Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  A world of white, lit plenty brightly by the ambient starlight to show up clearly across his visor.

  He blinked to shift his focus.

  Patty O’Donoghue. She was shorter in her seat than he was, but taller than some pilots. Her flightsuit topped by her survival vest and her gun hid any hint of shape. The blocky helmet covered her flowing hair and the lowered visor hid everything but the tip of her chin.

  Yet still he’d know her anywhere. Some part of his brain had cataloged her so completely that he’d instinctively know by the way she handled the controls, by the way she moved, by the way she breathed.

  Patty hadn’t reacted when he’d said he loved her. He’d also been yammering like a seasick drunk on his first sport fisher.

  Mick opened his mouth to tell her, but she’d told him to be quiet so she could concentrate. Busting her concentration during a nap-of-the-Earth flying mission would be a lousy choice, so he kept his peace.

  His brain switched on enough that he refocused inside his helmet and began watching the tactical displays.

  “Swing wide for Klyuchi,” he reminded her.

  “Thanks. Welcome back, Quinn.” There was enough salt in her tone that he knew he’d spooked her with his wandering responses.

  “Glad to be here,” he’d leave it at that. So glad to be next to Patty that he could barely stand it.

  Past Klyuchi, they climbed out of the Kamchatka River Valley, once again circling wide around Mount Shiveluch. The abandoned sub base lay a eleven miles the other side of the volcano. Almost home.

  They crested a long ridge that ran vertically down the side of the mountain. Just as they crossed the pinnacle from west to east, a bright flash burned across his display.

  The Little Bird’s threat warning screamed with the tone for a missile.

  But the missile was heading away from them.

  Patty carved a turn to go back the way they’d come.

  “Where the hell did that missile come from, Quinn?”

  “Working on it.”

  Ignoring the sharp protest from his arm, he reached out and ran back the recording. It looked as if the missile had materialized in thin air with no point of origin.

  Unless…

  He ran the tape again. There was a tiny blip of heat signature, far dimmer than the missile’s, that followed a different course. Then he recalled the empty space at the far end of the hangar they’d just raided. He hadn’t given the spot any thought, but now he knew what was normally parked there, a finished Skad UCAV.

  Mick decided that he had to risk the radio.

  “Sofia. They’re test firing a drone in our vicinity. Find it.”

  “One moment. I was watching the Beatrix pick up the rest of the team offshore from a small skiff. They’re safe aboard.”

  “Get away from this thing,” he growled at Patty.

  “Glad to. Tell me where the hell it is.”

  The heat trace had been small, but he should be able to see it now that he knew what to look for.

  There was only so much heat masking that could be done on a jet engine’s exhaust. It was an issue on all stealth aircraft.

  But it wasn’t there.

  “Come on, Sofia.”

  If he couldn’t see its heat signature that either meant that it was gone or…that it was headed straight for them so that its own fuselage hid the hot exhaust flowing to the enemy’s stern.

  He flipped on the jamming packages, hoping to block any radio transmissions it might be sending back to base, or from base giving it a firing solution. Especially any images of a nasty little American helicopter flying around in its airspace.

  “Climb, Patty. Get above this thing. It sees best looking down.”

  She climbed the side of Shiveluch. They’d been near the peak and would soon be up in the ash cloud above the caldera.

  “Yes, up into the ash cloud. Maybe it will be hot enough to mask our heat signature.”

  “Attention Linda,” Sofia’s voice was urgent. “Connie Davis says to evade only. Do not use electronic blocking. Their software is designed to go aggressively autonomous on loss of signal from base.”

  “Now she tells us.”

  A heat plume of another missile shown bright, close in front of them.

  Patty flicked them aside from the missile.

  Mick hit the decoy flares to distract the missile and he fired the Yak-B Gatling onto the point of origin. He managed only brief bursts totaling just a few seconds. In that time nearly two hundred rounds of half-inch Russian bullets hammered into the drone.

  The missile followed the bright hot flares that he’d shot out to the sides, but the attack had come from too close. The missile exploded close aboard and shrapnel pounded against their frame with pings and rattles and a few hard bangs.

  For an instant, they hovered, stable above the lip of the caldera. To one side were the barren snow-covered slopes of the volcano. To the other, so close Mick was looking right down into it, the great bowl of the rocky caldera spread below them. At its center, a boiling pool of lava was mostly hidden behind great plumes of hot ash cloud. It lit the cloud in a dark, malevolent red.

  A massive flash bloomed up from where the drone crashed into the side of the mountain a few hundred feet below them.

  “Did we make it?” Patty asked softly.

  Mick began flipping through the status readouts when the shockwave hit them. He heard the boom, even over the roar of the Little Bird’s engine. The shockwave spun them out over the caldera, tumbling them through a full flip.

  A dozen readings that had been rising toward redline bloomed into full alarms.

  In cascading failures, hydraulics, oil pressure, even fuel flashed up alarms of red panic.

  “Losing lift,” Patty reported with the sudden calm that came with being a trained Night Stalker pilot.

  “Hydraulics one and two failure,” Mick flipped switches. “Backup at fifty percent and falling.”

  “Have to land.”

  Mick began searching for a landing spot.

  Not going to happen. They were down below the edge of the caldera. The steep sides of the bowl offered no flat spots. The center was glowing with an angry red.

  “Prepare to jump,” Patty had reached the same conclusion.

  A piece of training that never worked in reality. It was beyond last resort, it was suicide. But it was better than riding the helicopter down. There was now no question where it was going to end up.

  “Rudders going soft. I’ll hold it as long as I can at ten feet.”

  “Roger that.” Mick popped open his harness, unlatched the door—ignoring the slice of pain his arm sent to try and stop him—and grabbed the emergency kit from under his seat.

  He wished it was him at the controls, not Patty. That she would be the first to try and jump to safety. But you didn’t take control of an aircraft away from the pilot in command during a crisis.

  “Fifty feet,” he called out, trying to spot a good place, but there weren’t any. “Forty.”

  Mick reached over and hit the release on Patty’s harness for her. He had to close his eyes against the anguish slicing up his right arm as he reached over her to unlatch her door. Give him a car’s seatbelt and an angry woman tugging on his ears in order to kiss him any day.

  “Thirty. Twenty. See you in a sec, Gloucester.”

  At ten feet up, Mick kicked his door open and jumped into the void.

  # # #

  Patty blinked to clear the sweat that was pouring down into her face. The moment Mick had opened his door, a wave of hot, sulphurous stench washed into the cabin.

  Mick had been right; death had very stinky breath.

  She rode the helo another fifty feet downslope to make sure she was clear of Mick’s landing zone, skidding on a cushion of blazing hot air.

  The L
inda was just five feet above the harsh rocks and moving too fast, but Patty was out of options unless she wanted to go swimming in a pool of lava.

  She wrenched back on the cyclic and yanked up on the collective for all it was worth. The Linda cried. Every system alarm roared in panic, but she stalled into a hover.

  Patty shoved open the door and jumped. She landed hard, banged her helmet harder, then rolled to get down into a crevice between two boulders as the helicopter crashed around her.

  Rotor blades battered against the tops of the rocks. Metal groaned and crunched. Something caught and the tail spun by close over her head.

  When she dared peek, she saw the Linda shredding herself in the flailing death throes that marked all helicopter crashes. Bits and pieces flew in every direction.

  A million pieces no longer flying in formation.

  The fuselage flipped and bounced. The engine’s whine still roared loudly enough to hurt right through her helmet.

  Then it tumbled downslope and plunged into the lava pool right side up.

  Most of the rotor blades were broken off, but the stubs still whirled frantically above the surface—hopelessly struggling to still lift the sinking and melting fuselage clear of its doom. Soon only the stubs of the rotors remained spinning above the surface.

  A strong hand yanked her out of her crevice.

  “Mick!” She tried to hug him, but he was already dragging her upslope. She banged her shin twice before she managed to get her feet with the program. Unable to see where she was going, she shoved at her visor, but it was badly star-cracked and stuck. She pulled off the helmet and heaved it down toward the molten pool. Mick didn’t have his either.

  “What’s the big rush? We made it.”

  “Fuel and weapons.”

  Shit! Now she wished she’d kept the helmet. They raced up the steep slope. They’d gone less than a hundred yards with that much more to go when there was a loud Crump! from behind them.

  Mick shoved her down behind a boulder and huddled over her.

  Bits of burning helicopter began pattering down around them.

  More than that. Bright bits of lava rained down all around them. A basketball-sized glob landed not more than a yard from her nose. She watched it in fascination. A glowing orb of yellow-orange; she could feel its scorching heat like a hot sunburn on a cold day. It sputtered and spit as it turned dull orange, dark red, and finally began forming threads of blackness as it cooled. It had transformed back into being a rock. Molten rock.

  “Quinn. I think we should get out of here. Fast.”

  More lava rained down, a small piece skidding off her parka sleeve and leaving a cut line where it had melted away the outer material in an instant.

  He started to race up the slope.

  She cried out even as she saw his misstep. His foot had broken free a rock and sent it tumbling to the side. In moments, he was sliding back down toward her. She dug in her feet and braced for the impact.

  He slammed into her, but by leaning forward she was able to stop him. If he’d kept going, he’d have landed close beside the melting Linda.

  “Follow me,” her shout felt small in the vast and lethal caldera. “Step where I step.” She grabbed up a four-foot chunk of rotor blade that had been broken off during the crash and used it to poke at unstable looking sections of the slope ahead of her.

  She didn’t wait for his nod, but moved upslope rapidly, testing each step as Two-ton, the silent PJ, had showed her. As she went, she poked her rotor-probe into the slope ahead just as she had before with the ice axe. That had been ice and rock, this was ash and rock, but the idea carried across well enough.

  Patty glanced back and saw that Mick was moving well close behind her. Beyond him lay the last signs of the Linda. Even the last stubs of the rotor was gone, just the pattern in the lava of where the five blades had briefly laid on the surface and cooled it slightly.

  Then the lava spit again and more globs were lofted skyward.

  Patty didn’t stick around to watch where they were going to land.

  She turned and ran.

  # # #

  “We can no send any rescue,” Sofia told him over the radio. “The flares you make and the explosion of the Russian drone lit up the top of the mountain far around. Helicopters they are coming from Klyuchi Air Base. You must hide.”

  “Roger that.”

  At least Patty didn’t scoff at him for his lame radio response under these conditions. He expected that they were both just too damn glad to be alive.

  Mick looked at the snowy mountainscape below them. They were hiding beneath the lip of a boulder fifty feet below the outside of the caldera. He’d scrubbed his face with snow until Patty said he’d gotten most of the blood off.

  “Well, it’s just like Mount Hayes,” Patty remarked. “Snowy peak. Handsome companion. Squatting in the snow.”

  “Kamchatka Peninsula. Melted helicopter. No cozy tent. Gobs of molten lava raining from the sky. Russian military coming to kick our butts.”

  “Okay, not so much the same. So, where do we hide?”

  “You’re great, you know that, right?”

  “I am?” Patty made it sound like innocent surprise.

  He wanted to kiss her, but that was a road to complete distraction, so he kept it casual. “Sure. Not another person living that I’d rather crash into a Russian volcano with.”

  “How about if you include dead people?”

  “Them too.”

  “Okay then. So, where do we hide?”

  Mick had managed to hang onto the small emergency pack: water, food, basic medical, and a thermal blanket big enough for one.

  Patty still wore her survival vest, which could make roughly the same claims. No gloves except for the thin ones they typically wore while flying. No thermal pants, though they still had their parkas. He could already feel the cold nipping at him and his pulse hadn’t had time to slow down yet.

  “Got to get off the mountain.”

  “Shouldn’t we be tied together?”

  “No rope,” he’d already searched through the pack. “Closest we’ve got is some duct tape.”

  “Well, I’m not going to risk being separated from you. What do we do, tape our hands together?”

  The idea of strolling hand in hand with Patty O’Donoghue down the face of Mount Shiveluch had its points. As did the helos that were probably already warming up their engines at Klyuchi Air Base.

  “I feel the need…” he said.

  “The need for speed,” Patty finished the saying for him. “I feel it too, any bright ideas, Quinn?”

  He pulled out his thermal blanket. Using the duct tape, he started fashioning it into a long tube, closed at the narrow end and open down the long side.

  Patty groaned when she saw what he was doing, pulled out her own foil rescue blanket and lined it inside his own.

  Mick took off his coat and taped it to the inside as padding in case they hit any rocks. It wasn’t much, but it was the best he had.

  When Patty started to shed her coat, he stopped her.

  “No, your coat will shield both of us. How are you at tobogganing?”

  “Lousy. I always crash into trees. And a big hill in Gloucester is like fifty feet high.”

  “Well, this one doesn’t have any trees, so that shouldn’t be an issue.”

  “Mick, it’s ten thousand feet high.”

  “And we’re dead if we stay here.”

  Patty muttered something under her breath.

  “What was that?”

  “I said: Before, I was only going to make you go on a roller coaster.”

  “When we get back, I promise.” Then he laid out the foil toboggan and made her sit her butt down in it. He tucked the closed end of the tube over her boots and taped it in place.

  Digging around
in the pack, he found their one set of night-vision goggles. The visor on the helmets were useless without the information feed from the helicopter, so he’d shed his as dead weight and was glad to see Patty had done the same. He turned on the binoculars and almost yanked them onto Patty’s head.

  No. She said she was lousy at sledding.

  He pulled them on himself and climbed in behind her, pulled himself close so that her back was against his chest.

  “Hey!” Patty leaned forward again.

  He shifted the Bizon submachine gun from across his chest to over his shoulder, then tried again. God she felt so good leaning back against him. He slid his hands under the harness of her survival vest, but over the parka, and squeezed her breasts just because he wanted to.

  “Hey!” Patty didn’t sound upset this time.

  He pulled his legs in, wrapped them around her waist and hooked them over her thighs. He grabbed Patty’s chunk of rotor blade and pushed off. The toboggan began to slide.

  Mick locked his legs tightly around her waist so that they wouldn’t be separated no matter what happened. If they found a crevasse, well, they’d die together which was probably better than locked in a Russian prison as spies.

  As they started to pick up speed, he did his best to watch ahead and steer them, dragging the tip of the rotor blade like a ship’s rudder. His arm complained bitterly and he ignored it; there was no longer time for such things.

  Her hair fluttered up on the growing wind of their descent and brushed across his face.

  To the odor of fish, she’d now added the stench of sulfur.

  Charming.

  # # #

  Patty flew downward through the darkness. The snow spray kicked up into her face. She had to keep shaking her head to clear the snow away because no way was she taking her hands off Mick’s thighs.

  In moments they were rocketing downward and the wind was a solid roar. Terminal velocity in freefall was a hundred and twenty miles an hour. Terminal velocity tobogganing down a Russian volcano felt pretty close to that.

  Tears were being ripped from her squinted eyes. She could feel them freezing along her temples in the wind chill. Unable to see anything anyway, she closed her eyes and hung on.