Flying Over the Waves

by M. L. Buchman

  The next wave began to lift the hull and the helo fell, tipping toward her. Nowhere to dive. Her life vest—which had auto-inflated on contact with the water—kept her pinned to the surface like a bug about to be squashed.

  Through the driving sleet and icy spray, she saw the blades slash into the water less than an arm’s length past her position. Without the engine driving them, they stopped almost immediately.

  She felt like a lion in a carbon-fiber blade cage: the body of her helo behind her and the blades driven down into the sea in front.

  Then the wave’s face went near enough to vertical for the helicopter to roll off the hull. She actually banged her helmet on some part of the helo as it tumbled by—driving her face once more into the frigid wash of water now two feet deep over the sinking deck. Her helo disappeared beneath the waves.

  Just because the boat’s hull was wallowing so deeply, didn’t abate the wave’s vehemence. In a cloud of slashing spray and biting wind, it flipped the hull over this time. Catapulting her aside with the ease of a rag doll, she landed clear of its tumbling mass.

  Too much for the remains of the trawler, it finally plunged for the depths. Caught in its vortex rush of sinking water, she was dragged deep beneath the surface.

  She swam hard, letting the life vest tell her which way was up and broke the surface just before her lungs burst from holding her breath so hard. She slid down the back of the wave.

  A light blinked in the darkness.

  Silvan.

  Just going over the crest of the next wave over.

  He might as well be a mile away.

  Chapter 8

  Silvan wiped the water out of his eyes for the hundredth time since he’d plunged into the icy North Sea. Alone, he rode over the wave and down the far side, bobbing as lightly as a cork.

  If ever there was a pilot to fly with, it was Chief Warrant Deborah Rosenthal.

  Which was exactly how he felt every time he got close to her. He’d like to have gotten much closer, but the Army wasn’t the only one against that. Their rank wasn’t an issue, but the fact that she was his superior officer was. He hadn’t wanted to risk not flying with her in the future.

  There was also something within her. Something…torn. It had kept him pushed to a distance and he’d done his best to respect that.

  And now he didn’t know if he’d ever have a chance to see past whatever that was, or even to thank her for saving him.

  Had she died in that final act?

  There was no way he should be alive, but she’d been masterful. Landing for those crucial few seconds on the hull had absolutely saved his life.

  He’d felt the skid hit the boat’s hull through the heels of his boots. The next instant he had kicked backward as hard as he could, flinging himself clear. With the two-foot-long life raft bag clutched hard to his chest, he hadn’t sunk more than a few feet.

  Then he’d watched in horror as first the helicopter and then the entire boat hull flipped over on where she would have jumped clear. If she even survived the landing.

  He wiped his face again and tried to kick himself in a circle, hoping against hope that he’d spot the light from her life vest.

  Night.

  Screaming wind.

  Pitch-black, overcast night.

  Yet, he could see shades of the gale’s madness—the waves as they ripped past him.

  No thought to grab the night-vision goggles that he kept stowed under the console. When attached to the helicopter, everything he needed was projected on the inside of his visor.

  Next time, if there was a next time, he’d remember to grab his goddamn NVGs.

  A glimmer?

  He watched closely over the next wave crest.

  Definitely a brightness beyond the next wave. The only light in the night, he’d take hope from that.

  He hooked the uninflated life raft to his belt on a short tether so that it would trail behind him and began swimming.

  Chapter 9

  Debbie had lost sight of Silvan. No matter how hard she swam, he seemed to slip farther and farther away.

  She made sure that her emergency radio beacon was blinking, indicating it was crying for help, but how long was rescue going to take to reach her? She was fifty miles from land in every direction in the midst of a brutal winter storm. The first shot had killed the helo’s radios and there’d been no time to try the handhelds.

  Now, to hear her little beacon, it would take a very lucky satellite or someone flying directly over her and listening for her signal. How long before Search and Rescue came looking? Too long.

  It was just her and Silvan.

  No, it was just her.

  That thought slammed in with a punch harder than the icy ocean seeping into her foul-weather flight gear. Next time she flew, she’d wear a goddamn dry suit.

  No Silvan. She hadn’t let him get too close to her because…

  A wave crest slapped and tumbled her. Rather than burying her under, the wind ripping at the water was enough to blow her through the air for a short distance and bury her face-first into the water, again. She resurfaced.

  Because she was an idiot.

  Silvan Exeter was the best man she was never going to meet again. Impossibly, even better than Moshe who had been swept backward by the tide of time as well.

  She’d lost all sense of direction when the wave had tossed her.

  She treaded water, slowly turning in a circle, searching for any sign of hope. Deborah the Prophetess had led the biblical legions against the oppression of King Jabin and his military general Sisera. The latter had fallen to a woman pounding a tent peg through his temple while he rested. Well, Debbie didn’t have a tent peg, a mallet, or the knowledge of a prophetess of the Lord God.

  All she had was—

  A shining beacon in the distance. A tiny flashing light.

  Attached to a man plunging down a wave face easily five stories tall.

  As he swam in her direction.

  A rescue swimmer? Already?

  No!

  Leaving the chill that had threatened to encase her behind a solid wall, she dug into the waves, speeding toward Silvan.

  Chapter 10

  Both cold, gasping for breath from the hard swim necessary to fight their way together, and lost in the North Sea—the first thing they had done was kiss.

  It had been sloppy, hurried, freezing, and in moments they were battered apart except for the death grip on the front ring of each others’ vests.

  But it changed Silvan’s world.

  It hadn’t been a kiss of “so glad to see you.”

  Their coming together had been an “Oh my god, I thought you were dead!”

  It took a coordinated effort, but they deployed the raft and managed to climb in before it blew away. It was small comfort in the heavy storm—it didn’t stay dry, but at least it remained upright. Between judicious bailing and unfurling the canopy, they finally were reasonably secure.

  The only way they could keep from being slammed together was by holding tightly to each other. It was something that Silvan had wanted to do for so long that it was hard to believe it was finally happening. Not how he’d imagined it, but holding her tight might just be the best thing to ever happen to him.

  “You aren’t going to die!” Debbie shook him by her hold on his vest.

  It seemed an odd statement as this was perhaps the safest they’d been in over an hour.

  “You aren’t!” She shook him again.

  “You’re awfully strong for someone who isn’t an elf.”

  She shook him again, though not as hard. As if she could anchor her words in his chest.

  If they hadn’t been deep in the comparative calm inside the high-sided raft, he wouldn’t have heard her next statement.

  “I’m not wrong this time. I can’t be. You’re going to live.” Then she buried her face against his shoulder and simply hung on.

  There, with the waves raging by dozens of feet above them, he knew he had found t
he missing piece, the tear in her world.

  Moshe. He wasn’t “some boy” who had died and changed the course of Debbie Rosenthal’s life.

  She’d been there. Held him while he died, telling him he was going to live. Her boyfriend? Her lover?

  “Did he save you?”

  Her nod told him the rest of the story. Moshe had died to protect her and she was repaying him by protecting everyone else that she could.

  Silvan held her tightly, and she let him.

  An eternity of howling winds and bailing out icy seawater later, a big C-130 Hercules turboprop roared by close overhead, soaring through the first light of day. It had sniffed out the track of their emergency locators.

  The satellite phone had been useless, the wave troughs too deep to allow even the time to place a call. Their handheld radios were only good for line-of-sight communications. But now with the big plane circling above, he pulled out the radio and told them they were safe and uninjured…and that there was no point searching for the other two pilots. The rest of the report would be for the company commander’s ears alone. He could decide who to contact about the spy trawler.

  Within the hour, a helo and a rescue swimmer would arrive to hoist them off the waves. The plane promised to stay on station despite the turbulence their crew must be suffering.

  Chapter 11

  Debbie lay quiet now, comfortable inside the circle of Silvan’s arms while they awaited the rescue team that would pluck them from the sea. Their helmets kept the worst of the howling wind at bay.

  “You don’t need to worry about protecting me.”

  Silvan’s shouted words were like a benediction. He might not understand that she hadn’t had a single thought of her own survival during the crash landing—she’d been shocked when she’d survived. But she’d known without a doubt that getting down on that hull had improved Silvan’s chances of survival. That was all that had mattered.

  But maybe he was right. She didn’t need to protect him as if he could be erased from existence at any moment. He’d survived the gunfire and crash just as they’d survived dozens of missions.

  When it was their time, like Junker and Tank, it would be their time.

  Until then—

  Debbie sat up as much as the pitching raft would allow and studied Silvan’s face. A few strands of his beautiful blond hair were finally long enough peek out from under the edge of his helmet.

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  His frown said that he couldn’t hear her.

  She braced herself against his shoulders by curling her fists around his vest’s armholes. Then she leaned in and repeated her shout between his right cheek and the edge of his helmet.

  “Bring it on, lady. If it’s a good one, I’ll put in a good word for you with the elf king.” His breath was warm against her chilled cheek.

  “How about we just worry about protecting each other?”

  “Sounds like a good plan.” Then Silvan’s face sobered, “How long were you thinking?” He had to repeat that more loudly.

  When he did, Debbie couldn’t help but feel the warmth in her heart despite the hail and spray currently battering at them. “How long have you got?”

  Silvan’s easy smile started slow but built big and then disappeared from view when he kissed her to seal the bargain.

  Debbie let her heart ride the wave as it lifted the two of them out of the trough and over the top together.

  She hoped they had a long, long time.

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  Target of the Heart (excerpt)

  Major Pete Napier hovered his MH-47G Chinook helicopter ten kilometers outside of Lhasa, Tibet and a mere two inches off the tundra. A mixed action team of Delta Force and The Activity—the slipperiest intel group on the planet—flung themselves aboard.

  The additional load sent an infinitesimal shift in the cyclic control in his right hand. The hydraulics to close the rear loading ramp hummed through the entire frame of the massive helicopter. By the time his crew chief could reach forward to slap an “all secure” signal against his shoulder, they were already ten feet up and fifty out. That was enough altitude. He kept the nose down as he clawed for speed in the thin air at eleven thousand feet.

  “Totally worth it,” one of the D-boys announced as soon as he was on the Chinook’s internal intercom.

  He’d have to remember to tell that to the two Black Hawks flying guard for him…when they were in a friendly country and could risk a radio transmission. This deep inside China—or rather Chinese-held territory as the CIA’s mission-briefing spook had insisted on calling it—radios attracted attention and were only used to avoid imminent death and destruction.

  “Great, now I just need to get us out of this alive.”

  “Do that, Pete. We’d appreciate it.”

  He wished to hell he had a stealth bird like the one that had gone into bin Laden’s compound. But the one that had crashed during that raid had been blown up. Where there was one, there were always two, but the second had gone back into hiding as thoroughly as if it had never existed. He hadn’t heard a word about it since.

  The Tibetan terrain was amazing, even if all he could see of it was the monochromatic green of night vision. And blackness. The largest city in Tibet lay a mere ten kilometers away and they were flying over barren wilderness. He could crash out here and no one would know for decades unless some yak herder stumbled upon them. Or were yaks in Mongolia? He was a corn-fed, white boy from Colorado, what did he know about Tibet? Most of the countries he’d flown into on black ops missions he’d only seen at night anyway.

  While moving very, very fast.

  Like now.

  The inside of his visor was painted with overlapping readouts. A pre-defined terrain map, the best that modern satellite imaging could build made the first layer. This wasn’t some crappy, on-line, look-at-a-picture-of-your-house display. Someone had a pile of dung outside their goat pen? He could see it, tell you how high it was, and probably say if they were pygmy goats or full-size LaManchas by the size of their shit-pellets if he zoomed in.

  On top of that were projected the forward-looking infrared camera images. The FLIR imaging gave him a real-time overlay, in case someone had put an addition onto their goat shed since the last satellite pass, or parked their tractor across his intended flight path.

  His nervous system was paying autonomic attention to that combined landscape. He also compensated for the thin air at altitude as he instinctively chose when to start his climb over said goat shed or his swerve around it.

  It was the third layer, the tactical display that had most of his attention. At least he and the two Black Hawks flying escort on him were finally on the move.

  To insert this deep into Tibet, without passing over Bhutan or Nepal, they’d had to add wingtanks on the Black Hawks’ hardpoints where he’d much rather have a couple banks of Hellfire missiles. Still, they had 20mm chain guns and the crew chiefs had miniguns which was some comfort.

  While the action team was busy infiltrating the capital city and gathering intelligence on the particularly brutal Chinese assistant administrator, he and his crews had been squatting out in the wilderness under a camouflage net designed to make his helo look like just another god-forsaken Himalayan lump of granite.

  Command had determined that it was better for the helos to wait on site through the day than risk flying out and back in. He and his crew had stood shifts on guard duty, but none of them had slept. They’d been flying together too long to have any new jokes, so they’d played a lot of cribbage. He’d long ago ruled no gambling on a mission, after a fistfight had broken out about a bluff hand that cost a Marine three hundred and forty-seven dollars. Marines hated losing to Army no matter how many times it happened. They’d had to sit on him for a long time before he calmed down.

  Tonight’s mission was part of an on-going campaign to discredit the Chinese “presence” in Tibet on the international stage—as if occupying the coun
try the last sixty years didn’t count toward ruling, whether invited or not. As usual, there was a crucial vote coming up at the U.N.—that, as usual, the Chinese could be guaranteed to ignore. However, the ever-hopeful CIA was in a hurry to make sure that any damaging information that they could validate was disseminated as thoroughly as possible prior to the vote.

  Not his concern.

  His concern was, were they going to pass over some Chinese sentry post at their top speed of a hundred and ninety-six miles an hour? The sentries would then call down a couple Shenyang J-16 jet fighters that could hustle along at Mach 2 to fry his sorry ass. He knew there was a pair of them parked at Lhasa along with some older gear that would be just as effective against his three helos.

  “Don’t suppose you could get a move on, Pete?”

  “Eat shit, Nicolai!” He was a good man to have as a copilot. Pete knew he was holding on too tight, and Nicolai knew that a joke was the right way to ease the moment.

  He, Nicolai, and the four pilots in the two Black Hawks had a long way to go tonight and he’d never make it if he stayed so tight on the controls that he could barely maneuver. Pete eased off and felt his fingers tingle with the rush of returning blood. They dove down into gorges and followed them as long as they dared. They hugged cliff walls at every opportunity to decrease their radar profile. And they climbed.

  That was the true danger—they would be up near the helos’ limits when they crossed over the backbone of the Himalayas in their rush for India. The air was so rarefied that they burned fuel at a prodigious rate. Their reserve didn’t allow for any extended battles while crossing the border…not for any battle at all really.

  It was pitch dark outside her helicopter when Captain Danielle Delacroix stamped on the left rudder pedal while giving the big Chinook right-directed control on the cyclic. It tipped her most of the way onto her side, but let her continue in a straight line. A Chinook’s rotors were sixty feet across—front to back they overlapped to make the spread a hundred feet long. By cross-controlling her bird to tip it, she managed to execute a straight line between two mock pylons only thirty feet apart. They were made of thin cloth so they wouldn’t down the helo if you sliced one—she was the only trainee to not have cut one yet.