By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers) (6 page)

He looked over at Kara to see if she’d changed somehow. No and a little bit yes. Still beautiful and with a dancer’s upright posture—ballet as a kid that had never worn off, maybe—that could just kill a man. She walked like a confident soldier and stood like one. Her expression didn’t look any different as she baited the newcomer over what flavor of soda he wanted from the small fridge beneath the workbench.

But with this high-tech world wrapped tight around her, Kara looked as if she belonged. He supposed it was like how he felt when he settled into the pilot’s seat of the
Jane
; everything just kind of fit.

This high-tech dungeon looked good on her, damned good.

“Don’t!” She aimed a finger at him and he knew exactly what she meant, though clearly the other two didn’t.

Justin couldn’t help himself, didn’t even bother to try.

He just kept smiling at her.

Kara forced herself to look away from Justin. She could see by Major Wilson’s face that he’d been inside RPA coffins before. A sweeping glance, and no more. It told her something about his security clearance at least.

His eyes hesitated only twice: once on the poster of an MQ-1C Gray Eagle soaring among the clouds, and once on her Fordham University Rams banner. She made a guess based on his hesitation.

“The Lions suck, by the way.”

Wilson’s frown was as instantaneous as only a true Columbia University Lions football fan would have.

“And we’re going to kick your butts this year too.”

He actually growled, but it was hard to argue with Fordham’s winning streak.
Reality sucks, dude!
But she kept the last to herself, figuring that she’d pushed him hard enough.

She could also see Justin looking like a kid on Christmas morning, finding a new colt under the tree or something. She still wasn’t sure what instinct had made her force Wilson’s hand to let her bring Justin along.

It had been a hard-learned lesson to trust that instinct. But once she’d learned to listen to it, she’d graduated top of her ROTC class and eventually ended up sitting in this box in the Mediterranean.

Good little Instinct!
She gave it a mental pat on the head and then shoved it aside. She was busy now.

“So, talk.” Kara gave it the full Brooklyn
tawk
, spun around her pilot’s chair, and dropped into it. At her nod, Justin took the copilot’s seat.

The Major dragged over a stool from the workbench; Michael remained standing.

“I can’t tell you who I work for and, no, pestering me isn’t going to—”

“Well then, I guess we’re done here.” Kara made to stand up. “C’mon, Justin.”

Michael watched her blandly, but she ignored him.

“Goddamn it!” Wilson cursed. “Will you sit still for a goddamn second, Moretti?”

She held out her hands as if intending no offense and dropped back into her seat. Kara had no intention of leaving, not when there was clearly something intense going on here.

“I’m—”

“—with The Activity,” Kara cut him off. She had no idea where that shot in the dark came from, but now that she’d said it, it made perfect sense.

Wilson’s blink of surprise was the only confirmation she needed.

“The Activity” was just one of the many nicknames for the former U.S. Army Intelligence Support Activity, which had been supposedly disbanded in 1989 and gone through a dozen incarnations since as it was vastly increased in size.

“Centra Spike, Gray Fox, Cemetery Wind…I’m guessing that you won’t be telling me your outfit’s current name.”

“How the fuck?” Wilson exploded.

Justin was smiling, so Kara nodded to him.

“Clue one.” Justin slouched down farther in the copilot’s armchair beside her as if he’d been here a hundred times before. He crossed his booted feet just as if he were wearing cowboy boots out on the range.

She considered being ticked, but then decided that she’d rather have Justin sitting so close in the copilot’s seat than Major Wilson.
Bring it on, Cowboy.

“You won’t identify your unit, not even in this location.”

“Two,” Kara joined in, “arrogant beyond belief.”

“Three—” Justin continued without hesitation.

She was really starting to appreciate more about him than just the way he looked and the way he kissed.

“—you didn’t even blink entering this container, which is one of the most secure areas aboard the
Peleliu
.”

“Four, rude too.”

His growing scowl was awesome.

“Five”—Justin made it sound as if the two of them had been tag-teaming idiots forever instead of this being their first run together—“you went directly for her, the 5D’s RPA pilot. That points to something very clandestine.”

“Six—” Kara hadn’t thought of that one, but it was a good point.

Justin was proving that he had a brain despite being from the wrong side of the Hudson River—by about twenty-five hundred kilometers.

“—Colonel Michael Gibson,” Kara continued, “knows exactly who you are, and I know that The Activity’s primary mandate is actionable intelligence for Tier 1 assets. Which includes: Delta, DEVGRU, and the Air Force’s 24th STS. Now, while the Colonel here might be the number one Tier 1 asset warrior there is, I’m not any of those. Yet you came to me. So can we cut through your Upper West Side ego and get on with it?”

Major Willard Wilson turned to look a question at Michael, but it was clear that he hadn’t said anything beyond greeting good old Willy.

“And seven.” Kara wanted to crow with triumph as the last piece clicked into place. “You’re a support guy. Admin. Logistics and liaison for a field team. Probably washed out and couldn’t make the grade.”

“It spares the action teams from having to deal with nut jobs like you.” But his tone said her last guess had hit too close to home.

They shared a grin for the first time.

“Could get to like you, Major Willard.”
Fat chance in hell
, Kara told herself.

“You won’t find me banking on that any time soon, Captain Moretti.”

“Hey”—she turned to Justin—“he’s not as dumb as he looks.”

* * *

Justin didn’t try answering; he was still trying to catch his breath.

Lord above. The Activity?

Meeting one of them made it feel normal that there were a half-dozen stealth helicopters parked on the deck close above his head. Or that he was sitting inside Kara Moretti’s top secret domain.

These guys made the CIA’s Special Activities Division look like they were using billboards to advertise their most clandestine operations. The Activity were the ultimate spooks of the military intelligence community. The CIA and NSA specialized in regional and national intel. The Activity pinpointed individual cell phones and could tell you the layout of bin Laden’s compound
before
you went busting in the front door.

Saddam Hussein had been captured by U.S. Rangers. Some people knew that Delta had led the Rangers there and then faded out of sight. Only rumor said that The Activity came up with the final two possible hideouts in the first place. But it was the kind of rumor that made perfect sense.

They were an intelligence outfit and their action arms were the very best in the world: Delta and DEVGRU, still popularly known by the name they hadn’t borne in over twenty years, SEAL Team Six.

“We…”

Justin could see that Kara was gearing up to go at Wilson again before he even had a chance to start, which wasn’t going to achieve anything. You could only humiliate a man so much before it became personal.

He didn’t want to kick her; it would be far too obvious. His hand had come to rest naturally on the joystick controller built into the chair arm. A tap showed that it was linked to the one on Kara’s chair. He wiggled it hard enough to get her attention.

She glanced over at him, huffed out a sigh, and then nodded ever so slightly, keeping her mouth shut as Wilson continued, apparently unaware of the barely averted broadside.

“…have assets on the ground in the Negev Desert. We have lost communications with them. You are the closest asset available with the resources to locate and extract them.”

“The Negev?”

Major Wilson nodded.

“The Activity,” Justin said slowly and carefully, “has lost track of ground reconnaissance personnel in the Israeli desert.” He didn’t know why he had to repeat it to make it real. Because it was too unreal?

Kara rolled her eyes at him. “If The Activity is spying on Israel, it means that we’re checking out whether to do some shit against our main ally in the region. They gotta be into something seriously bad.”

Justin reached the same conclusion, but it just didn’t strike him as…mannerly. No matter how many Taliban, al-Qaeda, and IS bullies he’d helped take down, he could never get over what they did to each other and the populace around them. He’d helped rescue a dozen hostages out of the Somali desert, some of whom had been there for years. Years of their lives lost to some fanatics who Delta Force had made sure were no longer walking on God’s green earth.

“So we’re going to unleash Delta against our allies now. Between you, me, and the steel walls, what in the world did they do to deserve that?”

“That,” Wilson said solemnly, “is what we’ll find out after you get our assets’ butts back out of there.”

“Three nights.” Kara rubbed at her temples and slumped lower in her armchair pilot’s seat. “Three straight nights we’ve been running at the desert without a peep.”

Her Gray Eagle had swept ever-increasing circles over the vast wilderness of the Negev. Overlaps, grids, high-altitude flights hunting for any sign of a U.S. military signal.

The first night she’d only monitored on the radio frequency that Wilson had provided her.

Justin had tried to help, but he only knew choppers. Might as well have sat her down in the cockpit of
Calamity Jane
and said, “Go!” Even if he’d been a jet jockey, it wouldn’t have helped much. The RPA was too different an animal.

When she’d looked to Wilson, he simply shook his head.

Michael had raised his hands as if fending her off. “I use your data. I’m no pilot.”

She hadn’t asked. The next night, when they all gathered for the next flight, she’d had Sergeant Santiago Marquez flying beside her. Wilson hadn’t said a word.

Okay, a bit less of a jerk than she’d first thought. A bit.

She kept Justin close, giving him the traffic control sensors to watch. She didn’t want any nasty surprise of an Israeli Defense Force F-16 or AH-64 Apache weapons helicopter crawling up her behind unexpectedly.

With the extra help, she expanded to a full spectrum of military radio frequencies on the second night.

On night three, she’d opened to the civilian frequencies with no better luck.

Kara looked at Wilson. “You think these guys are still alive.”

“Yes.”

“And you think this because…”

“Because they wouldn’t go down without a squawk of some sort to let us know.”

“Even if—”

“Even if they were under live fire,” Wilson insisted. “They’re hunkered down hard. They should be squirting a signal of some sort on the hour, every hour of darkness.”

“But they’re not.”

He dropped back onto his stool. “No, they’re not.”

Kara’s scream of frustration was loud enough to hurt even her own ears inside the GCS coffin.

* * *

Justin winced; too late to cover his ears. There had to be some way to help Kara find these guys. He’d felt clumsy at the controls. The cameras on the Gray Eagle were its main weapon and were far more advanced that anything the
Calamity Jane
boasted. He hadn’t even recognized some of the settings. After two more nights watching Santiago manipulate the cameras, Justin had a bit more of a clue and was even more impressed.

So, time to try using his brain as an alternative resource.

“These guys are the best recon folks out there, right?”

“Yes.” Wilson considered for a few moments, then sighed and continued. “The Activity fields two primary types. Knob-turners, the very best signal intercept guys in the business and human intelligence, on-the-ground guys. They collect the information needed by the action team snipers: Delta and DEVGRU. The Activity doesn’t recruit the best shooters, but rather the best scouts and spotters.

“Put three of these guys in a room and you wouldn’t believe the shit they’ve done. You put a half dozen of them together and it’s freaky what they come up with. They develop their own training regimens, because we can’t match what these guys already have. We pass on what prior teams have learned and then let them run with it.”

Justin tried to think about that. Such training was designed to shift skills from the conscious to the autonomic subconscious.

When his mother was training a new roper or barrel racer, she made them do the most basic exercises hundreds, even thousands of times. Teens would come in with their hands blistered despite their gloves because they’d spent so many hours casting a lariat at a fence post.

These guys would be like that. Survival wasn’t something they had to think about; it would become autonomic, just like making sure a final status message got out.

“This reminds me of a story,” Justin started out.

Kara rolled her eyes. “God, you are so Texan.”

“Thankee, ma’am.”

It earned him the short laugh he’d been hoping for. Between launching her Gray Eagle from Incirlik in time to arrive over Israel at full dark and then flying back after dawn, his and Kara’s days in the GCS coffin had been long and their personal time together had been nonexistent.

Justin kicked back in his chair. “I was drinking with this old Navy hand one night, and we got to talking about coming down in the sea.” About the worst nightmare for a helicopter pilot. “Turned out he was a submariner, and he started telling me about the emergency alert buoy on those boats.”

He did his best to shift his voice so it would sound as if he were the narrator from
Moby Dick
gone old and crotchety.

“We only kick that thar boo-yay loose if we knows we’re dead.”

Kara laughed, so he must have succeeded. Man, oh man, did that lady ever have a wonderful laugh. Her heart was right in it every time.

He made his voice even squeakier. “See our job in the missile boats is to go out there and get lost for six months at a time. No one is supposed to know where we at. So, if we go down, they never find us without that thar boo-yay. You can bet for dang sure we’re gonna hit that if it’s the last thing we ever do. Otherwise ain’t nobody gonna ever fin’ us’n.”

“Sounds about right,” Wilson agreed.

Michael simply nodded.

Tago looked as if he’d fallen asleep in his chair, but Justin now knew there was no way the sergeant would lose vigilance until he handed
Tosca
off to the ground crew at Incirlik. He was like a gamer on drugs, completely at one with the RPA for the long flight back to the American air base in Turkey. They couldn’t exactly move the Gray Eagle team to their normal base inside Israel. Ironically, they would normally be stationed at Ramon Airbase, the one they now were patrolling—without permission.

“So, why would a submarine stay silent if it was in trouble, other than—” Justin didn’t have a chance to finish.

Kara, who’d been slumped deep in her pilot’s seat, jerked upright. “Other than if they were hunkered down so close under the bad guys’ noses, they wouldn’t dare let out a peep.”

She leaned forward, and for a second, he thought she was going to hug him right in front of everybody. Instead she slapped his knee harder than he’d whack a reluctant horse.

“Well done, Cowboy!”

He wished he could read her better to know if there had been a hug there. It was one of the strangest things he’d ever done—kiss a woman and then not have even a single second of privacy for three straight days together.

There’d been a few moments, sort of, where Michael and Willard had wandered off to get some food and Tago had rushed off to the head. But they still hadn’t been alone because Kara Moretti had been so connected to the Gray Eagle that she was barely in the room.

She was one focused gal when there was a mission on. And he was finding that was something he really appreciated in a fellow officer, even if the woman was frustrating the hell out of his libido.

“So…” He really needed a mental subject change. “If they are tucked down so tight—”

“—then there’s no way they’d risk a high-power signal sent to reach my Gray Eagle.”

“Why—”

“—doesn’t matter. That they don’t dare transmit a strong signal is all we need to know.”

“We need—”

“—my little ScanEagle. We take it in fast and low, below the Israeli radar sweep. We nestle in so close to Ramon Airbase that we could hear the guys whisper.”

“But—” Justin wondered if it was even worthwhile trying to finish a sentence when she was in this mode.

“But”—she smiled at him to prove that she knew exactly what she was doing to him—“we’re too far away for my little bird. Michael, you have to get Ramis to move the
Peleliu
. We have twelve hours. I need to be five hundred kilometers closer. They can do that in a high-speed run.”

Michael was shaking his head no.

“What the… Why not?”

Michael raised his eyebrow at Justin who grinned back at him.

“Because, Kara”—Justin turned to face her, wondering how much of a clue she’d need—“that’s—”

“—RPA thinking, not Air Mission Commander thinking.” She thumped him on the arm hard enough to really sting.

Apparently “not much of a clue” was the answer. Damn but she was impressive.

“You’re absolutely right. I’m outta here. Gotta find Ramis. Tago, don’t crash while I’m gone or we’ll both be in a heap of hurt.”

And just that fast, the men were left alone in the cargo container.

“That woman is something else.” Willard shook his head. “And, brother, she likes you even more than she hates me—and that’s saying something.”

Justin massaged his arm and wondered if that was true.

Michael’s thoughtful nod made it hard to doubt.

Tago’s flinch and the resultant tumbling of the RPA’s view of the world confirmed it. Perhaps not in a good way there; his big brother protectiveness of Kara was pretty transparent.

What did that make him?

The RPA lost over three thousand feet before Tago regained control.

Justin knew exactly how the poor little Gray Eagle felt, like someone had just hit his cyclic control—hard.