Light Up the Night (7 page)

Sergeant Kee Stevenson barked out a simple laugh, then continued dressing.

It was Trisha's first break into the camaraderie of the women of SOAR. She'd flown with them, been accepted by them, but was clearly an outsider.

She zipped up the flight suit and tapped the various pouches to ensure that all of the armored plates were in the right place. Then she laced on her boots over the cuffs.

Trisha hadn't wanted to be identified as a “woman of SOAR.” She didn't like the image or the stamp of it. She wasn't a WOS. She was Lieutenant Trisha O'Malley of the Night Stalkers. Flying her own bird gave her some of that distinction. The DAP Hawk had Lola Maloney for pilot, Kee Stevenson for gunner, and Connie Davis for mechanic. She'd been half afraid that some stupid Army public relations guru would insist she fly copilot in the DAP so there could be an all-female crew.

But they hadn't gone there. This was the first time since she'd climbed aboard her own bird that one of the women had done more than say hello. The line between Black Hawk and Little Bird ran deep. As did the line of those who'd flown combat with Emily Beale and those who hadn't.

In addition to final training, Trisha had flown plenty with Beale back in the 101st, but she wasn't going to trade on that card any more than she had on her parents'. She was going to make this a go on her own standing, by her own skills.

So she chose a neutral topic as they slung on their heavy SARVSO survival vests covered in pouches containing first aid, additional ammo, and survival gear if they were downed, including an emergency radio and beacon, and a dozen other essentials.

“So what's the kid reading?”

Kee laughed as they left the locker room forty pounds heavier than they'd entered it and climbed back to the flight deck.

“Damned if I know. She blew through Harry Potter last year. Didn't like
The
Wizard
of
Oz
because it was too unrealistic. Go figure. I think she just started on McCaffrey's Dragonrider books, as if that makes more sense than Oz. I can't keep up anymore, now that she reads on her own. Kinda miss reading to her.”

Dragons made perfect sense to Trisha.

Kee turned aside at the DAP Hawk. Trisha noticed Billy the SEAL standing in the shadows getting briefed by Connie, the other DAP Hawk crew chief, and did her best to ignore him. Which wasn't as easy as it should have been. Her body definitely leaned that way, even if she didn't.

Of course, Dilya would read those books. It made perfect sense. Her mother flew every night in a beast that spit fire on command.

Trisha headed to her own chopper, ready to do the same.

Trisha buckled herself in and checked the lie of her rifle across her chest. When she reached for the engine starter, her copilot blocked her hand.

“Where's your head, O'Malley?” So Roland was still giving her shit for spacing half of the briefing. Just because she deserved it, she wasn't going to eat it.

“In the sky, Chief Emerson. In the sky. What else did I miss?”

He released a long-suffering sigh, though they'd only been together for a week. They shared a laugh. They'd hit it off right out of the chute when she found out he was from Philadelphia and was a huge baseball fan. Being Phillies and Boston Red Sox fans had made for an instant bond, all Phillies and BoSox fans instinctively hated the same team.

“It's a good thing you're not a Yankees man,” she informed him.

“Because you'd have to hate me on principle?”

“Bingo.”

“We also have cheese steak at our home games.”

“Another point in your favor. Though you were also named the number one ballpark for vegetarian options. What's up with that crap?”

“Damned if I know, O'Malley. Damned if I know.”

“So give. Why am I sitting in my chopper and we're not in the sky? Mama is itchy. She wants to kick some more bad ass.”

Roland grinned at her. They'd also hit it off even before their first flight because their flying attitudes fit together like oil and oil. The fact that she liked him in addition to respecting him was a great bonus.

“Drones, run from the
Peleliu
's communications platform.” Roland cocked a thumb toward the tower superstructure behind them. “They'll be doing a sea sweep. Lieutenant Bruce has identified the pirates' primary points of land departure, and they'll be focusing there. Then we sweep in on anything the drones identify for cleanup. We stay hot-ready here for the first thirty minutes, then we'll shift down coast to the carrier and be hot-ready from there as the drones move farther south.”

“Lieutenant Bruce.” The name was a foul taste on her tongue even if his kiss wasn't. She fussed with the seating of the electrical system connectors to the helmet that still rested in her lap.

“He said that because of the damage we did, it will take Bosaso and the surrounding ports a bit to recover. So we're going to circle the Horn and head south along the coast where the action is heavier. Ramis already has the
Peleliu
underway.”

So, Billy the SEAL speaks and their entire task force jumps and moves to a whole new position? That just wasn't…

Why did the man irritate her so much? He was a SEAL, which meant he was amazingly well trained. A lieutenant, which meant he'd been at it a while. A big white guy who'd embedded himself in Somalia, meaning he clearly had more bravery than common sense, a trait they shared.

It wasn't the kiss. It definitely wasn't the kiss that pissed her off. She could have stopped that easily if she'd wanted to, but she hadn't wanted to. Her brain still sizzled with the memory of it. All of that raw male power and her control over it made for a pretty heady mix. Even now she had to admit she was looking forward to trying it again, maybe without the knife this time.

So why was the man so maddening?

Other than being too damn sure of himself, she still didn't have an answer twenty-five minutes later when they got the command to shift to the carrier that was already operating further down the gulf. The carrier's primary mission was servicing jets in and out of Iraqi airspace. Piracy was just a sideline for them, but it was the
Peleliu
's mandate.

***

Bill pulled on his helmet, which blocked most of the DAP Hawk's noise, thankfully cutting the high whine of the starter as it began cranking the turbines. Once that cut out and it was just the two main engines, he worked his jaw to pop his ears. The thick smell of burned Jet A fuel filled the cabin, replacing the sea-salt air with the sharp bite of burned kerosene and the slight tang of hydraulic oil that always hung around a chopper. Once the jet engines were up to temperature, most of that kero-stench would go away. And then they'd be aloft, which would clear the air through the two wide-open cargo bay doors on either side of the Hawk.

They'd rigged a station with two seats against the rear cargo net, aft of the big ammo cans that fed the outboard guns. In some ways it was immensely spacious, especially compared to the Little Bird where there was barely room to wiggle your toes. If empty, the DAP's cargo bay was almost a dozen feet long, eight wide, and over four feet high. But it was anything but empty. It was amazing they had the room for the two seats for himself and Michael Gibson in a space where normally a dozen troops could fit.

The more Sergeant Connie Davis told him about the bird, the more impressed he became with both her and the chopper, though he did his best not to show it in either case. For one thing, her husband was even bigger than he was.

Her passion for the craft was immense, and she seemed to know every bolt, screw, and cable personally and would have been glad to introduce him to each one by name if he'd let her.

The DAP Hawk had overlapping weapons and detection systems, some of which he'd never even heard of. And he got the impression that there was more she wasn't telling him. She, too, had a reputation that reached beyond SOAR. He'd heard the rumors about a mechanic who had personally improved overall aircraft reliability by three percent. He'd just never expected to meet him or, as it turned out, her. Maloney had informed him that the team of Connie Davis and Big John Wallace had done that together.

What in God's name had he landed in the middle of here?

The DAP's primary weapon systems were on the outboard hardpoints. An M134 minigun that fired eighty rounds a second, a 30 mm chain gun that threw rounds bigger than his thumb at ten rounds a second, and a pair of nineteen-rocket pods of the Hydra 70 FFAR, Folding-Fin Aerial Rockets. The secondary weapons systems were in the control of the two crew chiefs stationed close behind the pilot and copilot positions. Kee Stevenson and Connie Davis each wielded a steerable M134 minigun of their own. He really needed to remember not to mess with these women.

Sergeant Davis was so soft-spoken that he thought he'd heard wrong when she identified her fellow sergeant as the two-time winner of the President's Hundred, the top sharpshooter in the United States, military or civilian. He'd heard that the nation's current top shooter was a woman. That he found it hard to believe didn't make it any less true. But since she was a crew chief on a DAP Hawk, maybe it wasn't so odd. And that would probably explain the locked rifle case mounted beside the starboard gunnery position.

He'd lost track of the protection and detection systems after the first five or six. Maybe O'Malley hadn't been exaggerating when she said these choppers were wholly different creatures from what he was used to. Could her tiny Little Bird also detect the direction of fire of a single bullet and project return-fire coordinates onto her visor? How much information could she process at once?

He was good at multitasking. Could be giving status to a remote commander, calling in supporting-fire coordinates from a ship while lasing a site for a bomber overhead, and still keep an eye out for a combatant sneaking up on their position. Was it possible that Patricia O'Malley was at that level? Or even some whole other level?

And what the hell was he doing thinking about her during an operation?

He looked back to the three screens they'd set up in front of his seat. Two were overlapped video and infrared feeds, one screen for each of the two drones. The third was a satellite positioning map showing the drones' relative routes across the Gulf of Aden and around the Horn into the Arabian Sea.

“Damn things make my eyes hurt.” Michael Gibson was in a seat close beside him and leaning over the screens as well. He wondered if Michael was there to assist him, make him feel better, or assess him. Probably all of the above.

“You get used to it.” Bill had done several hundred hours of training with the drones over the last few years. Michael would mostly have others do that for him. As a colonel, even one in the field, his job was to think and function at whole-team levels, not basic operations. It was rare enough for a lieutenant like himself, other than a SEAL or a Delta operator, to be doing this. He was often odd man out at the manufacturer training sessions, several ranks above the other students.

Drone control and interpretation was the role of a specialist, focused on that single task, from a deep bunker back in Utah or Nevada. But no SEAL or Delta team was likely to let someone else, no matter their clearance, have a chance of impeding an ongoing operation. They learned for themselves. SEALs did their best to be heavily cross-trained, no room for a specialist with a focus area as narrow as just drone control during a black ops mission.

These drones were flown by teams on the
Peleliu
, but Connie informed him that she'd insisted that the data was a straight feed to Bill's screens on the DAP Hawk. His kind of woman. Not that he really had a kind that he knew of. He knew what wasn't his kind. A feisty, pint-sized, pain-in-the-ass chief war—

“Welcome to Air Lola,” Chief Warrant Maloney chimed in on the intercom. “Tonight is predicted to be hot but with low turbulence, so you get to keep your breakfast. The extended forecast is for stretches of immense boredom, possibly interrupted by intense but hopefully brief squalls of piracy.”

“You should have been an airline steward, Chief,” Bill teased back.

“My daddy wanted me to be a stripper.”

Bill prepared to laugh and make a joke about how he bet she'd be good at it, but something in her tone, though it was light, stopped him. Was this, too, some sort of a test? No one else was laughing. A quick glance at Michael showed that he had accepted the statement as dead serious. He reconsidered his comment and instead said, “All of male-kind's loss is SOAR's gain.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant.”

She was a looker and definitely his type, if she wasn't married. Another man's woman had never been one of his weaknesses, though it didn't stop him from looking. Lola Maloney was almost tall enough to face him eye to eye. And again the image of a woman who barely came to his shoulder came to mind. Of the shape of her lips and the sharpness of her teeth as they'd scraped over his chin.

He'd always scoffed at the big guys who picked up small, delicate girlfriends as if they were flowers to be kept in a vase. Though that sure as hell wasn't Patricia.

He forced his attention back to the screens as they flew toward the aircraft carrier. The ships were about a hundred and twenty nautical miles apart. Cruising easily, they'd be there in just under an hour and the Little Birds could refuel at the carrier.

He glanced out the cargo bay door. The running lights of O'Malley's Little Bird blinked in the dark, just fifty yards off the starboard side.

Michael noticed the direction of his distraction.

Bill didn't need the faint illumination of the screens to read the Delta operator's expression. He returned his attention to the displays and watched the endless ocean rolling by beneath the drones just as it rolled by between his chopper and that of Lieutenant Patricia O'Malley.