The Ides of Matt 2017

by M. L. Buchman

  “You have a strategic mind. The 5D can’t be commanded by a tactician. Tacticians always get thrashed when it gets really ugly. Keep your people at the forefront of your priorities. That’s always the way through the problem.”

  Then he’d cracked that megawatt smile of his. “A’sides, worst that cain happ’n is y’all end up down a six-foot hole.”

  She’d already finished her sandwich, but the mug of ice tea had still been full enough to serve her purpose.

  Chapter Nine

  You want out-of-the-box, Mark?” she said between gritted teeth and hauled up on the DAP Hawk’s collective, pouring every trick she had into gaining max climb rate.

  “What?” Tim asked from beside her.

  She ignored him.

  “You want stupid frickin’ Hollywood? Fine, I’ll give you stupid frickin’ Hollywood!”

  Tim, being a good copilot and a wise husband, kept his mouth shut.

  The helicopters were a problem, but the jets were a disaster. They could move at Mach 2 and maneuver better than a BMW Mini. Even the DAP Hawk could only go one-fifth the speed of a Sukhoi.

  “Okay, folks,” she got on the general frequency. “It is time to do what we do so well. Flight level is one hundred feet,” though she kept climbing for all she was worth. “I want you to form up in a circle.”

  One thing Mark Henderson had always done a great job of was give the perfect amount of direction. A royal pain in the ass on the ground, but he was the master of the air. He never left a need for questions. But he also never said too much, thus trapping the flyers’ actions into narrow boundaries.

  “You are going to circle at one hundred feet above ground level as fast as you can go. Topography goes down, you go down. It goes up, you climb. If they come at you from above, Kara and I will take them.” Or do our damnedest. “They come at you from the side, don’t break formation to chase them. Your main firepower is facing forward. You shoot dead ahead as you circle. When they’re out of your sights, they’ll be in the sights of the helo circling right behind you. Trisha.”

  “Here, boss.”

  “You’re my chaos demon,” which was definitely what the woman was. “I want everyone on her tail. She circles more to the east, you shift with her. She circles to the south, you follow. Trisha keep that circle moving back and forth so they can’t get a fix on you.”

  “Roger that.”

  Already Lola could see them setting up a four-helo spinning top; one Hind and three Kamovs. When they fired their weapons they’d be like a spinning buzz saw of rockets and flying lead.

  Her tactical display said less than thirty seconds until bad news arrived. And the Russians had set up the pincer well, they’d be arriving from three directions at once; no chance of escape.

  “Tighten it up. Keep close together. I want your gap under one rotor between helos.”

  Even as she said it, they tightened up. They were now moving fast and began rolling back and forth over the river valley and the steep banks. Every ten to twelve seconds they made a full spin, shifting back and forth along the river like the circle itself was alive.

  Nobody but a SOAR team could fly like that.

  Chapter Ten

  One of the Sukhoi fast movers came in fast and low, thinking the four helos spinning over the landscape like a psychotic, whirling dervish were an easy target.

  Trisha fed it a Russian Vympel R-73 air-to-air missile from her KA-52’s spread of weaponry before it knew what was happening.

  Dennis killed the first enemy Kamov attack helicopter, and Lola didn’t have time to spare to see what happened to the other three attack helos that came in low, but there was a hell of a lot of fire being exchanged in her peripheral vision—enough to light up the wide river valley in brilliant stroboscopic splashes that wreaked havoc on her helmet’s night-vision display.

  Her real concern was up high and she kept climbing for the DAP Hawk’s service ceiling and to hell with the fuel reserve as she clawed for altitude.

  Lola was trying to set up the sleight-of-hand, knowing the most dangerous attack would be coming down from high above, if only she could get up into position in time. She had dealt the game for the bad guys to see, four cards face up along the river valley and spinning in their circle.

  But she’d kept two cards hidden up her sleeve.

  The apparently easy target was the circling helos…to anyone at their altitude. Viewed from above they were an easy and, more importantly, an obvious target.

  Two of the jets and one of the massive Mil-28 Havoc gunships came in high to do just that.

  The stealth DAP Hawk had been built for only one reason, to shoot better than anything else on the planet. Only SOAR had the Direct Action Penetrators and as far as Lola knew, the Vengeance was the only surviving stealth model—after the loss of one in bin Laden’s compound, and the other that had almost killed the now-retired Majors.

  Of the two jets who’d thought to attack from above, the first one had come in very high.

  Kara’s drone carried four Hellfire missiles and she launched them all.

  Two of them tore up the Sukhoi Su-23.

  That left a jet and a helo attacking from above, and Lola had a single drone with no more ammunition and her own DAP Hawk.

  The formidable Su-30 jet rolled into a dive, aimed straight down at the spinning circle of helicopters from above. That was the reason Lola had Trisha shifting them side-to-side, to make them a harder target in case Lola’s plan didn’t work. Not that it would buy them more than a few seconds of life, but it might be all she needed.

  The second jet flew right past the DAP Hawk never realizing it was there. Tim sent a phalanx of six Hydra 70s into the belly of the beast as it plunged downward.

  Three connected and blew off its wing, sending the jet into a death spiral.

  The Mil-28 Havoc pilot who had come in high was good, very good. The Havoc dodged hard when he saw the Su-30 get shredded.

  But Lola’s bird cast almost no radar image and regrettably for him, he guessed wrong about her location. The Russian helo ate a barrage from Tim’s Vulcan 20mm cannon.

  But before he died, the Russian pilot managed to launch an Igla-1V missile straight down at the buzz saw of helos still alight with their own battle.

  Lola put herself between the missile and her people. She couldn’t risk flares or chaff, because if the missile decided to ignore the distractors, it would hit her team circling below.

  She couldn’t force the nose of her helo to bear on the missile in time. So she rolled the DAP Hawk onto its side, exposing herself broadside to the missile.

  Lying on her back in the crew-chief’s seat behind Lola, with her minigun pointed straight up and firing six thousand rounds a minute, Connie killed the missile only a few rotors before it would have slammed into the Vengeance.

  The heat blast was intense. The shockwave of the exploding missile flipped them out of the sky like they were a swatted fly.

  Engines flamed out.

  She and Tim fought to restart them.

  Hydraulic systems failed as shrapnel sliced through crucial lines.

  Backups kicked in. Stabilized. Held.

  It took her fifteen thousand feet of tumbling freefall to recover. No time for fear. She leveled out only moments before she would have augered in—right through the center of her team’s spinning circle.

  Lola achieved a stable hover less than two rotors above Trisha’s dervish and scanned the tactical display.

  The other helos still whirled at top speed, rolling back and forth over the landscape. And, thank god—there were still four of them.

  Scattered far and wide across the river valley there were fires and, Lola’s night vision revealed, piles of overheated wreckage. No one was moving. No parachutes had deployed. There would be no witnesses to the bloodbath that had occurred on the bottomlands of the Kalmius River this night. No one to report who had actually been here.

  “Status?” she managed—against a very dry throat—to ask
those circling below her.

  Two of her crewmembers were hit but alive. One of their prisoners had been killed when a 30mm round passed through the cabin of the Hind right where his head had been, but the others were alive.

  Kara reported the airspace clear from her view high above.

  Lola lined them up, gave a big sigh, and they turned once more for the coast, moving fast and low.

  She would raise her next glass of beer in a toast westward, where the Majors had retired to fight forest fires in Oregon and raise their daughter in safety. That was in her and Tim’s future, but not yet.

  Lola now knew that Mark and Emily were absolutely right. The way through any problem? Protect your people, no matter what the personal cost. And against all odds it had worked; they’d survived.

  “How did you think of that buzz saw thing anyway?” Trisha’s radio call broke in on Lola’s train of thought.

  She blew out a long, slow breath and made sure she kept the adrenaline shakes out of her voice as she did her best to imitate Major Mark Henderson’s notoriously bad fake Texas accent.

  “W’all…”

  Everyone recognized it right away and laughed, some more shakily than others.

  “I jes had y’all pull them wagons inta a circle, don’cha know.”

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  Welcome at Henderson's Ranch

  Freelance journalist Colleen McMurphy finds her Irish penname far more professional than the Kurva Baisotei her Japanese parents perpetrated upon her at birth. Her “itinerant writer” role fit her deliciously single lifestyle, until an assignment sent her to Montana’s Big Sky Country to write an article about Henderson’s Ranch.

  Raymond Esterling, summertime cowboy, gratefully forgets his life beyond the prairie, at least for those precious months beneath the Big Sky. But when he meets Colleen, he can’t help but make her Welcome at Henderson’s Ranch.

  Introduction

  This story has an amusing origin. I was just about to release my first full novel set at Henderson’s Ranch, Nathan’s Big Sky. Emily Beale and Mark Henderson had their second child at the end of the Firehawks series in 2016’s Wild Fire and were finally coming home.

  I’d first visited Henderson’s Ranch in a pair of stories (Christmas at Henderson’s Ranch and Reaching Out at Henderson’s Ranch). Those were written to see if retiring Mark and Emily to his family ranch would have any fun stories in it.

  Oh my goodness! Absolutely!

  So, I plunged in and wrote Nathan’s Big Sky that was about the start of Mark’s and Emily’s transition out of military life. Of course you’ll want to catch the second novel, Big Sky, Loyal Heart, if you want to really follow how they’re doing. (Some days better than others.)

  To help promote that first novel, I wanted to write a story of introduction to the ranch, but from completely fresh eyes. I wanted a way to capture the nature and feel of the ranch, so sending a reporter seemed like a good start.

  But who was she or he? I wanted someone who would be a complete fish out of water. Someone who…

  I’m an East Coast refugee who put his life in his car after college graduation and drove from Maine to Seattle. The Pacific Northwest is definitely its own thing as much as the various states of New England that I grew up in.

  So, I thought to place my reporter in Seattle, sent to the “wilds” of Montana on assignment.

  Again the question of who was…

  And then I remembered. Years before, in 2011, I had published the first book in my Seattle Pike Place Market series, Where Dreams Are Born. I liked the common tie to the Pacific Northwest shared with Henderson’s Ranch.

  In Where Dreams Are Born, there is a brief scene, almost a nothing moment, in which the hero and his best friend go into a bar. (The real J&M was half a block from the theater where I worked as a prop man and electrician shortly after my arrival in Seattle.) Because the hero is in a foul mood, he ignores all of the come-on-over signals from two very pretty women. One of those women, for reasons unknown, stuck in my mind. Perhaps because she was a unique and interesting character who had never reappeared throughout the five novels and three short stories of that series.

  She had finally found a purpose all these years later and Colleen McMurphy grabbed it with both hands.

  Chapter One

  Dateline: August 15, Henderson’s Ranch,

  Bloody Nowhere, Montana

  Colleen McMurphy could write this article in her sleep, with her keyboard tied behind her back, and…

  “The wife and I had such a splendid time there. You simply must go and write us an article about it.” For some reason Larry always went old-school English whenever he got excited—which coming from her Puerto Rican boss who lived in Seattle seemed to be almost normal for Colleen’s life.

  He, of course, was too busy being Mr. Hotshot Editor to write it himself. That and he couldn’t write his way out of a martini glass. He was one of the best editors she’d ever worked for—and as a freelancer that had included a suckload of them—but his twelve-year-old daughter could write new material better than he could. Hillary was named for Sir Edmund of Mt. Everest fame and just might follow her namesake at the rate she was being amazing. She was a precocious little twerp who was so delightful that she made Colleen feel grossly inadequate half the time and totally charmed the other three-quarters.

  So, off to Montana it was. Magazine feature article—she was on it.

  The most recent in a cascade of ever-shrinking planes banged onto the runway in Great Falls, Montana clicking all Colleen’s vertebrae together with a whip-like snap that surprisingly failed to paralyze her. A Japan Airlines 747 had lofted her from the family home in Tokyo to LAX. The smallest 737 ever made hopped her up to Salt Lake, and a wing-flapping 18-seater express fluttered as hopelessly as a just-fledged swallow to Great Falls. If there’d been another plane that was any smaller, they were going to have to put her in a bento box.

  But finally she was here in…major sigh…Nowhere, Montana.

  She’d used this job as an excuse to cut the two-week trip home in half. Two weeks! With her family? What had she been thinking? She was going to have a serious talk with her sense of filial duty before it dragged her from Seattle back to Japan again.

  Outside the miniature plane’s windows the airport stretched away pancake-flat and dusty. Four whole jetways, the place was smaller than a bento box. But their plane didn’t pull up to any of them—because it was too short to reach. Instead, it stopped near the terminal and the copilot dropped the door open, filling the cabin with the familiar bite of spent engine fumes and slowing propeller roar. She’d spent the whole final flight glaring out at the spinning blades directly outside her window, waiting for one to break off, punch through the window, and slice her in two like one of Larry’s martini olives.

  “Enough!” she told herself so loudly that it made the fat-boy businessman—who’d made the near-fatal mistake of trying to chat her up across the tiny aisle—jump in alarm. Twenty hours and nine minutes in flight didn’t usually make her this grouchy. Her parents did though.

  “Why did you change your name?” Because everyone in America would laugh their faces off calling her Kurva—for the Hokkaido mulberry tree you conceived me under, much too much information by the way. It especially doesn’t translate so well for a girl who is Japanese flat. Besides there isn’t an American alive who can say Baisotei properly. Kurva Baisotei was not a moneymaking byline.

  Then, not “When are you going to get married?” but rather “Why do you not give us grandchildren like your sister?” My sister has three. How insatiable are you as grandparents?

  “Why do you not return home?” Because you live here.

  “Ma’am?” Fat-boy was waiting for her to get out of her seat first. Maybe because he needed the full width of the tiny plane, or maybe he was just being nice. She was about to step back on American soil—even if it was Montana—so she gave him the benefit of the doubt and offered a “Thanks” w
ith a smile that hopefully he didn’t read as encouraging.

  The air outside the airport smelled strange. It definitely wasn’t Seattle, which had an evergreen scent that wrapped itself around you like a warm, though often damp, welcome home. Her best girl Ruth Ann always met her when she landed from trips to Japan to drag her to their favorite dive, the J&M in Pioneer Square, and make sure that she got safely drunk within an hour of landing. It was doubly strange to arrive somewhere else without Ruth Ann’s patiently sympathetic ear.

  Montana was dry and, despite the warm afternoon, somehow crisp. In Seattle there were a gazillion things sharing the air with her: Douglas firs, seagulls, dogs playing in the park, ferry boats—the list went on and on. Here it tasted more rarified. More…special.

  Also high on the special list was the guy leaning comfortably on a helicopter with “Henderson’s Ranch” emblazoned down the side like it had been branded there with a flaming iron. He already had one beaming couple beside him with Los Angeles cowboy written all over their Gucci. He towered above them: six-two of dark tan, right-out-of-a-romance-novel square jaw, and mirrored shades for a touch of mystery. His t-shirt was tight and his jeans weren’t bad either. And—crap!—ring on his finger. Fantasy cowboys weren’t supposed to have rings on their fingers, but she wasn’t going to complain about this piece of the Montana scenery just because of the “Back Off” sign.

  Another couple joined them. First-timers by their lost look.

  “Hi!” He even had a nice deep voice to go with that big frame. “I’m Mark Henderson. Climb on aboard,” and he was helping the two couples into the back seats.

  Handsome guy who flies a helicopter. Sweet! Maybe Montana wasn’t going to be so bad. Ruth Ann was gonna be wicked jealous. She snapped a photo of him just for that purpose.