The Ides of Matt 2016

by M. L. Buchman

  “Damn straight you can, Mr. Lieutenant Manny!” Mila’s tone was teasing as she cut into the radio circuit. Her language had become as rough as his own. It sounded good on her, brash and full of life.

  He knew he could trust her. Over the last six months she’d proven herself every bit as sharp as she was beautiful.

  “And you make it quick. No three-day holiday in Crimea this time. We have wedding tomorrow. I may be single woman going up this aisle, but I will be married woman walking back down this aisle. That, or you will not be walking so good. Da?”

  “Whatever you say, Duchess.” He yanked up on the collective and shoved the cyclic forward to lay the hammer down hard. “On my way.”

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  Night and Day

  CSAR is perhaps the most dangerous mission of them all. One of their sayings is, “Sometimes even the SEALs need to dial 911.”

  The fliers of Combat Search and Rescue fly into the middle of a battle and extract the wounded, racing to get them to the hospital within the “Golden Hour”—the sixty minute window after injury that drastically improves the victim’s chances of survival.

  This series of stories was actually launched when I was invited into an anthology with Suzanne Brockmann and Julie Ann Walker: The Way of the Warrior. The project was to benefit the Wounded Warrior project. (My novella, NSDQ from the Night Stalkers’ unofficial motto “Night Stalkers Don’t Quit”, was curiously the only one to include a wounded warrior in the story line.)

  Time passes and sometimes minor characters are memorable enough to crop back up. I recalled two characters who I wanted to check in on.

  Gerta Kozlov defected from the Ukraine aboard a Night Stalkers Black Hawk helicopter in Night Stalkers #3 Wait Until Dark. Nicolai Martin was part of the crew left behind when Major Pete Napier departed to form up a new team for the Night Stalkers 5E in Target of the Heart.

  The chance to watch them fly together answered so many questions for me, was a joy to write, and told me that there is always hope in every future. (By the way, CSAR just flew again with another novella, Guardian of the Heart.)

  1

  Flying had always been a joy. This was less like flying and more like floating. Lieutenant Nicolai Martin tried to pin down the difference, but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. That itself should say something about him…he knew it should…he could remember it from training…but he couldn’t quite bring it into focus.

  He shrugged it off.

  And the blast of pain that lanced up his left shoulder snapped him out of it.

  “Derr’mo!” Oh. He remembered the training now.

  “In English, Nicolai.” Vasily couldn’t even curse in Russian which was why Nicolai always made a point of doing so around him. Though his French could be vitriolic, even if you could hear the Secaucus, New Jersey loud and clear behind it.

  “Shit!” Nicolai repeated as he struggled to catch his breath through the blinding pain. Now he could easily picture the page in the manual: Typical shock reactions to being shot.

  “No kidding!”

  Nicolai blinked hard, forcing his eyes to focus. It was pitch dark except for the soft glow of the instruments on the console—the console of their MH-47G Chinook helicopter. They were the Night Stalkers of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and SOAR ruled the night. The Chinook was a massive twin-rotor, heavy-lifter, the monster of SOAR’s fleet.

  Captain Vasily Carlsen sat to his right, his hands on the flight controls. Between the two of them, their helicopter had become known as “The Russian Bird” even though they were just a couple of good-looking second-generation Slavs from New Jersey. His and Vasily’s facility with the ladies had only added to the reputation. Vasily couldn’t speak a word of Russian, but he wasn’t above affecting the accent. Unlike Nicolai’s, it was a really shitty accent, but still it worked on the ladies.

  Nicolai closed his eyes again for a moment, looking for that pleasant floating feeling of a few moments ago…and not really finding it. Hard to do in the middle of a firefight. The three crew chiefs in the back were from strange places like Colorado and Arkansas. They were busy hammering away at the enemy with their guns.

  Tonight they had post-mission dates lined up with a couple of hot lieutenants fresh in from stateside—curvy California blondes, his favorite kind of lieutenant. As a bonus pack, they were both Air Force, which cured most of the fraternization issues. For some reason the California girls in particular ate up the Russian accent. Even imagining that didn’t get him back to the floating place that had been so nice a moment ago.

  Nicolai opened his eyes again. Careful to use his right hand, he flipped his main screen onto the HUMS display. The Chinook’s health and usage monitoring system was reporting complete and utter mayhem.

  Double Derr’mo! “The Russian Bird” was not very healthy at the moment. Careful again to use his right hand, he flipped down his Night-Vision Goggles. Right. That’s when he’d been shot. The FLIR had been shot out, he’d reached up with his left hand to shove the dead visor feed aside and pull down his NVGs. Being shot in his raised left arm was probably all that had saved him from being shot in the face.

  They’d made their delivery: two men in a battered Toyota Corolla, one of the most common cars in Pakistan, delivered at the dead of night on a deserted road outside of Islamabad. No questions were asked and no explanations were offered. Some missions were like that, usually ones for the CIA or other intelligence guys simply known as The Activity. Total time “The Russian Bird” was on the ground after a two-hour flight? Twenty-three seconds. Then they and their escort Black Hawk had turned for home, Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan.

  The four hundred kilometer flight should have been a quiet passage as they were moving low and fast, and well off the more fortified paths.

  When they hit the Safēd Kōh mountains, carefully well north of the hazardous Khyber Pass and deep into no man’s land, they should have been clear. Except for that random patrol by a PAF fighter. The Pakistani Armed Forces tended to shoot first and ask questions later. The dogfight had been brief and ugly, thankfully the Paki pilot hadn’t thought to go to missiles before Ed in the Black Hawk had. They’d managed to down the aged F-16A, but not before he did some damage…and called in for help.

  Even though the Pakis and the US were technically allies, tonight’s mission wasn’t exactly something the US could admit to or ask permission for. Additional PAF forces had harassed Nicolai’s and Vasily’s helicopter well into Afghan airspace—high in the mountains, borders were a matter of great debate and little attention.

  With the NVGs down, he could see that there was nothing outside to see unless he was doing the flying, which was Vasily’s problem at the moment.

  The Pakistanis had finally fallen behind as their own flight had descended into the western range. Running the Chinook low and dark was all that saved them.

  However, the air battle attracted the attention of the Taliban ground forces who had taken over the game, peppering them with small fire as they passed too close to Asadabad. Some of it not so small.

  “At least no one had time to grab an RPG,” he managed. If they had, the Chinook would be a thousand little pieces raining down over the glaciers.

  Vasily grunted, too busy to do more.

  Nicolai knew he should be helping him, but he was having trouble thinking what to do. The adrenal surge wasn’t going to hold off the real pain and panic for much longer. He forced himself to hold focus against the desire to drift away from this mess.

  A Chinook was a massive and tough bird with big twin rotors, bigger engines, and the power to carry forty troops or lift a howitzer. Its only defense was a pair of mini-guns, one to either side and a ramp gun at the rear, all in the hands of the crew chiefs.

  The three weapons were currently at full roar, meaning he was the only one available to try a
nd save the helicopter.

  The M60 ramp gun was hammering away and the two miniguns were barking their buzz-saw Brap!, spitting thousands of rounds a minute in short lethal bursts. The noise was so loud that even the flight helmet offered little defense against it. Still, he’d rather be on this end than the receiving end.

  They still had two engines, but the oil pressure was sliding on one of them.

  On the tracking radar, he found Ed’s Black Hawk, their heavy weapons escort…but they had taken the brunt of the PAF and Tali attack. They weren’t firing a thing.

  “Vasily, I got nothing here. Heading back to base.” Ed called over the radio.

  “Roger,” Vasily acknowledged because there wasn’t anything else to say. The Hawk wouldn’t abandon them unless he truly had “nothing.” It meant that he had so much systems damage, he couldn’t even fire. Hopefully that damage wasn’t to his human systems, but that might explain his choice to race across the last hundred kilometers back to base.

  They were on their own. The main problem—slashed across the status reading on the HUMS—was that there were limits to what the aircraft could take. And they were reaching it.

  They certainly couldn’t climb enough to clear the final ridge between them and the dry plains leading to Bagram Air Base. Or even much more level flying.

  Very gingerly Nicolai raised his left arm.

  Big mistake!

  That’s when it finally slammed into his brain what was wrong in more than a merely academic way.

  His hiss of pain must have alerted Vasily. Or perhaps that he wasn’t doing much to help with checking all the systems that were presently begging for attention.

  “What?” Vasily snapped out.

  “I just wish the Chinook was the only ‘Russian’ that had been shot tonight.”

  2

  Gerta Kozlov sat at the table in the pilot’s ready room at Bagram Air Base practicing her hurry-up-and-wait with a game of solitaire. Two pilots and a pair of crew chiefs were watching television. By their easy chatter, it was clear they had been together for a long time…this was her very first watch as a medic. Despite the thirty hours in transit from the states, her nerves hadn’t let her sleep and she was still wide awake. Maybe with the dawn she’d be able to sleep.

  In the early evening before the first briefing, she had gone for a run around the base, racking up a quick 5K just to keep herself loose. Bagram Air Base was one of the oddities of America’s partial return to Afghanistan. For years it had been among the world’s largest and busiest air bases with forty thousand people and a hundred and forty thousand flights a year—averaging once every four minutes around the clock. Now, the perimeter defenses had been pulled in until the base was one-third its former size, and still it was an echoing void inside the fortifications. Long lines of abandoned platforms showed where massive bunkroom tents had once stood. Whole hangers were filled with the burned and battered remains of a fleet of trucks, destroyed past use during the war. No longer in good enough shape to take home nor worth destroying further to keep them out of unfriendly hands—the piles of blackened and twisted metal were of no use to anyone.

  She lay a red queen on the king of clubs. This was the war she had come to.

  She had defected from the Russian Ukraine three years ago, a weapons officer of rank, rescued by Sergeant Connie Davis during a Night Stalkers black op. To pay back the kindness, she had made her way into the Night Stalkers as a medic. And, even though the US was only here in an “advisory” role, as usual the 160th SOAR’s helicopters were here to do far more than advise.

  The next card up was the suicide king. Perfect! She had nowhere for him to go.

  There were several missions on tonight, though of course no one had said what they were. Their own aircraft had scouted an al-Qaeda cell, but left it to the drone pilots to take care of once they’d confirmed the location. They’d returned to base hours ago, but remained at Alert Status in the ready room in case something went wrong with one of the other missions still out. With so few resources on the ground in Afghanistan, they were stretched very thin.

  Go!

  Cards scattered as she jolted to her feet. Her medical backpack was half on before the sound of the alarm fully registered. The pilot and crew were just as fast to their feet.

  Gerta liked that. In the Ukrainian military, first there would be curses, then complaining. After that a pilot was as likely as not to knock back the rest of his vodka before even considering to get his sorry ass moving. The Special Operations Forces of the US military were like Red Fury, the kickass heroine of Russian comic books. Gerta had considered dying her short blond hair red just for the effect, but she didn’t have the comic book chest—or much of a chest at all really—so it couldn’t work.

  Her mother was the one who had the figure that would never stop. She’d used it to crawl into a general’s bed and who knew how many others. Her father didn’t mind, it gave him more time with his mistress.

  Gerta had taken after her father’s lean form, his military calling, and as little else as she could manage.

  “Let’s move, comrade.” They called out, even though she was already in the middle of the pack. Explaining that “comrade” was an outdated Communist term now more of an insult than anything had only anchored the nickname. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t shake her thick Russian accent.

  “Chinook going down with injuries,” the watch commander said as he handed off a sheet of coordinates. “I’ll send a repair crew as soon as I get one. Go secure that site!”

  And they went.

  Climbing aboard the heavily armed Black Hawk was so reminiscent of the moment that had changed her life three years before. This airfield was in the Afghan desert instead of the lush farm country of the central Ukraine, so the smells were wrong. But the night, the noise of the helicopter winding to life, the kerosene of Jet A fuel on the air, her gut clenching in fear…these were all familiar.

  On that long ago night, a Night Stalkers team on a black op had landed deep inside foreign territory, her territory. The first she’d known of it had been when a Delta Force operator had whispered from mere feet away that if she so much as flinched, she’d die. Gerta had been very careful not to flinch. She had pleaded her way aboard their helicopter: unwanted, untrusted, but needed for the knowledge she alone possessed. Gerta had managed to prove herself and barter that knowledge for freedom.

  Now, she was once again the unknown factor to an American Black Hawk crew. Of course that would be how it was even if she wasn’t Ukrainian—the first day joining an already intact crew. The mistrust was there, though at least this time it didn’t include wrist cuffs and a weapon hard against her chin. Her wrists ached with the memory.

  This wasn’t a dedicated medevac bird, so its cargo bay wasn’t pre-hung with medical supplies and heart monitors. All she had was the forty-pound pack she was wearing. However, as she was just a medic along for a ride, rather than riding in an aerial ambulance, they weren’t required to have the red cross on the outside nor did they have to leave their weapons behind. She liked being safe inside a helicopter with all its defenses in place.

  They covered the hundred kilometers in under twenty minutes.

  3

  Nicolai did what he could to help. Engine Two flamed out shortly after hydraulic systems One and Two went south, probably dumping oil into the engine itself. The former problem was solved by pulling the engine’s emergency T-handle cutting fuel and flooding the space with an extinguisher. The latter was simply a matter of praying that the backup hydraulic system was still intact. It was. He made sure that the One and Two systems shut down automatically. Two needed some help, but he got it.

  There was an odd whistle, he could hear it only in the gaps between the on-going gun battle. But it was loud enough to hear through his helmet.

  “Change collective pitch for a second, Vasily. But don’t do it
too fast.” With his left arm out of commission, he couldn’t work the control which was beside his seat.

  When Vasily did, the tone of the whistle changed. “A lot of holes in the rotor blades.” And one in him. Shit! Even thinking about it made it hurt more.

  “Perfect!”

  “You mean ideal’no!” Nicolai grunted it out to distract himself from the pain. Satellite radio was out as was any hint of broadband.

  Vasily groaned along with their dying helicopter. He’d steadfastly refused to learn even a single word of Russian. His grand-parents had made such a big deal out of it that he’d studied French instead.

  “Or chudesnyy if you want ‘wonderful’.” He could feel the wetness all down his left sleeve, but needed his hand free to help save all their lives. For now he let the blood flow and just hoped it wasn’t too much.

  “I want to not die, in English or Russian,” Vasily growled as he managed to nurse the Chinook over a ridge with less than five meters to spare above the ice field.

  “How about in Chinese?” Descending over the other side of the ridge cut off the last of the Taliban gunfire. If there were Talis here, his team was going to be even more dead than they already were.

  “Do you speak Chinese?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then shut up.”

  “Can’t help myself. Gallows humor.” Nicolai gave up trying to restart the FLIR.

  The Forward Looking Infrared cameras themselves must be gone. The NVGs weren’t nearly as good, but even though the night was moonless, it wasn’t starless, which gave him enough to see by.

  “Plus, I’m charming. Just wait until we catch up with those blondes tonight.” He began searching for signs of an opening big enough to land in, and any heat signatures of enemy lying in wait.

  “C’mon, Nicolai. Find me something,” Vasily’s tense voice came from far away.