Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  There was fuel aboard and several sets of very authentic smelling clothing. Patty pulled hers on with a vague grimace that might have more to do with memories than the current stink.

  Altman and Nikita were as expressionless as ever while they dressed. Get it done and move on. Jason rolled his eyes and then dragged on the foul gear with a practiced hand. Mick helped Connie into hers, the short brunette clearly knew nothing at all about boats, not even how to wear the gear that went with them. She was a quiet woman who never complained, but was so out of her element here. It was almost like taking poor Sofia up onto Mount Hayes.

  “Do you really need to be here?” He turned to Altman. “Does she need to be here?”

  “Best mechanic we’ve got and is fluent in Russian,” Altman pointed his finger at her as if Connie was an exhibit on display, not a person. “Cranky old fishing boat—with an engine that I’m promised runs, but who knows how well—that was built and serviced in Russia.” He turned back to loading several duffle bags of gear into the boat.

  The conversation was done, apparently.

  Mick shrugged an apology to Connie. It was hard to tell what her reaction was. No answering shrug of friendly appreciation for his attempt. No flinch at being treated like an asset on a checklist.

  Instead, despite being the one least familiar with boats, she moved into the wheelhouse first and through the salt- and grime-smeared windows he could see her inspecting the controls. In moments, the big engine thudded to life and spewed a cloud of black diesel out the smoke stack that stuck up beside the mangy structure. When it didn’t settle as it warmed, Connie shut it down and disappeared below. About ten minutes later she returned and restarted the diesel. It had smoothed out and the black cloud shifted to a clear, mostly, plume of heat that merely shimmered the air.

  She stepped out of the cramped wheelhouse and onto the deck, glanced at the stack and nodded to herself. Then she faced Altman.

  “I left it slightly out of tune. I think that having a truly smooth-running engine on a boat of this age might appear as an anomaly even if there isn’t a single thing wrong with Russian heavy engineering. If you want to actually run out the nets and do any fishing to look authentic, I’ll need half an hour to rebuild the winch.”

  “Do it,” Altman said and she turned to the task. Altman looked at Mick a little round-eyed. “I’d heard she was good?” He made it a question.

  “Scary good,” Mick agreed. “If you hang with us more, you’ll find out just how good.”

  “It’s an idea.” Before Mick could ask what he meant, Altman tipped his head toward Patty. “What about her?”

  Mick had been watching Patty move about the boat. She moved without question or hesitation, cleaning things up automatically as she went. Boat hooks slammed into clips. A corner of a net lifted up and practiced eyes scanning its condition before dropping it back to the deck with disgust. All so smoothly that most of it wasn’t even conscious. No one could fake that kind of competency.

  “This is her space. Let her run with it.”

  Altman nodded. Mick’s word was good enough. Couldn’t Altman see how familiar she was with such craft? No, he was a Special Operations SEAL who could drive anything from a diver delivery vehicle—the small subs used by SEALs for underwater infiltration—probably up to a destroyer. But he wasn’t a commercial fisherman.

  “O’Donoghue,” Altman called to her. “Take us out.”

  “You bet, boss. What would I be called in Russian?”

  “Ya bol’ v zadnitse!”

  “Ya bol’v zadnitse,” she repeated dutifully, even hitting the accents well. She had a good ear.

  Mick tried to stop his laugh, but he couldn’t get control of it. Connie and Nikita were smiling but holding their mirth in by studiously inspecting the Graynose. Jason didn’t speak Russian, so he’d missed the joke.

  Which left a very irritated looking Patty glaring right at him.

  “What?”

  “Never trust a SEAL,” Mick pointed at Altman, doing what he could to deflect her attention, but it wasn’t working.

  “What’s so goddamn funny?”

  Mick would have to get Altman back for this later; he was enjoying himself far too much.

  “Quinn?” Her tone was only the leading edge of an “Irish Patty” threat level.

  “Your first lesson in Russian,” he tried to dodge one last time.

  “Is…?”

  No way out. “How to tell someone that you’re a pain in the ass.”

  She huffed out a breath that would have stirred her bangs if she’d had any. “Oh, like that would be a surprise to anyone.” Then she turned back to the task of getting underway.

  Mick knew he was screwed. Patty wouldn’t take it out on a Team 6 SEAL; she’d find her retribution on a much more accessible target, himself.

  # # #

  Patty showed Mick and Jason how to run a purse seine fishing net. Nikita picked it up quickly as well. Altman was hopeless which made her feel somewhat better. Always nice to find at least one thing Superman couldn’t do.

  Then they ran their first haul and actually pulled up a load of fish. Most swam free due to poor technique—that she of course razzed them about—but they still pulled up a couple hundred pounds of salmon. She showed them how to slip the bottom wire so that the bottom of the “purse” didn’t close and the fish could swim free.

  Some fish, being too stupid to live, were caught despite the crew’s worst efforts and she had them thrown into one of the hold tanks. Altman had wanted to throw them back overboard. Patty pointed out that being seen having a lousy fishing day wouldn’t raise an eyebrow; being seen dumping a catch would attract far too much attention.

  Connie ignored the whole operation once she saw how it worked, and continued moving around the boat servicing various systems.

  “Careful, Connie,” Patty called out to her on another of her passes through the wheelhouse. “You’re going to fix the boat so much that the real owner won’t know what to do with it.”

  “This boat is hurting and, worse, it isn’t its fault. I can’t not fix it.”

  “Makes sense.” Patty had taken the wheel as a form of protection, it kept her from doing the cold and ugly scut work of fishing. And it kept her marginally warmer in the semi-enclosed cabin. But she couldn’t move around much and the damp cold was really settling in.

  She tried to think of something to talk to Connie Davis about to distract herself from the mundane job of “fishing” their way down the coast toward the coordinates Altman had asked for. But she couldn’t. Connie spoke so seldom and—

  “You have a problem.”

  “I have about a hundred,” Patty sighed and then startled when she realized that for the first time in their acquaintance Connie had initiated the conversation.

  “That’s the problem. The way to solve them is to address them one at a time. I can’t fix the boat, but I can tune an engine, repair a winch, and tighten a linkage. You see it as a fixed boat; I perceive the individual elements of a mechanical system being consecutively refined.”

  “Meaning that I should stop trying to fight a hundred battles on a dozen fronts and…” Patty reached for it, but could seem to land the thought.

  “And fly the route. You are an exceptional Little Bird pilot and an even more exceptional copilot.”

  “Good enough to make SOAR anyway.”

  “No!” Connie spoke as vehemently as Patty had ever seen her. “You only see that because you fly with Mick Quinn who is as far above nominal as Trisha and Claudia are in the 5th Battalion D Company. That’s three women and one man I’ve met who are the best Little Bird pilots flying anywhere in the 160th SOAR. Mick Quinn is the one who is able to live up to our standards, not the other way around.”

  Patty felt like the slow child in school who had just been spanked.

  “You fly
for the 5E,” Connie continued in a tone that was passionate by Connie standards. “A SOAR company specifically assembled around our skills—which includes you. A Team 6 SEAL Commander has put you in charge of delivering him where he needs to go. Own it.” The last was a command.

  “Right. All I have to be is the perfect copilot, gunner, fisher, and mountain climber.”

  “Don’t forget lover.”

  “Right. And— Hey!” Patty glared at her.

  Connie smiled broadly, an unusual event in itself.

  “That was tricky.”

  “I’m a Night Stalker.”

  With those simple words Connie spoke an absolute truth. Unlike Patty, she hadn’t twisted it into a joke with “So sue me” or something similar. From Connie it was a bald statement of fact. And she was right.

  Patty had been fighting to be what she already was. What a waste of energy was that!

  Then she focused past Connie and watched Mick “The Mighty” Quinn working the nets on a Russian fishing seiner. He’d gotten the others working in an easy rhythm that looked authentic even to her trained eye, except that they weren’t catching anything in some of the richest fishing grounds she’d ever seen.

  Had she caught something? Mick Quinn had bedded her and collected his manly “prize.” But rather than acting as if he’d gotten all he wanted and was now done with her, he was treating her as if he wanted even more.

  That worked, because so did she.

  “Connie, could you take the helm for a minute?”

  “That would be a good idea, especially if we don’t want to ram that reef.”

  Patty twisted around to look back out the front windows. They’d left them grimy and smeared, again because they didn’t want the boat to look too clean. Despite that, she’d have been able to see breakers to mark a reef, if there were any to be seen. A look down at the ragged chart that had been left for them showed a broad reef not half a kilometer ahead.

  She corrected their course to swing well clear of that. Connie couldn’t have seen the chart from where she stood, so how—

  “Eidetic memory,” Connie explained with a sigh. “I looked at the chart the first time I started the engine.”

  That explained a lot about the woman’s strangeness. Connie could tell you how many times you’d…

  And Patty saw the resigned expression on Connie’s face. The woman was decidedly odd—the 5E’s quiet genius—and it was clear that she now expected Patty to have any of seven different cataloged reactions that Connie was used to getting. So, Patty would do something different.

  “Thanks. Guess I’m not the only one who belongs in the 5E. You have the helm. I have a man to go terrorize. I’ll be right back.”

  Connie blinked once, then a second time in slow surprise. Then that smile cracked open again, “Terrorize a couple for me.”

  “Deal, sister.” They traded high fives and Patty strolled out onto the deck.

  # # #

  “There,” Nikita indicated with a nod.

  Her observation sent Altman moving into the wheelhouse and retrieving his high power scope. Then he hunkered down behind the gunwale to look out.

  Mick followed the sight line, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Kamchatka had started out impossibly foreign. Black sand beaches, backed by grasslands and forests turned autumn shades. Like Alaska, the landscape was harsh enough that there wasn’t a wide variety of species, but the ones that survived were dramatic. He recognized the dusty, dark green of spruce, the yellow-gold of larch, and the brilliance of white-barked birch.

  Beyond them, rising in a jagged line of sentinels, volcano after volcano defined the horizon. These weren’t the broad lava domes of Hawaii or the grand old mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Kamchatka bred its volcanoes like a children’s drawing: steep, up past a mile tall, with circular calderas at the top. And now, most of them were coated well down their sides with thick snow. The lower limits of the snow lurked only a few hundred feet above sea level. Another few weeks and it would reach right down to the beaches.

  Here and there in the jagged chain, one spewed out a long column of white steam. Of the ones he’d seen so far, only Mount Shiveluch, the volcano perched above the abandoned sub base, was violently active. Even here, thirty miles south, its bold head and massive ash plume marked the sky.

  They hadn’t passed a single other craft in the first two hours of work. In the third hour, they’d passed three, one close enough to exchange a wave. As far as he could tell, the real fishermen hadn’t even wasted the energy of lifting a set of binoculars to inspect their craft.

  Even in that short amount of time, he’d grown accustomed to the stark scenery. What had Nikita seen that sent Altman into the cabin to pull out a high-power scope? Finally Mick could pick out the faintest glint of white on the shore. Even then, only out of the corner of his eye when they were riding over a wave crest. SEALs were damned impressive to have spotted the tiny anomaly.

  Mick’s hands were raw and sore from the freezing cold saltwater, but the feeling was an old and familiar friend. A part of him did miss being out on the ocean, though he’d have preferred a better prepared vessel. The Graynose had no luxuries such as life preservers or even an emergency radio. They had their own satellite radios and the Chinook was standing by in case they needed a scramble rescue. But the hull was sound and the weather mild. All in all, a beautiful morning to be out fishing.

  Though it hurt him every time he slipped the purse wire and let the catch swim free. His fisheryman blood didn’t approve.

  Fisheryman. Gods but Patty cracked him up.

  As if he’d evoked her by just thinking about her, Patty strode out onto the deck. Hands rammed deep into her pockets, she squinted up at the sky, then back at him. She dodged piles of netting and the occasional fish as she worked her way back to him at the stern rail. She stopped a step from him.

  “How can a woman so damn beautiful also be so damn cute?” Mick flicked a finger against her pom-pom.

  “Thought I was a girl.”

  “No. The person who I crawled into a double sleeping bag with was a hundred percent woman.”

  Her brilliant blue eyes inspected him carefully. No poor Russian fisherman would wear mirrored Ray Ban aviator sunglasses, so they’d all agreed to abandon their standard eyewear, even if it meant squinting most of the time. So, he could see her beautiful blue eyes, but he’d wager the squint had nothing to do with the brightness of the day.

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  “Damn straight. No time for sex, barely enough to talk.”

  Again, that narrowed inspection.

  “What are you thinking, Gloucester?” Did they really have a problem and he was missing something.

  “That’s not the problem.”

  “Are you going to tell me? Or do I just have to stand here and admire how amazing you look in that hat with a secret Russian drone base spread out behind you?”

  “Really? Where?” She spun away from him to look off to starboard.

  Mick tipped his head up to look at the sky. The woman was going to drive him mad.

  And high above him, he saw a tiny flash of silver, little more than a sun flash.

  Mick did his best to casually walk over to Altman with his scope and drag an oily tarp over him.

  “What?” His voice was muffled, but he didn’t try to shed the covering.

  “Company. About five o’clock, very high.” Under cover of the tarp, Altman shifted so that only the tip of his scope was visible as he turned it upward.

  “Notify Sofia,” the tarp called out to him. “Tell her that she has an Orlan-10 medium drone and she needs to stay clear.”

  “Get the nets back out,” Mick moved back to the crew. “You too,” he told Patty.

  “What the hell, Mick? I—” then she caught his tone. In that moment the puzzled woman
was gone and the soldier was in her place. That didn’t mean he couldn’t tease her anyway.

  “I need to get your pretty ass fishing. We’ve got surveillance. No!” He grabbed her earflaps to keep her head in place. “Do not look up. Fish.” He turned her around and shoved her toward the job, hopefully as one man might shove another—he doubted that slim redheads were standard fare on a Kamchatka fishing boat. There was no way to tell if they were under observation or not, but it was better to be safe.

  He went to the wheelhouse.

  “I’ve already called her,” Connie was tucking away a satellite radio. “I only dared risk a single, encrypted squirt transmission. I didn’t want them spotting us if they have a radio frequency package aboard. She reported back that she is staying another three miles above it and the Orlan is only designed to look down. She’s loaded with four Hellfire missiles just in case there are any issues.”

  “Good. Thanks,” Mick started to turn back for the deck.

  “Are you the Captain?”

  He looked back at her. “I guess. As much as anyone.”

  “Okay. Then do you want to know about the Stenka-class patrol boat that’s coming our way, or should I keep that to myself?”

  Mick hesitated for a moment, hoping it was more of a joke than it sounded. When Connie didn’t offer anything else, he struggled to keep his voice as calm and casual as she did. This was apparently her idea of high humor and he didn’t want to spoil it for her.

  “Stenka?”

  “Two-hundred ton category. Thirty-seven meters long, 1960s vintage. They were passed from their Navy to the Russian Coast Guard. A couple torpedo tubes and a trio of machine guns big enough to make short work of the Graynose.”

  “O-kay.” Of course Connie Davis would have all of those details on tap. “Anything else?”

  “Sonar says that we’re coming up on a rich patch of fish.”

  The depth-and-fish finder was the only electronic device on the boat that worked, but he didn’t care about fish at the moment.

  “Can you estimate the crew size?”

  “It’s designed for a complement of thirty-two to thirty-four, but with the staffing problems the Russian Navy is having, especially in the Pacific fleet, I’d say twenty-six. An awful lot of fish here.”