Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) (11 page)

“Now what are you really doing here, Peter?” Major Beale fired the question they were all thinking directly at the President. Connie was still shocked at how they spoke to each other.

“And why the sudden, rush upgrades to our birds?” That was unusual enough to worry Connie significantly. She’d checked every enhancement a dozen times, but the changeover was still too fast for her comfort. She glanced down the table and wondered what each of the members of the two crews thought. She’d like to ask them and find out, but it wasn’t her place.

They sat around a large dining table in a secure conference room at the Tonopah Test Range Airport. Flags lined one wall: U.S., Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine, Coast Guard… A banner for each fighting force that defended this country.

And for a hundred miles south and a hundred and fifty to the east ran the Nevada Test and Training Range. Nuclear tests and secret aircraft. Area 51 UFOs and Red Flag aerial combat training. Where Skunk Works had tested the fastest and the nastiest jets ever launched into the sky. U-2 spy planes and the SR-71 Blackbird had roared aloft here. The F-117 stealth fighter had been born in this baking desert. She’d cut her Special Forces teeth flying war games up and down this stretch of desert.

The President sat at the head of the long walnut table with Beale and Henderson to either side.
Viper’s
crew ranged down one side, Dusty, Captain Richardson, and Crazy Tim. Connie, John, and Clay sat down the other side. No Secret Service, not even Frank Adams. No assistants. The remains of a fine Mexican meal of tamales, enchiladas, and as rich a beef caldo stew as Connie had ever eaten were scattered about the table. The food had been spicy enough to make her sweat, and her mouth still burned despite the sweet dessert.

President Matthews toyed with the last of his tres leches cake for a moment.

“I wanted to see what you keep telling me about my lack of understan—”

“Cut the bull, Sneaker Boy. This is me you’re talking to.”

John leaned in to whisper in Connie’s ear, “Friends back when they were growing up. Wonder if they fought so much back then.”

“You have no idea.” Major Beale apparently had very sharp hearing. “Every conversation with Peter is a mental jungle like you can never imagine. And now that some fools made him President, it’s even more deeply ingrained than when he was just the older pain-in-the-ass boy next door.”

“And you love it as much as I do, Squirt. Admit it.”

She huffed out a breath, then smiled at him. “I hate to admit it, but I do. Now give!”

“There’s an assignment,” the President finally spoke as he fussed with his cake some more, “a mission. It may be happening and it may be happening soon. I need a team on immediate call, and I need you to be able to do things that your commanders insist you can do. I wanted to see for myself. At least as much as a civilian can understand.”

“And what did you see, Mr. President?” John asked.

Connie was amazed at how smoothly John stepped into the conversation. Distracting both the Major and her Commander-in-Chief from the next round of sniping debate with a perfectly natural question.

The President ate the last of his cake and washed it down with a sip of coffee before pushing both away.

“How many words would you have spoken if I wasn’t there?”

Beale shrugged.

“Seventeen in…” Connie considered for a moment, “eight hours, twenty-seven minutes. Sir.”

He looked at her a bit strangely.

Beale was clearly trying to hide a smile. Henderson didn’t even bother to hide his.

“I’ll wager that Mark’s bird wasn’t all that much noisier.”

“Oh no, Mr. President.” Mark reached out for a second piece of cake. “We had a running game of ‘I Spy’ twenty questions all across the country. You know ‘I Spy?’ Question one, ‘Will it kill us in the next ten seconds?’ ‘No.’ Question two, ‘Will it kill us in the next twenty seconds?’ ‘Only if you don’t move your ass.’ That sort of thing. Helps the time go by.”

“And you married him?” The President asked his childhood friend. In Connie’s estimation, his voice didn’t quite tease the way he intended.

“Guilty.” Major Beale also didn’t sound quite lighthearted. Had they been more than friends? How had she ended up married to her commander rather than the boy next door?

The President recovered quickly.

“I need a team with discretion beyond the norm. And I’m confident from prior experience of your absolute reserve when required.”

“Oh shit!” She and Mark shared a look. “You ready to saddle up again, cowboy?”

“Wa’ll,” his Texas accent was back. It was lame, but it appeared to melt his wife’s bones every time. “When yer nation cawls ’pon its finest, who be I to ar-gyuh with that?”

John and Crazy Tim groaned.

Major Beale must have seen the look on Connie’s face.

“You ever hear of black-in-black operations?”

***

Connie was still considering Mark’s fake accent, even worse than before. He sounded like John Wayne run through a
Beavis
and
Butthead
laugh track.

Then Major Beale’s eyes, which had been light and easy until that moment, became dark focused lasers of blue as Connie shifted to answer the Major’s question.

She almost answered in the positive, but everyone already knew about black operations. No one outside of the operations team and the chain of command could ever be told what happened.

Of course, if you were a member of SOAR and had flown some black operations, it became fairly easy to pin down the ownership of certain world events. The explosion that had shredded a Russian tank factory, she’d lay good money that it was a U.S. Army black op. Then there was the meltdown that, for reasons still unreported, occurred at the Pakistan nuclear fuel facility, just bad enough to require outside experts to see what was really going on there, but not bad enough to create real danger. That one had SOAR and Delta Force fingerprints all over it if you knew how to look.

White ops were released to the news after they were done. Bin Laden’s death, Hussein’s capture, Grenada, Noriega, all of the help after Hurricane Katrina, a dozen others.

But black-in-black?

Connie shook her head.

Crazy Tim held up one finger and looked sick. He tried to put a funny face on it but didn’t manage to pull it off. John held up three, which startled his best friend no end. Richardson, Henderson’s copilot, just nodded his head. Clay and Dusty’s faces, she suspected, matched her own.

“See the people at this table?” Major Beale slowly aimed her finger at Connie’s chest and then tracked it slowly around the table in full-on, scary-as-hell commander mode.

Connie turned to look at each face in turn, as did the others.

“These people. Now. Right now. Really look. Etch these faces into your brain and etch them deep. These are the only people you may ever discuss this mission with. Not your future commanding officer, not your therapist or priest, not the next President. Not in your retirement. Ten years from now, stone drunk so bad that you break your nose walking into the wrong end of a Marine, these people and these people only. Are we clear?”

The steel was back, the fine meal forgotten as the Major leaned in and studied each face carefully. Connie felt pinned by the inspection, as if her soul had suddenly been bared. There was no doubting that Major Beale meant exactly what she said.

“Good. Now, this is the moment where you can walk out of the room. Completely voluntary. No reflection on your record in any manner, shape, or form. And I can tell you, if you walk out that door, your life expectancy is going to be much, much higher. Anyone?”

No one moved a muscle. Connie couldn’t imagine that a Night Stalker would ever refuse a mission. Any mission.

“Go easy, Em. I don’t even know if it’s going to happen.”

“That’s one of the differences between civilian and military mind-sets that you always ask about, Mr. President. You aim for the best and try to avoid the worst. We soldiers always fully prepare for the worst. We train for it constantly and plan how to beat it every day, every hour. We’re seldom disappointed and it’s why we’re all still alive.”

President Peter Matthews looked much more sober.

“And with black-in-black, that usually isn’t enough.”

Connie stood with the group as they saw the President off with no one the wiser. He slipped out of Tonopah on a Gulfstream jet that would slide him back to Air Force One, parked overnight at Fort Campbell, as quietly as if he’d never left.

Connie and John spent nearly an hour packing their bird and freezing their fingers. Even the gloves couldn’t insulate against the chill that had crept in as they sat in the warm conference room. Black-in-black. That implied missions that were never heard of. Missions, whether they succeeded or failed, that were never even known about.

Had that been what happened to her father, a failed operation rather than a failed machine? At first she’d blamed the manufacturers. That’s why her first jobs were with Sikorsky and other vendors for the Black Hawk helicopters. When she hadn’t discovered flaws there, she signed up with the military expecting to find slipshod work. Instead she’d worked with some of the finest mechanics she’d ever met—ones like John—who she was proud to work alongside.

For some reason, she’d never considered an operation gone bad. An operation so secret that no word of it could ever be released, not even to the surviving daughter.

When she and John finished preparing the DAP Hawks, the C-17 loadmasters took over and shifted
Viper
and
Vengeance
onto the same aircraft that had delivered them to Fort Campbell. But Major Henderson herded the crews off before the vast rear cargo hatch closed like a giant mouth eating their Hawks.

“Not our flight.”

The rear ramp closed, and instead of taking off, the plane was towed into a hangar and the doors shuttered her in.

Connie looked around the group. A secret mission without their helicopters. That didn’t make any sense. Especially after all of the trouble to install and train on the ADAS and the upgrade to “half stealth.”

They all stood there in their civvies, their heavy gear on the choppers, light backpacks and duffels stacked at their feet.

Another Gulfstream jet rolled up. They were all directed aboard and moments later were climbing up to twenty-thousand feet.

When they were up to cruise altitude, Henderson stood at the front of the cabin. Or tried to. The ceiling was too low. He stood almost as tall as John, and was nearly as broad of shoulder, but lacked the sheer physical power of a man of John’s size.

Henderson crouched, then finally sat sideways on a chair arm that groaned in protest, and faced backward toward them. They sat in the seats arranged one per side down the length of the aircraft.

“Most of you have been in-country for near enough a year with too few breaks. The operational tempo is horrendous right now between Africa—north, central, and south, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, not even counting South America or the Pacific Rim. We didn’t want to slam you from action to training and back into action. Though as you know, that’s never stopped the Army before.”

He got the laugh he was looking for. Connie found it easy to add her smile with Big John’s deep and easy chuckle rolling it along, lightening the mood in the cabin even further.

“We don’t know how long you have, could be up to a week, assuming it happens at all. All we know at the moment is that it isn’t happening right away and that we’ll have enough lead time to pull the team together.”

They were all used to that. Three-quarters of planned black ops never happened, never received that final “go.” Sometimes a month or more of planning went into a mission, only for the team to be informed they were no longer needed. Or they’d do the flight, only to find a dry hole where intelligence had bad information. It was just a normal part of their day.

“In about thirty minutes, we’ll be dropping into Reno. Civvie side. Go play. I know it’s winter, so go skiing or something. Do not, I repeat, not break a leg. Continental U.S. only. We want you to be ready to launch off the East or West Coast on six hours’ notice. No Cancun, no Maui. Sorry about that. Keep your pagers on and your cell phones charged. Keep your gear packed but try to unwind a little. Questions?”

Major Henderson somehow sounded like a combination of Mr. Easygoing and a hard-ass drill instructor. Of course, there were no questions. He always ran his briefings that way, everything anticipated, questions answered before they were asked.

All except one.

Where the hell was she supposed to go?

John had whooped when he heard the news. Home. Reno to Denver, connect to Tulsa, call up Paps and get a ride home. He could be home in four or five hours if everything lined up right.

“Home by dinner! Awesome!”

He punched the back of the seat in front of him hard enough to jerk Crazy Tim forward. Tim turned and they punched fist to fist hard enough that John’s knuckles stung. He knew what his buddy would be up to, girl-hunting. They always swarmed around his broad shoulders and gentle eyes.

Tim let out a howl halfway between crow and wolf that set everyone laughing and talking at once. The plane was loud with both crews shouting over the roar of the engines. Someone raided the small galley and ran back tossing out cans of soda and bags of salted peanuts.

“Wait. Wait. What the hell’s the date?” John shouted them down.

“December,” someone called out. “I think.”

“Fifteenth? Twentieth? I dunno.” When every day was planned for you, dates weren’t what you’d call important. The only time that really mattered was a major mission. Even then, you trained until you were ready, then they gave a “go” day. Dates didn’t matter.

“December 19th.” Connie’s voice was a soft drift. As if she answered out of habit while her attention was elsewhere.

“Six days. Oh, come on, baby. Come to poppa. Six days. Let the mission prep take seven. Oh, please, momma. Please, please, please!”

Several of the guys looked at him as if he’d lost it.

“Christmas, man! Think about it.”

That got them all going again. There was a chance of being home for Christmas. Crazy Tim started talking about his mom’s Christmas garlic-roasted pork and green banana cakes. Sounded as if Henderson would try to get his folks out of their winter-bound Montana ranch to stay with Major Beale’s folks in D.C. Clay was gonna hang in Reno and take a run at the tables. Dusty came from Oregon, said he missed the rain after a year in the desert, though he admitted that about a week of it would be plenty. Captain Richardson had a sweetheart in Maine, of all whacked-out places.

Connie…

Hadn’t spoken a word.

John had sat across the aisle from her, as much by chance as plan. With the narrow fuselage, he could reach out and touch her shoulder easily when calling her name didn’t get her attention.

“How about you, Davis? Where’s you headin’?” He tried for Henderson’s Texas accent but knew he messed it up.

She just shook her head.

The plane’s attitude nosed down as the engines slowed, and the hum resonating the length of the cabin softened. Starting the descent already. The engine’s diminished roar started to set up a waver, ever so slightly out of sync. John and Connie turned in unison to face the cockpit as the pilot caught it too and tuned them back up. Fast and assured. Military training. Sometimes on civilian flights the engines would be a quarter tone out of sync, which made John absolutely insane when the pilots failed to correct it. More than once he’d asked a flight attendant to deliver a note to the cockpit to fix it.

“So where—”

She shook her head again. Sharper. Without looking over at him.

He dropped back against his seat and stared out the window at the snow-shrouded Rocky Mountains as they flashed by below.

Where was she from?

He remembered her answer. A list of Army bases. Her dad, dead. That must have been hard. He couldn’t imagine Paps dying, nor was it likely to happen anytime soon. John came from a long line of old men. Old Grumps still drove the combine at eighty-three during harvest, wasn’t ready to let that task go to a mere youngster like his son who had only turned fifty-five last spring. Old men, all except his true father.

He shut his eyes for a long moment to bury the thought. Paps was his real father in every way that mattered. Every way except blood. John felt disloyal every time he thought of the man who’d died in a car wreck before John was even born.

When he managed to find level flight again and open his eyes, Connie still stared square at the back of Clay’s seat. Not out at the amazing mountains towering below. What? Nowhere to go? Some crappy hotel somewhere, room service, and a stack of service manuals to study? No! It wasn’t right. Especially not for Christmas.

John leaned over casually and patted her arm.

“Don’t you worry none, little lady. Y’all are coming home with me. You’ll be welcome and then some.” This time the Texas sounded right. Like when Henderson was teasing his wife. It shifted and changed a bit.

She slowly turned. From that profile that made him wish he could draw until those gold-brown eyes focused on him. Really focused.

A gentle smile tugged up at one corner. Wry, perhaps a bit sad.

“I don’t think that’s the best idea.”

“Y’all got a better one in that purty head o’ yours somewhere?”

She shook her head without looking away. He couldn’t have looked aside if the front half of the plane blew off.

The other corner of her mouth slid up, the first hint that her radiant smile lurked just below the surface.

Still no answer.

“We’ve got extra rooms at the farm. You’d be welcome. Ma’s a helluva cook. And you’ll be as safe as you want to be. Promise.” He raised his hand in the old three-finger-raised Boy Scout salute.

That amazing smile cracked forth.

“What?”

She tipped her head ever so slightly to the side, studying him. Like one of her manuals. Except for that laser-bright smile that bloomed across her features. And the hair that draped to the side, inviting his hand to slip inside it to cradle her cheek. An invitation he resisted considering their present company.

“And if I don’t want to be so safe…?”

The air whooshed out of him as if he’d just been punched in the solar plexus. Not a thing he could say to that one.