Figuring that answering the same question again was redundant, she whispered softly against his lips, “Only if you’ll be the Captain of mine.”
His kiss was all the answer she ever needed.
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NSDQ (excerpt)
US Army Captain Lois Lang circled her Black Hawk helicopter five miles outside the battle zone and ten thousand feet up. Usually height equaled safety in countries like Afghanistan where the Taliban had no air power, especially in the middle of the night. Get above the reach of most of the cheaper weapons—rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and the like—and you were generally safe.
But the Lataband Pass, visible as a thousand shades of green in her night-vision gear, deep in the heart of the Hindu Kush Mountains, was at eight thousand feet and the surrounding peaks cleared ten easily. Even at night in the mountains, ten thousand was pushing the high-hot limit of the helicopters. The high altitude and mid-summer temperatures gave her helicopter’s rotor blades thinner air to push against. To get higher, she’d have to really burn fuel; never a good bet on a long mission.
So, she and her crew circled wide and low, and watched their threat displays closely. Not a soul this far from the pass, not even a goatherd. Nothing to do but wait. Their job was CSAR—she always thought of a seesaw whenever she heard the acronym for Combat Search and Rescue, every time—which meant their night would be quiet and routine, unless something went wrong with the attack the US Army’s 160th was about to unleash at the heart of the pass.
A ground team, probably from the 75th Rangers, had been dumped in this barren wasteland a week before to do recon. And for tonight, they’d reported a massive convoy of munitions crossing this disused pass from Jalalabad, Pakistan, to supply the Taliban forces inside Afghanistan. With the drawdown of US troops, the Taliban were gearing up to hit the Afghani government forces and hit them hard. Special Ops Forces’ job tonight was to make sure the Talies didn’t receive the supplies from the ever-so-innocent Pakistanis.
“Keeping chill?” she asked her crew.
“Chill,” Dusty replied from his copilot’s seat beside her. He’d been a backender, only recently jumped from a back-seat gunner crew chief to front-seat copilot, and they were rotating him through the different helos for cross-training. He normally flew troop transport but had logged time in the heavy weapons DAP version of the Black Hawk, as well. Now that it was nearing his last flight in CSAR, she’d definitely miss him. It was tradition to scoff at backenders who aspired to be pilots, but Dusty definitely had what it took.
“We be very cool, Superwoman,” Chuff and Hi-Gear answered from their crew chief positions right behind the pilots’ seats.
Her nickname had been inevitable. Being named for both of Superman’s girlfriends, Lois Lane and Lana Lang, had labeled her for life. Her mother had always been a crack up, right to her last comment from her death bed, “Flying out now, honey.” The fact that Lois had the same light build, narrow face, and straight dark hair as Margot Kidder—who’d played Lois in the old Superman movies—didn’t help matters.
The two crew chiefs sat in back-to-back seats facing sideways out either side of the helicopter. Steerable M134 miniguns were mounted right in front of them.
The days of the UH-1 Huey medical helos with the big white square and red cross painted on their unarmed bellies were long gone. Bad guys now thought the red crosses made for good targets. And in the modern world of strike-and-retreat tactics, there was no quiet after-the-battle moment when it would be safe to go in and gather the wounded.
Rescue ops now happened right in the heart of the fray, and a medical helicopter arrived ready to both save lives and deliver death simultaneously. Some of the old-guard guys complained about that but not SOAR. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment had flown into Takur Ghar, bin Laden’s compound, and a thousand other hellholes, and CSAR crews like hers had been there to pull the lead crews back out when things went bad.
The two medics, a couple of new guys, checked in with her as well. They were the real crazies: Chuck and Noreen. They went into a hot battle zone armed with a stretcher and a medical bag. Beyond crazy.
“Thirty seconds,” she called as the mission clock continued counting down to 0200. The Night Stalkers, as everyone called the 160th SOAR, ruled the night. “Death Waits in the Dark” was their main motto, and they did. They were the most highly trained helicopter pilots in any military, and she’d busted her ass for eight years to fly with them, spent two more years in training, and had now been in the air with them for two more. It was her single finest achievement.
Even five miles out, the flash of the first strike was a clear streak across the infrared night-vision image projected on her helmet’s visor. The resulting explosion was small. The night’s mission brief had said to stop the convoy, gather intelligence, then destroy the munitions. So, first strike had been merely to stop the gunrunners’ forward progress and get their attention.
The latter part definitely worked. Fire raked skyward and not just little stuff. She could see anti-aircraft tracers arcing upward in a white-hot trail of glowing phosphors and hoped that no one was in the way.
“Stay sharp,” she warned herself and her crew. The fire show was a distraction for others to worry about. Their worry was—
“CSAR 4. Immediate extract. Grid 37,” Archie, the air mission commander called in. He was back at their helibase a hundred miles into Pakistan, watching their world from an MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone circling another fifteen thousand feet above them.
She acknowledged and dove for the roadway. Grid 37 was right in the gut of the pass, so coming in high was just asking for trouble with the on-going battle she could see still in progress. At five feet above Lataband Pass, she unleashed the five thousand horsepower of the twin GE turbine engines. Fifteen thousand pounds of Black Hawk helicopter flung itself toward the battle at two hundred miles an hour. Even with the twists and turns of the narrow gravel road winding between the steep peaks, they were just two minutes out.
These were always the fastest and the slowest two minutes of her life. At her present altitude and the narrow valley she was flying in, even a stray boulder was a life-threatening hazard. Constant adjustments were needed to crest every rise and take advantage of every little dip. This is what SOAR trained for: flying nap-of-the-Earth to come out of nowhere, in the dead of night, exactly on target and on time.
Yet every second that ticked by, someone lay on the battlefield fighting to stay alive long enough to be rescued. She drove the turbines another couple RPMs closer to yellow-line on the engine’s tachometers.
This time the faster feeling won out, and they were on the battlefield with a shocking abruptness. And battle was definitely the operative word. Her tactical display showed two Black Hawks and two of the vicious Little Birds dancing across the sky. But there had been three Little Bird helicopters when they left the airbase.
Grid 37.
Pulling back on the cyclic control to right between her knees for a hard flare dumped speed. Pulling up on the collective along the left side of her seat gained just enough altitude to keep her tail rotor out of the dirt as she slowed. She hammered them down less than a hundred feet from the crumpled remains of the Little Bird helicopter.
Everything was happening at once. Chuff and Hi-Gear were already laying down covering fire, their miniguns blazing with a dragon’s deep-throated roar. At three thousand rounds a minute, they scorched the earth anywhere they spotted a bad guy. Chuck and Noreen were already out at a dead sprint toward the crumpled helo.
She debated pulling back aloft to offer them better cover, but the intensity of the overhead air battle told her if she went aloft, she’d have to move well out of the area to be of any use. Her people stood a better chance if she stayed on the ground.
So instead, she remained a sitting duck in the heart of Grid 37 and counted the seconds. A hundred-foot sprint, with heavy gear but high adrenaline: ten seconds. If the injure
d weren’t trapped but perhaps delirious enough with pain to fight against rescue: thirty seconds to get them strapped down. A hundred-foot return carrying deadweight on a stretcher or slow-limping someone back to her aircraft: twenty seconds more. If they were bloody lucky, they only had to survive one minute beneath the tracer-lit madness so close above them.
Rather than watch the medics, she watched the tactical displays. She was getting heavy cover from above. A technical appeared from nowhere around an outcrop: a Toyota pickup with a heavy-caliber machine gun mounted on the bed—serious nightmare vehicle. But Hi-Gear was on it, and in moments the truck was adding its own fireball plume to the light and confusion of the night.
“Ten,” one of the medics shouted.
Lois shifted from counting up seconds—she’d only reached forty so they were ten full seconds ahead of her best estimate—to counting them down. She eased up on the collective until the helicopter was dancing on the dirt in its eagerness to be aloft.
She ignored the bright sparks of bullets pinging off her forward windscreen, hoping nothing was a big enough caliber to punch through. Her audio-based threat detector filling her ears with muted squeals indicating only small-arms fire; the big stuff was still hunting the SOAR attackers overhead. The directional microphones translated each bullet’s trajectory into fire-return data, and her crew chiefs were pounding back on those positions.
At five seconds to go, a crowd came out of the roiling dust kicked up by her rotors.
She glanced over for just an instant and then returned her attention to tactical while her mind unraveled what she’d just seen. One medic carrying a man over his shoulder, dead-man style. The second medic pulled one end of a stretcher, the other end dragging on the road’s gravel surface with a body strapped to it; good, both of her crew accounted for. Two other guys limping in with their arms around each others’ shoulders, clearly nothing else keeping them upright.
The last two deserved a second glance. MICH helmets and HK416 rifles rather than the FN SCARs that all of SOAR carried across their chests. Delta Force operators. If Delta were on the ground here, it meant this action was much heavier duty than she’d thought. That explained the unexpected scale of the firefight.
At zero on her countdown, she could feel the shift in her two-inch high hover as the team slammed aboard. She gave the stretcher bearer an extra three seconds to load.
The “GO!” came just as she racked up on the collective getting her off the dirt and airborne without a wasted instant.
Whatever was happening in the cargo bay was no longer her problem. They could do everything that most field hospitals could do. If you were alive when CSAR got you, your life expectancy was very high. And sometimes even if you weren’t.
Lois punched through the dust brownout kicked up by her own rotors and headed back the way she’d come. She slewed hard to clear the first turn in the road as the battle behind her moved toward the other end of the pass.
She climbed enough to keep her rotor blades clear of the ground and leaned into the first turn in the ravine.
She barely had time to see the white-hot streak coming in her direction. “RPG!” the warbling tone of the threat detector screeched out. The rocket-propelled grenade impacted her Number One turbine engine with no chance of an evasive maneuver. Dusty pulled the overhead Fire Suppress T-handle as Chuff’s minigun announced he was taking care of whoever had gotten them. That was no longer the problem.
The problem was she was in a turn that needed four-thousand horsepower to recover from, and she now only had twenty-six hundred. She cranked the Number Two engine right into redline and yanked up hard on the collective.
Not enough. The steep rock wall of the pass loomed before them. The night-vision gear gave her a perfect, crystalline view—as well-lit as if it were broad daylight—of the boulder field that was going to kill her Hawk.
And her crew. No! There!
Normally, she’d yank back on the cyclic and let the tail hit first and then belly-flop the bird down—worked well on a flat landing area. The Hawk could take a lot of abuse that way and could often be bounced off its wheels and they’d be on their way.
But not with these boulders. The very worst of the damage path would be right through the center of the cargo bay where she had four injured, two medics, and two crew chiefs.
She slammed over the cyclic and rammed down hard on the right rudder pedal, intentionally driving the pilot’s side rotor blade into the cliff wall.
They would tumble in a hard roll, but it offered the best chance of the crew’s survival.
Only one problem.
She’d known it even before she’d slammed over the controls but didn’t shy away.
US Army Captain Lois Lang’s position was the very first point of contact in the developing crash.
* * *
NSDQ is available at fine retailers everywhere.
About the Author
M. L. Buchman started the first of over 50 novels and as many short stories while flying from South Korea to ride across the Australian Outback. Part of a solo around-the-world bicycle trip that ultimately launched his writing career.
Booklist has selected his military and firefighter series as 3-time “Top 10 Romance of the Year.” NPR and Barnes & Noble have named other titles “Top 5 Romance of the Year.” In 2016 he was a finalist for RWA’s 2016 RITA award. In addition to romance, he also writes thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction.
Past lives include: years as a project manager, rebuilding and single-handing a fifty-foot sailboat, both flying and jumping out of airplanes and he has designed and built two houses. He is now making his living as a full-time writer on the Oregon Coast with his beloved wife and is constantly amazed at what you can do with a degree in Geophysics. You may keep up with his writing and receive a free Starter Library by subscribing to his newsletter at www.mlbuchman.com.
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Copyright 2017 Matthew Lieber Buchman
Published by Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author.
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Cover images:
Lighthouse Sunset © pieterpater
U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter © Michael Kaplan
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