The Ides of Matt 2017

by M. L. Buchman

  “Please, please, please,” Carmen wasn’t going to let him go.

  “Carmen. Begging. I like it,” he took another run at being brave.

  A fist thumped down on his shoulder which told him Carmen had shifted forward to the observer seat close behind the side-by-side pilots’ seats. She was a very physical gal—which sent his thoughts in entirely the wrong direction. He supposed he was lucky, she’d probably have done it much harder if she’d known where his thoughts went so often.

  “Picking on your pilot-in-command. Very dangerous, Carmen. Picking on the PIC,” he emphasized the play on words, too late realizing that was probably too obvious.

  “Why dangerous, Danny? It’s just you.”

  “Maybe you’re in the mood for a swim.” Mission profile said stay low, the storm said stay high, he was a Night Stalker so he’d climbed a hundred feet above the waves, rather than the five thousand any rational Army pilot would have. The Night Stalkers flew at the edge of what he liked to call rational insanity. He’d become very comfortable with that over his five years with the 160th.

  “Swim with the dashing Danny Corvo? Be sti-ill my heart.” A microburst bounced them up fifty feet before he could compensate. Maybe staying a little farther from the waves would be a good idea. He took it as a sign from Mother Nature and stayed where she’d just bounced them to. They’d now be visible from farther away, not that radar would pick them out in this crap. The rain lashed so hard against the windshield and hull at their hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour speed, plus an obnoxious amount of wind velocity, that he could hear it despite his helmet. It was louder than the beastly big rotors of his Chinook.

  “Swimming with you? That totally works for me.”

  A couple of the guys hooted encouragement. It was rare for anyone to banter with Carmen past the first round or two. Her wit was faster than an RPG and not much less dangerous.

  He glanced at the engine readouts, even though that was Justin’s job at the moment, with Carmen as a backup. The temperatures looked good, so the rain wasn’t enough to drown the twin, five-thousand horsepower Lycoming engines. He turned his attention back to keeping them in the air.

  And to picturing Carmen in a dark red bikini that matched her hair. Her fair skin and blue-green eyes the color of the tropical sea. Which at the moment was pitch black because it was almost midnight in a bitch of a storm a hundred-and-sixty miles off Panama. Almost midnight. It was hard to not smile even if it didn’t really mean anything, except to him. He checked the dash clock, 2304 and counting.

  “No, none of you mugs will ever see me in a bikini, so just stop thinking about that.”

  “Which plants the image firmly in my brain,” Danny heaved on the thrust control along the left side of his seat to compensate for a sudden downdraft, but managed to stabilize at eighty feet above the waves before climbing back up.

  “Ho-ly crap!” There was no air pocket to jar her words this time, so she did it herself. Damn but she was funny. “You guys heard that? You!” She poked him in the arm. “What did you do with our quiet and shy Danny Corvo?”

  “I put him out to pasture where he belongs.”

  “Whoa!” “You were right, Carm.” Vinnie and Raymond chimed in from the back.

  “This is a passel of strange, ain’t it,” the captain agreed, his Texan accent far thicker than normal.

  Danny liked flying with Justin Roberts. He was always cheery—even when everything was going to hell. Justin also gave him plenty of pilot-in-command time. He’d flown with a lot of commanders who just wanted you to sit your ass in the seat and leave them alone. However, egging Carmen on wasn’t going to help anyth—

  “Crazy weird,” Carmen agreed. “It sounds like Danny. And I can see his cute little chin.”

  Just how every Army Special Operations guy wanted to be described by a hot soldier woman.

  “Where oh where has our Danny gone?” The captain broke into song as he was apt to do at the drop of his cowboy hat.

  Danny did his best to ignore it as they mangled the verse. At least until Carmen joined in with that sweet alto of hers for the refrain, “Aliens done took him away.”

  Images of sticklike green men bearing rectal probes—and a particularly hard slam by the storm—definitely knocked the bikini-clad redhead out of his thoughts. Too bad. If his imagination was worth shit, she’d be damn cute in one.

  Chapter Two

  Present Day, June 13, 2310 Hours (Panama Local Time)

  Danny had never joined in the singing aboard the Calamity Jane II. Carmen had teased him about that any number of times, to no avail. At least he’d stopped complaining about their choices of music, mostly.

  He was such a quiet guy that he was hard to read. Even his laughs were quiet and his looks thoughtful. Though she could never tell quite what was going on behind those steady eyes.

  “Why are you always such a serious guy?” The question was out before she could stop herself.

  “Am I? I thought I was a happy-go-lucky leprechaun. Damn, and I was so close to finding me a pot of gold.”

  “Thought you said you were Portuguese.” He looked it with those deep brown eyes, black hair, and sun-dark skin. He was also too handsome for words.

  “That was the other Danny Corvo.”

  The others laughed, but Carmen was actually a little worried and found it hard to join in. This wasn’t the Danny that she knew. He wasn’t the kind of guy to crack under the stress of a flight no matter how horrid—to emphasize the point, her teeth clacked together sharply as the seat’s shocks bottomed out hard in the next air pocket. But she couldn’t imagine what was up with him.

  She spent a few moments on the HUMS interface—as she’d been doing every five minutes or less of their ride through the storm. The helo’s Health and Usage Monitoring Systems was reporting no problems, though she often heard problems before HUMS reported them. After nine years in Chinooks, the last two as a Night Stalker crew chief, the aircraft was in her blood. And no matter what the pilots thought, this was her bird. She was responsible for every nut, bolt, and signoff. The pilots just climbed aboard on occasion to do some flying.

  She rested her hand against the inside of the hull and could feel it vibrating with the controlled violence of the twin Lycoming turbines spinning at fifteen thousand RPM and the uncontrolled violence of the storm. She could also feel every little shift in attitude and speed. It was unreal how fast Danny compensated for everything the storm could throw at him. Maybe he was some alternate version of himself.

  For a while she simply rode along, enjoying the connection between them. The motion of the helo tied to the constant tiny corrections Danny made on the cyclic and thrust control. She couldn’t see his feet on the rudder pedals in the dim light, but she could imagine the expert dance he used to keep fifteen tons of helicopter and crew headed toward their destination.

  But she couldn’t explain the sudden surfacing of a sense of humor. She liked knowing exactly what was going on with all of her equipment, and having a copilot suddenly develop a sense of humor was definitely throwing her.

  Not that Danny was hers. He was actually the only one on the crew who hadn’t at least made a pass at her. Of course Justin’s had been after he was happily married to the lethal Kara Moretti, so it had been pure tease that she’d happily returned in kind.

  But for her there’d always been something special about Danny.

  She remembered her first day as a Night Stalker…which had been a night much like this one.

  Chapter Three

  Two Years Ago, June 14, 2320 Hours (Alabama Local Time)

  The downgraded hurricane had been beating the shit out of southern Alabama as a tropical storm when she’d gotten off the plane at Fort Rucker. It was a real “sicker” of a flight, everyone who wasn’t a seasoned flier had been puking their guts out for the entire second half. Even some of the old hands lost it just from listening to all the others.

  Carmen would admit that she’d regretted the gut bomb bacon-ch
eeseburger she’d had just before flight, but refused to be humiliated by seeing it again quite so soon.

  She was a Night Stalker crew chief—at long last Fully Mission Qualified. And FMQ Night Stalkers didn’t lose their shit because of a little lumpy air. Nonetheless glad to be on the ground, she shouldered her duffle, yanked on her helmet against the last of the six new inches of rain Alabama had gotten that day, and stepped off the flight squarely into a seriously handsome man’s chest.

  She flattened him right onto his ass.

  “Boy, you sure are a pushover,” she managed to keep her feet, barely. The rest of the flight began unloading to either side of them as the man she’d plowed into continued to lay in a puddle on the tarmac looking up at her. The storm cracked with lightning, revealing his bewildered expression, as fast-following thunder said the latest weather wasn’t done with them yet.

  “Sergeant Carmen Parker?”

  She nodded and offered a hand, not that she was all that steady yet from the rough flight, but it seemed the least she could do.

  He shook his head, either trying to clear it or to say no.

  But before she could withdraw her hand, he’d taken it and let her help him to his feet.

  “Thanks.”

  “This is your definition of personal space?” The man stood just inches away, their clasped hands the only thing keeping them apart. So close that it was hard to tell, even in the light spilling out of a nearby hangar, if he was really as handsome as her first impression.

  “Not really,” he took a step back, then another. He was mighty slow about letting go of her hand though, which was kind of sweet. No complaints from her: muscled, Latino, five-ten to her five-six, and one of those guys who was surprisingly handsome but probably didn’t realize it. His easy smile lit his face without doing anything more than saying, “Hi!” No “Hey, baby!” or “Nice to meet you, hot stuff!”

  She’d never minded guys flirting with her—especially because she could kick the ass of anyone who overstepped the bounds. But Danny was like the perfect straight man for her teasing. Maybe even too straight because it didn’t seem to phase him in the slightest.

  “I’m Danny Corvo, the copilot on your new assignment.” Then he shook the hand he’d still been holding and let go. One more step back and “proper personal space” was reestablished.

  “Lead on and I will follow,” she put a lot of sass into it just to test him.

  “This way,” he waved toward an electric golf cart of all things. Truly a straight man, unless he was gay. No, she’d seen where his eyes had traveled, however briefly. Then he turned and she saw that he was soaked from butt to brain because of his dunk in the puddle. Yet he made no complaints, no tease. Not even a decent grumble. Weird.

  Chapter Four

  Present Day, June 13, 2330 Hours (Panama Local Time)

  Even after two years, Danny never quite understood what had hit him that day. The shock of Carmen striding down the flight’s ramp like she owned Fort Rucker had been visceral. When she’d slammed into him it had become physical as well. He’d had no extra attention span to even try to recover—he’d simply toppled over.

  He’d looked up at the vision of Woman standing over him. Serious curves under a black t-shirt and camo pants. The finer qualities of her figure only emphasized by the heavy duffle she wore backpack-style, pulling her shoulders back. Topped off by a Night Stalkers helmet painted with a flamenco dancer in a flirty red skirt on the side.

  Carmen from the opera by Bizet.

  It had unquestionably been the new crew member he’d come to fetch from the transport flight, but all he’d been able to do was lie in the puddle and stare as she sassed him.

  Real smooth.

  In two years, he also hadn’t figured out what he should have done differently. You didn’t just grab a woman like Carmen Parker, her inner strength showed as clearly as her figure from the first moment. In the way she walked, in the way she carried herself, in the way she held focus on what mattered to the exclusion of all else. If she had to walk out into a hail of gunfire to help an injured aboard, she did it without a cringe. If some meathead tried to grab her, she laid him out flat, then dusted her hands of him and went back to whatever she’d been doing. Nothing touched her when turned on that laser focus—which was pretty much all the time.

  A particularly heavy squall line in the storm had him climbing up to five hundred feet before they hit it. Sure enough, the solid wall of water that this tropical storm called “rain” took ten percent out of his engines—water just didn’t burn very well no matter how much Jet-A fuel you let loose with the throttle.

  He kept an eye on the engines as he came out the other side. The Lycomings only took a few seconds to clear their throats and climb back to full power. Damn but he loved this bird. Almost as much as he loved—

  Useless thought. Carmen Parker wasn’t for the likes of him.

  But he couldn’t think of anything other than her strength. And her boundless joy and humor—she was funny enough for any five other people combined. That was one of the main reasons he kept his mouth shut. Anything he came up with was going to sound lame next to the cool shit Carmen could deliver on no notice.

  Once the engine temperatures had restabilized at fifteen-hundred degrees, he descended back onto profile. Their target ship was well out of the storm now, shifting into the calmer waters close under Panama’s mountainous coastline, but he angled in a little deeper into the storm to get them as close as possible while under its cover. Night Stalkers method: push every training opportunity to the limit and maybe, just maybe, you’ll have the chance to survive the real thing.

  Danny remembered the day things had changed between them. It had nothing to do with mud puddles that had almost earned him a “Danny the Duck” nickname or his soaking flightsuit.

  At least not one soaked with water.

  Chapter Five

  One year ago, June 13, 2340 Hours (Yemen Local Time)

  Justin was flying right-seat as usual. But a new copilot flew in Danny’s seat—out for an indoctrination run. He was FMQ in the tiny MH-6M Little Bird helicopters. A Little Bird had four seats, but you didn’t want to be one of the folks in the back seat, compared to the fifty-plus troops that his Chinook could carry in addition to her five crew. Weighing in at less than a ton apiece, a Chinook could lift fifteen Little Birds without breaking a sweat. But the company commander wanted every one of their pilots to at least have a feel for the capabilities of each airframe type that SOAR flew. And what Pete Napier ordered, nobody messed with.

  So, while the copilot had stretched his flight legs over the nighttime Gulf of Aden, Danny had been relegated to the back to see what the crew chiefs did for a living.

  “We do all kinds of cool shit back here,” Carmen had set them to Intercom Channel 4 so that they wouldn’t bother anyone else as she gave him the tour.

  “Such as?”

  She pointed to Vinnie and Raymond sacked out on the hard steel deck.

  “You sleep?”

  “You guys up there are just giving us a rocking cradle ride—”

  The trainee was slamming the Chinook through a turn worthy of an F-35 Lightning II fighter jet, forcing both of them to hang on so that they didn’t tumble about the cargo bay like pinballs.

  “No hostiles around,” Carmen didn’t even break her speech as the helo slid to a halt in mid-air and did a full spin—not an easy trick in a Chinook, which he flubbed the first couple times. “No gunnery practice to do. We might as well grab some shuteye back here. I can run this whole sweet bird by myself.”

  “Except for flying it,” Danny tried to carve out some territory for his role.

  “Pilots! Feh!” Carmen wiggled her fingers at him. Then she started guiding him through an in-flight systems check. Every five minutes this, every ten that, and a full tour of the bird’s interior along with a dozen systems checks every half hour. She waved the checklists at him, though it was clear she didn’t need them. They were at least as
long as the pilot’s set. “Then when we’re on the ground…” she’d pulled out an even bigger set of checklists.

  Carmen had always humbled him. Now he was discovering that she was more daunting than he’d thought. If he could just somehow—

  “Alert Status One! Alert Status One!” slammed in over the primary intercom channel. Vinnie and Raymond bolted to their feet as if electroshocked.

  “You!” Carmen had jabbed a finger against his arm. “You stay attached to my hip or you’ll get run over.”

  “I should—” he pointed forward, but knew he wasn’t needed. All through Carmen’s tour he’d been aware of the rapidly growing competence of the new pilot as Justin ran him through the paces. A Chinook was no Black Hawk and trading positions in mid-flight was actually possible. But Justin didn’t call him forward and he supposed he agreed. Nothing like being at the helm during action to really learn what it took. And Justin Roberts could handle almost anything solo if he had to.

  Their little training sortie became a crash-priority evac for a mixed team of the 75th Rangers and Delta. By the time they hit the Yemeni shoreline, a heavily-armed DAP Black Hawk and a Combat Search and Rescue Hawk had joined them as well.

  Carmen and Vinnie each shot a few test rounds out of their side-facing miniguns then began checking their personal weapons. He did the same. Raymond went to the rear of the cargo bay and began rigging his ramp gun, even though the ramp was still closed tightly, shutting out the night.

  They came in on the terrorist camp low and fast.

  Danny presently had the crews’ tactical feed on his visor rather than his normal pilot’s version. Far more information about the engines and systems performance—next to nothing about the terrain except in the broadest strokes. The threat monitors were soon piecing together the situation. Small arms fire raking along the ground in a vast, back-and-forth interplay of flying death.