Night Is Mine

by M. L. Buchman

  She tried to yaw ninety degrees. She just didn’t know this craft well enough. She could do a ninety-degree yaw in a Hawk blindfolded.

  Well, that was appropriate. Blindfolded. Blind… Don’t think. Just fly.

  “I need help. I need you to talk to me constantly about where we are and how we’re flying.”

  The radio squawked in her ear.

  “What’s the condition of the First Lady?”

  “Unknown. She’s—”

  “Don’t worry about her,” she cut Daniel off. “If we crash, she’ll be way worse off than she is.”

  “I see the White House,” Daniel sounded dreamy, like a sleepy tourist admiring the view. “It’s over to your right and pretty far down. You’re tipped to the left and the nose is up.”

  Damn. She’d have bet she was rolling right. A lot of beginning pilots flew out of their first clouds upside down because they trusted their inner ear over their instruments. She knew better than to trust her body signals while flying, they’d always lie about angle of attack. But dammit, she couldn’t see the console to trust or mistrust anything.

  “Is this level?”

  “A little more. Too much!” Daniel’s shout made her ears hurt. “Shit! Go back! Go back!”

  Little adjustments. Little adjustments. Feel the bird. Her stomach was trailing her to the right. She leaned a little on the left foot pedal and the feeling went away.

  “This is flight control. Status, Marine Two?” The controller’s voice strident and demanding.

  “Flying blind in the vicinity of the White House. Now if you’d shut up, I’m trying to get us back there.”

  “That’s a negative, Marine Two. White House is crashed. Full security lockdown. Any craft attempting to land will be fired upon. Proceed Anacostia Naval Support Facility. We have a team converging on the shooter. Escort is scrambled. ETA your vicinity seven minutes.”

  “Seven minutes from now won’t matter a tinker’s damn.” Not the best radio protocol but she didn’t give a tinker’s damn at the moment.

  She heard a low groan.

  “Is that the First Lady?” she shouted back at Daniel.

  “She’s out. And bleeding. Not much. Nosebleed maybe. Can’t see. Her arm isn’t right. I’m sure it’s not supposed to look like that. It looks kinda like a doll that flopped down on a pile of…”

  She tuned him out as he rambled away to himself.

  “Flight. First Lady is unconscious and injured. Need to land and find immediate medical.”

  “Reroute authorized. Proceed Walter Reed Medical Center all haste.”

  “Damn your eyes,” she regretted that as soon as she said it. “I’m blind. Literally. Not no instruments. No vision. I’m sure not going to find a hospital—I can’t even find a horizon, you damned idiot!”

  That gave her a moment of silence that she used to jerk her head toward the empty copilot’s seat. The headset flipped off and good riddance. Flight control wasn’t going to be of any use to her.

  “Daniel. You still with me, buddy?”

  “Parts of me. You banged us up pretty good.”

  “Wear your seat belt tighter next time.” No time for sympathy. “Now pay attention. I need to land, and they won’t let me back to the South Lawn. What can you see? Big and wide open. And how am I flying?”

  “You’re going in a pretty big circle to the left, and we’re tilted about twenty degrees to the right. I didn’t even know that was possible.”

  “Neither did I.” She did her best to correct it.

  “I’m so glad to hear that.” His voice sounded sleepy.

  “Daniel! Stay with me.”

  “Uh, right. Just really dizzy. I think you kinda concussed me with the window.”

  “Someplace wide and open.”

  “How about the Mall?”

  “Any concerts or protests tonight?”

  “Not that I can see. Turn right and slow down. It’s off to the right about two o’clock, but I have no idea how far down.”

  “Can you see my console?”

  “Yeah. But none of it makes any sense to me.”

  Did she dare let go of the cyclic and point? She’d bet they were out of trim and she’d lose what little concept she had of their orientation if she let go.

  “Two big screens right in front of me. Two dials to the right. Top one. Short, fat hand.”

  “How many screens?” He must have hit his head hard.

  ***

  Emily was never quite sure how they got down. Daniel stuck with her, and though she smacked the Bell down the last fifteen feet, the landing was better than that carrier landing Mark had hammered hard a lifetime and two days ago. No. Yesterday morning.

  Well, maybe the landing wasn’t so great. One of the wheels let go. She could fell the rotors hammering against something as she shut down the engines, but they didn’t shatter. She was feeling pretty woozy herself as the adrenaline rush eased off. Then her face began to throb and her feet were cold.

  She started reaching around for the headset. Then she heard it.

  The sweet sound of sirens.

  Chapter 24

  “Viper, this is Oversight.”

  Mark wrenched the cyclic hard left, and Richardson fired three FFAR rockets as their nose crossed over the SAM missile battery. Everything going wrong. The Little Bird that had inserted the Ranger four-man squad to check out an abandoned Russian tank had been shot down. Clay was down there in his Black Hawk trying to extract the two injured pilots and recover the Rangers before they were overrun.

  The 10th Mountain had promised the area was quiet and then walked into a machine-gun emplacement that tore through their first two squads.

  The second rocket hit the SAM battery, which lit the sky as it blew up.

  “Viper, aye.” He checked the clock. The Apache Longbow backup gunships of the 101st Airborne were still three minutes away. Completely useless.

  He reefed back to the right and watched as a stream of tracers sliced through the air he’d occupied less than two seconds before.

  “Enough of this shit!” He stood the Black Hawk on its nose, setting the rotors to drag the Hawk straight forward. Hopefully too fast for the ground troops to compensate. “Coming up in five, four…” He saw Richardson arming everything. One the count of zero, they lit into the baddies.

  Eight rocket trails streaked from the helicopter almost straight down. Mark linked the 30 mm cannon into his vision-tracking. He spotted the howitzer emplacement in the flare of the rockets piling into the trucks and buildings. Lining up the crosshairs in his heads-up display, he unleashed the 30. Ten rounds a second of ammunition, each over an inch across, ripped into men and machine. His crew chiefs pounded a couple hundred rounds each from the miniguns in the second and a half the howitzer was in range.

  The capper was the Hellfire missile that Richardson dead-centered on the howitzer. In an air-shattering explosion, the whole place was gone.

  “Viper, we thought you’d want to know.”

  “What?” The overhead AWACS battle commanders were rarely coy. Of course, the eye-in-the-sky wasn’t part of his battle. As far as he knew, the closest one was working thirty miles to the east and had no idea of the mess he had on his hands.

  He circled hard and spotted thirty fighters on foot cresting the ridge above the downed MH-6 and Clay’s transport Hawk. And he didn’t need a close look. Didn’t need to see if they had IR tags sewn into their uniforms to identify them as friendlies with his NVGs. He could tell by their movements as green silhouettes across his night-vision goggles that they weren’t regular Army.

  “Clay, you’ve got under fifteen seconds to be airborne.”

  “Need forty-five,” was all the reply he got.

  “Steel, boys!” he called over the intercom. “Hard steel!” He knew there was a .50 cal machine gun he hadn’t found yet, but he couldn’t let the rescue site be overrun, even if that .50 could punch some nasty holes in his own bird. The crew chiefs began burping out hundred-round
splashes from their miniguns at anything that moved.

  “There’s been an incident stateside,” Oversight’s dispatcher sounded calm, as if he was busy scratching himself.

  Mark really didn’t give a damn about stateside at this particular moment. He kept the nose aimed at the ridge above Clay’s chopper and began moving sideways so that all of the Hawk’s weapons had a clear sweep of the rocky ridgeline.

  “We just picked it up off the news. Emily Beale’s been shot down. She’s alive and in the hospital, but apparently, well…”

  Mark swallowed hard.

  “They say she may be blind. Sorry, Mark. Thought you’d want to know.”

  Mark opened the 30 mm cannon against the ridgeline. He let the whole belt of ammo run through the gun at 625 rounds per minute. The feed lasted ninety full seconds, tearing up the ridgeline and anyone trying to cross, sounding like a single sustained scream inside the chopper.

  When the feed ran out, his throat felt as if he’d been the one screaming.

  Chapter 25

  “I knew you could save me.”

  Emily struggled to collect her thoughts.

  They must have pried her out of the bird. She wasn’t in her seat now.

  Horizontal…

  A world of wonderful.

  And the First Lady was saying something.

  “I knew you could.”

  It was nice that someone knew she could do anything. She felt all wrapped in wool and unable to weave any of it into a meaningful fabric.

  Moments or hours later, someone wrapped their hand around her wrist as if looking for a pulse. Pretty old-fashioned thing to do when she could hear a machine beeping lethargically away in the background. They must have drugged her on something serious to get a pulse that slow.

  “If you think that lying there faking it is going to get you a medal, forget about it.” The voice was the first clear thing she heard. The grip on her wrist tightened for a moment, then released.

  “Already have a couple.” At least that’s what she’d tried to say. And it really wasn’t worth the trouble of being shot or broken to get one. She tried to open her eyes, but there was padding pressing lightly on them. And total darkness. Couldn’t say that surprise or fear was rocketing through her. Whatever they had pumped into her veins didn’t let her think anything much at all.

  And there was a thrum on the left side of her face that made her bet she’d be in real pain if they didn’t have her drugged up beyond caring.

  Her eyes… The thought drifted away.

  “Where am I?” It didn’t sound right, even to her own ears.

  “Walter Reed Hospital.”

  A part of what she’d said must have come out clearly. Right where she’d been told to land. There was someone she wanted to tell that, but she couldn’t remember who or why.

  “What? How?” Waaa. Huuuoooowwaaa?

  “The shooter evaporated. We found the launch tube sitting in the middle of the street. Not a print, mark, bit of hair. Nothing on it. No trace. The weapon itself went missing two months ago in Nevada. Specialty piece from a research test. We’ve been looking for it ever since.”

  “Hunhuoash?” Even she couldn’t translate that one, but the voice continued telling her what she needed to know.

  “You got the bird down, though they’re taking it back out with a crane. Both you and Daniel Darlington have concussions. You knocked my wife out cold though she’s hard-headed enough to be fine. You also bloodied her nose and dislocated her shoulder, but that was okay as soon as they reset it. She’s up and gone back to the residence about an hour ago. You always were a hazard, Squirt.”

  “Reter.”

  “Yup.” She felt the right side of the bed sag as the President sat beside her.

  “My seyes.” Her voice felt a little clearer.

  “You weren’t kidding when you said a ‘flashbang.’ Lit up the whole area. Inside the Oval Office it shone like a lightning strike, and you were a couple thousand feet closer. Worse than July Fourth, which can be pretty bright in this city. Based on radar and photographic reconstruction and the few comments you made on the radio, we think a proximity fuse tripped about twenty feet away from you. Based on your sunburn, you were looking at it to your left. I’ve seen pictures of your eyes. Now that’s a shade of red I haven’t seen since the last time I got plastered at Oxford. You really gotta stay out of the sun, Em.”

  She could hear his voice clearly now. Hear it well enough to know. To know how much it was costing him to stay light and easy. So, even if another woman did get him, they were still close. Hell, he was sitting on her bed. It was nice. And the drugs weren’t letting her worry about anything as trivial as blindness or sunburned eyes.

  “A rane?” Why did they need a crane to remove her helicopter? The landing hadn’t been that bad. Had it? It had.

  “Big crane. You landed in the Reflecting Pool. Exact same spot as you soaked my sneakers. How did you do that?”

  “Did it wit’ my seyes closhed.”

  That got a laugh. Not a good one. Kind of a choke and gasp.

  “Do it allsh the time.” At least that explained why her feet had been cold. They’d been in the water.

  He shifted, took her hand. Not to hold, but more playing with it to see how it worked. Their old joke. She’d always said that if she was ever bored and Peter was around, she could just give him a piece of string or a sheet of paper and be entertained for hours. He wasn’t hyperactive or jittery. But there was a restlessness about him that expressed itself in stacking pennies or folding and unfolding dozens of paper airplane designs across the same sheet until the paper dissolved along the folds into a dozen shreds which he’d then rearrange into different shapes. It was what he did to keep a part of his mind occupied while his thoughts worked.

  “Squirt. Why do you do this? I mean how many times have you almost killed yourself since I last saw you?”

  She wanted to sit up, but didn’t want him to stop playing with her fingers. It felt good. Her fingers were cold, his warm.

  “You saw me yesterday, in New Shork.”

  “Two days ago. It’s morning now.”

  “Shorry, couldn’t see the sky.”

  That killed the conversation. She tried again.

  “I’ve only had one near-death experience since New Shork.” Pretty droll answer for being so drugged. She’d have to pat herself on the back when he stopped fooling with her fingers.

  “I mean…” He dropped her hand and the bed shifted as he moved away.

  She almost reached for him. Captain Emily Beale and the President of the United States of America. The married President of the United States. They’d clearly given her good drugs for that childhood fantasy to climb even partway to the horizon. She kept her hand where it lay, soothed and warm, resting on her abdomen. She’d pat herself on the back for making it out alive some other time.

  His pacing across the room and back sounded clearly. Fast. As if something were worrying him.

  “I mean since I saw you at the reception.”

  And she thought she could kill a conversation? Twenty years old, passed out drunk on champagne in her father’s office. The FBI Assistant Director at the time. She must have been a sad sight.

  “You were fresh out of West Point. Highest honors and all that. I watched. I kept track. And you did it the hard way. You volunteered—Army, Airborne, Special Forces—I can’t believe you actually qualified for Special Forces, then SOAR. First woman ever to make the grade. What makes you do that?”

  She did sit up. Well, slouched higher on the stack of pillows. Her head only swam a little; the drugs must be clearing out of her system. She wished she could see him. Here. At her bedside. Alone. Well, except for the flock of blacksuits he must have silently in tow somewhere about the room.

  “Is the Commander-in-Chief asking me? Or Sneaker Boy?” She thought she heard a muffled laugh beyond the foot of the bed. A blacksuit with a sense of humor? Adams. Had to be. She felt a little safer for having
him there, even if he despised her.

  The pacing stopped. Was he close or far? Was he staring out a window in contemplation or a step away studying her intently?

  She reached for the bandages over her eyes but then thought better of it. There were things she didn’t want to know any sooner than she had to.

  “Can’t I be both?” His voice barely a whisper.

  He was close.

  Chapter 26

  “Good question.” Emily considered it as well as her muddled brain would allow. One was the best friend she’d ever had and the first man she’d ever loved, or at least suffered a multiyear crush over. The other was a man who had married Katherine Matthews, by choice. A flashy, self-aggrandizing, social success. He’d made himself the most powerful man on the planet, with the help of a hundred million or so voters. Also the man who, by orders to others, had sent her on each mission she’d flown over the past year.

  The divide was too great. She’d known the first man better than anyone alive, perhaps even himself. The other one she didn’t know at all. She shoved herself a little higher on the starchy hospital pillows.

  “Nope. You pick your cards and you play ’em.” Most of the words came out right. Her body finally found the proper rudder control and the room stopped whirling around inside her head.

  “Harsh, Squirt. You were always harsh with your rules. No gray areas.”

  “I’m the warrior, you’re the politician. I live in the black and white. I survive there. You excel in the gray areas of negotiation and compromise and trickery I could never see.”

  See. Oh crap, the drugs were definitely wearing off.

  “I guess I could cut Sneaker Boy a little slack. Just for old times’ sake.” And a distraction.

  “Gee, that’s big of you.”

  “Yea, I shnow.” Okay, the drugs weren’t all gone. Probably just as well or she’d be screaming her head off in panic right about now. She felt the bed sag again as he settled once more, this time closer to her feet. He began playing with her toes through the thin hospital sheet.

  “Why do I do what I do?” No way was her head clear enough to explain something she didn’t understand. Or maybe that would help. She shoved herself the rest of the way to sitting upright. The rudder control held, no more spins.