Chinese and seriously cute. And, if he said that aloud, he’d wager that a US Army former captain would be glad to make him eat those words at her earliest convenience.
She blinked at him in surprise as if shocked to see where they were. Then she looked up at him. The darkness of her eyes was emphasized by the brilliant colors of her hair dye.
“Why the wild colors?” he indicated her hair. Always best to come at a problem by asking something completely normal.
She pulled a strand of it forward as if to inspect the color, even surprised by seeing it. “ ‘Girl who flies like her hair’s on fire.’ Too many grunts grew up in The Hunger Games era. Embracing it was easier than fighting it.” The color slowly eased into her cheeks as she spoke.
“I was more the Batman Dark Knight trilogy era. Catwoman seriously rocked it. Anne Hathaway was hot.”
“She was,” Andi’s voice was still rough.
“A beautiful and talented woman wrapped in head-to-toe black spandex, what’s not to like, right?”
“Right.” Andi had slipped back into the land of monosyllables.
“Anything you want to be talking about?”
13
“Way not!” Andi couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less.
“Okay.”
That surprised her enough to look up at Mike again. He didn’t frown or push. Instead, his shrug said that he might actually be fine with her not explaining what had just happened.
As if she could.
All she remembered was…nothing. One moment she’d been sitting in General Thomas’ office and the next she’d been inhaling bleach fumes.
Mike didn’t appear to be trying to game her. What if Mr. Easy-going wasn’t just an act and he actually was? If she was attracted to men, she could see how women could easily be attracted to him.
The last thing she really remembered was…
“The S-97 Raider.”
“What is that anyway?”
Her breath caught in her chest and it couldn’t escape.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Mike pushed her head down between her knees again.
She shoved herself back upright, hard enough that she crunched his hand against the tile—hard. It was all that probably kept her from giving herself a concussion.
“Yikes! Okay, spine of steel is back in place.” Mike shook his hand as if making sure it wasn’t broken.
“Sorry.” And she actually was. “ ‘The only way through is to beat the weakness to death.’ My sixth-grade gym teacher had this slightly demented approach to how I should deal with all the teasing for being so small. It worked, I guess. I was top pick on most teams by the time I hit eighth grade.”
“And on into the Night Stalkers.” He massaged his hand but continued lightly, “That’ll teach me to try and help.”
Now she owed him. She hated debts. Could she trust Mike? Her instincts and her watch’s second hand said yes. Andi suspected the two of colluding against her, but didn’t argue.
“The S-97 Raider is America’s newest helicopter. It’s seriously hot shit.”
“Why?”
“What’s the top speed of a helicopter?”
Mike shrugged, making her rhetorical question less like rhetoric. She’d assumed he’d know since he was on an NTSB team called to evaluate a demo flight of the S-97.
“Okay, right now the fastest military helo in the world is the big twin-rotor MH-47G Chinook cargo helo. It can just hit two hundred miles an hour. My old MH-6M helo ran best at one-fifty. The S-97 can go two-eighty. It’s also barely two meters bigger than my Little Bird, so it can still slip into tight little corners like I…used to.”
Her throat constricted at the memory.
She could do this.
She could get through it.
The second hand was at the bottom half of the minute.
Shit!
“So, it’s fast,” Mike’s simple statement snapped whatever was winding so tightly around her.
“It’s more than fast,” Andi managed to override the second hand’s dire prediction. “It’s stealthy. It has technology like you can’t imagine and, well, I’d have thought I couldn’t tell you except we are sitting on our bleached asses in a goddamn Groom Lake bathroom.”
“Don’t worry. Like Holly said, I wouldn’t understand it. So, it’s fast and cool. I can follow that much.”
Maybe Holly had also been right that human factors really were all he cared about. He was here with her after all.
“Why does it freak you out?”
She opened her mouth but nothing came out.
“Wait a sec,” Mike stared at the ceiling. “You know high security information about the newest helicopter. That means…that you were part of the development.”
She flinched. Crap! There was an obvious giveaway that he was right on the mark.
“So, you were the test crew.”
“All the first- and second-round tests. Down at Sikorsky Development in West Palm Beach, Florida.” And those had been glorious days. Starting with basic hover, then hover and rotate, until she’d finally been cracking speed records. Sometimes two, three, four flights a day.
“Uh-huh. Except you got replaced by the two guys flying tonight. Two…Night Stalkers pilots. That means you were one of a two-pilot test team but now you’re one and…” He looked down at her suddenly. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Andi.”
And just that fast her secret was out there for all to see, as if Ken’s blood was still splattered all over her. He’d been the best copilot she’d ever had. Right up until he died.
She could only nod. How to explain Ken or the guilt she had about his death? That he’d given his life and widowed his wife to save hers.
“My copilot died less than three feet from me while we were in an NOE—nap-of-Earth—flight, meaning really low, in someplace I can’t mention. To even flinch as he died would have ended me in an instant.”
She’d only wondered a few times if that might have been easier. The guilt would certainly have been more short-lived—unless the afterlife had guilt too. Maybe she should become a Buddhist, then she wouldn’t remember any of this in the next life, at least not until she was a far more evolved person.
“I guess that you have every right to feel stressed.”
Stressed. Such a simple word.
Captain Andi Wu is diagnosed as suffering from PTSD and may prove unreliable in any flight situation.
Or any other part of the service that she cared about. No TBI. Her brain was physically intact, just the rest of it was royally fucked up. Honorable medical discharge.
Only after she’d explained about why she’d been booted, let go, discharged like from a circus’ human cannon out of the military, did it sink in what she was revealing.
“How did I just tell you all this? I’ve never said a word of it to anyone, never mind a total stranger.”
Yet she had just dumped her guts out onto the ladies’ bathroom floor.
14
Mike decided he’d rather keep her talking than try to explain himself to himself, never mind anyone else.
“Were you close?”
“Not the way you mean,” Andi’s words came slowly. “He and his wife were my best friends. I can’t even face her, though she’s reached out several times. Christ!”
Andi twisted enough to glare up at him.
“Seriously, how do you get people to spill shit like that?”
Mike shrugged as if it was no big deal.
Andi huffed out a sigh and went to a sink to wash her face.
Sister Mary Pat had always loved telling him that he’d had the gift of the “secret superpower of gab” all the way back to when goo-goo and ga-ga were the extent of his vocabulary. She’d been a family friend. After the car wreck killed his parents when he was nine, he’d done the rest of his growing up in the St. Bernardine Catholic orphanage where Sister Mary Pat served. Bernardine, whatever the modern orphanage might be, had made himself popular for preaching against sorcer
y, witchcraft, homosexuality, and Jews.
Actually, Sister Mary Pat had been wrong.
His gift was getting other people to gab.
Looking back, he could see that it was a survival mechanism. It had earned him a disproportionate amount of Sister Mary Pat’s attention in the crowded orphanage. Making himself her favorite had earned him a measure of safety and a lot of teasing. The latter had been easy to ignore because of the former.
Convincing other people that they wanted to tell him things made him important in their eyes, someone to protect. The priest had pushed hard for him to enter the clergy. As if.
At nine, when he’d arrived at the orphanage, he’d been a naive, lost little boy.
By the age of ten, he’d learned about leverage and had dirt on everyone, including the priest and a certain young lay sister who he’d convinced to take the “lay” part of her status very literally.
By the time Mike was fourteen—by the time he was five according to Sister Mary Pat—he’d learned that being a good and willing listener was a superpower around women as well.
Curiously, Holly never told him what she was thinking and feeling. Perhaps that’s why he found her so fascinating.
Though what had brought him to kissing her awake he still didn’t know. He knew women liked that, other women than Holly. If he’d thought for half a second, he’d have figured out that he’d gotten exactly what he would have expected.
That was what sent a shudder up his spine.
Since when had he stopped thinking about consequences when it came to women? That was a path to no end of pain. Sometimes literally.
Father Stevens had caught his favorite lay sister advancing Mike’s education behind the altar in the chancel at Saint Bernardine’s. In the very heart of the church, at Jesus’ feet, Mike had been beaten senseless with a bible. Which had definitively completed his religious education.
Later, in his twenties, Violetta Celeste Giovanni had almost gotten his ass murdered by her mafia brothers as part of a scam to defraud them. That he’d gotten involved with her in the first place was a very pleasant accident. It had also been a dangerous one as he’d been a front for the FBI at the time—who had screwed him in a completely different and far less enjoyable way just two years ago.
Mike should thank Holly for the reminder, even if it still hurt to swallow.
Andi slid back down beside him. “How is it you know so little about planes but ended up in the NTSB?”
“I’ve always loved flying. Even if I’m only a private pilot, I love to talk about flying and planes. Usually that’s all I need to get the conversation started. I’ve learned the types of information needed for an investigation. But as to what an S-97 Raider is or quite why Holly was so impressed that you were a Night Stalker? That’s still out of my reach.”
“That was Holly being impressed.”
“Yep. She’s—”
The bathroom door banged open hard.
“Hey, you two just gonna sit on your duffs all day?” Holly stood at the threshold with her fists on her hips.
“I don’t know,” Mike turned to Andi. “Are we?”
He could see Andi’s relief that he kept it light. He knew better than to offer any hint of what they’d been discussing.
Ha! There was a laugh, he’d become a priest-confessor after all.
Andi tipped her head to the side as if thinking about it. “It depends. How mad will it make Holly if we just sit here?”
Holly rolled her eyes and strode into one of the stalls, slamming and locking the door.
Mike looked away when Holly’s pants crumpled down over her boots.
Holly called out, “It’s not me you have to worry about—as long as you aren’t stupid enough to try waking me with a kiss.”
“Yeah, my bad. I already apologized once,” Mike shouted back.
“Actually you didn’t, but then neither did I,” Holly’s voice was surprisingly soft, and Mike didn’t think it was just the baffling of the door.
Andi used the cover of Holly flushing to whisper softly, “Thanks, Mike.”
He shrugged that it wasn’t even worth mentioning.
But what was he supposed to do now? What if she froze at the wrong moment? Well, Miranda did that too. Besides, it shouldn’t matter. How dangerous could a crash investigation be? And this time there wasn’t even a crash, just a flight.
Easy-peasy.
15
Miranda had found her way back by writing down a list of every major investigation she’d led, from memory. First she wrote them in date order, then again successively by aircraft model number, date of model introduction, date of frame manufacture (though she’d had to consult her tablet to look up two of those), and finally by tail number.
When she was done, everyone was sitting around the age-worn wooden conference table facing the display screens. The sun had gone down outside the windows and the buzz of fluorescents overhead now lit the room.
She’d never trusted fluorescents. They always appeared to flicker on the edge of her vision but were steady and constant when she stared at them directly. Her emotions page suggested that “smug” was the proper adjective. Smug lighting fixtures.
Jeremy and Helen were the only ones talking. He was asking very detailed questions about projects that forced Helen to keep saying, “That project is classified” over and over.
Miranda hadn’t even heard of most of them, but Jeremy’s curiosity didn’t abate.
Holly was watching Mike and Andi closely, but Miranda couldn’t see anything different that made them noteworthy.
Someone had delivered a cart laden with various dinners from the cafeteria. By the time they’d made their selections and returned to the table, the screens were lit.
Top left was a forward view from the front of the Raider, presently a hangar door opening wide. Bottom left was a view inside the cockpit, showing the two pilots, so encased in their flightsuits and helmets as to be indistinguishable if not for their names written across the brow of their helmets: Morales and Christianson.
Top right was a feed of the performance and engine instrumentation. Bottom right was all of the test instrumentation—accelerometers, strain gauges, even the pilots’ pulse and blood pressure.
The only sound she heard was the pilot asking the control tower for departure clearance. Once it was given, they were gone into the night sky.
Finally, something to concentrate on.
16
“Stable at two-two-zero.”
“Roger.” Despite nineteen prior flights in the last seventeen days, Chief Warrant 3 Roberto Morales still couldn’t believe this bird.
Small helicopters just didn’t cruise at two hundred and twenty knots, two hundred and fifty miles per hour.
No helicopter did.
When it entered full service after this test, its Never Exceed speed of two-eighty would make it the fastest helicopter in the world by eighty miles per hour. It wasn’t much slower than the MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor—when it was in airplane mode. Those guys at Sikorsky were superstars.
Normal cruise speed for his company’s usual MH-6M Little Birds was a hundred and thirty knots. Jumping from one-thirty to two-twenty was freaking awesome.
The S-97 Raider was better than any wet dream, than any woman—except his Juana, of course. She always made it easy to keep his promise that she was Number One in his heart. Now she was pregnant with their daughter, as if he needed another reason to love her.
But between the unborn kid and the S-97 Raider?
At least until her birth, second place was still too close to call.
It was time to rip this awesome bird out of the test pilots’ hands and get it certified for combat. Every test in the acceptance suite had been blazed through with flying colors. All that remained was this final free-for-all stress-test. Their instructions were simple: “Go and really wring it out.”
Right now everyone would be watching over their shoulders, but he shrugged that off easily. Night Sta
lkers only flew one way—never giving less than a hundred percent.
The first several batches of Raiders would be deeply customized for the 160th Night Stalkers Special Operations Aviation Regiment. And he blessed whatever saint on high had decided that it was the 1st Battalion A Company’s job to run the acceptance tests.
Hard luck for Andi when Ken was killed. They’d done most of the early testing, and had been sent back to active duty time after time during the long waits while fixes and upgrades were incorporated.
But he and Christianson were now the lead team, the final test pilots, and he was going to ride that high for a long time. They would be the first Night Stalkers certified in the military’s newest rotorcraft.
The night desert rushed by invisibly twenty-five feet below them.
The console had only minimal displays. The information he needed was all projected on the inside of his Collins Aerospace helmet—a direct cousin of the ones used by the F-35 Lightning II pilots.
The helmet muffled all sounds until he could hear little other than his heartbeat—steady at fifty a minute no matter what was going down.
They’d created something incredibly new in the Raider.
The GE YT706 turboshaft engine was fifteen percent more powerful and twenty percent more efficient than its predecessor T700. That had provided a brilliant improvement in the difficult high-and-hot operations tests.
The two sets of coaxially mounted, counter-rotating four-blade rotors looked unusual. Stacked one set above the other, they looked as if they shouldn’t work. The change from a single rotor allowed a sixty percent faster speed, with full control.
And to reach that speed, the six-bladed rear pusher propeller drove the Raider forward at thirty-seven percent the speed of sound. The bird of the future, as the replacements for the Black Hawk, Apache, and Cobra were all going to be a scaled-up version of the Raider.
Raider Page 6