Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  The guard laughed and smiled, then slipped to the ground. Altman and Nikita caught him on the way down. Altman took back the bottle and stoppered it.

  “Falling asleep on duty will get him latrine duty. Doing so while supposedly drunk will get him far worse,” Altman explained as he pocketed the bottle.

  There was no keypad on the door, just a simple lock. Nikita knelt and pulled out some picks. Ten seconds later they were inside and confirming the lack of alarms.

  “Feeling too safe out here in the wilderness, Comrades,” Mick whispered quietly.

  Thirty seconds later, they had confirmed that they were the only ones in the vast building.

  As they’d spotted from the fishing boat, there was an Orlan-10 drone parked close by the main doors. With another positioned close behind it.

  The rest of the hangar was taken up by four very nasty looking aircraft in various stages of assembly. A complete one stood on its wheels close by the door.

  “Skad UCAVs,” Connie confirmed and moved toward the partial aircraft as if in a dream.

  “Pictures, Mick. Every angle and a video of each one.”

  Mick pulled out a low-light camera and went to work.

  “Software,” Connie said, shaking herself awake. “That is the key to aircraft now. We need the software.”

  “Here,” Nikita moved unerringly toward one particular station. It took Mick a moment to figure out why; it was the only one that was a complete mess. She flipped through the papers rapidly, checked under a keyboard and then a mouse pad, then under the mouse. She left it on its back and began typing as she read what was written on the bottom of the mouse.

  The screen flashed to life. Nikita plugged memory sticks into external ports.

  Mick went back to taking photographs.

  A very quiet and intense four minutes later, he couldn’t think of another angle to photograph the Skad and moved on to the Orlan-10. He was just wondering whether or not to try pulling the covers on one when a low whistle brought him hustling back.

  “Two clean copies,” Nikita announced. And yanked out the memory sticks. She handed one to him and he copied all of the pictures onto it. She took it back and gave him the other copy of the software. By now they’d been inside the building for five minutes and had two copies of everything.

  While they’d been making the copies, Connie had slid into the programmer’s chair.

  “Isn’t that interesting,” she seemed to be talking to herself.

  “You know about software as well as mechanics?” Then Mick cursed himself for asking such an extraneous question during a mission.

  Connie ignored him as she scrolled blocks of code faster than an air battle shifted tactical screens.

  “In modern day…the physical mechanics…”

  It was as if his question was slowly jerking a response from her in little dribs and drabs while her main attention was processing the information on the screen.

  “…are just a small factor…in performance. The…software now controls…most of the ultimate…capabilities of the…craft.”

  Six minutes gone and still she was scrolling screens faster than he could focus on them.

  Then her voice shifted abruptly.

  “I need fifteen minutes,” Connie didn’t wait for an answer as her fingers flew across the keyboard.

  They’d rehearsed this a dozen times back at the sub base. Maximum mission time was to be ten minutes from first contact.

  Mick pulled Altman and Nikita aside. “How long is the guard’s knockout good for?”

  Altman didn’t bother checking his watch. “Twenty minutes to groggy, thirty to fully awake and praying to God that we were just a hallucination. If he isn’t caught sleeping, he’ll never report us to anybody. Sofia observed that last night they changed the guard at 2000 and 2400 hours. It’s 2230 right now, so that part of it should work out.”

  “Do we drag her out?” Nikita asked softly.

  Mick was about to nod that they’d have to, but Connie didn’t give him a chance.

  “Don’t,” Connie spoke once again in her parsed, jerking way. “Right now I’d be leaving a big digital thumbprint across their software. I need fourteen more minutes.” And then she leaned in as if she could meld with the screen.

  “I bet we could drop a bomb right now and she wouldn’t hear us,” Mick tucked the camera and the memory stick back in his parka’s pocket and made sure it was sealed in.

  No reaction.

  For a ten loud heartbeats, Altman frowned at a spot somewhere near Mick’s shoulder.

  Mick wanted to reach up and feel if it was growing warm under Superman’s x-ray vision.

  The only sound was the brap of Connie’s keyboard, as loud and dangerous sounding in the silent hangar as the chainsaw-burr of an M134 minigun.

  “Go!” Altman grabbed Mick’s lapel. “You head for the helo. We need to separate these two copies of the data. As soon as she’s done we’ll either follow or find another route out.”

  Mick tried to ask what other route, but Altman was already shoving him toward the door.

  He was able to stop Altman’s strong-arming him right at the threshold to the door only by grabbing the door frame.

  “You don’t bring Connie back safe, you’ll be the one who has to deal with Big John. He’s a very protective guy, you know.”

  Altman slapped him on the arm, “I promise you that if Connie doesn’t get out of this alive, neither Nikita nor I will either.”

  Mick nodded. It was exactly the answer you’d expect from a Team 6 commander.

  He ducked through the door, checked that the guard was still passed out, and high-tailed it for the taiga forest.

  # # #

  Patty had taken to thumping the back of her helmet against the headrest of her pilot’s seat. It didn’t make her feel any better, but if she counted five between the thumps, it gave her something to do that actually let the watch move forward in time. In slow excruciatingly motion, but forward.

  Altman’s plan stated that they were forty minutes to base. Another thirty to infiltrate and find the right building. He’d allotted them ten minutes inside and another hour to get back.

  By her best estimation she had thirty-eight minutes before it was even time to start worrying, never mind panicking.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Thump.

  Thirty-seven minutes and fifty-four seconds.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Thump.

  Thirty-seven minutes and forty-eight seconds.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

  Thump!

  The entire helicopter shuddered with the impact.

  Patty opened her eyes, but didn’t see anything unusual through the night-vision cameras mounted on the outside of the helicopter.

  One. Two. Thr—

  Thump!

  Something heavy crashed against the front of the helo. Still nothing to see. Whatever it could be, it was closer than the area of the external cameras.

  She shoved her visor up.

  Nothing but pitch darkness. The starlight that she’d been watching earlier was blocked by a dark shape—one that took up half her view out the windshield.

  Again the helicopter shook as if being struck by a large hammer.

  Deciding to risk a light, she pulled a flashlight out of her thigh pocket and aimed it out through the helicopter’s windscreen. The Little Bird offered exceptional visibility. The windscreen was essentially one piece of curved Plexiglas from the rudder pedals to up behind her head. A small console rose between the two pilot’s seats to about chest high, but the view from a Little Bird was spectacular. At least normally.

  She couldn’t make sense of what the flashlight revealed though. Something thick and brown was pressing against the outside of the windscreen blocking her view all the way up to the level of her eye
s.

  Then it moved.

  A gigantic furry face turned to look at her, blinking in confusion.

  Patty tried to think of how to respond, of what she could do. The bear’s head was bigger than her entire body and they were looking right at each other from less than two feet apart.

  The massive brown bear snorted the air several times—great puffs of hot air that briefly fogged the outside of the windscreen hazing her view of his huge brown eyes.

  She could see every wrinkle of his nose as it tried to puzzle out the light’s origin.

  After a long moment’s consideration, the bear must have decided that she wasn’t food, or something that needed a good tromping. It looked away and returned to scratching its back against the nose of her helicopter.

  Then it ambled off into the darkness. She didn’t remember to pull down the visor until the last of its fat butt was disappearing into the trees. And the recorder hadn’t been running. No picture to prove her story.

  But she couldn’t wait to tell Mick anyway.

  She hadn’t even had time to be scared, hadn’t thought to be. Just two vastly different creatures, each in their own habitat, staring at each other across the Plexiglas void.

  She looked down to put away her flashlight the moment before something else smacked into the helicopter.

  “Goddamn bears!”

  She yanked the flashlight back out and shone it out the windscreen.

  Mick lay against the windshield.

  And his face was covered in blood.

  Chapter 12

  Someone was cursing at him. A long vivid stream of invective in several languages. Or maybe just cursing at the world in general.

  He wanted to curse back, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the wind. His side hurt so much from running at his flat-out limit that he couldn’t even move. He’d already been moving at a fast jog for a while when he’d been attacked.

  He’d sprinted from there.

  Then he recognized the voice even though she’d wandered off into Viet or maybe Thai.

  “Gloucester,” he managed to gasp out. Thank God.

  She could curse him all she wanted as long as he’d finally found her.

  Patty grabbed his arm and he yelped. He couldn’t help himself.

  “What the hell, Quinn?”

  “Wolf. Bit my arm.” He tried to lean down to see if she smelled as wonderful as he’d remembered.

  But she spun away before he could.

  “Where is it?” She shone a flashlight into the woods. She had her handgun out, ready to kill it. His own personal redheaded action heroine.

  “Gone.” Really gone. Good and gone. Gone for good.

  “You’re all bloody.”

  “Wolf’s blood,” Mick raised his Bizon 9mm. “I messed up its brain a bit.” The submachine gun had been short enough for him to ram it right into the ear of the hellhound that had surged out of the darkness to latch onto him. He’d only saved his throat by getting his right arm up in time. How strange. Methods to Survive a Dog Attack had always struck him as a wasted bit of training for a helicopter pilot and now it had saved his life. Leave it to the Army to cover all the bases, even the ones that looked totally stupid…until they saved your sorry ass.

  “You just never know.”

  “Never know what?” Patty was looking up at him.

  “Pretty Patty with the big blue eyes.” Even in the vague sidelight of the flashlight’s beam, they were brilliant.

  “ ‘You never know what,’ Mick? Where are the others?” Once again she spun away just as he was leaning down to sniff her hair. This time he got a good whiff though.

  She smelled like fish.

  “The others?” The urgency of her tone cut through his wandering thoughts.

  “They’re coming. Or maybe not.” He knew he wasn’t making a whole lot of sense so he struggled to focus. “They’re going to follow. In fourteen minutes. Maybe more as I ran a lot. Unless they don’t.”

  “And if they don’t?” Patty started guiding him toward his seat in the helicopter.

  That was a good idea. He didn’t want to risk almost shooting his arm off again if there was another wolf.

  “And if they don’t, Quinn?”

  “Altman promised he and Nikita would make sure Connie got out safely.”

  “How will we know?” She buckled his harness for him. Which was good. The adrenaline was going away and the shakes would follow.

  And his right arm was starting to really hurt.

  She climbed in the other side and turned the cockpit light on low.

  He looked at his coat sleeve again, just as he had after extracting his arm from the dead wolf’s mouth. No tooth holes, just an in and out where the bullet had passed through a fold of cloth near his bicep, right after passing through the wolf’s brain. He probed a finger through the hole but found no liquid heat of spilled blood and no pain. A clean miss. The thick parka and a quick shooting had saved his arm, but the forearm where the wolf had clamped down really really hurt.

  “How—”

  “Sofia will call.”

  “Okay.”

  And there was pretty Patty again, now sitting beside him in the Linda and staring into his face.

  “You sure that’s not your own blood?”

  “I’m sure. Damn, but you’re a looker, Pretty Patty. I love Pretty Patty,” he’d said it before and he’d say it again. Actually, maybe he hadn’t said it out loud before.

  “You’re a nut, Quinn,” she patted him on his shoulder. That didn’t hurt.

  “That’s true,” he admitted. “Because I’m nuts about you. Maybe that makes me certifiable.”

  “That makes two of us certifiable.”

  And then the shakes slammed into him as the last of the adrenaline slid away and he finally realized just how close he’d come to death.

  # # #

  Patty was still holding him when the call came in from Sofia.

  She didn’t know which of them she’d been holding on for. To comfort him as he was slammed time and again by the shakes? Or herself for how glad she was to have him back beside her.

  When the worst of it had passed, she didn’t ease her hold and he continued to lean into her.

  “So close,” he whispered. “So close. I’m sorry Patty. I almost broke my promise to get back here. That was all I could think as that wolf tried to kill me. I promised you I’d come back.”

  “And you did, Mick. You kept your word,” as, of course, Mick Quinn would. All of her doubts of the last few hours washed away. She didn’t just love Mick Quinn. If they survived this, she was damn well going to marry him and he didn’t get a vote in the matter.

  “I’ve been injured before, but never faced death. Not like that. Hot, immediate, and horribly violent,” his rough voice tore at her heart.

  “It’s okay. You made it. It’s okay,” Patty did her best to reassure them both.

  “Who knew death had such stinky breath.”

  She pulled back enough to look at him again. He’d scared the shit out of her first with the blood and then with the babbling incoherence. That he’d said he loved her somewhere in the middle of that didn’t quite count, but it was very promising.

  She wanted him to say it again, even in babble. But now, with the adrenaline gone, he’d come back to coherence.

  Then the “stinky breath” line.

  “Don’t I even get a laugh?”

  Mick Quinn had just delivered a joke about almost dying and wanted a laugh for his punch line.

  And she gave it to him; couldn’t help herself. It bordered on the hysterical, but that didn’t matter. He was okay. The battered and bloody man looking over at her had those same gorgeous eyes she was used to.

  She leaned in to find some not-so bloody spot that she could kiss, when the en
crypted radio squawked to life.

  “Team of three using alternate evacuation route,” Sofia announced. “Linda cleared for return to base.”

  Patty didn’t key the mike in response, that wasn’t protocol. Instead she powered up and Sofia would know they’d received her message when the Linda took off.

  Chapter 13

  Mick’s right arm was horribly tender, every move sent sharp twinges, sometimes down to his fingertips and sometimes up to his shoulder and neck—he’d probably wrenched it but good blocking a hundred pounds of wolf. These twinges were less intense than before. Way better than the moment Patty had grabbed his arm; which was infinitely better than the screaming agony as he’d extracted his arm from the dead wolf’s mouth.

  He flexed his fingers and wished to God he hadn’t. His lame attempt to suppress a sharp hiss of breath was thankfully masked by the high whine of the accelerating turboshaft engine.

  So he nestled his right arm in his lap and watched Patty fly.

  “You’re very smooth.”

  “Why thank you, Mr. Quinn. Now shut up, I’m busy here.”

  She’d taken it completely the wrong way. Or maybe not. He remembered the smooth soft heat of her in their joined sleeping bags atop Mount Hayes. Nobody felt that good, not even in late night fantasies. But Patty O’Donoghue did. Someday he’d get a chance to test if that was real or imagined, and it had better be soon.

  He let his left hand float on the collective, enjoying the connection from his hand to hers on the linked controls.

  Smooth, so very smooth.

  And he was utterly exhausted. Too little sleep last night, fishing all day—it was hard work catching nothing all day—and once again it was the middle of the night.

  Maybe they’d get to leave Kamchatka tonight. They were barely three hours to Alaska. If they could get even halfway under cover of darkness, they could be back to Anchorage the next day. It all depended on how fast the other team was moving.

  Patty swooped the Linda through the saddle between the two dormant volcanoes that stood as sentinels over the pass between the drone base and the Kamchatka River valley.