By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers) (9 page)

Kara wondered how she hadn’t noticed him over the last two months. Well, she’d noticed him—what girl in her right mind wouldn’t? But she hadn’t
noticed
him.

And now she’d better get her Air Mission Commander act together and save him.

A distraction? Like a Hellfire missile into the air base control tower? It would certainly get their attention, but not in a good way.

She had to convince the Israelis, from her steel coffin in the cargo hold of the
Peleliu
, that the U.S. Army had not just invaded their air base. She had to convince them there was an explanation for the noises they’d heard and any possible radar sightings.

She called up the
Jane
. “What’s the nationality of the vehicle they stole?”

“And how does that matter to—” Justin cut himself off. “Sorry, ma’am.” He sounded so contrite for questioning her. His voice was far more normal when he came back on. “Looks to me like the Yankees are down one vehicle.”

That was good news. If an IDF vehicle went missing, the Israelis would probably stage a raid on the American Camp. But the other way around, maybe not.

Would the Americans ever admit to the Israelis that they’d lost one of their own Humvees inside the Ramon Airbase perimeter? Not a chance. It might start a little intramural discord—as only the Americans and Israelis were inside the fence—or a run of back-and-forth practical jokes. Hopefully the U.S. forces would only see it as a weakness to ask if the IDF had taken the Humvee from under the Americans’ noses without them noticing.

Therefore, she only had to explain away the noise and radar, and not the missing vehicle.

“Tago, give me back the ScanEagle.” Kara had given him the controls so that he could learn to fly it by following Justin’s exfiltration from Israeli soil. She could see Tago sweating it even though his craft was a thousand times smaller than the Chinook—Justin was just that good.

Kara wished she could follow him, just to watch him fly. But there was no time. Each second was one second closer to the activation of a wider perimeter. If they escalated to full air defenses before Justin reached the coast, there would be little chance of him slipping away clean.

Tago flipped control back to her.

She took the ScanEagle’s engine up to full throttle as she did a flip turn back toward the air base.

“It won’t be silent,” Tago observed.

“No.” Kara looked at him. “It won’t.” He didn’t get it yet. She glanced back toward the only other occupant of the coffin, sitting on his stool. Major Wilson didn’t get it either…loser.

She could almost see Justin on that stool instead, if she squinted just right and added four inches to his height, blond hair, and…a cowboy hat. Kara was definitely losing it.

By the time she had the Ramon Airbase back in sight, it was lit up like Shea Stadium for the last-ever New York Mets game…even if they did totally choke and lose to the Florida Marlins, also losing their shot at the playoffs. She’d watched the blue-and-orange fireworks from deep down the third base line and groaned in agony along with every other diehard Mets fan.

Well, if she didn’t want fireworks here, she was going to have to get creative.

The tiny stealth ScanEagle was designed to be silent and invisible. Of course the engineers back in Hood River, Oregon, hadn’t anticipated someone trying to purposely be seen.

She didn’t want the Israelis to get clear photos, but she wanted them to clearly see the craft. So, just short of the perimeter fence, she pulled back on the joystick and sent the ScanEagle soaring aloft.

At three thousand feet, she took it through a hammerhead stall and kicked the RPA into a nose-down power dive.

She gave the propellers full pitch and drove the one-and-a-half-horsepower engine right past redline. Didn’t matter if it seized up, not this time.

It was well past the never-exceed speed as she drove down toward the center of the air base. It was dicey to avoid ripping off the wings at this speed, but she rolled out of the dive and aimed straight for the airport control tower.

Individual gunfire was pinging off the bird. There was a hard wobble in her view, which indicated a solid hit.

At two hundred meters out, hating herself for so abusing the craft that had served her so well, she triggered the destruct charge that was rigged in all of the stealth birds.

The ScanEagle shredded before their very eyes. She’d been told that no piece bigger than a thumbnail would remain. Even the engine block would be powdered by the charges planted on it. She hoped they were right.

Kara’s screens blanked with the loss of feeds from the ScanEagle, disorienting her badly for a moment.

Tago flashed up the image from the MQ-1C Gray Eagle
Tosca
still circling high aloft. A high-res camera revealed nothing at least.

Israel could now rest comfortably that they had beaten the “drone”—which would be assumed to be Egyptian or Jordanian—that had been sent to spy on them. Any little bits and pieces would point to American manufacture. But that would be okay, as so much of the world’s military was. If it wasn’t American or stolen, it was simply left behind from one of the region’s recent wars. The tiny bits would make no sense to anyone because the Americans would be right there helping with the analysis.

In their eyes, disaster would have been once again averted by their vigilance.

Kara leaned back and rubbed wearily at her eyes. In her view, she’d just consigned to its doom a hundred-thousand-dollar RPA that had done nothing wrong.

Hands massaged her shoulder.

She wished they were Justin’s, but knew they weren’t.

Kara didn’t have the energy to turn. So she reached up, found the pressure point between Wilson’s thumb and forefinger, and drove into it with three fingers on one side and her thumb on the other. She used the leverage to double over his wrist and drive him to the floor. He hit with a very unhappy grunt.

“Three older brothers,” she apologized softly, not really caring if he heard her or not.

Then she dropped her hands back into her lap.

Not the man she wanted at all.

Justin crossed out of Israeli airspace with no one the wiser, except for a couple small fishing boats that he overflew at five meters and full speed in the dead of night. Somewhere behind would be the DAP Hawk, though he hadn’t spotted it, and far above, the Gray Eagle would be turning for the long trip back to Incirlik.

“Incoming, boss.” Carmen’s whisper warned him over the intercom just moments before a man leaned over the console between Justin and Danny. “I kept him out until you cleared the coast, but that’s all he would put up with.”

“Hey, buddy.” The man clapped Justin’s left shoulder hard enough to drive the collective partway down. They dropped from five meters above the waves to three before Justin caught it.

“Hey, yourself. Careful there. Three more meters down, catch a wheel at this speed, and none of us are going home.”

“Sorry, Texas.”

“Best state in the nation.” Why did everyone insist on calling him that? Kara didn’t—yet another reason to like her, as if he needed one.

“Been there a couple times…”

Justin mouthed the rest of guy’s line under his helmet.

“…got some great barbecue.”

“So, buddy…” The man barely resisted another crashing delivery of bonhomie. “Why don’t you just drop us off at Clay Kaserne, then you can be on your way.”

“Clay Kaserne?”

“Sure, used to be Wiesbaden Army Airfield. The one in Germany.”

“I know Clay Kaserne. It’s a twelve-hour flight from here.”

“Good, I need a nap. Haven’t slept much this week.”

Justin knew that any comment about having already been in the air for three hours making for a dangerously long day of flying had just blown out into the wind. Well, you didn’t walk right up to an unfamiliar horse; you came at it just a little sideways. And this wasn’t Justin’s first rodeo either.

“In a hurry to get there?”

“Fastest possible.”

“Well, if you were to empty the Humvee, we could—”

“Nope. No one but my men and I touch what we have in there.”

Why didn’t that sound good?

“What if I could get you there in time for lunch instead of dinner?”

The guy grunted. “It would rock. We’re already days late.” It was the first time Justin could hear the deep exhaustion in his voice.

“Let me take care of it. I’ll get you there.”

Again the clap on the shoulder, but not crash-worthy this time. The man wasn’t moving off. Clearly he was worried about what Justin might say, despite the encrypted channels.

“
Jane
to AMC Moretti.” He hoped she caught the formality.

“Roger,
Jane.
Go ahead.” Kara missed nothing and simply made it all so easy.

“Could you find the closest carrier? I need to be there before daylight. We’ll need a C-2 Greyhound and a bare deck for a cross-load of cargo.”

“Uh, roger that. Head three-four-seven. Two hundred klicks out. I’ll let them know.”

“Appreciate it, AMC.”

“Everything okay up there, Justin?” she whispered. Which was kind of sweet. Made him think of what he’d like to be whispering into
her
ear.

“Roger that. And,” he whispered, just as if they were flirting side by side rather than him already flying away from her as he turned toward his new heading, “thanks.”

* * *

Justin had The Activity and whatever secret was hidden inside the Humvee on the deck of the USS
George W. Bush
an hour before sunrise. Per request, the crew on the carrier’s deck was minimal.

Instead of landing up forward along the starboard rail, Justin circled to land close behind the waiting twin-propeller C-2 Greyhound. It was parked, tailgate lowered, pilot and loadmasters standing by. As soon as a green-vested deck officer had guided him down, blue-vested deckhands chocked his wheels and white-vested ones double-checked that everything was safe.

Only after they’d all evaporated did Raymond drop the rear gate.

Justin twisted in his seat as the unranked and still unnamed Activity agent backed out of the
Jane
’s cargo bay, down the ramp, and up onto the C-2’s ramp. The fit was so tight that Justin would have inched it along, the Greyhound being several inches narrower than the Chinook. By their frantic arm waving, the C-2’s loadmasters would have preferred that as well. The driver backed onto the Greyhound with all the confidence and speed that most people showed backing out of their garages.

Even if someone on the carrier’s deck was watching, there hadn’t been much to see. A dark night, minimal deck lighting, and an American Humvee visible for seconds at most.

The two ramps began swinging back up cutting off his view.

Ingrates. Not a word of thanks. Not a—

There was a sharp rap on the pilot’s window by his right shoulder. Outside stood the main agent from The Activity. He’d hopped up on the Chinook’s aerial refueling probe that was mounted several feet below Justin’s window so that they were eye to eye.

The guy stuck his hand in and Justin shook it. “So fuckin’ tired I forgot to say thanks. Plucking us up like that was a really sweet job you and yours did back at the air base. Make sure it gets added to the SOAR training. Not many could do that. Name’s Tom…” Then he flashed a big smile. “At least I’ll answer to that name.”

“Justin.” He returned the man’s crushing grip.

“See you, buddy.” And he was gone.

Justin checked in with the green-vested helicopter landing signal personnel who had rematerialized once more straight ahead of him. Since he hadn’t cycled down his engines, he took the finger-pointed-at-the-sky signal and headed aloft.

Even as he pulled up off the carrier’s deck, the C-2 was firing up its engines. It had already been in position at the catapult when Justin had landed behind it. Less than a minute later, the Greyhound ripped past him, waggled its wings in a greeting, and turned north toward Germany before he had a chance to respond.

He decided it would be better if his curiosity about what The Activity had found at Ramon Airbase was never answered.

Who was he kidding?

He flew with the 5D. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he’d find out exactly what was going on. Two months in, and he still wasn’t used to that.

All he wanted right now was to get home.

A small flash of reflected sunlight drew his eye upward. High enough above him to catch the first light of the unrisen sun. Kara had kept watch over him as he flew to the aircraft carrier. Now, at long last, she would be turning her Gray Eagle
Tosca
back toward Incirlik.

He liked that she had watched over him.

* * *

Kara finished shutting down control consoles. She’d shooed Santiago off to dinner and bed a couple hours earlier and flown
Tosca
back to Incirlik on her own. She enjoyed the peace and quiet. It had been a day of many impressions.

Maybe she’d skip food and simply hit the shower and the rack.

Maybe she’d skip the shower too.

The last radio transmission she’d heard from the
Calamity Jane
was Justin calling in to the
Peleliu
for permission to land, which had been an hour ago, maybe two. There’d been no rap on the coffin’s door. He’d probably been as exhausted as she was, but still it hurt.

She slipped out of the GCS coffin and secured the door. The hangar deck was a world of bright sunlight and hard shadows. It was always disorienting to come out of the coffin and reenter the real world where there was temperature, weather, wind…and people. Except under extraordinary conditions like the last four days, her world usually included only her and Tago.

For Kara the world was kept at a radio or long-range imaging distance.

She was about to duck into the shadows and head for her berth when she spotted a blaze of white at the other end of the hangar deck.

A cowboy hat shining in a shaft of sunlight. Its owner stood with his back to her, his arms crossed, watching the technicians swarming over his helicopter. The rotor blades had been folded up, six massive blades each ten meters long and a meter wide lined up over the fuselage. There were several mechanics swarming over the craft.

Kara hovered for a moment in indecision. She’d been focused on sleep…and being ticked that Justin hadn’t come to find her. Three sixteen-hour days had taken it out of her…yet there he was. Whether waiting for her or hovering over his craft, he was there.

She meant to turn away but she began walking forward, as if her body was moving of its own volition, until she came to a stop close beside Justin.

What to say to him? He’d flown like…nothing she’d ever seen. With the ScanEagle gone, she’d used her Gray Eagle to ensure his security, done nothing but watch Justin fly as he wove through the carved mountains of the Central Negev like he was threading a needle with a hundred feet of helicopter. It was…breathtaking. Sort of like standing so close beside him that she could see the slow rise and fall of his chest with his breathing.

“You mess up the poor
Calamity Jane?
Bad cowboy.”

“It seems that I scraped up the ramp a bit by dragging it down a runway somewhere. They also wanted to service the wheels, see the effects of high speed and the unexpected impact load.”

Kara looked up at Justin watching the mechanics work on his helicopter. She noticed that Lola’s crew chief Connie Davis was right in the midst of them.

“I thought she worked on Black Hawks.”

“That and just about every other thing you can imagine. Heard tell if it’s a rotorcraft, she knows more than the folks who designed them.”

Why were they… “Why are we standing here talking about helicopters?”

“You mean since I’ve been standing here for seventy-three minutes wanting nothing more than to drag you off and investigate being inappropriate? Can’t rightly say, ma’am.”

She thought about the GCS coffin close behind them, or any of the hundred other spaces a three-quarters-empty ship the size of the
Peleliu
offered as options. Any of those would have sufficed with any other man. But Justin Roberts wasn’t any other man; she wanted him in her actual bed. It was shockingly conventional of her, but it was no less true.

She turned and led the way. He followed without further comment. Off the hangar deck and through the winding corridors and ship’s ladders of the
Peleliu
, there were no strained silences, no awkward moments. They both knew what they wanted, and to hell with the rules, they were going to get it.

As they went along the corridors they chatted about the details of the most recent flight. What could they have done differently to save the ScanEagle? Could the timing have been better? Could…?

Kara hesitated outside the door. She’d never had sex with a fellow officer. Hell, she’d only had sex with another soldier of any rank or branch of the service a few times. It wasn’t worth the risk, yet suddenly here she was.

Perhaps reading her emotions, Justin leaned in and spoke softly though this stretch of the corridor was empty at the moment. “You just say so, Kara, and I’ll head back down the hallway. You got my word on it.”

She studied those summer-sky eyes of his.

He would too. Had used her name so that she’d know for a fact that he was completely serious about that.

She breathed in and found that earth, sun, and man were thick on the air with him standing so close beside her in the bowels of the old steel ship.

It was what finally tipped her across the threshold. She wanted to lose herself in the wilderness that was Justin Roberts. Once inside her berth, she flicked on a small reading light and held the door wide to show that he was meant to follow.

He glanced once to either side, then looked her right in the eye as he stepped in. Not her chest, not even her face, but as if he could see her most clearly that way.

* * *

Justin couldn’t look away from so much trust. It wasn’t the heat, the need, or the desire; those were all mixed in there as well. Rather, she simply trusted him to be decent and honorable. Trusted he would be worth the risk.

Well then, he would live up to that standard.

He slipped his hands to either side of her face and let his fingers slide into the thick cascade of her dark hair. As thick as a horse’s mane and as soft as the tip of a horse’s muzzle.

Justin wanted to…

He dug his fingers into her hair and fluffed it outward. Reached back in and stirred it around until it was in total and absolute disarray.

“What the—” She batted at his hands, but he didn’t stop until not a single hair was still in place.

“I promised to be inappropriate. The proper thing to do was to kiss you until you melted into a little pile of Kara Moretti. So…”

“So instead you mussed up my hair.”

He shrugged easily.

She opened her mouth to protest, and that’s when he kissed her. He might be all proper and decent, at least most of the time on the other side of the door. But once a woman entered his bedroom, or even more so when he was invited into hers, all bets were off.

He muffled her squawk of surprise with a deep kiss. Keeping one hand dug into her hair, he pulled her in enough to practically devour her—he certainly wanted to. She tasted spicy, alive. She—

Fisted his gut!

Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to surprise.

He pulled back her head just far enough to recover his lower lip from her quick nip—not by the hair, but rather by sliding his other hand under her T-shirt and forcing her back with a hand on her breast.

She reached to—

But he’d been in enough tussles with a wild horse to protect his privates.

He pivoted and dropped to the bunk with her lying back across his knees. He kept her head supported, but the rest of her was open to him, gloriously open. A magnificent terrain of hill and valley; breast, belly, and hip.

He leaned down to pin her breast with his lips and cupped her hard through her pants with his free hand.

She hissed and he felt the strength of her response buck through her as she arched against his palm. So he ignored the fist that bounced off his shoulder.