Light Up the Night (26 page)

“I warned you about Michael.” Trisha was laughing at him, but it was hard to complain. He'd been well and thoroughly duped.

“You did warn me, but I didn't see it coming, not a single bit. In answer: I've liked it a lot. He's an amazing man to work with. And the skills the other operators have are truly exceptional, even by SEAL standards.”

“Okay, question two.”

Clearly she was enjoying herself. He hoped the questions got easier from here.

“Team, and being a part of one, is an essential part of who you are. How would you feel about leaving SEAL Team Nine for Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta?”

So much for easier.

***

The twenty questions, which had numbered more like thirty-five, had helped Trisha with the monotony of the long, overwater flight from the
Mistral
toward Bosaso. Now the reports were coming in fast enough that they had to stop the game.

Trisha had carefully not returned to that initial question that she'd set aside as a premise. About that one question, she was stuck with every “What if?” scenario on the planet. “What if he went away after this assignment?” had been at the top of her list for longer than she'd care to admit. “What if he did stay, but she then did her predictable blow-up-the-relationship thing?” No way that would be pretty if they were then trapped in the same unit.

And the third question for her ranked as a real kicker she'd rather not think about but couldn't help herself. “What if he did stay and she didn't destroy the relationship? What then?”

That question had plagued her while some calm, rational part of her mind was working up the questions to ask Billy. It had followed her ashore as they dropped back to nap-of-earth flight levels and left the Arabian Sea to cut inland just south of Ashira, then climbed through the narrow valleys of the Karkaar mountains.

She'd expected a riot of inner protest. A lie-on-the-deck-and-scream-and-wail kind of feeling. Instead she found a silence she didn't recognize or understand.

It was only as they shot over the Gulf of Aden so that they could circle back to approach Bosaso from the sea that she noticed it wasn't silence. It was quiet. It was like all of her emotions simply went quiet and calm.

All except one. And that one spoke plenty loud. She started to smile… She really should tell Billy.

“Three minutes to contact,” Billy the SEAL-soon-to-be-Delta announced on the common frequency.

Okay, maybe this wasn't the best moment.

So she said the words very quietly to herself and was surprised at how easy it was to say.

“Love you, Billy Bruce.”

Bill had debated the allocation of teams. He hated to put Trisha back in harm's way, but it made the most sense. He and Trisha knew the pirate's compound in westernmost Bosaso far better than anyone else.

“
Merchant
and
Max
, your teams go on either end of the
Gracie.
Vengeance
, you're their hammer on high.
Vicious
, you're into the compound with the
May
. Remember, folks, maximum three minutes contact, then I want us gone with or without the ship. We can always scuttle her from the air.”

How many missions had gone like this? All the planning, preparation, transport, and infiltration, and it all came down to just a few minutes, or occasionally a few seconds, of contact. It had always struck him as odd, like they were the tiny lethal tip of an immensely long lance.

“Okay, Billy.” Trisha interrupted his thoughts. Her voice sounded command tough. “You don't do a damn thing with the controls unless I'm hit. I've got it covered. You worry about two things, spotting for me and running the operation.
May
's HUMS, Health and Usage Management System, will tell me if anything goes wrong. I'll take care of the weapons as well. We clear?”

“Clear.” He wanted to salute, but there wasn't room in the tiny cabin. If any pilot could handle that huge a volume of information and still fly, it was Patricia O'Malley.

AMC Stevenson made a final report at two minutes out. “Two technicals still remain outside the compound, both on the east end closer to Bosaso city. Perhaps ten shooters inside. Several bodies in the guard shack and four more sitting in what Lieutenant Bruce identified as the remains of the main building. We are designating these as possible prisoners. They haven't moved in two hours. I have only three warm bodies showing on the ship. They also haven't moved since initial overflight two hours ago. Best of luck, teams.”

“Sixty seconds,” Billy said mostly to himself over the intercom. They'd be in radio silence now, only mission-critical calls until they were clear of the coast.

Trisha decided that even if this wasn't the best time, she really didn't give a damn. She cranked up the throttle but eased down slightly on the collective so that she'd have the extra power when she needed it. It wouldn't be a question of “if.”

“It's oh-three-hundred,” she said over the
May
's intercom.

“Uh-huh,” Billy acknowledged as he leaned forward, straining to see the ship that would be coming into sight in just moments.

“Thirty days ago, at precisely this time, I was on my way to rescue your ass.”

“Hell of a first meeting. Thirty seconds.”

“I love you, Lieutenant William Bruce.”

“Uh, sure.” Five-second lag. “Wait!” Three more. “What?” He spun to face her so fast that she was glad he'd taken his hands off the controls.

“Fifteen seconds, Lieutenant Bruce.”

“What? You do? Shit!”

***

They blew by the
Gracie
at close to two hundred miles per hour and crossed the shoreline with the
Vicious
in close formation.

Crap! Damn the woman. No time to think!

He needed to mark this moment somehow.

“Great!” was all he managed, then he spotted the technicals. “Hit 'em!”

Coming in at ground level, low enough to look straight into the startled eyes of the men lounging against their big fifty-caliber machine guns, Trisha unleashed a pair of rockets. Men were diving aside as the two trucks blew sky high in unison.

Trisha peeled off, up, and left before quite flying into the fireball.

Vicious
, who only had her miniguns for offense, was already over the main building. Two streams of fire raked upward from the guardhouse, and only two heat signatures were placed in that building. The
Vicious
pounded it down.

Trisha fired up the
May
's miniguns and did a fast spin, raking the parapet of the surrounding wall, and launched another rocket into a garage. The same spinning-top move she'd used in the courtyard a lifetime ago.

And this woman loved him? That was… For lack of anything better, he settled for one of her phrases, “so cool.”

Per the plan,
Vicious
dove down into the main building. A half-dozen Rangers spilled out of the bird and sprinted to the four bodies lined up against the wall.

“Billy, two o'clock low.”

Before she'd even finished, he pulled up the rifle hanging across his chest and dropped the armed Somali sprinting across the yard toward the grounded chopper. The two of them continued to concentrate on the shooters that the ADAS was reporting both inside and outside the walls. Her minis did the heavy lifting, and he sniped out the left-side doorway.

When he could, Bill kept an eye on the ground team, but it was like disconnected blinks. Rangers wielding bolt cutters. Prisoners halfway back to the chopper. First aboard. Only one last Ranger on the ground, kneeling, facing outward, his rifle at his shoulder. The
Vicious
aloft, her miniguns blazing. The
May
falling back and away.

Then they had no more targets. They were aloft. The compound dropped behind them, then beach, and abruptly water. Time came back under his control.

The
Gracie
had her bow turned toward the sea. She'd been bow to the west when they flew by before, hadn't she?

On his visor Bill could see four men kneeling on the stern deck facing aft, hands on their heads. Two Rangers stood guard, identifiable by their exposed IR reflector shoulder tabs and their rifles aimed at the pirates. A third moved down the line pulling out zip ties and binding the pirate's wrists.

An abrupt movement at the bow drew his attention. A Delta operator swinging a long knife at the anchor line. It parted and the ship headed out to sea under the
Vengeance
's watchful eye.

They disappeared back into the dark, five helicopters and one ship. Almost no one had seen them. As if they hadn't been there. They were Night Stalkers, and he found it was very easy to imagine flying with them.

“So.” He settled his hands lightly on the controls and felt Trisha's constant, tiny adjustments transmitted through them. “So, you love me, huh?”

She turned to him, but he had to imagine the grin in the darkness.

“I do.”

“Last day you get to wear these. You sure you're okay with that?” Patricia tugged on the lapel of Bill's Navy dress white uniform as she arrived beside him.

He looked down at her and merely nodded. He couldn't muster more because he'd never seen such an amazing sight as Patricia O'Malley standing at the altar in a wedding dress.

The setting didn't hurt. It was spring at the Old Round Church in Richmond, Vermont. Outside, the air was kissed with the first blooms, though the scent of snow still lingered in the higher reaches of the Green Mountains.

Military uniforms glittered in the pews on both the bride's and the groom's side of the church. Many of those who remembered his mother fondly filled the seating in the wooden balcony that swept three quarters of the way around the church's second story.

Colonel Gibson stood as his best man in his dress blues, the same color Bill would be wearing after today. He had finished Delta school, as much as it ever ended, just this week and his official commission awaited his return from their honeymoon.

He'd been introduced to Mark Henderson and Emily Beale. He'd never felt threatened by a woman before. Well, other than Trisha.

They'd held the rehearsal dinner yesterday as an afternoon picnic out at the lower pool of the Huntington Gorge waterfalls. Beale had come up to him and taken his hand in hers as if to shake it. Then she'd clamped down in a way that proved she was still strong from flying Firehawk helicopters over forest fires, as well as not forgetting any of her Army training. The stunning blond was tall, and he didn't have to glance down far to look into her eyes, which were almost as bright blue as Trisha's.

“If you don't treat her right, I will ram a fire-retardant hose up your backside and then deliver a few thousand gallons under pressure. I may be out of the service and merely the maid of honor, but she's the fourth I've stood beside, and I watch out for my girls. Are we clear?” Her smile was absolutely charming, and he didn't doubt for a second she meant it.

“Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. Uh, yes.”

Then her grip eased but didn't let go. Now they maintained a friendly handclasp as she turned to look at the rocks around them and the crews picnicking around the pool at the base of Huntington Gorge.

“Aren't they amazing?”

They were. The quiet mechanic Connie with her enormous husband, Big John Wallace. The exotic sniper Kee, sitting with AMC Stevenson and Dilya, who was their flower girl. The teen was reading earnestly to Beale's own one-year-old daughter, one of the most beautiful children Bill had ever seen.

Lola Maloney, the long, lean, and strong commander, lounging back against Tim, her weight lifter, gunner husband. Even Dusty James was there with his lovely wife, Amy, who was still in SOAR training. They were an amazing team. Dennis and Max would be at the wedding along with members of his SEAL team and his new Delta friends.

“I'm proud to be flying with them.” Then he turned back to face Beale. “I wish you still were. Trisha tells such stories about you.”

“She's sweet.”

“She is. But they all share serving under your command. I'm leaving my team to join this one. And I've learned that the main thing that made this a team was you. You and your husband.”

She'd squeezed his hand once but didn't speak. She was blinking hard when she moved away to sit by Dilya as the teen read out loud to the infant about the wonders of dragons.

They were amazing women, all of them. Especially Patricia O'Malley.

As she'd walked up the Round Church's aisle beside her father, her figure sleek in a form-fitting dress and bare shoulders, her long hair all up in one of those things women did for weddings, he'd never seen a more beautiful sight.

Unless it had been that morning as they knelt together in the dawn light before his mother's grave. Flowers had bloomed there. Daisy and buttercup. Indian blanket and even the black-eyed Susans that matched Trisha's wedding bouquet.

They had knelt on the dew-filled grass together and remembered those who had fallen and those who would continue to fly.

There she hadn't been some perfect woman in an incredible dress. She hadn't been his soon-to-be-wife or his fellow soldier.

For that brief time, they had simply been Billy and Trisha, two people who knew they would always be in love.

Pure Heat

The Firehawks Series

by M.L. Buchman

These daredevil smokejumpers fight more than fires

The elite fire experts of Mount Hood A
viation fly into places even the CIA can't penetrate.

She lives to fight fires

Carly Thomas could read burn patterns before she knew the alphabet. A third-generation forest fire specialist who lost both her father and her fiancé to the flames, she's learned to live life like she fights fires: with emotions shut down.

But he's lit an inferno she can't quench

Former smokejumper Steve “Merks” Mercer can no longer fight fires up close and personal, but he can still use his intimate knowledge of wildland burns as a spotter and drone specialist. Assigned to copilot a Firehawk with Carly, they take to the skies to battle the worst wildfire in decades and discover a terrorist threat hidden deep in the Oregon wilderness−but it's the heat between them that really sizzles.

“A wonderful love story…seamlessly woven in among technical details. Poignant and touching.” —
RT Book Reviews
Top Pick, 4.5 Stars

For more M.L. Buchman, visit:

www.sourcebooks.com