Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  The “survivor” made it down alive, but even the PJs were dragging.

  And Mick figured that if he was allowed to sleep for about a week, he’d have made it down alive as well.

  Patty was still grimly matching him step for step when they were finally retrieved in the flatlands. An Army bus awaited them for the six-hour drive back to Anchorage. They were whipped hard the whole way as they drove deeper into the storm; rain drummed so hard on the metal roof that it was impossible to talk even if he’d had the energy to try. He was damn glad to be off that mountain.

  When Patty collapsed against his shoulder, she was asleep before she got there. It didn’t keep him awake for more than a few seconds. But those few were enough to register just how happy he was that she was there.

  It was also long enough to wonder at how much his life had changed in the last thirty-six hours. But he was out before he had any time to think about it.

  # # #

  “Got an opening here for you anytime you want,” Casper and Two-ton had shaken her hand and Mick’s. “That was some damn fine work,” they told Major Napier and strode off as if she and Mick had done no more than win a quick game of racquetball.

  Patty didn’t really remember much else about her triumphant return to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Partly because it was just the end of another training exercise to the Two-Twelve, so no one made any big deal of it.

  She also didn’t remember it because she couldn’t stop falling asleep. She’d given everything she had, and then more, on the mountain as they’d wrestled the toboggans down off the snowy peak. She’d refused to become another victim that would burden her team on the final descent. By the time they were out of the danger zone she knew far too well what it took to wrestle those two heavy “victims” and she wasn’t going to become the third.

  She’d been led to turn in her gear to the quartermaster, but slept through any chance to rib him about his selection of MREs. One moment she’d been still loaded up in heavy gear and the next she’d been sitting in the Mess Hall and mechanically eating a meal she didn’t recall and the next walking along the hallway of the transient lodging hotel.

  And now she was in the dark.

  The glowing red clock that read 7:30 didn’t tell her a thing. First off, what idiot put a civilian clock in a military transient lodging? Heavy curtains would have required her to crawl out of a very warm and comfortable bed to see if it was morning or night. Actually either 7:30 would be dark now, a.m. or p.m. Second, she might have slept an hour or a day. But third, since she didn’t know when she’d finally been allowed to crash, it was all worse than meaningless. The clock only pretended to have useful information, but it was obviously lying.

  Then there was a very small sound that provided an immense amount of information, a soft sigh. She might be in bed, but she wasn’t alone.

  Next level of awareness: beneath the covers she was wearing a t-shirt that swam on her, she could practically slither out the neck hole and the sleeves reached her elbows. And she was wearing nothing else.

  “You’d better be Mick Quinn,” she whispered at the form, but received no answer.

  She reached out into the dark and found a shoulder. Mick’s? Muscled enough to be.

  Then its owner, from lying flat on his back, scooped her against him so that she landed with her head on his shoulder and his arm cradled down her back.

  Definitely Mick. It was exactly the position they’d slept in up on Mount Hayes and he felt exactly this way. He smelled so gloriously warm and male there beneath the covers.

  But he took no further action.

  With another sigh, he was back asleep.

  Whatever had passed between them—that they certainly hadn’t discussed any further during the brutal mountain descent close beside the two PJs—The Mighty Quinn’s subconscious obviously approved of it.

  The simple move had also awoken every overstrained muscle fiber in her arms and legs. First it was a twitch, then a spasm, then the hand that was lying so comfortably on Mick’s broad chest spasmed hard enough that she clipped him in the chin.

  After a surprised grunt and a curse, his hands that had been completely lax clamped onto her.

  “Easy,” he whispered rather than asking what the hell? “Easy. It will pass.”

  In moments her body bucked and writhed with cramps and charley horses. Mick simply held her and let her flail. Eventually the spasms eased and the sharp pains faded back to mere twitches, then thankful calm.

  “I salted your food fairly heavily, but you were too tired to eat much of it or drink any Gatorade.”

  Patty lay still, afraid to speak or even take a deep breath for fear that the shooting pains would start all over again.

  “You sweat out a lot of salt and electrolytes at altitude without noticing. We were working hard up on that mountain. And you built up enough lactic acid for a lifetime. I almost punched out Napier when we got down. He should never have pushed us so hard.”

  “Punching out a superior officer is frowned on in most circles.”

  “Yeah,” he chuckled softly, “especially when that officer is Pete Napier. The only thing that saved me from having my ass kicked and thrown into the brig was Danielle got one good look at you and went after him for me.”

  “Go, Danielle.”

  “Yeah. There was something strange though. Napier never does anything by accident. He whispered something to Danielle and she backed right down. Didn’t look any less angry, but something else was going on.”

  Patty felt a sudden chill and snuggled tighter against Mick’s warmth as he stroked a hand idly up and down her back.

  “Something else…” he tested the words as he spoke them.

  “What? Like a new mission?”

  “Maybe,” she could feel Mick’s nod. “Yeah, more than maybe. He wanted us, you and me, to parachute in. Work with the PJs. He specifically wanted us to get that ice-and-snow training.”

  “No. That wasn’t him, we volunteered. You volunteered us.” But even as she said it, she knew. “And if someone else had volunteered…”

  “Napier would have switched us into their places with a simple, ‘Why don’t we let Mick and Patty take this one?’ Nobody would gainsay him.”

  “Gainsay. Pretty fancy word for an Alaska fisheryboy.”

  “Sass. Pretty standard from Patty O’Donoghue.”

  Since there was no point in arguing that, she concentrated on something else…like how good Mick smelled. Whereas, “I smell like something the polar bear dragged in.”

  “Better than something the penguin barfed up,” he made a point of sniffing her hair. “But not by much.”

  “Why don’t you smell like that?”

  “Because I showered. If I tried to shower you last night, I was afraid you would drown, so I just held my nose and stuffed you between the sheets.”

  Patty sniffed at herself again. “Ick! Real attractive. I gotta shower. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Deal.”

  By the time she was at least sanitary if not fully decontaminated, Mick was fast asleep again. It had been so much fun waking him the first time, she couldn’t wait to do it again.

  She slipped in between the covers and snuggled up to him. He was out, not even curling his arm around her. She reached down to—

  A hard pounding on the door was followed by Napier calling out.

  “Up, Quinn. Enough beauty sleep.”

  “Goddamn it,” Patty kept her voice soft because she certainly didn’t want the major to know where she’d spent the night. That would not go down well at all. She and Mick in bed together definitely warranted a disciplinary action, if not something far more serious.

  “You too, Boston!” Napier beat the door once more before his footsteps tromped off down the hall and he began battering down the next door.
/>
  “Goddamn it!” She didn’t bother to keep her voice down on that one.

  Napier might have chuckled as he moved down the hall.

  Now what the hell had that meant?

  Chapter 6

  The time was 2000 hours when Major Napier had rousted the team. By 2030 they had breakfasted and assembled in the hangar, all staring at their aircraft in bewilderment. Well, everyone except Napier who looked slightly smug, and the two mechanics, Connie and Big John, who looked harried.

  None of the changes were explained which was making Mick feel more than a little grumpy. He hoped that was rooted in lack of sleep and not lack of sex with Patty, because no way could he allow his personal life into his military one.

  Napier hadn’t pulled him aside; hadn’t made a single sign. Mick was a Lieutenant sleeping with a Chief Warrant Officer, even if all they’d done last night was sleep. At least Patty wasn’t an enlisted—not anymore—but it still wasn’t right. Yet, Napier hadn’t said a word. So still no change there.

  It was his helo that was changed.

  The Linda’s two outer weapons’ hard points had been replaced by long-range fuel tanks. The weapons that now hung from the inner hard points on his Little Bird were no longer American.

  They were Russian.

  They’d been repainted, but it wasn’t going to fool anyone. The Ugroza missile pod had replaced his Hydra 70s and the Yak-B Gatling gun had supplanted the M134 minigun.

  The weapons were absolutely not certified to be on his bird. Their weight and capability were similar enough to what had been removed that it shouldn’t be a problem, but he couldn’t make sense of the change. Any idiot who looked at those weapons wasn’t going to be fooled by the American stealth helicopter attached to them.

  Patty shook her head at him sadly from where she knelt inspecting the attachment points, “You always were the slow one on our team, Quinn.”

  “Me? I didn’t say a word.”

  “Didn’t need to. It’s all ov-ah that pretty face of yours yawz,” she laid on an extra thick helping of her accent.

  He rubbed his eyes. He felt rested; he was never the slow one. But just being around Patty it sounded like he was sometimes…it sounded.

  Oh! That was the key.

  “The sleeping bear awakens,” Patty snorted.

  He placed a hand on the top of her head and pressed down. She went from squat to sprawl with a very satisfying thump and a quite descriptive curse.

  “My moth-ah,” he imitated her, “has never said that she’d wished she’d gotten a dog instead of me for a son.”

  “Didn’t need to,” she answered from the concrete floor. “Some things are just that obvious.”

  He ignored her self-satisfied grin. It was the sound that mattered. At night, in the dark, no one would see their Little Bird, not even most radar equipment. But if they had to fire weapons, they couldn’t sound American or fire American rounds.

  A quick scan showed similar changes on all of the other aircraft. The Beatrix, being a heavier DAP Hawk, now sported a Shipunov 2A42 30mm cannon, which Rafe, Julian, and their gunner Drake, were inspecting with admiration on their faces. The cannon was a nasty-looking piece of hardware even if most of it was tucked inside a composite, radar-absorbent housing.

  Stealth American helicopters with Russian armament.

  The Chinook was little changed. The crew chiefs’ three M134 Gatling guns had been replaced and a massive fuel bladder of four thousand gallons of JP-5 jet fuel now filled the main cargo bay. Add that to the extended-range fuel tanks on Linda and Leeloo. They were going a long way from any friendly filling station. All the way to—

  “Oh man,” Patty connected the pieces at the same moment he did and grimaced.

  He held out a hand and helped her to her feet.

  Napier was down at the far end of the hangar by the Avenger drone with Sofia, her copilot, and a woman with long dark hair that he didn’t recognize. When they were all done marveling at the changes to their own aircraft, they gathered around them.

  Instead of one Avenger drone parked at the far end of the hangar, Sofia’s Raven—named for Marion Ravenwood in Indiana Jones—had grown a twin. As far as Mick knew, only three had ever been built. To have two of them here told him just how hairy this mission might get.

  “These,” Major Napier rested a hand on one of the drone’s blunt noses, “will be forward deployed to Eareckson Air Station on Shemya Island near the end of the Aleutians along with a refueling and maintenance team from the Pac Air Force Regional Support who will not be told our mission.”

  “Not like we’ve been told squat either!”

  Mick laughed at Patty’s snide remark. It was the perfect tension breaker. It was definitely frustrating to be heading aloft with no information other than they were flying into Russia. But he wouldn’t have dared to drop that in the major’s lap. Patty shrugged at him as if to say, No guts, no glory!

  Napier waited out the laugh before continuing as if nothing had happened. “Sofia and Zoe, you will control the flights from your coffin here. We’ve also borrowed Captain Kara Moretti from the 5D,” Napier introduced the sultry woman with Mediterranean skin and a sparkling wedding ring, “to trade off shifts with you. The Rita is her aircraft.”

  “Hayworth?” Patty guessed.

  Moretti shook her head in a swirl of dark hair. Her smile was sassy and reminded him of Patty even though their coloring had nothing in common.

  “Rita Moreno from West Side Story?” was Julian’s shot at it and others began tossing out ideas.

  “MacDowell in Groundhog Day?”

  “Nah. Though Andie was hot in that.”

  Mick knew who it was. It hadn’t been hard to figure out that all of their aircraft were named for exceptional action heroines, though that trick of Danielle’s had avoided her husband’s notice until it was too late.

  “Edge of Tomorrow,” he spoke up and Moretti tapped her finger on the tip of her nose. “Rita was the ultimate warrior. Emily Blunt with Tom Cruise defeating the alien, time-warping scourge across Europe. She, to use Patty’s term, totally kicked ass.” Since that movie, Ms. Blunt had moved way high on his gotta-meet-that-woman-someday list. Though the other idle fantasies that had gone along with that no longer seemed to matter with Patty looking at him with that goofy grin of hers as if she knew exactly what he was thinking.

  Napier scowled at Danielle for a moment then simply sighed before continuing. “Eareckson is an hour from our destination and the Avenger remotes have a flight duration of eighteen hours. We expect you to keep an eye in the air above us at all times. Stay out of sight but we may need your craft’s eyes and ears.”

  Sofia looked relieved at being left to work from somewhere warmer than the icy slopes of Mount Hayes. Mick had checked in with her on the descent and she’d done better than he expected. She actually understood and integrated their one talk in the Mess Hall straight into the harsh realities in the field. Completely deserved to be in Special Operations.

  “Airborne in ten. Let’s go!” Napier clapped his gloved hands together and they all hurried to prepare their aircraft.

  He and Patty did their preflight in silence, got their engines started, and waited while someone doused the hangar’s lights before sliding open the big doors.

  By 2100 hours, just an hour after he’d woken up in bed with Patty still beside him, he scooted the Linda forward out of the hangar and pulled aloft.

  He’d actually expected her to discretely slip off after her shower. Not that he expected her to cover for them, rather that he figured that she would prefer less connection between them.

  Mick had taken her into his bed in the first place because he wasn’t about to feel her up in the hallway to find where she’d stashed her own room’s keycard and because she was so exhausted he’d been half worried that she’d stop breathing. That she’d returned to
his bed after her shower had surprised him no end.

  It had also pleased him.

  Rather than avoiding him after what they’d done in the mountain tent, she had chosen to curl back up against him. If a beautiful woman wanted to be in his bed, his ego wasn’t going to complain for a second.

  If Patty O’Donoghue wanted to be there, he’d count himself a very lucky man.

  And that was the most surprising thought of them all.

  # # #

  Ten hours and two refueling stops later, Patty groaned dramatically going for the laugh.

  She didn’t get the response, but that didn’t worry her. If he was half has tired and stiff as she was from spending so long in the tiny cockpit, then he wouldn’t have the energy for a laugh.

  Besides, Mick was busy fighting the controls to bring the Little Bird shimmying down out of the dull gray sky. Not a storm front this time, just rotten weather and too damn long in the air.

  “The Aleutians. Again,” she said with disgust. “Personally I felt that one visit was plenty for this island chain.”

  “Look at the bright side. We didn’t even get to see the islands last time; it was all a night flight.”

  “You’re right, Mick. As usual. Because this,” she waved a hand toward the front windscreen, “is so much better.”

  Desolate didn’t begin to describe Attu Island. They were almost a thousand miles past where they’d been harassing the KPN fleet a few days ago. Attu lay several islands and half a hundred miles farther west than even Eareckson Air Station, where the Avenger drones had been staged. And the breaking dawn light wasn’t making it any more attractive.

  “You know,” Patty twisted in her seat once more. “After ten hours cramped up in a Little Bird seat, downtown Paris wouldn’t look attractive.”

  “I bet they have hotels there. Nice ones.”

  “Probably,” she’d never been Paris, only to Pau to train with their 4th Special Forces Helicopter Regiment.