When he went and bought them burgers and a Coca-Cola at the diner, he came back with a floppy hat almost the size of a Mexican sombrero.
“You’re burning in this sun.”
She’d noticed, but hadn’t wanted to leave. It was nice that he’d noticed. Though she wasn’t sure about wearing the hat. “You are burning as well, Jerome.”
He pulled at the hat and she saw that there were two of them nested together. They looked ridiculous, but as they were both wearing them she didn’t care much.
Jerome landed the kite while they ate. Afterward he fetched a paint set from a small bag he’d brought with him. He started painting on the kite’s upper wing.
When she started to rise to see what he was doing, he shook his head.
“No. Stay right there.”
That’s when she realized that he was painting her portrait on the wing. Cynthia was dazzled by more than the sun.
She barely heard the call for the bathing beauty contest farther up the beach.
“Hey! You should go. You’re a contender, Cyn.” She liked his nickname for her, though she’d never liked it before.
“Do you know what the grand prize is?”
He shook his head.
“A trip to the Golden Gate International Exposition. My friends and I are going to it next week anyway. I’m fine staying right here.” And she was. Even more as Jerome inspected her over the wing of his kite again and again while he worked.
“Well, maybe this will change your mind.” He lifted the kite and almost lost it to the wind sliding along the sand. She grabbed the ball of string to make sure it didn’t get away from them.
He tried again more carefully. Then she could see what he’d painted. It was her, but not in floppy sunhat and a loose shirt over her bathing suit.
No, it was her as…
7
Gran? Am I crazy or does that mermaid look like me?”
Cynthia shaded her eyes to look at the mermaid kite now climbing into the sky above Eagle Cove. It did look like Skylar. Actually it looked—
She had to hold a hand over her mouth to not scream, but some of it escaped anyway.
In a moment, Skylar was kneeling beside her chair. “Are you okay, Gran? Should I call the doctor? But how am I going to move you? Oh god, I should have gotten that wheelchair. I’m such an idiot—”
Cynthia moved her hand from covering her own mouth to covering her great- granddaughter’s.
She managed only a hoarse whisper. “The kite doesn’t look like you, sweetheart.” She looked at it again in wonder, “It looks like me.”
“But—” Skylar mumbled through Cynthia’s hand.
“Trust me.”
Skylar pulled her hand away, but held onto it tightly between her own.
“But how?”
Cynthia looked up at the mermaid now flying and dancing near the baby whale. She had no idea. But they were going to find out.
8
The trip down to the beach was an arduous one, but with Skylar’s good care, Cynthia managed.
There was no parking near the ramp to the beach, but Skylar got her seated out of the sun on the porch of The Puffin Diner then went to park the car.
She’d eaten a breakfast here seventy-six years ago. Now, Judge Slater, who ran the diner in his retirement, was kind enough to come out and offer her some ice tea while she waited. When he asked what had brought her to the beach, she didn’t dare speak. There was such hope in the moment that she didn’t trust herself. She could only pat his hand in thanks and watch the mermaid now flying high above The Flicker movie house.
Skylar returned with the walker.
In order to use it, she had to give Skylar the thin leather portfolio she’d kept in her bedside table all these years. It was one of the very last personal possessions she had.
“Don’t open that, young lady.”
“Whatever you say, Gran. Are you sure you’re up to this?”
Cynthia looked at the ramp down onto the beach that ran alongside Grouse Hardware and didn’t know, but she had to be.
Skylar was patience itself, cheering her along, and helping to move the walker forward through the softer sand. Every time Skylar asked if this was really necessary, Cynthia could only nod, conserving her breath for more effort than she’d expended in five years.
It took a long time and several rest breaks to reach where the kite lines from the mermaid descended into the crowd, but they made it.
The moment the crowd opened so that she could see who was flying the mermaid kite, she knew she’d been right.
A man in his forties and his son were tending the lines together. In the man’s face, she could see hints of his grandfather. But in the boy’s she could see Jerome reborn. Just like his long ago relative, he had little attention for them—all he cared about was the kite.
The man looked at Skylar for a long moment, the shock of recognition was as clear on his face as the confusion.
Unable to speak, Cynthia reached out a hand and tapped the portfolio that Skylar had carried. When Skylar inspected her cautiously, she tapped it again.
With a shrug, Skylar untied the string.
9
Jerome held the kite up for her to see.
Cynthia’s face and torso had been painted across the wing. Instead of a bathing suit top, her image wore the scantiest of clam shells. Instead of the bottoms, she wore a long sinuous tail of shining green scales. But most off all, her long red hair billowed across the kite’s wing.
Looking up from the beautiful image, made with an engineer’s eye, she stepped up to him until they were separated by only the thin paper and balsa of the wing. She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him.
10
It was a kiss that I’ll never forget. A girl never forgets her first real kiss, no matter how old she is,” Cynthia said the last to Skylar who only blushed in return. Young girls were kissed and plenty more these days, but by that blush she’d guess that Skylar still hadn’t found the right man to make a memory which lasts a lifetime.
Thomas had settled her into a folding lawn chair and sat in another. He held the portfolio as he and his son Simon looked down at the painting within.
“Jerome finished the kite on the beach knowing he had no way to take it home once he had glued it together. It only flew that one day. As the sun set in the waves, right there,” Cynthia pointed out to sea, “he cut out the painting and gave it to me.”
Simon glanced up at the sky where the mermaid—where she still flew. “Dad kept a few things for me when Great-Grandpop died. The design for that kite was one of them. It was dated August 6th, 1939. It also had your first name on it and ‘Eagle Cove.’ Dad and I decided to try to build it and fly it in his honor. I was kinda named for the kite. Cynthia—Simon,” even his shrug was so much like Jerome’s that it hurt to watch. “Funny. Guess I was sorta named for you, lady. Now that’s kinda cool. Named for Great-Grandpop’s old girlfriend. I’m good with that.”
And they all shared a laugh, though it took almost all Cynthia had left to join in.
She didn’t know how to ask, but being an old lady, she knew she didn’t have time to avoid the question either.
“He never came back,” she told Thomas after his son had returned his attention to the kite. He was showing Skylar tips on how to manage the big kite and how they’d built it.
Cynthia had come back to the Redhead Roundup from San Francisco in 1940 and 1941, then they had ended with the war. After the war was won she moved to Eagle Cove and taught children for forty years. And every year she had watched the sky during the kite festival hoping to see that unique box kite. Her letters came back marked “Addressee unknown.” If he ever wrote, the letters never reached her. Her parents had moved mere weeks after her return from the Redhead Roundup when she moved into the city for college. So many things ha
d been lost.
“He was co-opted into the war effort right out of college,” Thomas said softly. “Long before the war. He would have been in England then, helping with their plane designs. Very secret work. I’m so sorry.”
“No. No. It’s okay. I had a husband and a child. It was a good life. Apparently he did as well.” She patted Thomas’ hand and wondered which of them she was reassuring. Her life had come full circle. For she had come alive in a man’s arms, right here on this same stretch of beach, ever so long ago.
Cynthia sat in the chair and watched Simon and Skylar flying the mermaid that looked like her and her great-granddaughter.
They stood so close in the afternoon sun that the light didn’t pass between them.
As close together as she and Jerome had once stood, flying a kite in the sky.
My Apologies
My small town of Eagle Cove has stolen the twice-yearly Kite Festival from Lincoln City, Oregon, which indeed has a family of life-sized great whales. Eagle Cove has also laid claim to the “Redhead Roundup” from Taft, Oregon which was held as an annual fundraiser for the town on the first weekend of August throughout most of the Great Depression.
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Love Behind the Lines
I have two military companies of Night Stalkers that I write about.
Emily Beale and Mark Henderson founded the 5th Battalion D Company (5D) in the book The Night Is Mine. (In reality there are only four battalions in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—the 5th is all mine.) Twenty novels and a near equal number of short stories later, I wanted to tell a different kind of Night Stalker story.
The 5D was heavily based in reality. Every one of these missions is possible, or as close as I could make it. They feel, as one critic called it in a glowing review, “ripped from the headlines.” That was my intent. I wanted to showcase the types of missions these people take on. (I can only hope that they have equally happy love stories.)
But there were looser, more edgy stories that I wanted to tell. I wanted to push those limits, but I didn’t want to “break” with the tradition of the 5D.
Enter the 5E.
The 5th Battalion E Company flies the unflyable and survives the unsurvivable. The 5D goes where no one else can go. The 5E flies the same types of missions, except they go where no one can know they’ve ever been. Are there real life missions like these? Maybe, but we’ll never hear of them.
The 5E took flight in Target of the Heart. Their third novel released just four weeks ago: Target of Mine. This story launched the 5E’s short stories. I’m sure that there are more to come.
1
Mission recall. Repeat, mission recall.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me.” Lieutenant Manfred “M&M” Malcolm looked down at the radio to make sure that it was on tonight’s frequency and that the message wasn’t for someone else.
“I’m only three goddamn klicks out!” He shouted at the radio, though he didn’t hit his transmit key to send his least fond regards. There were some places that American military helicopters should never be caught and he was in one of them. His Little Bird MH-6 might be stealth rigged and his radio signal encrypted…but that wouldn’t make him or the point of origin of any electronic transmission invisible.
“Mission X-ray Tango Alpha is aborted,” the Air Mission Commander repeated. “Return to base.”
XTA. Extraction of prime target Alpha. That was his mission tonight.
“Goddamn it!” He hated the alphabet agencies. DIA, NSA, and most particularly the CIA. They never seemed to know what they wanted. In the military, you received a mission, you planned it, and you by god executed it after you were given the “Go!” order. In the CIA he figured they had a mission board and flung darts at it until they hit something and said, “Oh, let’s do that.” He’d bet they wore blindfolds while planning or whatever it was they did back in Langley. After that, because shit flowed downhill, it would be:
“Hey Manny,” as if pretending they were already on a first-name basis before they’d even talked and he didn’t have a rank after a decade of flying and even facing down Officer Candidate School. “We have a top level asset”—which meant spy—“whose cover is blown. We need an immediate extraction. Tonight.”
There were only two companies in the entire US military able to fly a route like the one needed, SOAR’s 5D and his own 5E. The helicopters of the Special Operations Aviation Regiment’s 5th Battalion E Company had been in a better position so he’d been sent in.
Now he was deep behind Russian lines—except the Russians still insisted they weren’t in Crimea—and he had to figure out how to get back without tripping some high-tech booby trap. All that noise about the Russians being so far behind in tech was just that, noise. Their problem was that they couldn’t afford as much of the good shit as America could, but what they had was damned impressive. And those heavy-duty assets were concentrated in places of particular importance to the Russian government…like every square meter within a hundred klicks of his present position just outside of Sevastopol, Crimea. Which had been part of the Ukraine until recently. He wished it still was, because then he’d be welcome instead of being a target.
Low and fast had been his answer going in; he just hoped that it would work equally well on his passage out. He yanked up on the collective and shoved the cyclic forward to lay the hammer down hard.
That hope lasted almost thirteen seconds.
Some Russian soldier with an itchy trigger finger and thirty-year old technology fired a missile at his trace. It was a crazy waste of $100,000 Igla surface-to-air missile, because Manny knew that his craft’s radar signature wasn’t much bigger than a fat seagull’s. It was a stupid move by an undertrained molodoy; an action for which he’d probably be punished above and beyond standard new-recruit hazing. Any soldier with a decent amount of training would have ignored that faint blip on the tracking radar.
What the goddamn, suffering molodoy would never know was that he’d actually done his job exactly right.
Once on Manny’s tail, there was only so much that could be done to disguise the thousand degrees of heat exhaust from his turbine engine. The missile had flown close enough to sniff out that heat signature and zeroed in. It moved at almost Mach 2 and he moved at about one-tenth of that.
A locked-on Igla wasn’t something that was evaded by a quick maneuver. The “needle” as it was aptly named, was about to drill his ass. It ignored the signal-blocking chaff that Manny dispersed. Firing off a round of distracting flares would illuminate and pinpoint his location for much more substantial forces. He saw only one chance and punched for it. Head for the sea.
The high cliffs south of Sevastopol were just close enough for him to dive over the edge and buy himself a few seconds before the missile reacquired. A half kilometer out from shore, he stalled the helicopter hard, heaving back on the cyclic until the joystick was jammed into his gut. His Little Bird groaned and wept, but it slammed from a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour to under forty in moments.
He armed the self-destruct charges, then unsnapped his belt, and dove out the doorway.
He was less than halfway to the water when the Igla caught up with his Little Bird. The explosion was blinding in its reflection off the water, the concussive punch of combined missile and destruct charges made the last twenty-five feet of his fall go by very quickly.
2
It felt as if Alisa had been undercover her entire life. First from the ruling government of the Prime Minister turned dictator and now from the Russians. Their recent annexation of Crimea had made her job a hundred times more dangerous and she stayed because she didn’t know what else to do. She was trapped between the Russian SVR, their version of the CIA, who would ruin her day if her role was ever discovered, and the CIA itself with their promises of safe passage out…if she could just hold on a whi
le longer and find out about whatever was next on their never-ending list.
Then Sergey of the SVR had taken a sudden interest in her, more than just trying to bed her. He began dropping by her desk at work, or just happening to run into her when she was out at a club.
Knowing she’d reached her limit, she’d finally convinced the CIA that it was time to honor their commitment and send in an extraction team as she had no way of escaping on her own.
For twenty hours she’d cowered in fear, dodging shadows and afraid at each moment that she’d be taken into custody and never see daylight again. Just as she was preparing to leave and work her slow way to the extraction rendezvous—a journey that would take half the night—a knock had sounded on her door.
Instead a phalanx of guards, there had been only Sergey. He had offered to “protect” her in exchange for certain “services.” She didn’t need to watch where his eyes remained fixed to know what services he was interested in and didn’t care to guess how brief a respite from prison his protection would offer should she consent.
Then Sergey had made the mistake—fatal as it turned out—of tapping his briefcase and saying he had a report he would turn in if she did not agree.
She had read the report while Sergey quietly sank to the bottom of Pivdenna Bay. He had gotten only a few facts right, but two of them were completely damning—they also told her who among her informants must be a double agent for the SVR, as that part of the report was too accurate. When she found the thumb drive in his pants pocket, with a copy of the report on it, she decided that Sergey was definitely arrogant enough to have left no form of “Open this file if I do not return” at the office.
The Ides of Matt 2016 Page 18