Light Up the Night (4 page)

Now the four of them sat around the red table in the corner of the officers' mess of the
Peleliu.

Trisha considered feeling uncomfortable—Lieutenant Commander, Colonel, and Bill Whatever-His-Rank-Was the SEAL were all clearly way above her mere lieutenant—but she decided against it. She'd just think of it as one of her parents' dinner parties, with enough political and social power in the room to light up half of Boston. Unlike those Boston power dinners, these guys still didn't have a clue among them.

At long last, they started discussing some past missions. Everyone aboard this ship had serious security clearance, not even an embedded reporter aboard, so they knew that they could speak freely. But still they didn't, hedging references, casting sidelong glances for her perceived delicacy.

Men seemed to come in mostly one breed, jerk. Actually, she could see Michael glancing her way, but with a different expression. The glance wasn't about her presence bothering him. She'd once explained to him what always happened around women in the military, how men's brains switched over into “stupid mode” almost every time. He'd argued at first but finally had seen it happen to Trisha enough times to believe her.

His slight nod acknowledged that he was making the same observations she was and that she wasn't being overly sensitive. And, typically for a D-boy, he wasn't saying a word.

Fine! Let them have their way.

Trisha grabbed her tray with her half-finished meal, gave Michael a pleasant smile, and rolled her eyes at the two oblivious men, then went to join the Little Bird crews.

She could feel Bill the SEAL watching her back as she walked away. He better not be watching her butt or she'd hurt him big time.

Billy the SEAL. Even better. Maybe she should buy him a one-way ticket to SeaWorld. He could perform scowls, sulks, and grimaces four shows a day. The fact that she'd be willing to pay the price of admission was something she simply ignored.

***

Bill caught the woman's eye roll as she turned away. He also noticed that she was even slighter than he'd first thought when she'd been in the flight suit. If she weighed a hundred and ten soaking wet, it would be a surprise. Yet she'd survived SOAR training. He knew what the Night Stalkers put their people through. Ranger School, Green Platoon, and worse. It wasn't a BUD/S course, like all SEALs survived, but it was about the closest thing there was in the U.S. Special Operations Forces. That meant she was tough as hell and driven beyond belief, in addition to the cuteness factor.

He dragged his eyes away from her trim form and perky walk—the woman actually bounced on her toes. Light on her feet like some dancer or the very best field operators. As if. But what if she was? Again he had to actively shove her out of his thoughts. Shouldn't be too hard, as he still didn't know her name.

Bill put his attention back on Boyd's story of a messy operation they had been running against a pirate operation off Indonesia back when he was a second lieutenant, but his mind wandered back to the woman.

It didn't take much to figure out what caused her disgust. He'd served with the Lieutenant Commander before, back when Boyd was on his first tour. The man had gone through the Naval Academy at Annapolis and started out as the greenest ensign the planet had ever seen. By that time Bill, who had enlisted straight from high school, was a petty officer third class, not long before he went over to the SEALs.

The nice thing about Boyd was he'd listened and learned. Now, at thirty-two, he was a lieutenant commander and had been given charge of this overage vessel on a solo special operation, a low-stress posting for the Navy. It boded well for his future career. He was a good guy, as far as it went. Bill made a bet with himself that Boyd would never break the rank of captain and would probably never command a warship. He was cut out for supply and service vessels; he'd never make it to a destroyer or carrier except as a second- or third-ranker.

Boyd's problem was that he thought lower ranks were useful, to be treated well, but that they were indeed lower ranks. And the woman—damn, he wished he knew her name—was Army rather than Navy, which was its own crime in Boyd's eyes.

Bill would have to corner Michael later and see what he knew about her. That they'd been sitting together had said a lot in her favor, though Bill still didn't know how to interpret it.

Of course, getting information out of a D-boy like Colonel Michael Gibson would take some doing. Maybe Bill needed a different tack, like maybe just asking her.

He turned his attention back to Boyd's story, for now.

***

“So what were you doing back there?” Max Benjamin waved a piece of bacon over his shoulder. Sitting in the windowless bowels of the ship, there was no way to know in what direction Bosaso now lay, so over the shoulder was as good a direction as any. It wasn't toward the table she'd just left, which was fine with her.

“Covering your behind, Max. Covering your behind.” Trisha had only been flying with this particular group for a couple weeks and tonight had been the first action she'd seen with them, but already they were comfortable. It helped that there had been four women before her, but even during training, the Night Stalkers had been a significant improvement over her former Army unit. In SOAR only one thing really mattered—how good you were. And she was damn good.

She wanted to laugh at her own arrogance, sitting around a table with far more experienced fliers, but she knew how to assess her own skills objectively. Okay, fairly objectively. Any decent pilot had at least some dose of arrogance. But she belonged at this table. She belonged or they wouldn't let her sit here.

“That blockhead SEAL.” She tilted her head over her shoulder toward her former table. “He was standing there in the brownout dust of Bosaso yelling at me for wanting to rescue his sorry ass. So, I had to kill a couple technicals before they erased him.”

“Next time you want to be a little more careful.” The voice behind her was some kinda pissed. Army-superior-officer pissed.

Trisha spun to look at who had come up behind her, then bolted to her feet and snapped to attention.

Chief Warrant 3 Lola Maloney stood close behind her, still imposing in her flight gear. She was flanked by Sergeant Kee Stevenson and the massive Master Sergeant John Wallace. The Black Hawks were clearly back from delivering the hostages to the aircraft carrier. Kee Stevenson was Trisha's own height, but built like God had meant a woman to be, seriously curved. Trisha had to look a long way up to see the dark eyes of Chief Maloney, and Big John Wallace towered another couple inches past her.

“I killed them, sir. All three technicals.”

“No.” Lola Maloney shook her head. “You killed two. The third had you in the sights of both their .50 cal machine gun and an RPG launcher when I put a pair of rockets in them. John gave them several hundred rounds for good measure.”

Trisha could feel her knees go soft. If Chief Maloney hadn't been there, she, her copilot, and Billy the SEAL would all be very dead right now. No way to dodge an RPG from straight behind. But she'd been so sure she had done it right and gotten away clean herself.

And she hadn't even seen it happen.

Damn! Another goddamn RPG! They had it in for her.

Maloney nodded once, seeing that the message had been received. “Nice job pulling him out, by the way.”

Trisha swallowed hard past the tightness in her throat.

“Thank you, sir. He didn't appreciate it much.”

Lola smiled brightly as if she hadn't just finished whittling Trisha down to boot-tall. “Men never do. And no, you won't get used to it. It will keep pissing you off. Next time, call for help before you head into trouble. We were right there, but we might not have been.”

Then the three of them were gone, moving as a unit toward the chow line.

Trisha sat back down slowly and took a bite of her burger without really tasting it, just for something to do. She kept an eye on the DAP Hawk and transport Black Hawk crews. The three women and five men moved as a unit down the line and gathered all together at a table beyond some Navy officers. The Air Mission Commander, “Wrench” Stevenson, and a young girl joined them. They made a tight group, impenetrable. Other.

Usually, Trisha was amused by the dynamic. When there were only a few of them, Night Stalkers would gather together as a group. But as soon as the density of helicopter crews was high enough, they divided by type of craft. The Night Stalkers only flew three different craft. And the other three women of SOAR were all flying on the Sikorsky MH-60M Black Hawks, as were two of their husbands. So here she was the outsider.

But she wasn't. She was the first woman to fly in the Little Birds. The Hawks might be the hammers of the outfit, but the Little Birds weren't called the Killer Eggs for nothing. They went in close. She'd rescued Billy the SEAL from a place a Black Hawk would barely fit. And they'd never have room for her spinning-top maneuver.

“You actually killed two technicals?” Mad Max leaned in, keeping his voice down so that it wouldn't carry past the Little Birds' table.

Roland, her copilot, answered for her while she continued to chew slowly because her throat was still too tight to swallow.

“Sweet as could be. Never seen anything like it.” Then he started explaining what she'd done to the controls to pull it off while compensating for the weight of the SEAL.

She was content to focus on her hamburger and let the feeling of belonging spread over her again as she ate and the Little Bird crews laughed around her. Together they reviewed every control detail of what she'd done. She had something to teach here, something to give.

One thing every Night Stalker cared about—how to fly it better the next time.

What did SEALs care about?

Trisha was halfway through her late-afternoon run in the helo hangar of the
Peleliu.
The aft half of the ship and a stretch up the side of the main deck were an open area for parking and maintaining helicopters. The space was empty, since all of SOAR's craft fit on the ship's flight deck thirty feet above that covered the helo hangar. This saved time because rotors didn't have to be folded back for storage.

That left the hangar open for running. Briefing for tonight's mission wasn't for an hour yet, which would leave her plenty of time for a shower and breakfast. For now, she worked the roughly half-kilometer running loop down the length of the helo hangar and back.

Up top, heat waves still shimmered off the flight deck in the late-afternoon light. A person could get heatstroke just standing on the steel surface, assuming their shoes didn't melt first. Here inside the body of the ship, the covered but wide-open helo hangar wasn't that much cooler, but at least it didn't have the sun hammering on it.

The Navy guys had shown them a running track that had been worked out on a couple of the lower decks, but you kept having to hop over hatch frames. They'd also included up and down ladders to the workout, but she preferred simple distance running. Here, the path was wide open except for the equipment racks in a couple of the service bays.

Only a half-dozen others were running at the moment, scattered over the length of the ship, so she was practically alone. For company, she had the echoes that rattled around the massive deck. Three stories high, two football fields long, half of one wide, and all steel, the hangar had serious echoes. Even with just the slap of rubber-soled shoes, it was quite loud.

That's when she spotted Michael doing warm-up stretches by the big elevator that raised and lowered aircraft between the helo hangar and the flight deck. She eased up to him and continued jogging in place.

“Morning.”

“Hey, Trisha.” In moments, he fell in beside her.

She kept her pace down for the first lap or two as he warmed up, but soon they were both back at their normal pace. It was one of the ways they'd been compatible. They ran well together, neither holding the other back.

She kept running longer than she'd planned, just enjoying Michael's quiet company as they looped along the track for a quarter of a mile per lap.

“So, did Billy the SEAL get even more charming?” She put enough sarcasm in her question for Michael to get it clearly. Trisha wasn't quite sure why she was asking about the SEAL, but it was a morning conversation starter.

They ran past the flight-ready room and along the forward service bays delineated by broad stripes of worn yellow paint just barely an aircraft-width apart. Turning at the forward gunnery station and gunnery crew berths, they were heading back down the length of the ship before he answered.

“Bill's a good guy.”

Trisha almost dismissed the comment, but this was Michael. He didn't praise anyone who didn't really deserve it. And the only way to earn Michael's respect was the hard way.

“What else did he have to say?”

They passed the chopper-sized opening in the side of the hangar deck where the elevator would come down. It offered a blinding view from the otherwise dim deck. The Gulf of Aden shimmered in the brilliant light. They were steaming slowly east, so the opening was to the north. That meant no direct sunlight, but still the ocean glared and she had to squint to see that the waters far below were pretty calm. All quiet for now.

“He wanted to know your name.”

“That's it?” It was a start anyway. A start of what? She wasn't really interested in Billy the SEAL…so why was she asking about him?

“No.”

Trisha laughed. Michael was always such a fontof information.

“And…” she prompted him.

“When he asked about more, I told him that he'd better watch himself around you. Because anything you left after taking him apart, I would see to personally.”

That shut her up. They turned at the afterdeck, the second major opening in the helo hangar for the aft aircraft elevator, now filling with the orange light of the setting sun.

Michael only spoke truth; it was just a part of who he was. That meant he thought she could probably take on Billy and win. He was one of the few people who knew about her past, or at least that part of it. But there was more than that. One of the most decorated and able soldiers on the planet had just threatened a Navy SEAL on her behalf.

She wasn't going to tear up because of that, despite the tightness in her throat. She wasn't going to hug Michael, as she'd like to. Not even punch his arm as they ran side by side down the long side of the deck marked for a dozen empty maintenance bays, stripped now of aircraft, tools, and even equipment racks.

Trisha said the only thing she could think of that wouldn't leave them both totally uncomfortable.

“Thanks.”

He nodded once and they kept running in silence.

***

William Bruce climbed up the decks toward Boyd's office. He'd gotten a call that new orders were in, and could he report to the Lieutenant Commander? A bit unusual. Typically someone would just tell him when his flight to rejoin his team would be, but Boyd was an old acquaintance and must want to handle things personally.

Bill climbed past the main and 01 level decks. At the 02 level deck, the highest level below the flight deck, an opening in the stairwell let him look down over the vast helo hangar. The sunset was streaming into the stern of the ship, lighting the length of it. A half-dozen guys were running the loop. The sun also lit the color of fire off the hair of one particular redhead.

Lieutenant Patricia O'Malley absolutely glowed in the belowdecks light. He automatically assessed her gait. Smooth, long, not practiced. There was something about how a practiced runner ran, and she didn't have it. Patricia ran as if it was the most natural thing on the planet, as if she'd been born to it. That meant she'd run a lot as a kid. Not around the playground, but really run. Like it was important.

That didn't fit the mental picture he'd been building. She sat with Colonel Gibson, which few did. She was just a second lieutenant, but had at least seven years in the service to be flying for SOAR, which meant she'd started out enlisted and had only recently flipped over to being an officer. The only way to do that was to enlist and then earn it through hard work and exceptional service. Couldn't be more than mid-twenties, so she'd earned it fast. She sounded like a college girl. Add five more years of service before you could even interview for SOAR, plus a minimum of two years before you commanded a bird in the field, so late twenties.

Only at this moment did he register quite where she'd been sitting when he first saw her. She'd been sitting right-hand seat in a Little Bird for the 160th SOAR. That meant she was pilot-in-command, not ride-along copilot in training. Beyond good, she had to be exceptional to fly right seat for the Night Stalkers.

Still, he'd figured her for some comfortable middle-class girl who'd decided to go military for reasons as yet unknown. She had some of that entitled attitude and poise that he pegged as having been brought up in a far nicer world than he had been.

But then there'd been Michael's twofold warning. That Patricia was actually a skilled fighter and would stand a chance against him, though she couldn't weigh half as much. Which Bill would have dismissed as impossible coming from any other source. And the second that Michael would defend her if she couldn't.

That's when the Colonel's shield had come down. They weren't lovers, that much was obvious, but Bill took the Delta operator seriously when he threatened to take Bill apart on Patricia O'Malley's behalf, if necessary. And though he knew that only a few men on the planet could take him down in a fair fight or even an unfair one, he'd bet that Gibson was one of them.

Bill continued to look down, watching Patricia run the length of the helo hangar and back. He sure as hell couldn't look away. How in the world had she crawled under his skin? He'd watched her laughing with her teammates for the second part of dinner. Seen her and her commander discussing something, with her showing the sharp military she could present but then slide back into being her casual self. He sure hadn't minded watching what her gait did to her body as she'd walked away from them, either.

And the way she ran was something impressive to see, as well. Her gait had an odd break when she hit corners. Not the plod, twist, plod, twist, plod, finish turn of most runners on a narrow course. Instead it was a sharp lean and quick offbeat shuffle. She practically turned a right-angle rather than a curved one. A necessary skill to disappear down an alley or into an opportune doorway.

That was street. He knew how a street fighter moved, had grown up surviving on the bad side of Detroit and later Chicago. And she had it. How could a pretty little thing like Patricia O'Malley and her upper-crust accent have survived that hell?

Then he refocused.

She wasn't running alone. She ran beside Colonel Gibson. They were coming down the deck toward his lofty position at the head of the stairs, which was nearly lost in the girders that supported the flight deck.

As they drew close, Patricia said something to Gibson.

Michael Gibson looked right up at him. One quick, assessing gaze, despite Bill being back in the shadows and three stories above them.

As Gibson looked down, Patricia nodded without even looking up herself. She'd already spotted him, and he hadn't even noticed.

Just before she ran out of sight below his position, she looked ready to laugh. He rubbed a hand over his face. He really needed to get off this ship and far away from this woman, or she'd really lodge herself in his brain. He climbed the last story into the command tower.

Bill knocked on the squad room door and was admitted immediately. The Lieutenant Commander had taken over one of the flight-level ready rooms as an office. It placed him closer to the communication and navigation platforms that made up the ship's tower and was a good choice. The Lieutenant Commander's formal cabin was at the forward end of 02 deck, awkwardly out of the way with so few people aboard.

Boyd shook his hand and offered coffee, which Bill accepted. A table with a long bench down either side only took a small part of the room. He could see painted-over bolt holes that indicated a much larger table had been here before. Now some comfortable chairs and a couch had been placed in the extra space and then bolted down in preparation for bad weather.

On a short couch sat Captain Archie Stevenson, the SOAR Air Mission Commander, and Chief Warrant 3 Lola Maloney, the commander of the
Vengeance
DAP Hawk. This wasn't some casual handoff of orders.

Bill felt a sudden itch between his shoulder blades and did his best not to show it.

Introductions were barely completed when Colonel Gibson came in after knocking once. He had a towel around his neck and sweat dripping down his face.

“Sorry, wanted to finish my run before the meeting.” He took a large bottle of water and perched on a chair facing the door. His look at Bill revealed nothing beyond a pleasant good morning.

The itch between Bill's shoulder blades started feeling more like a target.

***

“Your commander has left the option up to you.” Lieutenant Commander Boyd Ramis was not being the least bit helpful.

Bill translated that one easily. Lieutenant Commander Luke Altman, Bill's commander back at SEAL Team Nine, would kick his ass if he didn't make the right choice, but, per usual, Altman wasn't giving any hint about what the right choice was. That at least felt normal. About the only thing that did at the moment.

The others were here in the Lieutenant Commander's conference room to make a full-court press for Lieutenant William Bruce to remain aboard the
Peleliu
and assist in the ongoing antipiracy operations. To make the pitch, they'd gathered Boyd Ramis, the top-ranking Navy asset, the two ranking SOAR assets, and the top Delta operator.

“Experience in-country.”

“Unique intelligence asset.”

“Provides us with significant advantage.”

Bottom line, he knew too much about Somalia, the Somali pirates, and their tactics. After six months studying them and three months embedded with them, there was probably no one in the U.S. military who knew their ways so well. Now this team wanted to leverage his knowledge and skill set, and Luke had left it up to him.

Bill tried to weigh the advantages and disadvantages as he sipped his now-cool coffee. The others were all trying to look casual, sitting back in their chairs, pretending to have some side conversation about the ship's food, while he digested the load they'd just asked him to swallow.

He didn't want to be their adviser or anyone's. He was a SEAL. If he wasn't on an op or training for one, the edge would come off. Not only physically, but also mentally, and that's where the game was really played. He knew he'd perform to his own personal best when challenged as only a fellow SEAL could challenge him. The need to never let down your teammates, no matter what, elicited a level of exceptional performance unattainable elsewhere.

But neither were these people slouches.

Archie Stevenson's reasons had been all about strategic advantage, as you'd expect from an AMC. Maloney had combined being a fine-looking woman with having a fine-functioning brain. Tactics, methods of protection and attack, patrols and guards. She'd been hard pressed not to ask him a thousand questions so that she could enhance her own flight crew's safety and nuance their attacks and defenses. If he stayed, she certainly would be hounding him.

Commander Boyd Ramis liked the idea of having an old buddy on board, even if they'd never been all that close. He also liked having a new liaison—make that a buffer—of someone besides himself to deal with the Night Stalkers. That was probably a more important reason to him.