Light Up the Night (9 page)

Bill could feel that anger. Every time he thought of his father and the Battle of Mogadishu, he felt it burn deeper. With each mile they had progressed south along the coast, he had become angrier. Serving up north in Puntland, he hadn't felt it so deeply. But with each mile toward the Mog, he could feel the force of it like a strike to… He almost smiled. To his solar plexus.

He stared at the image projected on his visor of the pirate leader bracing to steady his aim. He still had to be guessing, but he wasn't far off. An explosion would be very close to aboard even if it didn't hit them.

If it were up to Bill in this moment, he'd dump the chopper's remaining thirty-six rockets and blow the whole boat to hell.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Lola Maloney cursed over the intercom. “Kee.”

“Ready.”

Bill glanced through his visor rather than at the projection inside it. Sergeant Kee Stevenson had pulled her weapon out of the steel case bolted to the bulkhead. She'd left her seat and attached a three-meter monkey-line tether from the D-ring on the front of her vest to the ceiling of the chopper so that she could move around the cabin without being thrown out.

He whistled to himself as she dropped into kneeling posture in the cargo bay door. A Heckler and Koch MSG90A1 with a night scope and flash suppressor. He'd fired one when he did some training with the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, one of the sweetest guns he'd ever shot. And Kee Stevenson was carrying one around in the helicopter.

Bill glanced at Michael beside him, but he was wholly focused on Kee. One heartbeat. Two.

Then a small blink around the flash suppressor and a sharp crack.

Even with all his training, he'd have a hard time settling for a shot that fast.

He looked back at the projection on the inside of his visor, the feed from the infrared camera system, just in time to see the pirate boss' head snap back. Bill couldn't see the shot actually hit him in the forehead, but there was no question that's exactly what happened.

As the pirate tumbled backward, his reflexes pulled the trigger. The RPG shot up at a steep angle before arcing well over the DAP Hawk and exploding somewhere behind and above them.

What kind of a person went for a head shot from a vibrating platform like a helicopter? He'd have shot center of mass, and if he'd hit the heart, he'd have been thrilled.

Kee remained in her crouch for several long seconds, then the rest of the pirate crew began tossing their weapons over the side of the boat with a show of great reluctance.

That created a problem Bill had never solved. Without the weapons, there was no “proof of intent to commit piracy” that any international court would uphold. But if the pirates were dragged back to shore, the boss man who had financed the operation, including paying for the weapons, might be just pissed enough to execute the whole crew. Yet what choice did they now have?

Kee Stevenson finally stood up into a low hunch, which was all the DAP Hawk cabin allowed, and moseyed back to her position, clearing her weapon. Michael relaxed as if someone had plugged him back in.

“What?”

Michael shook his head.

“What?”

“I've watched her shoot dozens of times. I still don't know how she does it.”

Bill blinked at that. He was amazed by the shot. But the man sitting beside him was the senior Delta Force operator on the planet, and even he couldn't unravel the technique.

“It's pure instinct. That's the only possible explanation.”

Michael looked over at him. “Is that what you do?”

Now it was Bill's turn to feel uncertain. He had trained thousands of hours to turn learned skills into instinct.

“No, because I don't have a gift.” He'd seen it in his SEAL team. There'd be one specialist who could run, jump, shoot, and swim with great practiced skill, but when it came to languages, he picked them up in weeks rather than months or years. Rawlings made explosives do the strangest and most interesting things. Need a guy who could get comm gear to still work, even after it had been shot a couple times? Axel was the dude you wanted. Bill could barely align his mother's antenna for satellite television, but Axel could nail the angle through a hole in the trees that every manual said wouldn't work.

O'Malley ran that way, as if she were just a natural. And flew that way. What else did she do so “naturally”?

“No,” he answered Michael. “I'm really good at CQB.” Close Quarters Battle, often becoming hand-to-hand combat. It required many skills including a very fast reaction time and no identifiable patterns or timing to your attack and defense techniques. “But I have to train like any other fool.”

Michael just watched him closely, not saying anything else.

And Bill wasn't about to explain further. He'd grown up on the streets of Detroit from age eight, fighting for food, somewhere to sleep, for everything so that he and his mother could survive. He knew where he'd learned to fight, learned to stay alive. But he sure wasn't going to be talking about it to anyone real soon. He hadn't even mentioned much of it during the psych evals they put him through when he went into the SEALs.

He turned his attention back to the drone screens, which had turned up nothing else as the
Peleliu
controllers continued winging them down the coast.

The DAP Hawk held station, releasing the Little Birds to head for the carrier. A SOC-R, Special Operations Craft-Riverine, sent out by the aircraft carrier and loaded with heavily armed Marines, pulled up alongside the pirates' boat. The craft was intended for near-shore and river work. But with two miniguns, three machine guns, and a pair of grenade launchers, added to an ability to travel at forty-five miles per hour through almost all weather or wave conditions, the SOC-Rs were pressed into service in many areas.

In minutes, the Marines had tossed a hose into the pirates' craft, emptied the boat of water, frisked all of the prisoners, and confiscated an array of handguns and knives. Then they tied the pirates bowline to their craft and began towing it back toward the shore.

They determined that the big engine was leaking oil and therefore an environmental hazard as an excuse for confiscating it. The Marines left the pirates with the broken smaller engine to fix if they could for their fishing. Tonight it would be a good thing that they'd brought along a pair of oars, because the Navy dumped them off a half mile from the beach and wished them well. The Navy wasn't looking for engagement with any shore-based forces.

The DAP Hawk turned for the carrier about twenty minutes behind the others.

Trisha sat on the deck of the aircraft carrier by her bird. They'd only be here another hour or two, then they'd shuttle back to the
Peleliu.
Most of the other guys had gone into the air-conditioned ready room through the deck-level entry to the carrier's tower.

She sat alone by her bird at the very stern of the flight deck and idly slid her finger in and out of the bullet hole in her flight suit. It was along her ribs, third one up from the bottom. Once she was alone, she'd fished out the bullet, which had flattened against her armor. She'd be black and blue for a week, but it didn't hurt, much, when she breathed so the rib wasn't cracked.

All those years of running on the street, circulating around the edges of the Boston gangs, she'd always managed to not be there when it “went bad.” Not chicken, it had just worked out that way. She'd been in plenty of fistfights, even a couple knife fights, but nothing that led to gunfire.

More than once, she'd come back from a week gone to discover she'd missed the death and funeral of someone she'd been laughing and telling lies with just the week before.

When she flew, she'd certainly been shot
at
a lot. But never hit. Even the RPG that had taken down her chopper in the mountains past Mosul, Iraq, hadn't actually hit her chopper. It had exploded right in front of her engine's air intake. The shrapnel had killed the engine, cut off one of her rotor blades, and shaken them hard. The explosion also had been far louder than Fenway Park full of baseball fans filling the bleachers and protesting a bad call against the BoSox.

She'd managed a Mayday before the radios shorted out and then auto-rotated into a narrow valley by the Great Zab River in Kurdistani Iraq. She'd rigged her chopper with a remote detonator, then she and her copilot had hunkered down, hiding as well as they could.

Eight hours later, while they were debating the best route to start walking out that night, a squad dressed in poor clothes and AK-47s began investigating the site. She blew up the Little Bird. That, in turn, attracted the attention of the choppers that were out looking for them. Turned into an easy ride back to base rather than trying to walk out of Iraq's northern mountains.

She hadn't mentioned that her hearing had suffered for a week, despite her helmet, from the explosion of that RPG so close to the chopper.

Now she had three holes in her flight suit, and she couldn't stop slipping her finger in the one along her ribs. The hip and thigh shots had bounced off and the bullets were gone, actually leaving little more than small tears in the outer fabric.

But the rib one would have killed her if she hadn't been wearing nonstandard-issue armor under the survival vest.

That close. She rubbed her finger against the flexible material, as if she could find some evidence of where the bullet had pancaked. It must have come in exactly square-on to not skim to the side. She was still able to breathe and was able to join Roland in a full inspection of their bird the moment they had it down—and do it without too much pain to her side. That told her it was a 5.56 mm round, because anything bigger would have broken her ribs even if it hadn't punched through the armor.

In her left hand, she held the bullet. Its head had mushroomed to a couple times its normal width. A hollow-point round. If it had found a seam in the armor, she'd be dead right now.

“Hey, O'Malley.”

She clamped her fist shut around the bullet.

“What have you got there?” Billy the SEAL dropped down to sit beside her on the deck.

“Nothing.” Trisha slipped it into a pocket on her vest and leaned back against the side of the rocket pod sticking out from the right-hand side of her chopper. Maybe she'd make a necklace out of it. Or just throw it over the side. Or something. Later.

She turned her face toward the stern, watching the phosphorescent wake churned up by the aircraft carrier powering through the night. It felt good to be leaving this behind. She was alive. Damned lucky to be so, but alive.

“Something's up.”

Trisha turned back to face Billy. “You don't know me.”

“No,” he admitted slowly. “But something's up.”

She studied his face by the red lights washing the nighttime deck. The red allowed pilots and deck crew to retain most of their night vision, as long as they looked away when a jet was taking off. The intense white of a jet engine's exhaust could blot out your night vision for eight to ten minutes.

At the moment, SOAR's helicopters parked along the port edge of the carrier's deck were the only flight operations. The deck was quiet. The night crews were hanging out wherever they usually did while waiting for an action call. Probably spreading more gray paint on every surface they could find.

By the red light, Billy's face didn't look demonic like some people's did. His skin was dark enough, tanned by living and fighting outdoors, that it looked warm and friendly.

She saw his eyes widen and suddenly he leaned right up to her as if studying her face.

“You were shot!”

“No!” She shoved back against his chest, but he didn't even waver.

It was in that moment that she realized just how strong he was. She hadn't pushed softly.

“No.” She said it again, but it didn't sound very convincing, even to her.

He began inspecting her with probing hands like he was a surgeon and she was on a stretcher instead of sitting quietly minding her own damn business.

Trisha slapped his hands away, just as he probed her right rib cage. Her hiss of pain stopped him cold.

“How bad? Are you bleeding?”

“Will you get your damn hands off me?”

He didn't. “How bad, Patricia?”

Had his voice been one bit angrier or if he'd used her last name or her rank, she'd have brushed him off.

But he hadn't. He'd used the perfect tone to calm her.

“No one calls me Patricia except my parents. No blood. No broken bones.”

He probed a little more gently for a moment.

“Dragon Skin. Good armor.”

“It's the most protection I can wear and still fly.”

“Good. I'm glad you do.”

“No one calls me Patricia.” Yet it hadn't sounded awful when he said it. “Where did you get that idea?”

“Then what do they call you?” He probed a bit more, studying her face as he did so. He was surprisingly gentle, and she only winced a couple of times. “Not broken or cracked.”

“Trisha. Everyone calls me Trisha.”

“Except Michael.”

She started to laugh, but it came out rough for reasons she didn't want to know. Her emotions were a mess tonight. Probably something to do with getting shot. Or with the way it felt to have his hands on her, even on the opposite side of her armor.

“Michael probably gave you rank and serial number along with it. He'd never dare use that name to my face.”

Billy eased back until he too sat with his back against the rocket pod.

She missed how his hands had held her, even if they had been merely probing for wounds.

“Name, rank, serial number, and a threat to kick my ass.” His voice held such deep chagrin that she couldn't resist patting him on the arm in sympathy.

“Don't worry,” she told him. “If I ever get pissed at you, I'll be sure not to leave anything for him to kick. So you're safe from that.”

Billy the SEAL groaned. “Great, just what I need. A woman who wants to kick my ass.”

“It's a nice ass.”

He turned to look at her with narrowed eyes.

Trisha bit her lower lip. She wasn't sure if she was doing it to keep from laughing at him or from leaning into him, which would be much too easy at the moment. She would really not mind if he wanted to just hold her for a moment, but there wasn't a chance in hell she was going to let that happen. Instead she turned to look along the carrier deck and out over the dark ocean.

He did have a nice ass, but she couldn't believe she'd just said that. Even for her, that was a wild statement. Good thing he was in a whole other branch of the service. So, harassment wasn't likely to be thrown at her. In the current state of the U.S. military, wouldn't that be the ultimate joke? A woman accused of harassing the man. Might even be a first.

Her emotions were indeed all over the place.

Again she rubbed her finger along her ribs.

***

Bill sat in the dark and watched Patricia, no, Trisha O'Malley's profile in the red nighttime lights of the carrier's deck. The red deck lights turned her red hair black, making her fair skin even starker white.

He knew he had a good ass. It was something he'd been told often enough by his lovers over the years. One of the many side benefits of training a minimum of eight hours a day, year in and year out.

But he'd certainly never been told that by a fellow soldier, male or female. Well, there had been Garvey, but he was always razzing everybody in the squad about something. He'd done a whole riff on Bill's backside on one really horrid watch where they didn't dare sleep. Garvey had kept them all awake by keeping them laughing, which they didn't dare do aloud. They'd all laughed silently until they wept at the pain in their sides. Garvey was also the guy who would be right beside you when it all went to hell.

He missed his team and wondered what mess they were getting into right now. Three months in-country and now assigned to Operation Heavy Hand, he was completely out of touch with what was going on in SEAL Team Nine. Instead, he was sitting in the red-lit darkness with a SOAR pilot.

Bill couldn't figure O'Malley out at all. She was a crazy mix of skills and wild, of serious and sass, of breeding and street. He couldn't pigeonhole her one bit.

He glanced aft to see where she was looking. Just out into the darkness. The red deck lights were bright enough that the stars were hard to see. No moon. The only real light was the phosphorescent green lifted in slow, lazy waves by the carrier's passage. This ship could actually throw a rooster tail when she was in a real hurry, but a thousand feet of ship weighing a hundred thousand tons rarely needed to race along at forty miles per hour. Tonight she was moseying along at maybe ten, not really going anywhere, just staying in constant motion as any carrier should.

It was a beautiful night, but he'd bet Trisha O'Malley wasn't seeing it much.

He'd seen soldiers go shocky when they were shot. Some were still so high on adrenaline that they didn't even know they'd been hit. But you could see in their eyes that some part of them knew.

One in fifty of the two and a half million who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had been physically wounded, aside from traumatic brain injury. The TBI rate was estimated at one in eight and came from being blown up without being actually wounded or killed in the process.

While Trisha's injury was marginal for a wound, and he knew a lot of soldiers who didn't bother reporting such injuries, getting shot wasn't all that common. One in fifty wounded in Afghanistan. Drop that ratio for wounds by improvised explosive devices and other types of mine shrapnel, crashes, bombs, stupid-ass drunken brawls, flat-out accidents, and so on. Maybe one in a hundred and fifty was actually shot, perhaps one in two hundred.

He had been shot three times, once before and twice since joining the Navy. You didn't get used to it, but after a while it didn't change your worldview much. You just woke up in pain being damn glad you could wake up at all.

Then he looked back at her. She was so absolutely still. It seemed that if he touched her she'd break.

“First time, huh?”

She nodded sharply, once. Like a mechanical doll. She was holding herself together by sheer force of will. The woman was so damn strong it was amazing. It would almost be easier to deal with her if she'd just cry. Not that he was any good with a weeping woman. But she was wound so tight.

If he did touch her, she wouldn't break, she'd shatter. And for reasons he wasn't going to think about right now, he cared a great deal that she didn't.

He leaned back and looked away from her, giving her a bit of privacy.

“I was fourteen the first time I was shot.” He kept his voice low and soothing. He also did his best to not remember how that long-ago night looked, tasted, felt.

Nothing. No sound. No movement. He didn't watch her out of the corner of his eye because even if she didn't know he was watching, she'd feel it.

But both of their backs rested against either end of the two-hundred-pound, seven-rocket launcher hanging from the Little Bird's hardpoint. He'd feel it across his shoulders if she so much as wiggled a muscle, but she didn't.

“Buddy and I were working a con, a confidence game. We were both fourteen and so damn smart and so convinced that we were indestructible that we decided to take on Ralph. No last name, like he was some runway supermodel or something, just Ralph.”

Even now he could feel the heat of that July night. Detroit wasn't like the Arabian Sea. Here, even when it was hot, it was achingly dry. Three months in Somalia, and from the very first day he wanted to lie all day in a pool trying to rehydrate his flesh. Even when the temperature fell below eighty, Somalia still leached the moisture right out of you.

“Detroit was sticky with heat. This was over fifteen years ago, and trust me when I say the city was even worse then. It stank of desperation and we reeked of it.”

The con was supposed to take minutes, but it had taken seconds. Only seconds to go completely wrong.

“Old Ralph saw through us so fast that we didn't even have time to blink. We'd both worn white. We thought it looked sharp and cool when we swung into his black-lit club that night. What it did was make us easy targets as we sprinted down the back alley at midnight.”

He closed his eyes against it, but the image was there anyway.

“Buddy always followed along with all my stupid ideas. That night it got him killed. I was hit first. But just before the bullet got me, I stumbled on a pile of broken garbage bags from some restaurant. What should have gone through my back went through my arm as I fell and flailed, landing right in the garbage. I just rolled under, dragging the bags over me. Soy sauce, sesame oil, sticky rice all dripping on me.”