Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  “The KPN’s radar uses such a broad sweep that we could fly right between their lines of resolution. Even Danielle’s big-ass Chinook could do that.”

  Why was it that the ever so classy Danielle flew the monstrous, twin-rotor Carrie-Anne? Of course flying in a Chinook MH-47G named for the actress who played Trinity in The Matrix—the ultimate leather-clad kick-ass heroine—had its points.

  Still, Patty could have enjoyed flying her Little Bird with Danielle, not that she wanted to trade Mick even one little bit. Not only was he exceptional as a flier, but if your pilot was supposed to be eye candy, Mick fit that bill very nicely too.

  But Danielle had so much smooth sophistication that Patty knew she totally lacked. If they flew as a girl-girl team, it would have been fun…and maybe a little of the effortless elegance would have rubbed off on her.

  “Too bad for the KPN,” Mick didn’t sound sorry at all, “that we’re stealth rigged. All that energy spent looking for something they’ll never see.”

  “Poor bastards,” Patty agreed. The storm was beating on them now, thick with rain and hard winds. The KPN’s ships were all in the two- to three-hundred foot range, but narrow enough that they rolled hard in the rough waves. Even for people she didn’t like, they were not having a good day…and the Night Stalkers were about to make it even worse.

  “Just makes it more fun,” Mick commented.

  “You are evil and twisted. There’s hope for you yet, Quinn,” she grinned behind the lowered visor of her helmet which was glowing on the inside with layers of rapidly shifting tactical information.

  Mick didn’t let his snide out very often, but she always appreciated it when he did.

  “Knew there was a reason I liked flying with you.” Because whatever else The Mighty Quinn might be, he was a kick-ass pilot and a hell of a partner.

  She was never as good beside any other pilot; his skill demanded her best performance be even better. Be all you can be. Hell with joining the Army, she’d already done that. Earn the right to fly beside Mick Quinn, that took some serious doing.

  “Our target will be the westernmost ship,” she filled him in. “It’s also the biggest, a Nampo class. Twin 30mm machine guns, so don’t mess with that. And intel says an RBU-1200—that’s a five-missile anti-submarine weapon so we should be fine as long as you don’t dump us in the soup.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” Mick stated it as if he was discussing a change in a battle plan. She really needed to find a way to loosen him up.

  “They also have a helo platform, not that they have the skills to launch in this weather. Rumor has it that they’re still flying Russian Mi-4 Hounds. You know those things are half a century old. It would be really cool to see one, even parked on a crap frigate. North Korea is the last nation trying to fly them.”

  “One minute,” Major Napier, their company commander, called over the encrypted radio channel from the trailing Chinook Carrie-Anne. “Keep them busy.”

  “Dance!” Danielle called before Napier clicked off.

  That was another reason to want to be like Captain Danielle Dellacroix.

  Dance.

  It was one of those crazy commands that the captain had cooked up during training—back before they’d been formed into the 5E and Pete “The Rapier” Napier took command.

  If Patty could be any other woman, it wouldn’t be the curvaceous Sofia Gracie; it would be Captain Delacroix with her soft-spoken Québécois French accent and exceptionally strategic mind. Though if she’d been Danielle, she’d now be married to Major Pete Napier and Patty would have killed his ass in the first month. He’d be damned irritating if he wasn’t such a good commander.

  So, not Danielle.

  Patty would find her boy someday. But he wouldn’t be a fisherman, who thought a pretty woman on a working boat was an open invitation. The first real attack had only been averted because she happened to be in the galley and could grab a knife. After that, she’d learned to always have a blade handy and still had to flash it at the occasional overeager asshole to convince them that “No!” meant no. Two of them she’d had to scar but good before they’d backed off.

  And it wouldn’t be some gung-ho Army pilot too damn sure of himself. If she never heard some airjock say “Come fly me!” then ask if she still had her stewardess uniform again, it would be too soon. She’d had enough of those kind of creeps who didn’t like the fact that she could out fly every one of their asses. By that time she didn’t need a knife, the Army had trained her plenty well in hand-to-hand combat. Switching to Special Operations had only honed those skills.

  She glanced over at Mick. And it sure as hell wouldn’t be someone who was both fisher and pilot no matter how handsome.

  In the meantime she had every intention of enjoying herself. She’d taken up with teasing Julian over on the Beatrix. But it was just to mess with his head, there was nothing ever going to happen there. As it was, she’d been having a long dry spell and was just fine with that.

  Dance, Danielle had said. She’d just instructed each of the pilots to implement evasive tactics based on their favorite music. Better than something Star Trekish like “Execute Evasion Plan Delta.” The military’s top pilots would each dance differently and it made the flight wholly unpredictable and nearly impossible to target. It also meant…

  “Oh, man! You are not gonna hit me with country,” she aimed her complaint at Mick over the on-board intercom. She checked that all weapons’ systems were armed and ready in case the North Koreans were dumb enough to actually try and engage American aircraft while sailing in American waters.

  “Only the finest,” Mick began humming some Tim McGraw song.

  “Goddamn it, Quinn. How is it possible that a perfectly respectable girl knows that’s a Tim McGraw song? You’re ruining me.”

  “Because a perfectly respectable girl would know it was Tim McGraw.”

  “That’s not true!” Patty resisted the urge to stomp a little rock and roll into the rudder pedals as he began making the Little Bird shift and sway.

  “It is,” Mick continued placidly. “Which begs the question of how you know anything about it.”

  So much worse than that, she even knew the words well enough to sing along—which she absolutely wasn’t about to do. “I’m gonna request a goddamn new pilot; one who knows decent music when he hears it.”

  He hummed even louder over the intercom until it was resonating inside her helmet.

  “Keep it up and you’re gonna be so dead that you’ll be way past living like you still had any dying to do.”

  Patty knew it was a mistake as soon as she said it.

  Mick broke into full song with the last line of the refrain, which is what she’d just done her best to mangle. Then he began all over going on all about skydiving and climbing mountains—the helicopter swooping and slipping through the air in perfect time to his music. He wielded a good, deep baritone designed to turn a girl into a liquid puddle.

  Well not her.

  She fought back with Marianas Trench’s Fallout, but she couldn’t carry a tune for crap so her attempt at punk/emo didn’t cut him down even a little.

  At that moment, the tall sides of the frigate came into view just a dozen rotor diameters ahead. Which on a Little Bird, with its tiny five-blade, twenty-seven-foot diameter main rotor, wasn’t very far.

  The ship’s high bow was climbing clear of a big wave and then crashing down into the next trough; a very uncomfortable-looking ride. They’d be better off in a fishing boat that could just ride over one wave at a time without all of the bucking and yawing. Military ships were built narrow to move fast, but that meant they totally sucked during a storm.

  Mick hit the KPN with the song’s line about riding a rodeo bull just to emphasize the point—wasn’t right that a country boy could make her laugh so easily—and then he dodged aside as the frigate’s forward a
nti-submarine rocket launcher tried to spear them when the ship took another painful roll.

  The ship only had running lights on: red and green to the sides, a white all-around at the top of the mast, a second white below that pointing forward. The deck itself was ink-and-storm dark.

  The North Koreans didn’t notice that they’d acquired a pitch-black Little Bird helicopter hovering above their foredeck. Of course the Linda was a stealth craft with its running lights out.

  Mick slipped up until the Little Bird was hovering directly in front of the command bridge’s windows.

  “Are you feeling ignored, madam?” Mick asked Patty in an über-polite voice as if they were at some snooty Boston social event rather than a couple of fishers-turned-pilots now hovering over a ship’s deck in the middle of the Aleutians.

  “Why yes, good sir. I feel as if they aren’t paying any frickin’ attention to us at all.” She raised a pinkie finger from the cyclic control, not that Mick would be able to see it.

  Quinn switched to singing the Trace Adkins song about a lonely heart who turned on every light in the house to show his departed lover the way back home.

  Oh, what the hell! She could take a hint. So, she joined on the chorus and hit the landing light, aiming it directly into the command bridge windows.

  The reaction was galvanic. It was easy to see the several seasick officers leaning against any support—brown water navy indeed. Two seamen, looking far more stoic than their superiors, clung to the wheel.

  And every one of them too frozen with surprise to even cover their eyes. Korean deer staring into the headlights.

  Perfect.

  Because tonight’s mission was to make sure that the KPN never looked astern to see what the SEAL team delivered by the Chinook Carrie-Anne was doing back there.

  # # #

  Mick watched for the first one to unfreeze; a junior officer twitched like he’d had his butt pinched.

  Mick dodged the Linda back into the storm with all the agility of her Terminator II namesake the moment before the deck lights flashed on.

  “Camera.” It was their first really close look at a Nampo-class light frigate; though he had no time to look himself.

  “Never stopped recording,” Patty answered back.

  “Good girl,” not that he’d expected less.

  “Woman!” She sniped back just as he’d planned.

  “Where?”

  Her growl was music to his ears.

  This time he approached from the starboard side, flew directly over the bridge and disappeared to port.

  “Woman! Like the one who’s gonna shove you out on the next fly-by. Then you’ll be shipped off to North Korea and no longer chapping my ass.”

  “So scared. Eek,” he delivered it deadpan.

  She spared a moment to punch him in the arm, lightly, so that she didn’t jostle his control.

  Mick focused on keeping the bridge crew distracted. They didn’t begin to understand the high technology of his Little Bird. Across the inside of his helmet was displayed the image of any direction he looked. With a thumb control he could look up, down, even straight behind him as if he was sitting alone in the night sky without a helicopter wrapped around him. Outside, multiple mounted cameras routed thermal-enhanced seamless images onto his visor.

  A slap of wind tried to slew him into the high bow of the frigate. He lifted enough to clear the railing, but kept his landing light aimed directly in their faces as the ship slewed across beneath him. Between the wind and the waves and the crap visibility, this was getting nasty even by Night Stalker standards.

  “How are the others doing?” he asked Patty.

  “You just focus on keeping us alive and this crew distracted.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “Am not. I’m a woman. I get,” and she went for song, “R.E.S.P.E.C.—”

  “First ship tampered,” Sofia reported over the radio, cutting off Patty’s grossly off-key efforts. “The Leeloo, she is clear.”

  Sofia’s naturally musical tones only emphasized the degree of murder that O’Donoghue had been perpetrating on Aretha.

  “The wet team, it is headed now to Beatrix’s target.”

  Mick was damn glad to not be on the wet team. It was a given that SEALs were comfortable in water, but this storm was ugly even from the air. From the small rubber boat that the Carrie-Anne had delivered astern of the KPN’s ships, it must be pure hell.

  Beatrix’s ship was second. The Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk was named for Uma Thurman’s role in the Kill Bill movies; a very appropriate moniker. The DAP Hawk was the most heavily armed helicopter in any military. There were less than two dozen of them—all designed by and built for the Night Stalkers of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

  Mick had flown the big helo on a couple of familiarization flights, but he’d always been partial to his Little Bird. Hard not to be impressed by the DAP Hawk’s raw power, but he preferred the super-agility of his aircraft. Less maneuverable, he hoped Beatrix was being careful while distracting their target. He shouldn’t worry, Rafe and Julian were almost as good a team as he and Patty. He worried anyway.

  A hard gust smacked him sideways and he yanked up on the collective to avoid eating the frigate’s radio mast.

  “Hey look! They do still have an Mi-4 helo tied down on their stern. Ooo! Big wave just buried it in spray. Salt water, fifty year old hardware, bad deal guys.”

  Mick wished he had a moment to look, but that was Patty’s job as copilot in situations like this. He actually appreciated the running commentary as she cataloged the ship’s features for the recorder that was also capturing the video for later study by whoever cared.

  They were playing an elegant trick on the North Koreans. A DEVGRU team—that the public had called by their long abandoned name of SEAL Team 6 for so long that they’d taken to calling themselves Team 6 anyway—had been launched in a boat by the lurking Chinook helicopter. The team was dodging in behind each of the Korean ships, one by one, and performing a death-defying stunt.

  The plan, suggested by the SEALs themselves because they were just that crazy, was to partially disable each ship. Not in a dangerous way, in case they hit a big storm on their way home, but enough to be immensely awkward.

  When a particularly tall wave lifted the stern of each ship high enough for the rudder to clear the water, the SEAL team would zip forward in their tiny boat. Undetected due to the helicopters playing distraction games around the command bridges, the SEALs would slap a super-epoxied bar of metal to the hull directly in front of the rudder.

  The bar extended out alongside the rudder. The result was that the Koreans would be able to turn to starboard without a problem. But if they tried to turn to port more than a few degrees, the rudder would hit the bar and that was it. Any time they came too far off their course, they’d have to go in a full circle to regain their heading.

  For the North Koreans to cut the bar, they’d require calm seas, a skilled diver, and an underwater cutting torch. It was a fair bet that they probably weren’t carrying the last item, especially as the bars were titanium—light to handle but with an unusually high melting point.

  Even if they were able to cut it, they wouldn’t be able to hide the bar itself—it would take a shipyard and new plating to remove it from the hull. Three senior captains were about to be in immense trouble.

  “The Beatrix, she’s complete,” Sofia updated him.

  The tactical display showed that the heroine of The Fifth Element, Leeloo, and the Beatrix were standing off in case he needed help with distracting his own light frigate, the largest of the three.

  # # #

  The Linda bucked hard, momentarily making Patty float off her seat. She wanted to shriek with delight.

  “You a roller coaster boy, Mick?” She leaned forward to brace herself against her flight
harness to keep her hand steady on the controls. Still she could barely follow what he was doing. Goddamn, but he could fly.

  “Never been on one,” his voice remained Mick-steady. He actually flipped the helicopter upside down in a sideways rollover as he shifted from right-side up on one side of the ship to right-side up on the other.

  “Wait! What?” Patty gasped for breath as the adrenaline pounded. Her efforts to match Mick’s imperturbable calm were a total failure. “Did you…Oh Crap!,” a searchlight swung their way, but Mick was no longer there, spinning them off over the ocean’s darkness, “…grow up deprived?”

  “No coasters in Alaska except the little ones at county fairs.”

  “Well, we gotta fix that.”

  “You going into the carnival business, O’Donoghue?” When he slewed across the deck again, Patty could see trouble was coming soon.

  “I’m not gonna—”

  She keyed the mike. “Sofia. Our boat is arming. Only rifles so far, but they’re scrambling now.”

  “Roger,” Sofia called back. “SEAL team needs two minutes more.”

  “—build one,” Patty picked up right where she left off. “I’m getting your butt on the next one I can.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “My luck you’ll be a sicker. But it’s a total right of passage and you gotta do it. Can you get me right over the deck?”

  “Didn’t you just say that they’re arming?” He moved off their bow.

  She flashed the landing light full in their faces down the length of the deck before Mick dodged aside once more.

  “Seriously. I’ve got a special delivery for them.”

  “Is this something I want to be party to?”

  “Absotively! Now do it. Because your only other option is to circle the stern, and you don’t want to draw their attention there.”

  “SEAL Team clear,” Sofia announced.

  Mick cursed under his breath. It was nice to know he wasn’t so perfectly cool all the time.

  “The Carrie-Anne still has to recover the team and in these seas that could take some doing,” she nudged at him.