had a little space to maneuver.

  The boat had clearly opened its throttles wider, had pulled ahead once again, and was slaloming side to side.

  “Kee, watch for shooters aboard. At least one…” No, there was the RPG shooter and whoever was either driving the boat or, more likely based on the driver’s obvious skill, keepi
ng her father at gunpoint while he drove.

  “There are at least two shooters, and Dad’s the driver. Baddies have had time to reload. Tim, I’m going to roll in and set you up to take out his propellers. And if you hit a gas tank, I won’t complain.”

  Three massive outboard engines were positioned across the stern of the weaving boat, an almost impossible shot. But Tim was right—they needed information almost as badly as they needed to stop them.

  She popped up over a thousand feet and then did a rolling dive just like the final one on the range. The DAP snap rolled with far more willingness than the Huey. Sure enough, another RPG roared upward, but nowhere near the blacked-out helicopter. The roll made them a really lousy target.

  At the last moment Lola steadied the chopper into a nose-down-and-diving-hard attitude. Tim lit off with the minigun mounted on the weapons pylon inboard from the Hellfires and poured the flying fusillade into the water barely a foot off the boat’s stern. He’d read her move as if they’d flown together for years.

  The boat stumbled, then nosed in hard at the abrupt loss of all three screws. Nose down, it kicked the stern into the air. Two propellers were gone and the third was dangling; Tim had sheared all three in a single pass.

  The bow dug in so deep that a wave rolled down the length of the boat. Nothing new for an ocean racer, still impressive to see.

  A sharp crack sounded over the intercom as Lola recovered from the dive barely feet over the boat.

  “I nailed one,” Kee reported. “But that’s all I saw other than the driver.”

  Maybe Lola had miscalculated. She circled to face the now wallowing boat head-on, staying well clear of the oily smoke swirling upward from the ruined engines.

  Small-caliber fire pinged against her windscreen.

  He always was a persistent bastard.

  “Tim.” He laid into the 30 mm cannon, dropping the inch-and-a-quarter shells at ten rounds a second in a blazing arc that encircled the boat.

  Lola flipped on the outside speaker when he stopped.

  “Stop being stupid. Put down the gun and come out with your hands up.” She could feel the bile rise, the rage swelling from every bone of her past. Every bit of it that she’d thought long since laid to rest.

  “Just do it, Dad!”

  Chapter 59

  A big man slowly rose out of the boat’s cockpit, his hands not raised, but both holding the upper edge of the windshield. In plain sight.

  She fingered the control. One 30 mm round through the center of his chest. So close. So easy.

  “Don’t do it.” Tim’s voice was barely audible over the intercom.

  Lola didn’t answer. Her finger actually ached from her desire to end it. Screw the information. Screw the chemical. It didn’t matter if she hit the payload and was caught in the resulting cloud of Soman. At least he’d be dead. Once and for all.

  “Don’t.” Tim’s voice was gentle. As gentle as when they made love. “You’re better than that, Lola. We’d cover for you. No question. But he’s not worth it. You’re better than that.”

  She knew there was no need for anyone to cover for her. She’d seen the Presidential Order granting her full authority to blow the bastard back to hell.

  She held the hover tight, her whole hand now aching with the desire, the need to finish him off. A scream ripped up from her belly, hurt her ears amplified by the intercom. Now she knew how an animal denied her fair kill must feel.

  Well, she wouldn’t be denied. Maybe if the Major was here aboard Vengeance, maybe she could stop this, stop what had become inevitable from the moment in the desert when the D-boys found the chemical lab.

  The Vengeance.

  The moment before she plunged down the trigger, Lola remembered a small voice. The voice of a young girl sitting in a gunner’s chair and deciding that vengeance “just make everybodies sad.”

  She screamed again as she released her hold on the safety. The scream twisted inward and nearly choked her, coming out as a single sob when she eased her finger clear of the trigger.

  A sharp double crack sounded over the headset. Kee’s rifle.

  “What the—”

  The windshield next to her father exploded. A bright muzzle flash flared skyward from close beside him.

  She’d been right the first time. There had been a second shooter, he’d just been hidden.

  Lola slid the Hawk around until they could look down into the racer’s cockpit. A man with an AK-47 still clenched in his hand lay sprawled on the deck; one shot had shattered the windshield, and the second had bored a neat hole where his temple should be.

  Chapter 60

  The Coast Guard had rushed a cutter to the scene from where it had been patrolling farther west. For twenty long minutes she had waited, hovering fifty feet from the boat and staring at her father in silence.

  His smirk had grown.

  When he took a hand off the windshield, as if to scratch his head, Lola sent a round whistling past his ear to slam into one of the engines. The force of the 30 mm shell actually ripped it off the mounting and sent it plunging into the ocean depths.

  The hand reclamped to the windshield and the smirk went away.

  Lola considered dropping the crew chiefs on the deck to secure him. But didn’t want to risk her team. She knew how fast his hands could deliver pain, though he’d rarely done more than slap her, how powerful he would remain despite his age. No one would ever be exposed to that again, especially not her crew.

  Her crew. They were her crew now. Sure, she’d flown command, but they were her crew.

  The Coasties swarmed aboard the racing boat. Once they had it secure, Lola settled the DAP Hawk on the helideck of the Coast Guard boat.

  “You done good, team.” She wanted to make sure they knew, somehow understood how important they’d all become to her. “You done real good.”

  “You too, Chief,” echoed back to her, from all of them one by one.

  The situation remained stable while the Coast Guard secured everything. Her hand still aching from not firing that single 30 mm round through his chest. Even after the moment had passed and she knew she wouldn’t actually do it, resisting the urge to let fly had remained a struggle.

  As soon as the Hawk was secure on the deck and she had it shut down, she clambered out of her seat. At first she’d thought to go down and confront him, stare down the demon from her past face to face. Had thought how it would feel to spit in his face. He was going to get off scot-free, and she’d lost her chance to just shoot him.

  Instead, she sat on the cargo deck of the DAP Hawk and watched the action from her perch high atop the helideck.

  She sent Tim and Connie down to make sure the Coasties handled the Soman with the respect a weapon of mass destruction deserved.

  At first the Coasties had been solicitous of Deputy Sheriff Ricky LaRue, checking him for injuries from his ordeal. Then there was an abrupt shift of attitude. Tim climbed up from where he’d gone below, carrying a plastic bag of something white.

  Suddenly the Coasties had Ricky LaRue slammed against the side of the cockpit and were reading him his rights.

  Her father looked up at the helideck as they handcuffed him, and Lola had to resist the urge to flinch away.

  Instead, she sat up straighter, holding his gaze until he looked away first. Somehow he shrank in size as they dragged him toward the boarding ladder hanging down from the cutter’s tall side.

  Kee sat down beside Lola to clean her sniper rifle. The sounds slowly descended to the steady background hum of a military ship going about its duties, a sound so familiar it was akin to silence.

  “Thought you were a phony.”

  Lola looked up at the radar mast etched white against the night sky. Kee was right. Nothing about her was real. The competent soldier Chief Warrant 2 Lola LaRue. A facade. The woman who has her act so tog
ether, a complete and utter fraud. Some persona she’d made up out of poor assumptions and insufficient bravado.

  Lola turned to watch the Sergeant sight the barrel, then set to running a BoreSnake down it to remove some stray residue.

  Finally Kee stopped what she was doing and turned to stare directly at Lola with those narrow, penetrating eyes of hers.

  “I thought you were all flash. And no f’ing way you deserved someone as good as Tim. I could see you caught him from the first second. Knew that wasn’t right.” Then she flashed a smile that lit her up. “Should’ve known you were okay when Dilya liked you.”

  Kee snapped her gun back together without looking down to see her motions. She turned to stow the gun in its case, then stood for a moment before Lola.

  When Kee glanced down at the deck, Lola followed her gaze.

  Her father stood there, drawing himself up tall despite the handcuffs and four-guard escort.

  Kee turned back to Lola and snapped a smart salute to her. Clear for all to see. Making it obvious to the man below exactly who had taken him down.

  Lola returned the salute. Didn’t even bother to look down as they led him away. He no longer mattered and she didn’t need to witness his final demise.

  Kee then cracked a smile, more welcoming than any salute. “You done really good, Chief Warrant.” And she headed down to the main deck.

  Lola stared up at the sky and contemplated the night. A moon, a spread of stars now that the helideck work lights had been shut down. A night lit much like the roof of the Fort Rucker hangar where Tim had made impossibly gentle love to her.

  Made love to her.

  She closed her eyes, remembering. And she had made love to him. Had felt as if… No, she had belonged in his arms. The safest place in the world. Now maybe she understood Emily a little better. To have a part of a man she loved so much growing inside her, nothing could be more important when that was happening.