Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  “We cooked up the bomb, even defeated Germany before they could cook up one of their own. Gave us an edge for a while. Once we figured out rockets, we dusted everybody: the moon and all that. We even got the International Space Station. Everyone knows it’s mostly ours, we even paid for or built most of the Russian components because they couldn’t afford to. We have stealth and UAVs cornered…until suddenly we don’t.”

  “It’s not fair.” She didn’t want the world to change faster than she was ready for. “I joined to get away from the danger.”

  Mick’s snort of laughter warmed the top of her head. “You went Special Operations to get away from danger? Christ, only Patty O’Donoghue would do something like that.”

  “No, Doofus. I went National Guard to get away from watching my brother lose his leg to a shark that came up in the seine net. To not watch my brother-in-law get caught in a rogue wave that washed over the boat and widow my sister when his hold slipped. In the Guard, helo pilots pluck people out of floods and fly training missions. My tours in the dustbowl were brief and…”

  “And?” Mick’s soft murmur encouraged her.

  “And I was bored as shit. I applied for Night Stalkers on a dare.”

  “That’s my Patty.”

  She wasn’t his anything…even if she did like the way it sounded. She’d never actually admitted all this to anyone, but it felt safe, almost important, to tell Mick.

  “So why did you stick with it?”

  “My reputation,” it sounded stupid when she said it that way, but it was true.

  “Explain that.”

  “My reputation caught up with me. You know, all those things you learn on a fishing boat. Safety first, be level-headed in a crisis, hard work is better than the empty net of a waterhaul because it means your family will get to eat that winter. All that crap.”

  Mick kissed her hair. “Yeah, I know ‘all that crap’ too.”

  “Well, my commanders kept recommending me upward. Then the Night Stalkers hooked me with promises that I’d be the best.” At the moment she felt like shit. All the underpinnings of her world were crumbling. The Russians were scaling up for another cold war. And they were building and flying stealth UCAVs.

  She was such a mess. It even bothered her that she was the one who’d been afraid of the “dark” and come running to her lover’s arms. Did once even count as “lover”? She wasn’t supposed to be curled up in some guy’s arms seeking solace, not even if they were Mick’s.

  “Why did you join?” She could feel the change in him the moment she asked.

  While they’d been talking, Mick’s hold on her had eased off. Not that he’d moved, he’d just been holding her less hard. Now he pulled her back in tightly enough that she had to turn her head to the side if she didn’t want her nose squished against his breastbone.

  “It’s okay, honey.” She wanted to brush a hand down his back, tell him it would be okay and he didn’t have to say anything. But her arms were trapped inside her sleeping bag up against her chest.

  He took a short, sharp breath. Then a deep, longer one that almost squished her because he didn’t ease off on his hold of her at all.

  Unable to do anything, all she could do was wait.

  He finally blew out the breath in a loud whoosh.

  “We lost a boat. Our family lost a boat.”

  “Oh shit!” Her family had never lost a boat, but Gloucester as a community lost a boat every couple years. And when you lost a boat in the North Atlantic, you usually lost the crew too. It gutted the community. Just because the movie The Perfect Storm told the tale of the Andrea Gail, didn’t mean the losses had stopped.

  “The Coast Guard rescue team,” Mick continued, “the peacetime version of the PJs we just trained with, flew out and dropped two swimmers. It was sixty and fifty.”

  Patty pictured a sixty-knot storm and fifty-foot waves. She’d been out working on a boat in that kind of weather a few times and it was sure as hell why she flew in warm and dry helicopters for a living.

  “The two of them saved all eighteen of our people. One at a time, in that serious-as-hell weather.”

  “Wow.” There was nothing else to say, it must have been an amazing feat.

  “One of the swimmers didn’t make it.”

  “‘That others may live.’” Patty blinked hard against the tears. The swimmers and PJs shared that motto.

  Most people, especially those inside the military looked up to the Special Operations soldiers as heroes.

  Inside Spec Ops, everyone, absolutely everyone looked up to the PJs. Each time one lost his life it was a blow that could be felt all through the community no matter what branch of the military your team technically belonged to. And a Coast Guard rescue swimmer was right up there with a PJ.

  “I tried to go into the water for a career. I washed out, wasn’t good enough. Air Force Pararescue has a ninety percent failure rate and I was part of it.”

  Patty tried to imagine Mick failing at anything he set out to do but couldn’t quite manage it.

  “Our family’s lead boat, the one I was on, arrived just in time for us to watch the rescue swimmer get trapped in the wreckage and be dragged under. I couldn’t get past that image during testing and it kept me from making the cut. Figured if I couldn’t swim, then I’d deliver the swimmers.”

  “Helicopters,” Patty whispered against his chest.

  “Helicopters,” Mick agreed.

  And in that instant Patty knew that she was totally screwed. It had been hard enough stepping up to Mick’s standard every day, even if she was a better woman for it.

  But living up to the standard of his love, how was she supposed to do that?

  Well, she’d better find a way because she’d just learned that she was sure-as-shit in love with this man.

  They didn’t speak another word. Not when the generator finally ran out of fuel and the heat shut down. Not when the first chill crept back out of the concrete walls forcing them deeper into their bags.

  They curled up tightly against each other through their separate sleeping bags and it was a long time before either of them slept.

  Chapter 8

  “Five hundred miles,” Major Napier announced as they gathered, each wearing heavy winter gear around the table in the Attu Island USCG rec room. Mick looked around. They were a tribe of giant snowmen, even the women—but all in non-reflective Night Stalker black.

  Pathetic! That was such a Patty-type of bizarre image, and now it was in his head. Mick wondered briefly if she was doing some kind of telepathic thing, showing him quite how strange her view of the world was.

  Patty was so layered up it would have been impossible to tell her from Sofia except for the light skin and blue eyes that had tracked his every move. Something was different with her this morning, but Mick couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  Maybe she was just cold. Once the generator had run out of the last dregs of fuel, the chill day had worn away at the building’s minimal heat reserve. The indoor temperature had fallen to within a few degrees of outdoor ambient—five degrees below freezing. With the onset of evening it was getting colder.

  “Five hundred miles and a three hour flight to the next piece of land…and from here on, neither the land nor the sea will be friendly. Sunset is,” Napier checked his watch, “right now.” He said it as if it was setting to his command rather than Mother Nature’s. With Major Napier, you never knew. Just maybe it had.

  He handed around rendezvous coordinates, both primary and secondary in case the primary was occupied by Russians. If it was, the secondary had better be clear because the Little Birds would have to land soon either way.

  “This is a hard stretch right out at the fuel limits for the Little Birds, but Commander Altman and I have determined that you are highly necessary assets for the operation’s success. If you stumble upon an
unfriendly asset and are unable to avoid it, you do not have the spare fuel to engage. Keep flying. The Beatrix and the Carrie-Anne will be sweeping along behind you and we’ll deal with the problem. The ocean is calm tonight, at least by Bering Sea standards. Stay low, move fast, do not catch a wave.” He aimed the last at Kenny, the Little Bird Leeloo’s copilot, who was an avid surfer.

  “Yes, sir,” Kenny “Geek” Rumford, a serious electronics whiz in addition to being a California surfer boy, saluted with all the crispness of a parade ground recruit facing his first three-star general. “Too damn cold anyway, Major Napier, sir.”

  “Wimp!” His pilot, Malcolm “M&M” Manfred, punched him on the arm. “Life expectancy submerged in this shit is at least four or five minutes, Geek. Where’s your board? I’ll drop you off on the way.”

  “Left it stuck up your mama’s—”

  “Airborne in five,” Napier cut them off.

  In the chill of the lingering twilight, Mick and Patty preflighted the Linda and soon everyone was in the air.

  Mick wanted to ask Patty what was the change, because her curious look hadn’t dropped behind like Attu Island. And it hadn’t changed when the warmth from the cabin heater let them at least unzip their heavy parkas.

  But now was not the time.

  Flying along at five thousand feet from Anchorage to Attu yesterday had been a casual enough operation.

  Departing Attu at fifty feet over dark and formless waves was quite another. Fifty feet up at a hundred and fifty miles an hour placed them under half a second from a watery plunge into the depths.

  Patty worked the passive listening devices out to their limits. Infrared, radio, active Russian radar that might be searching for intruders. There would be very few cargo vessels in these waters. Russian, Japanese, and American fisherman were probably the only ships that would be here, though they didn’t want to run into any of them either. She’d also be monitoring the helo’s well-being and—

  “This is Leeloo. We appear to have an issue.”

  Mick felt his entire body flinch at the low-power radio transmission—the first break in an hour of silence. Only by careful training did his hands remain still.

  “Go ahead,” Napier replied

  Mick could see the Chinook using its superior power to quickly close the three mile gap they’d been maintaining.

  “Negative fuel flow from starboard auxiliary tank. We can’t fix it in the air. If I find out it was one of those Air Farce refueling dweebs, I’ll—” M&M managed to cut himself off.

  Mick glanced at Patty and she gave him a thumbs up. She’d already tested their tanks and they were good.

  “Point of no return in fifteen minutes,” M&M came back on the air but still sounded pissed beneath his professional calm. Without the fuel in that tank, they’d fall from the sky a hundred miles from the Russian coast. And in fifteen minutes they wouldn’t have enough fuel to get back to Attu.

  The Beatrix and the Carrie-Anne had mid-air refueling probes that could be extended out to guzzle several hundred gallons of Jet-A from a friendly tanker. The Little Birds weren’t big enough to support that much extra equipment; they had to make the crossing on their own tanks.

  Now came the tough call and it didn’t take Napier more than a second. Damn but the man was impressive.

  “Leeloo. Turn immediately for return to Attu Island.”

  The other Little Bird hesitated for a long moment, than slammed a vicious turn. Mick couldn’t imagine how frustrated M&M and Geek were at this moment.

  “Beatrix you will fly escort for the Leeloo only until a Pave Hawk from Shemya can take over from you.” Because helicopters, especially broken ones, did not fly alone over vast reaches of freezing waters.

  Mick could hear Danielle on the radio in the background. Napier and Danielle made such a seamless team that they might have been a single voice.

  “A KC-135 tanker,” Napier was relaying the information even as Danielle and Sofia were making it happen, “will meet Beatrix for a mid-air refuel and then escort the Beatrix back to our group while the Air Force Pave Hawk escorts Leeloo back to land. Rafe, your DAP Hawk has a strong speed advantage over our Linda and the Carrie-Anne, use it on the return. We want to arrive at the Russian coast as a unit.”

  And without the Beatrix for escort, the Leeloo would have no way to rejoin them. They had just gone from four aircraft to three for this mission; five to four if he counted Sofia’s Avenger even now high above them.

  Mick watched the tactical display as Beatrix fell in close behind the crippled Little Bird. It was said that a helicopter wasn’t an aircraft, it was a million parts flying in close formation. Night Stalkers’ operational availability exceeded all other outfits. The Air Force barely managed a seventy-five percent Mission Capable Rate across the hundred different models of aircraft they flew—the big bombers ran closer to fifty. The 160th SOAR held a full investigation into every single failure and managed to maintain an MCR percentage in the high nineties outside of scheduled maintenance, the best in the business. But it could never be a hundred and Leeloo had just drawn the short straw.

  “Better to have poor fuel flow than a rotor falling off,” Patty commented over the intercom.

  Mick laughed a little, “Leave it to you to find the bright side, Gloucester.”

  “I’m just a bright-side kinda girl.”

  “Thought you were a woman.”

  She made a raspberry sound over the intercom loud enough that it echoed inside his helmet.

  Mick kept pushing west. A hundred and fifty miles down, three hundred to go.

  “I suddenly feel kinda naked out here,” her voice barely a whisper this time.

  “I’ve seen you naked. That’s a very good thing.” But Mick knew exactly what she meant. He kept glancing down at the tactical display and there was only the one other blip—Danielle’s big Chinook, the Carrie-Anne, still hanging three miles back. It was a lot of empty ocean. Rolling waves that he couldn’t see and shining stars that had slipped out unnoticed some time after they escaped Attu.

  “A very good thing right back at you, Quinn.”

  And it was the first time her voice had sounded normal since they’d woken up this morning.

  # # #

  Patty was still trying to make sense of what had happened. She and Mick had made love once, well, twice but in the same night and morning up on Mount Hayes. And that had been less than forty-eight hours ago.

  She’d never gone soft in the head for any man, if she didn’t count a multi-year teenage crush on The Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins. A crush she wasn’t entirely sure she was over at thirty.

  Plenty of men came to her for comfort; it’s what men thought women were for. But it wasn’t something Patty ever did in turn. One of Patty’s very first memories was being afraid of the thunder and her father’s cheery jibe of, “You gotta get your shit together, kid!”

  She’d made a career out of having her shit together.

  Being around Mick Quinn made her feel both worse and better. Worse that she’d gone to him seeking solace and better for having found it.

  Now she rode her hands on their connected flight controls and could echo the immense skill that simply flowed from Mick. The connection was deep, not just through the controls, but also uncomfortable places that were near the heart she’d never really believed she had. Books and other women described such things, but it wasn’t anything she believed in.

  “I can take it if you need a break.”

  “You have control,” Mick agreed. And just that easily she was Pilot in Command.

  “After two years of flying with you, Quinn, you think I’d be used to being trusted.” Patty paid careful attention to her flight level. Normally she’d see if she could fly a few feet lower than Mick had been—shave that edge just a little. Not this time. She even let herself float up another five feet s
o that she could concentrate a bit more on the bigger picture.

  “Trust is a big issue for you, Gloucester?”

  “At times.” And lately, the challenge of entirely trusting herself, which she was not going to voice aloud. She had experience with men, but not with what she was feeling about this particular man. This was territory as foreign as the fast-approaching Kamchatka Peninsula.

  Chapter 9

  “Kamchatka Peninsula,” Mick said as they slid along with their skids a dozen feet over the waves in between a pair of rocky headlands. Patty hadn’t offered him back the controls and he’d been content to be their electronic lookout. Now it was starting to itch at him.

  Not a damn thing wrong with how she’s flying, Mick. So let her do her thing. The problem was that there wasn’t much wrong with her at all that he could see. He had her up on a kind of pedestal at the moment and knew it, but he wasn’t finding any easy way to knock her back off it either.

  “Looks a hell of a lot like everyplace else we’ve been in the last few days.”

  Mick blinked to refocus his vision beyond his visor rather than onto the images and overlaid tactical display projected on the inside. He didn’t see a thing…

  Right. Middle of the night here versus on Attu or in Anchorage. They all were invisible in the darkness.

  The flight had been eerily uneventful. No submarines lurking just awash on the ocean’s surface. No coastal patrols. Not even any wandering fisherman working the edge of the continental shelf on the bitter October night.

  The report of Leeloo’s safe return to Eareckson Air Station only to discover a failed valve, and Beatrix catching back up with them a half hour from the Russian coast had been the only excitement. The tanker that had accompanied the Beatrix had cut and run, they didn’t dare climb high enough to top off the Carrie-Anne’s tanks this close to the Russian coast.

  The three helicopters had purposely come ashore in a stretch of deep wilderness well clear of roads or habitation. The coast here was a mix of stark wilderness, abandoned fishing villages, and several defunct military bases. Satellite imagery said they had their choice of the last. Commander Altman had selected a particularly isolated former submarine base. It was defunct and stripped. Even with night vision, it was easy to see the wreckage of the abandonment.