The Ides of Matt 2017

by M. L. Buchman

  The DAP Hawk climbed above the camp and answered back hard.

  It was so disorienting when their missile slammed down on one of the compounds—he hadn’t known it was coming like he normally would have.

  The DAP Hawk gun platform was raining down hell. The CSAR bird was hanging back in case it was needed, and their Chinook was head-on into the fray. On the ground, one Black Hawk was burning fiercely and another was being protected by more soldiers than the one bird could carry out. No…soldiers and several rescued hostages.

  Justin—Danny could feel the familiar flight control of the captain taking control—eased the Calamity Jane II toward the men on the ground surrounding the beleaguered Black Hawk.

  More and more of the fire was directed upward at the DAP Hawk dancing and spinning overhead, which eased the burden here on the ground. Justin got them landed close beside the waiting troops.

  The instant the ramp was down, troops stormed aboard. Not all of them were soldiers. Three hostages, two clearly American and the third sounding Japanese, looked battered, confused, and disbelieving at their sudden rescue. There were no hostiles as prisoners. Some operations just didn’t call for that.

  Several soldiers came aboard with a rifle in one hand and an arm over a buddy’s shoulders. Most of those hit the relative safety of the cargo bay and collapsed.

  Carmen’s station was on the side away from the action—whereas Vinnie’s side gun was unleashing a near constant roar of four thousand rounds a minute—so the two of them grabbed med kits and began helping the worst of the wounded.

  The hull rattled with small arms fire. Sometimes a double-smack as a bullet penetrated one side and splatted against the other. Soldiers were hitting the deck as the windows were shot out.

  He’d strapped off two legs with tight bandages and was pressing down on a shoulder wound as they lifted. Less than twenty feet in the air, the helo…flinched. Forty thousand pounds of helo wasn’t supposed to flinch.

  Critical system failure or—

  “Corvo!” Justin’s voice called him forward. But if he let go on this guy’s wound, he’d bleed out before anyone else could get to him.

  “You!” Danny shouted a nearby soldier. “Pressure! Here!”

  The man was injured himself. “Can’t you get the medic?”

  Danny tapped the downed man’s armband—a red cross bathed in blood. “He is your medic.”

  The guy looked positively green, but placed his hands onto the wounded medic’s shoulder.

  “If you’re gonna be sick, turn to the side so that you aren’t sick on him.” Then Danny scrambled forward over the bodies of both the wounded and exhausted. The helo was wavering, making him stagger like a drunk on his way forward.

  There was no question about what the problem was when he got to the front. The forward windscreen was shattered and the trainee copilot hung limply in his harness.

  “Carmen!” Danny shouted out and hoped they still had their private intercom set up.

  “Can’t see shit!” Justin complained.

  Danny saw why. There was blood trickling down his face and it had covered both his eyes. It wasn’t gushing, but it wasn’t good. The captain couldn’t wipe it away because he needed both hands on the controls.

  In moments Carmen was at his shoulder.

  He gave the blinded Justin moment-by-moment directions on the flight controls while Carmen helped him lever the trainee out of the copilot’s seat. He tried not to be too squeamish as he slid in to sit in another man’s blood. Finally buckled into the seat’s harness, he shouted out, “I have control.”

  Justin slumped down—having kept them aloft and steady on sheer nerve—and cursed. “Hell of a way to run a rodeo.”

  Danny flipped to the pilot’s view and the full tactical hell of the situation slammed in. Much of the camp was burning. Men were down everywhere, though he didn’t see any American bodies—no telltale infrared tabs that would have glowed like searchlights in his night-vision display.

  Three soldiers ran from the second Black Hawk—now also burning brightly—toward the back of the Chinook. Danny eased the tail back down. One stumbled and fell—and didn’t get up.

  From the copilot’s raised seat, he spotted the problem. Someone had picked up an AK-47 from a fallen Yemeni and shot the Delta Force operator at least a dozen times from behind, mostly in the leg.

  Danny snapped the position lock on the thrust control to free up his left hand. Yanking out his Glock sidearm, he shot twice. Once to blow out his side window, and once to shoot the Yemeni with the AK-47 in the heart.

  The shooter collapsed.

  Danny slapped the sidearm back in his holster and began easing back down for the wounded Delta.

  “CSAR 1. We’ve got him,” a woman’s voice. Someone jumped out of the medevac bird and rushed over to the fallen soldier crawling along and dragging one leg.

  “Roger. Calamity Jane II aloft.”

  He pulled up and back to clear the CSAR bird and the two grounded and burning Black Hawks. Then got them the hell out of Dodge as soon as the CSAR bird was aloft.

  As he was pulling away, he finally got perspective on the shooter he’d just downed and the man he’d taken the AK-47 from in the first place. The shooter was half the size of the dead man.

  “I just shot a kid.” Probably dropped him on his dad’s body.

  Carmen, who’d been treating Justin now collapsed in his seat, spun to face him.

  He remembered the feel of her comforting hand on his shoulder for a long time after she’d turned back to bandaging the captain.

  No one else had heard. He also left that part out of the after-action debriefing.

  Chapter Six

  Present Day, June 13, 2350 Hours (Panama Local Time)

  Carmen did a full inspection and systems check as Danny continued to fight them through the storm. A couple of the Deltas were awake. It was a strange team. Three women, four men. She’d never seen a female Delta before and here was a whole clump of them. A gaggle of geese. A flock of ewes. An incoming disaster of Deltas? What would it be like to be a woman who kicked butt at a Delta level? She’d miss her Chinook too much, but the three women looked beyond cool.

  One of the guy Deltas called her over.

  “Oh. My. God!” Carmen slapped a hand to her chest and put her wrist to her forehead. “I’m gonna faint. It only took four hours for one of the silent warriors to acknowledge that they weren’t the only people on this flight.” Then she collapsed onto one of the Zodiac’s pontoons and fell upside down into the bottom of the boat to sprawl at his feet.

  Several of the Deltas startled awake, inspected her strangely for a moment, then went back to sleep.

  “Got a question for you, once you’re done playing the lead role from a Bizet opera.”

  “What are you talking about?” She continued laying upside down, but raised her head to inspect him. He was handsome, but she was feeling oddly self-conscious about teasing him, which wasn’t like her. She teased everybody—except Danny since that night he’d shot the kid.

  “The opera Carmen. The dazzling man killer.”

  “There’s an opera named after me?” As if she didn’t have Carmen the gypsy dancer emblazoned on the side of her helmet. “How cool is that? Dazzling man killer—perfect fit. Are you my next victim? This should be fun.”

  The guy looked at his watch, typical Delta.

  She flipped around until she was upright once again.

  “How would you take down a cruise ship?”

  Delta operators had no sense of humor.

  “Couple-a Hellfire missiles at the waterline?”

  The discussion went on for a few minutes, but her thoughts were on why Danny was acting so strangely. She left the Deltas sitting in their rubber boat in the cargo bay talking about it and drifted back forward.

  She ended up close behind the two pilots’ seats. She didn’t usually ride in the observer’s chair, but the memory of the two storms—the present one and the one in whi
ch she’d met Danny—had drawn her back to the front.

  Her last two years aboard the Calamity Jane II stood out so much more clearly than the five prior years in the regular Army or the two years of additional training to become a Night Stalker.

  No, that wasn’t all of it. Each moment with Danny stood out. The good and the bad. The smooth perfection of how he’d flown them out of that battle, despite a windshield so star-cracked that he could only fly by peaking out of the bullet holes marking where unfriendly fire had wounded the captain and killed the last person in that seat, despite the shot-up hydraulics that had forced him to wrestle the massive helo by brute force, all while having just shot a kid. The quiet ease with which he sat back at a hangar barbeque: beer in his hand, smile on his face, just watching the goings on, watching her…

  Watching her.

  With the same look as the moment she’d plowed him ass over teakettle into a mud puddle. A look she’d never forgotten, but couldn’t understand. Unless…

  Her throat was suddenly dry.

  She leaned forward and rested a hand on his shoulder.

  He flipped to Intercom Channel 4. One, she finally realized, that they’d shared often for privacy. Privacy? They were just on the same crew together, why did they need a private channel? Yet they had one. Sometimes back-enders (her and the other two crew chiefs) shared Channel 2 so as not to disturb the pilots, but usually the whole team stayed on Channel 1. Danny was the only one she had a “private” channel with.

  He waited for her in silence as he held tight control of the bucking bronc that was the Chinook in the storm.

  “Danny?”

  “Carmen,” his voice was “normal” Danny. Not substitute Danny Corvo. No joke or humor. Once again her straight man was there.

  “Why…” she couldn’t quite bring herself to confront her question directly. “…why don’t you ever sing?”

  He chuckled with the warmth of a caress, accepting the evasion. “Tone deaf. I’ve been told that I sing like a choking hyena.”

  “You can’t be that bad.”

  “Sadly, sometime when we’re alone, I can prove it. Besides, if I don’t sing it lets me hear you better.”

  And now they were back to the inexplicable attack of nerves she was having. She checked the HUMS again, but the helo’s health was just fine despite the thrashing of the wind and rain. It was hers that was in doubt.

  “You’re still wondering what I did with the real Danny Corvo?”

  “Well…” Carmen took a deep breath and plunged in. “You’ve always been the straight man. Mr. AJ Squared Away.”

  “That’s sailor talk. What would that be in Army-speak? Mr. Shiny Shithook pilot?” A shithook was slang for an Army Chinook helicopter.

  “See! That! That isn’t the Danny I know.”

  “But it is,” he whispered as she watched him slew their Chinook around a particularly dense cloud that blanketed a whole section of the radar screen. It was so strange to be having this conversation while he was busy and Captain Roberts was sitting about a foot away, oblivious to everything.

  “How? The Danny Corvo I know doesn’t joke or tease or—”

  “Okay. No tease. There’s this beach I know, just down from my grandfather’s house, called Praia da Marinha, in southern Portugal on the Atlantic. Just a few hundred kilometers from where the opera about you is set. Warm. Soft sand with tall cliffs, sea arches, caves. It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I would take you there. Maybe you’d wear a red bikini. Same color as your beautiful hair.”

  “Already said, no bikini.” It was lame, but it was the best defense she had against such a beautiful vision.

  “How about a flamenco dancer’s dress?”

  She sat back and glared at the side of his helmet. That didn’t sound like Danny either—no matter how much she liked the sound of it. Her and Danny off somewhere sunny. They’d—

  Her and Danny?

  Her personal HUMS system should be flashing red lights and alert sirens.

  “Why didn’t you ever say any of this before?” She wanted to grab and shake him. Would have if he wasn’t flying.

  “Tired of waiting.”

  “For me?”

  “No, me. To be brave.”

  She wasn’t sure if she’d ever met a braver man. Heavy gunfire, his captain wounded, rattled because he’d shot an underage terrorist, and then started to re-land his helo to retrieve the wounded Delta. “What in the world do you have trouble being brave about?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What do you mean, not yet?”

  “Two more minutes.”

  She glanced at the mission clock on the helo’s main console.

  2358.

  Too stubborn and maybe too unnerved to ask why, she folded her arms and waited in silence.

  She could feel Danny smiling as he flew. They reached the edge of the storm closest to the cruise ship where the Delta operators would soon be simulating an attack. He banked hard, out of the interminable pounding of the storm and into clear air. The wind calmed and even the sky above began clearing as they raced away from the storm. He slid back down toward the sea.

  They were the two longest minutes of her life.

  It finally flipped to four zeros.

  “A new day. Now give.”

  “Not just any day.”

  “Danny…” she knew she was grinding her teeth.

  “June Fourteenth.” He waited.

  She didn’t get it.

  “Two years ago today…”

  The date was ringing a bell. It was…the day she’d joined the crew of Calamity Jane II. It was the second anniversary of… “Oh shit!”

  “Yep! Two years ago you bowled me over and I’ve never recovered.”

  “Two years,” she could barely breathe.

  “It’s our second collision-anniversary.”

  “What was the first?” And then she knew and was sorry she’d asked.

  “The kid.”

  She’d made a point of tracking Danny down afterward at the carrier. He’d been sitting on an old tire in a back corner of the hangar deck, just staring out at the dark sea. She didn’t remember what they’d talked about, not much of anything. But they’d sat for hours and she remembered his brief hug and his whispered “Thanks” when the sun rose over the Gulf of Aden.

  Again his silent patience while she processed things. He understood her. Everyone else she’d been able to brush off with a joke or a flirt.

  Not Danny.

  He’d stuck by her. Encouraged her. Made sure she knew she was welcome from that first day. In the Night Stalkers you didn’t need someone to push you to excel, everyone did that. Everyone set their standards so high that you just wanted to strive to keep up with them. She was no different. Nor was Danny.

  One of the Delta couples came up with a change in the deployment for the exercise. They ran it by her and the two pilots. They’d decided to add a maneuver to the simulated attack.

  After she told them it was technically possible—though she kept to herself that it was bat-shit crazy, making it perfect for Delta—they cleared the last of the details with Danny before returning to the cargo bay.

  Danny had been her quiet place. Somehow he let her know that she was okay even when she was too tired to speak or too sick of the unending supply of terrorist nut jobs.

  He was…the man she didn’t know how to live without. When she’d hauled the trainee pilot’s body out of the copilot seat, she’d only been able to be thankful that he’d been sitting there rather than Danny. It was a guilty thought, but it ran deep. She would step in front of the bullet herself if it made sure he was still in the world afterward.

  “Fifteen minutes to target,” Danny announced on the PA.

  No response. She turned, and could see that the Delta operators were completing their final prep. Silent warriors indeed.

  Danny had stayed silent about his attraction to her. So carefully silent that she’d assumed he wasn’t attrac
ted at all, making her keep her own mouth shut about how much she’d been attracted to him. Shut enough that she’d almost buried the feeling. Just kept on being Carmen—wild, funny, in your face.

  But now she knew, now she understood that smile on Danny’s face. He always laughed with her jokes, but he also saw the quiet person inside her too. It wasn’t Carmen the flashy gypsy dancer he was attracted to. It was Carmen Parker, lead crew chief of the Night Stalkers’ Chinook Calamity Jane II.

  “Danny?”

  “Carmen,” he said it exactly the way he had before.

  “You really feel that way?” Was if even possible she could be so lucky?

  He twisted all the way around to look at her for just a brief moment. “Really.”

  She wished she could see his eyes behind the visor, but she could see his smile, and that was enough. With Danny Corvo that was everything and it always would be.

  He turned back to flying and she hustled back to make sure the Delta team was ready for the drop. She lowered the rear ramp and peeked out into the night.

  The sea was calm, twenty minutes and sixty miles from the storm’s closest approach.

  The sky was clear.

  All the flying ahead wouldn’t be smooth. There’d be more gut wrenchers, but she knew, she just knew that they’d get through it all together.

  Justin started humming a song over the intercom. Vinnie picked it up with his low baritone and she found herself joining in on the melody before she caught herself.

  “What the hell?”

  “Y’all amaze me,” Justin Roberts spoke over the intercom, his Texas cranked up to full mud-thick. “Like y’all think that simply going up to little old Intercom 4 makes you private somehow. Rest of us tumbled to that trick about six months back. Let me just say, ’bout time, you two.” And then he swung back into the music.

  “Does this mean I’m going to have to buy a goddamn bikini?”

  There was a mass chorus of, “Yes!” without breaking the rhythm.

  “Then all you boys are buying goddamn thongs. Beach wedding.”

  There were laughs over the channel.