Christmas at Peleliu Cove

by M. L. Buchman

  They reached the top and the wind slapped at them. The point of the cape no longer protected them from the westerly winds. On the west side, the waves boomed and crashed against the ancient stone. Looking out to sea, she still couldn’t quite believe that she’d flown across that.

  Sly’s “Well done” when she’d finally woken up this afternoon and her own aching body had told her quite how much she’d achieved. In eight years she’d never done anything quite like it. Keeping an entire MEU armed and aloft all by herself during her flight deck days would have been less exhausting. Seeing the ocean from the safety of land with her crew and her cargo intact, that was when she knew she’d really done something.

  “What’s for me to say?” Clint shrugged as he led the way out toward the point. “You want to end the best relationship either of us has ever had. I can’t say it makes any sense, so I don’t see much point arguing.”

  “The best relationship I ever had?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “How would you know what the best—” then she could hear herself and stopped. It didn’t help that he was right.

  “Thought so,” was his smug response.

  “We’re still done.”

  “You’re repeating yourself, Petty Officer Maier.”

  She was. Dammit!

  They were halfway out to the point before he spoke again. “Are you so sure of what I want?”

  “Happy-ever-after dreams are written all over you, Lieutenant Barstowe. I know the type and you are so it.”

  “Well,” he didn’t deny it as he might have just a few weeks before. “If you’re so sure what I want, then what do you want?”

  # # #

  Clint had moved on a dozen paces through the buffeting wind atop Cape Tripiti when he realized that Nika was no longer beside him. He turned and saw her rooted in place with her strong eyebrows indicating a furrow of concentration hidden beneath the brim of the Santa hat.

  He backtracked to her, but she didn’t seem to notice. He might as well be made of transparent glass for all of the attention she was paying him, though he stood right in front of her.

  Happy-ever-after dreams were written all over him, huh? He didn’t think they were, but if he considered the woman in front of him, maybe he understood why she thought that. Something about being right a hundred percent.

  That intense concentration didn’t break.

  He reached out to brush a finger along her cheek.

  “Don’t do that!” Nika slapped his hand aside.

  For the first time, he felt a small sliver of fear slide up his spine. If ever there was a woman stubborn enough to decide against their being together and sticking to it, it was this one.

  “What is it that you dream of, Nika?”

  When she finally looked up at him, he couldn’t read the expression in her deep brown eyes. Not anger. Not loss. But neither were they blank. They were just…neutral.

  “What?”

  “I never had dreams of my own, Clint. I never did. I think…I think that I’m living someone else’s dream.” Then she stepped aside and continued past him as if he wasn’t even there.

  Now it was his turn to stare blankly at the rock before him. Never had dreams? That didn’t even make any sense.

  “Going to miss the sunset. Get a move on, Ranger,” her call was almost lost upon the wind.

  He turned and followed her out to the very end of the headland where the flat-top surface tapered, then crumbled until the last shredded edge tumbled down into the sea. Atop the last flat spot a concrete compass-rose, several feet across, had been set into the stone. It had large brass letters at the cardinal points. On the compass-rose stood a giant wooden chair weathered and beaten but still solid. Its slat back was ten feet tall and the broad seat itself was as high as Nika’s shoulders.

  Without really thinking about it, he wrapped his hands about her waist and lifted her onto the seat.

  “Putting me on a pedestal, Ranger?” She swung her feet back and forth like a little kid.

  He didn’t bother to answer.

  “From up here, I can see all of Europe.”

  While that was untrue—for much of the horizon was blocked by the gray bulk of Gavdos Island—the seat did face north. And they were perched at the southernmost point of all of Europe. Farther south than Malta, Sicily, or even Gibraltar.

  He was looking up at the woman that perhaps he did have on a pedestal, but he also knew it was a posting she deserved. Behind her lay nothing but the Libyan Sea as the stretch of the Med from Greece to those distant and hostile shores was named.

  “Whose dreams are you living then, if not your own?”

  # # #

  Nika looked down at Clint. He stood before her high seat, no less strong, but a great deal less certain than when they’d started their walk. She was sorry for that, but there were some parts of Keila’s dream she wanted no part of. Family had never worked well for her, except as something to escape.

  But if anyone deserved an honest answer, Lieutenant Clint Barstowe was that man. So she looked up once again at her view of “all of Europe.” A desolate island, arid with only a few tiny settlements on the far side of its inhospitable interior. Crete lay as little more than a dark smudge on the horizon.

  But it didn’t feel right to speak to him from up here either. Nika slid back to the ground, but unable to face him, she turned aside and spoke to the sea. She told him of Keila’s death, essentially by rape. The loss of her near-sister combined with her own lack of ambition which had formed Nika’s subsequent choice to step into her best friend’s shoes and live her life rather than the mess that was her own.

  At some point Clint wrapped his arms around her from behind and while she appreciated their warmth against the chill wind, they did nothing to abate the chill inside as she finished the story.

  “I didn’t join the Navy for me; I joined it for her. I do my best to fulfill the potential that she offered the world and I didn’t. A potential that maybe I could have saved, and didn’t. We Jews are great at acts of atonement, especially for the dead. I never really understood that before, but this is mine. That’s all there is to me, Clint. A hollow shell that is all facade and happens to be named Nika Maier.”

  He didn’t speak and Nika could feel the cold wind blowing through her as if she didn’t even exist.

  “You’re the only one who knows that I’m not really me.”

  His answer was a low chuckle that stung like a lightning bolt. Then he spoke softly, “You have no clue how amazing a woman you are, Nika. Only makes me love you all the more.”

  She shot an elbow back, hard.

  Clint, wholly unprepared for the blow, let go his hold on her and dropped to the hard stone. He managed only a faint wheeze before he tipped over from knees to curl up on the ground.

  Frozen as hard as the rock and feeling as weathered as the old chair, Nika stood and stared at what she had done. She should kneel to him. Offer succor, apologize…something. But nothing came to her.

  Her voice was little louder than the wind when she spoke over him.

  “There is no me to love.”

  She turned and left him. Her footsteps leaving no sound, no impression on the hard stone. She had pronounced the death sentence on her own heart while standing over her best friend’s grave. In the eight years since, she had found no true sign of her heart, or of Nika Maier.

  But for the first time, she wondered if she’d take her heart back if she could.

  # # #

  Clint managed to sit back up within thirty seconds, but it was too late, Nika was gone into the gloom of the evening. The sun had disappeared into the distant storm clouds and the light was failing. He caught occasional glimpses of her. Moving away across the headland. Descending the slope to the beach. Finally he lost track of her as she walked back toward the LCAC.

 
He rubbed at his solar plexus. No question that was going to hurt for a while, but his body had certainly suffered plenty worse in training and in battle. Never from a lover before, but Nika was a first in so many ways.

  Clint sat there as the sky darkened: cobalt blue, midnight blue, black. The first planets came out and finally the first stars. He was cold, but a Ranger learned to ignore such inconveniences. He needed some time to think.

  Nika Maier.

  Her he needed a lot of time to think about.

  She might have reshaped herself because of her terrible loss, but she had reshaped herself. There was no denying the amazing woman she’d become.

  Yet she did.

  “Woman needs to take a good long look in the mirror,” he addressed the darkness.

  But she wouldn’t see herself there.

  “Well, Clint, you got you some choices, my man.”

  He could wash his hands of her and good riddance. That was attractive in several ways. He’d sworn off marriage and heavy-duty relationships, after all. He knew he had because he’d been there when he’d done it.

  Problem with knowing the why behind Nika’s choice was that it only made her all the more attractive. There was an integrity inside her that went deeper than any Ranger he’d ever served with.

  Option two: finding some way back to being just lovers. He’d lay another two year’s pay that would end up with him right where he was at the moment—knocked on his butt and wondering what the hell had just happened.

  So, that was a no-win scenario. A Ranger knew that someday there just might be a battle where you had to die to win and they trained for that as well as they could. But this was a battle that could only be won if he came out the other side of it alive.

  Or…

  That was the problem. He didn’t know if he wanted that particular “or.”

  Option three: he could find a tactic that would lead them ahead until they were walking along a shared path. No question about the kind of path that would have to be with Nika Maier. With her it would have to be a path that led to: until death do us part. She was a serious kind of woman after all.

  It was nuts, but his instincts also told him it was the only choice.

  It would be a hell of a struggle, but he was used to that too.

  He considered the battle plan. For a starter, he appeared to have Michael’s and Sly’s consent to proceed. No two men knew him better. But they weren’t really assets in this operation, should he choose to undertake it; more like interested observers.

  Other assets and liabilities? Nika associated with very few people outside the hovercraft crew and he’d wager that all of them would be solidly on her side, no matter what that was. Perhaps he could enlist the help of a few of the female Night Stalkers. On the other hand, that was a scary wildcard—no man controlled those amazing women. Married them, yes. Controlled them, not so much.

  There were some missions that had difficult strategies with complex timings carefully coordinated across all units involved in the operation. It didn’t take much for a battle to grow sufficiently to require a dedicated comm operator, which then meant there had to be a backup plus additional protection. In such dynamic scenarios, it required detailed planning and an exceptional team to achieve the desired goal.

  Then Clint pictured the rifle practice they’d held two weeks ago aboard the Peleliu.

  There was another approach. The lone gunman. Perhaps with a spotter, but perhaps not.

  Such a strategy provided maximum flexibility and all it really required was an unearthly amount of patience. A sniper might take days to slither into position. They’d stop drinking water so that they didn’t have to urinate and risk leaving any odor. Go without food, because to slip out an energy bar was to make an unnecessary motion that could be spotted.

  Flexibility and patience. He had both of those down.

  Clint stood and let the wind gusts slap the limestone dust off his clothes.

  The stars shone brilliantly above, bright enough that he didn’t need to pull a flashlight out of his thigh pocket to see his way. It lay clear before him.

  “Last question. Do you really want this or do you just want the victory of achieving the goal?” It was a question a Ranger had to ask constantly. They were a very goal-driven unit by design and had to temper that with at least some common sense.

  In the quest to win Nika Maier, there wasn’t a whole lot of common sense involved. For once, she’d made her feelings pretty damn clear. And his main opponent in the whole effort would be Nika herself.

  But there was nothing in his past like her quick laugh, her slow smile, or the amazing way she felt in his arms.

  He didn’t just want all that; he needed it.

  “Well, Mama. You made your choices,” he looked up and hoped that she was looking at the same stars, or would be when darkness reached Little Rock. “Looks like mine are down a different path.”

  He turned for the hovercraft.

  “Hoo-ah,” he told the night as he set out on his newest mission.

  Three steps later he caught his boot heel on a shadowed ripple in the rock and tumbled into a sticker bush before he could catch himself.

  He used the flashlight to complete the rest of Phase One of his plan…getting back to the hovercraft in one piece.

  Chapter 12

  They’d had to refuel from the air again, despite the dangers.

  Nika felt bad about that. The night before she’d run them far enough up the lone goat path that the helo couldn’t land beside them due to the slope. They’d tried restarting the engines, so that she could move down to the level beach. That effort had failed before the engines were even up to operating temperature—they ran the fuel tanks dry. Minutes. They’d made it out of the storm with just minutes to spare.

  So, Captain Roberts’ big twin-rotor Chinook once again hovered overhead and dumped fuel down a dangling hose. At least this time they weren’t battling waves and the storm. The way the wind curled around the cape was giving the pilot some troubles, but he was a Night Stalker, so they managed.

  Clint had been decent through the whole thing. He’d greeted her civilly enough on his return for nothing to seem out of place. He could have made an ugly scene, but he was too decent a guy to do that.

  She certainly hoped that the two nasty scratches on his cheek weren’t somehow her fault.

  He did a better job of behaving normally than she managed. Every time they brushed by one another, on the deck or in the narrow confines of the hovercraft’s interior spaces, she could feel her cheeks flaring with heat.

  It might be okay if it had only been embarrassment at the way she’d hit him and left him.

  As she waited for Dave to once again bring the engines up to temperature, she still wasn’t sure what had come over her. A man had said he loved her and her reflex response was to level him.

  There was also a second heat that occurred every time they passed. But, she admonished her body harshly, that one would be fading with time.

  “At operating temperature, Craftmaster Maier,” Dave informed her over the intercom.

  “Clear for operations,” Tom stated. “Peleliu now standing two miles out in the lee of the island.” Downwind of the island, the wave action would be milder for several miles, making reboarding the LCAC into the Well Deck a more manageable task.

  “I’m looking at a pine tree,” Sly reported from the Loadmaster’s portside spotter position.

  “Real helpful, boss.”

  “Always glad to be.” He’d also insisted that since she’d been the one to fly them off the Peleliu, it was up to her to make sure she returned his craft in one piece to where it belonged.

  “Ready.”

  Nika barely resisted turning to look at Clint. He sat, as he had through much of the previous night, close behind Dave in the Troop Commander’s seat. His was…no
t for her to think about any longer.

  “Take us up, Tom.”

  As soon as he did, gravity had them slipping backwards down the slope. She made small corrections, twisting the stern side to side so as not to create a new damage path in addition to the one she’d made coming in. A winter storm from the east should erase the worst of it. By January there’d be no evidence that the US military had occupied a tiny corner of Greece in a “hostile takeover.”

  In moments, she was sliding backwards over the tiny salt sea—the saline lagoon she barely recalled flying over last night. With a twist of the controls, she managed to spin the hovercraft one-eighty around though the pool was only twice the LCAC’s length.

  When she drove out over the beach and plunged back into the surf, it felt as if her world was coming back to normal. A slash of spray had Dave reaching for the windshield wipers, Tom was calling out a heading, Sly reported all secure from the Loadmaster’s station. The hovercraft felt far less like an adventure than it had yesterday. Not that it was any less fun to fly, but she’d crossed some threshold fighting that storm and now she could anticipate the motion rather than just react. She had time to think about the wind currents swirling around the cape and ease back on the wheel just before they caught and tried to spin her craft.

  The Peleliu lay less than five minutes away at a comfortable pace. And with a thousand gallons of fuel aboard, there was no edge of panic like last night.

  The ship had turned bow into the wind, so she swung wide and was able to slide up the steel beach of the rear loading ramp while in the ship’s wind shadow as well as the island’s.

  Up the length of the Well Deck, the engines once again an outrageously loud but familiar reverberating roar on the final approach inside the ship.

  She gave the command to settle the LCAC and secure from operations.

  She was home.

  Nika pulled off her helmet. She had to find something civil to say to Clint for all he’d done and put up with over the last thirty hours, but he was no longer in his seat. Only the spare headset, dangling on its hook, still swung back and forth to indicate he’d ever been there.