I Own the Dawn: The Night Stalkers

by M. L. Buchman

  But they’d spared the child. Left her to wander an orphan over the brutal terrain until she’d stumbled on the fateful Jeep.

  Spared the child.

  “Major, could I see that photo again?”

  She handed it back to Kee.

  Kee angled it to catch the setting sun. Not enough light, she pulled a flashlight out of her thigh pouch. She turned the photo to one side and the other as if she could get some perspective on it. It was hard to tell through the loose native cloth, but there was a shadow. A shadow on both women.

  They were pregnant. When the women had been killed, they’d taken Evans and Arlov’s unborn children to the grave with them.

  Evans and Arlov had chosen the future day of their deaths, the day they would unleash war on the SCO for driving them away and then killing their wives, one for marrying a foreign officer and the other for marrying someone suddenly labeled a traitor for having worked with them.

  No, they hadn’t just killed the men’s wives.

  They’d killed the women the men loved as well as their unborn children.

  If someone killed Archie and Dilya, Kee wouldn’t hesitate for a second to start a world war as long as it rained retribution down on the heads of the guilty.

  How would she feel if someone executed Archie the day after they threw her out of SOAR not for screwing up, but because someone else, someone far away, made a decision?

  Pretty damn pissed.

  Suicidal enough to bomb a major city. Sure. But Evans and Arlov would want to be sure. Sure enough to play kamikaze with a Russian jet.

  Chapter 48

  Four hours later, nearly the stroke of midnight, both Hawks arrived at the exact coordinates where they’d dropped Evans’s truck.

  One of the big twin-rotor Chinooks waited for them. Beale and Henderson set down their DAP Hawks to either side. Before they were even off the birds, two crews poured out of the Chinook. In moments they’d set up grounding cables and refueling lines to both Hawks. Then they started checking all the weapons despite the fact that not a single shot had been fired.

  The Chinook would pull back and wait to see if they needed fuel on the way back out. They shouldn’t. They’d be okay with a midair refueling at that point. Assuming everything went as planned.

  The two crews wandered about to stretch their legs, an unusual luxury while on a long mission.

  On the rough earth track lay a rope harness. The harness that had tied Evans and Arlov’s Toyota to the Black Hawk for their lift over the mountains. The rope’s ends were taped off with black duct tape to keep them from unraveling, which explained the roll of tape Kee had found buried in the sand. Four metal hooks dangled at the ends. Nothing else, though they scouted the area for several minutes using the floodlights shining out from the Chinook.

  Evans and Arlov had hit the ground running, literally.

  Kee wandered up the ramp and into the belly of the Chinook. The high whirr of fuel pumps filled the helicopter. The massive fuel bladder tied down to the deck occupied much of the space. Ammo cases lined the walls for the miniguns and the Vulcan cannon. A rack of Stingers, air-to-air missiles, had been stocked for this mission. They’d switched the armament on the DAP Hawks’s pylons over to mostly missiles that morning.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  She turned to face the crewman who’d come up behind her. He held a small box out to her. Kee held out her hand and he dropped it into her palm even as she recognized it.

  “M118LRs.” A box of the cartridges for her sniper rifle. She hadn’t been looking for them. Not really. But now that she held them, she knew that’s why she’d wandered aboard. There wouldn’t be any call for her rifle on this mission. Besides, she’d never use up the twenty-five rounds she had in her case. Her record had been seven rounds on a single assignment, but having ten more made her feel better anyway. As if she just scratched an itch.

  “Brought them for you special, ma’am.” The same guy who’d gotten them for her on the ground.

  “Kee.”

  “Robert.”

  She knocked a fist lightly against his shoulder. He deserved a kiss on the cheek, but their helmets made that impossible.

  “Thanks a lot, Robert.”

  He grinned down at her. “We aim to please. You all set on 5.56 and .45?”

  She tapped the pockets on her vest for the spare magazines for her SCAR rifle and her handgun.

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “You are. Go get ’em.”

  “Thanks, we will.” She wandered back down the ramp and spotted the two Majors conferring with the Captain of the Chinook.

  She watched them, picked out of the darkness by the Chinook’s soft work lights. Beale and Henderson were so comfortable together, at ease beyond any mere experience of flying together could explain. They were in tune.

  Did she and Archie look like that to the others? Look as if they belonged together? Hard to imagine. Even if she could imagine it, was it something she was willing to risk?

  Kee turned away to watch the refueling grapes rolling up the hoses.

  Six years, ever since Anna’s death, she’d avoided all human connection. Too much risk of too much pain. And in all that time she hadn’t missed it for a single minute. She’d been enough, on her own. Now, she missed Archie merely because he wasn’t beside her. Needy? Really sad.

  Kee stood taller. She wasn’t going to be needy. Kee Smith was just fine by herself. She didn’t need…

  “Hey, beautiful.”

  He stole her breath away. He’d come up beside her in his avenging angel mode. Flight suit with armored vest, a SCAR carbine hanging comfortably from his chest, his helmet strapped on and night-vision goggles flipped up out of the way. How could a man make her feel so safe simply by standing beside her?

  She didn’t say anything. All she did was lean over until they brushed shoulder to shoulder. They didn’t need the words at all.

  “I love you, Kee.”

  Of course, there wasn’t enough breath left in her body to say any words, even if she had them in her.

  “Would you two get a room?” Big Bad John stood close behind them. Then he lowered his voice. “And get it somewhere that you aren’t gonna be slapped with Paragraph 14 of the Personnel Policy.”

  They jerked apart at that.

  “C’mon. We’re outta here.”

  They all headed to the chopper, splitting up to climb in through their various doors.

  The long-range cartridges were still heavy in her hand. She slid them into a thigh pocket of her flight suit.

  With each passing minute, she liked this mission less.

  ***

  The Afghanistan-Uzbekistan border slid by twenty feet below their wheels with no mishap. Right on schedule, they weren’t pushing it. At 150 knots, they were cruising nicely in a country where they absolutely didn’t belong.

  For ten miles everything was normal. Kee sitting on her seat, keeping an eye on the landscape around. The next moment the bird rattled with gunfire, but nothing showed in her goggles. It must be on Big John’s side. She flipped on her gun and the barrels spun up. Safety off and she was ready for a target.

  “We’re hit!” Henderson’s call. “We overflew an AA battery.”

  There’d been no intelligence of an anti-aircraft battery along their route, but since you could move one around on the back of a heavy truck, that didn’t mean much.

  “Got it. Firing,” Archie called. The Hawk slewed sideways.

  Kee blinked her eyes shut to avoid being blinded by the glare. Even so she could see the bright streaks of two FFAR missiles through her eyelids. She opened them in time to see the 30 mm cannon on John’s side light off. Archie was hammering the site.

  Still, rounds were pounding against their bird. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, they stopped. A moment later the roar of the shock wave hit them, slapping them aside. She could feel the heat wash over them.

  They’d been flying close to the ground, only a fe
w hundred meters behind Henderson’s Hawk. No time to slow down or evade. Barely time to react.

  But Archie had. He’d hammered the site even as they flew a dozen feet over the AA guns. His rockets had flown true, and the battery was blown. Blown up, right into their path. She listened, but heard no faltering in the engines. So they hadn’t sucked up any shrapnel along with all that heat and flame.

  Beale circled hard, exposing Kee’s side to the site.

  “Steel!”

  She opened fire immediately. Even though she couldn’t see anyone standing clear, she wasn’t taking chances. She raked the stream of fire back and forth over the truck and the twinned machine guns burning on the bed. A man on fire ran for the desert and she took him down as well.

  Five full seconds she laid in. Nothing else exploded, no one else moved. Archie had nailed them, and nailed them hard.

  She stopped her fire and studied the area. Nothing and no one.

  “Looks clean,” Kee called. “Have John double-check.”

  Beale did one of her gut-wrench swoops, and Kee could see nothing but the black of desert.

  “Confirm, no movement,” Big John called. “I—”

  “This is Viper.” Henderson’s voice was completely steady. “We’re going down.”

  Kee could feel their own helicopter flinch as Major Beale’s perfectly steady hands twitched.

  In seconds they were racing ahead once more. Kee leaned out to try and see ahead. A mile past the AA battery, she saw the other DAP Hawk. They were descending rapidly. A crash with a fresh load of fuel and a full load of weaponry. Not good.

  Beale must have had the same thought as she jerked them back into a hover, practically standing them on their tail to avoid overrunning The Viper’s bird. If there were an explosion on landing, they would not want to be at ground zero. All they could do was watch.

  Even in the dark of the night, Kee could see the black cloud billowing out of the exhaust, filled with sparks from a critical hit.

  The flight was erratic, but controlled. A few feet up, the nose flared hard, stalling them barely a meter above the desert. In three more seconds, they were down, rocking hard on their shocks, but down.

  “We’re down. Hold at guard station.” Henderson’s voice sounded absolutely calm.

  Kee glanced over and saw Beale hang her head for a moment before acknowledging.

  They set up a circling perimeter, about a quarter mile from the downed Hawk. Kee faced into the center, looking at the downed Hawk. She flipped down her night-vision binoculars and saw four people climb out of the bird. Then two of them turned back to pull out the fifth member of the crew.

  “Dusty took a couple rounds. He’s conscious, but bleeding. Tim, help me check him over. Richardson, Davis, check the bird.” Henderson had left the comm open.

  For several minutes Kee’s Hawk continued its slow circle. The AWACS, their eye-in-the-sky still thirty miles back inside Afghanistan, reported that the air remained clear, no enemy aircraft inbound. Maybe they’d taken out the anti-aircraft gunners before they were able to report any problem. They were certainly far enough away from everything. They’d hidden themselves well, dug into the backside of a low rise. Almost invisible until you were on top of them. If no one missed them for another four hours, everything should be okay.

  “Okay, Dusty is stable, but I’ve had to dope him. What about my bird?”

  It was Connie Davis who answered. “I can fix the hydraulics they nailed, that’s pretty easy. It spilled fluid into the exhaust, so all the smoke didn’t mean much. That’s not the problem.”

  Kee watched as one figure led the other three around forward. That had to be Connie.

  “Avionics, fire control, FLIR, all gone. If you try to fly Nap of Earth, as this mission calls for, you’ll be flying blind. And even if you could, once you got there, you couldn’t fire anything. I can’t fix this. They smithereened a quarter of a million dollars of electronics. I can get us flying in thirty minutes, but we can’t fight off an angry mosquito without replacing half the panel. Even the redundant systems are all shot up.”

  Kee pictured the line of fire that had hit Henderson’s Black Hawk. Firing up from below, rounds passed through the control panel. Enough rounds to wipe out all of those systems. More rounds passing through and punching up into the engines, hard enough to part the hydraulics lines. In those few seconds, rounds slashing everywhere through the forward compartment, big rounds, at least .50cal, probably bigger to punch through the chopper’s armor. That it took out that much equipment and missed both pilots ranked nothing short of a modern miracle.

  She leaned over and could just touch Major Beale’s shoulder.

  Emily Beale grabbed her hand, squeezed it hard, and held for the length of three heartbeats, then she nodded her thanks and released Kee’s hand. All without turning. No matter how strong she appeared, by all odds her husband should dead down on the sand at this very moment. And they all knew it.

  Kee reached for the wryest voice she could manage.

  “You know he’s going to become even more insufferable.”

  Emily’s head turned sharply at that to face her.

  “I mean this is bound to become another legend in the name of Major Mark ‘The Viper’ Henderson. The man who flew between the bullets, a hundred holes puncturing his pilot’s seat.”

  Emily glared a moment longer then burst out laughing. She pushed her night-vision goggles up and mopped at her eyes.

  “Oh, God. You are so right.” She aimed that radiant smile of hers at Kee while she laughed and wept. “You are so right.”

  “Vengeance,” Mark called their bird.

  “Here, Viper.” Beale’s voice was rock-steady as she replied.

  “We’re safe, but unable to proceed. You must continue to target.”

  The Major rocked back in her seat. She looked right, then left, as if hunting for another answer. Any other answer. But they all knew that Henderson was right.

  “Should I pick up Davis?”

  “Negative. With Dusty doped up, I need her to get me back in the air. Smith has seen the target, that’s all you need. All we’ve got.”

  “Roger.”

  Beale didn’t hesitate. She turned the bird, aimed the nose down, and yanked up on the collective, hurling them to the northwest.

  “And Vengeance?”

  “Yes, Viper?”

  “Make damn sure you come back in one piece.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Kee turned to look outside. Major Beale’s voice had gone soft and whispery. She’d heard the Major sound tough, sound amused, even sound gentle when she talked to Dilya. She’d never heard this. Never heard the sound of a woman so in love.

  She wanted to discount it. As if she were some woman in one of those long-dress shows on late-night TV. But it wasn’t. It came from the first woman of SOAR.

  Glancing forward for a quick peek at Emily revealed no change in her expression. The Major sat in quarter profile, flying a DAP Hawk, attention on the heads-up display, flying $40 million of Battle Hawk two dozen feet over hostile territory.

  Kee turned and glanced toward the back of the chopper. She saw something move across her night vision. But it was inside the helicopter.

  The pile of coats she and John had secured to the cargo net shifted.

  Dilyana stuck her head out and looked at Kee.

  Kee couldn’t hear her, but she could read the words on her lips.

  “Safe now?”

  Chapter 49

  “I don’t know how she got here, but we can’t take her with us.” Kee wrapped one of the coats properly around Dilya. She was partly a Popsicle from huddling so long under the pile of coats on the steel deck. Kee zipped it and patted down all the Velcro closures. She opened the front for a moment, stuffed in the small orange cat Dilya was never without, and resealed the coat again. It was long enough that, with her legs tucked up, the girl disappeared completely inside it. Kee pulled the furred hood up, and it flopped down over Dil
ya’s face. She pushed it into place until just the elfin face popped out.

  With a quick flip of a strap, she secured the girl and the coat once more to the cargo net.

  “And what would you suggest, Sergeant Smith?”

  Kee blinked rapidly as her mind struggled to kick into gear.

  “We could—” turn back and leave Dilya with the others. Not an option. They were already fifteen minutes behind schedule. They’d planned to be on station an hour early, now it would be a mere forty-five minutes. She could hear the turbines running higher, trying to make up the lost time. Going faster made them louder and more detectable. A calculated risk.

  If Evans and Arlov decided to leave earlier than planned, they risked missing them. The one hour of leeway had been a gamble between the baddies leaving early, or the good guys on site for too long and being discovered. They couldn’t afford another half hour that the return trip to Viper would take.

  “What if—” No. Landing and leaving Dilya wouldn’t work. There’d be no guarantee they could stop and fetch her on the return flight. If they were on the run or had to leave by a different route, she’d once again be an orphan lost in the high-mountain desert. At least she’d be back in her own country, but it was a country she didn’t know or even really belong in anymore. The first time she spoke in English, who knew what would happen to her.

  Kee made sure Dilya understood that the strap had to stay around her waist, then rested her hand on the girl’s head.

  “Please, keep her safe.” Kee didn’t know where she sent the prayer, but she felt better for doing so. She kissed the girl on her forehead, receiving a nose full of furry parka hood, then returned to her seat by her minigun.

  When she was clipped back in and had her hands back on her gun, she responded.

  “She’s a Night Stalker now, ma’am. And Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.”

  “NSDQ,” Archie and Beale murmured.

  “Damn straight!” Big John echoed softly.

  ***

  They were less than half an hour from position. Archie sat and watched the desert rolling by. They’d chosen their route carefully, they had flown over no towns at all and very few dwellings. Occasionally a road would flash by beneath them, the only interruption of the rolling landscape.