Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) (4 page)

The C-17 with two DAP Hawks in its belly flew straight through. No Aviano Air Base in Italy. No Ramstein in Germany. Fourteen hours, two flight crew changes, and several midair refuelings, straight to the States.

They slept as well as they could on the hard deck. Everyone woke cranky after fighting to ignore the pounding roar of the four jet engines ramming them from Southwest Asia over the Mediterranean and finally the Atlantic. Water bottles and plastic-packaged sandwiches were handed round, all made with white bread that turned to mush and stuck to the roof of your mouth in awkward lumps.

John now had a crick in his neck that he couldn’t crack loose to go along with his sore hand. He and Connie put in a couple of listless hours on the Hawk. They finished what could be done inside the cavernous space hurtling along at five hundred miles per hour and thirty-eight thousand feet in the air. Mostly the cosmetics, tail plates, and copilot window.

After they called it off as a job well done, or as well as they could, they moved to the benches at the head of the cargo bay. Crazy Tim had shoved a couple of crates around until he had a makeshift poker table. John had been taking Tim’s money since Basic Training and saw no reason to stop simply because he was exhausted.

Even Major Henderson was yawning, but exhaustion wouldn’t be a problem for him; he never lost at poker. John always figured it was the price of observing a master at play, to sit down to a game with the company’s commander. And he always dragged some winnings off Tim and Dusty. Usually enough to break even, but rarely did he make enough for a night out. Sometimes not even a beer’s worth. Henderson was just that good. Clay had learned the hard way to resist joining in. Major Beale didn’t play.

Major Henderson at least played low stakes with his own crew. Other crews weren’t so lucky and had suffered badly at the table when the Black Adders helicopter company came to play. The name had been a natural extension when the company was formed by then Captain Mark “Viper” Henderson. Now, many of them had the striking snake tattoo, along with the flying Pegasus with laser-vision eyes that was the unofficial emblem of the Night Stalkers.

Connie sat down across from John.

“You play much?” he asked as Tim shuffled the cards.

“Never.” Her typical one-word reply.

He did his best to hide a smile. An easy mark and some quick money in his pocket would be just fine.

He told her the rules once and she had it. Or claimed she did. That simple, silent, single-time nod of hers with no wasted motion. Recorded, registered deep in her weird-ass brain that never needed to look in a service manual to fix even the most esoteric problems on the Hawk.

Well, he was about to prove her wrong. They’d run through a couple of hands open and a few more for no money until she had the feel of it. Now they were playing for money, low money, but that wasn’t the point.

Tonight, today, whatever it was, John would tempt fate and his wallet by throwing caution out the window.

“See your buck,” he called loud enough to be heard over the roar of the Globemaster’s engines. “And one more.” John was nursing along a respectable trip jacks. A high percentage winner in five-card draw. He knew he had Tim beat just by how he sat. The simplest poker game to play, but very hard to win. He eyed the Major.

Henderson laughed and matched but didn’t raise.

Crazy Tim tossed in his cards with disgust on top of his two bucks already in the pot.

Dusty released a massive yawn. “I’m out and done.” He tossed his cards down, accidentally face up, revealing a low full house. When John exclaimed, Dusty looked at them again. “Sorry.” He flipped the cards face down and crawled off to sack out on a bench seat. Too tired to even realize that he’d thrown down an almost guaranteed winning hand.

Connie inspected each player carefully. Laid down the one dollar to stay in and raised back. Four bucks in.

He had to see this. What the hell, he raised her back as well. Teach the newbie a lesson.

The Major hesitated. Hesitated too long, making it clear he didn’t have squat, cursed quietly, realizing he’d been tired enough to give himself away, then threw his cards on top of Tim’s. First time John had ever seen him falter.

Just the two of them now.

She waited. Did she somehow know to watch for his reveal, some facial tic that might give him away? Some twitch of his pinkie that he didn’t know about possibly indicating the quality of his hand? Maybe she paused merely to test his confidence. To task him.

Well, he was up to that. She was probably trying to remember if two pair beat three of a kind.

At length, she matched his bet. Seventeen bucks. A very sweet pot in such a low-stakes game.

He laid down his three boys and sat back to watch her.

Without a word, no hesitation to double-check, she fanned her three ladies on top of his jacks.

Not a glimmer. Not the least hint that she’d figured out the cards and taken her first hand at poker. No hesitation, no uncertainty.

John glanced over at the Major.

“Nope. I didn’t see it either. Let’s go again.”

“See what?” Connie’s first words since she’d sat down and said that she’d never played.

Neither of them answered.

They dealt around again. Connie only took one card on the draw, classic two-pair move.

He drew… garbage. The temptation to play it out almost drew him in, but didn’t.

This time the Major went for the ride on Connie’s trip tens with his aces and eights pairs.

Connie’s stack of ones and fives was growing.

Major Henderson didn’t look so sleepy anymore and John couldn’t figured out how he was losing money so fast in such a small game.

By the fourth hand, he and Tim were folding on the deal, leaving the Major and Connie to go at it. They were so intent that when the C-17 drove into an air pocket, dropping them a quick twenty feet or so and all of the cards and money floated weightless for a moment, neither of them glanced away. Mark merely slapped his hand down on the pot to hold everything in place until the flight resettled. They watched each other far more than the cards.

Thirty bucks down, John folded for the night. Tim had long since lost interest and fallen asleep stretched out on the deck.

The Major had to be fifty in the hole by the time he threw up his hands in surrender.

“Game over. Okay, girl. Give.”

Connie had started straightening her winnings. She looked at him a moment, tipped her head sideways as if to relieve a crick, and then offered him her stack, over a hundred dollars.

“No. No. No. That’s yours.” He scrubbed at his face. “You’ve really never played before? How did you do that? How did you beat us?”

She finished with the money, slipped it into a back pocket, and began reboxing the cards.

“It strikes me as a relatively simple game in some ways. Between what is in my hand and discards, and the pattern of discards of others, I can discount at least fifteen of the fifty-two cards. Taken only in combination, the odds simplify further. Then I observe the players and that alters the odds. After that I simply need to know if I can make you believe I have a better hand, whether or not I do.”

The Major grunted barely loud enough to be heard.

“Then John…”

The Major slapped his shoulder. “You’ve got to watch how you hold your hand, buddy boy.”

“Not his hand. His mouth.”

“My mouth?” A key to poker was knowing your own tell. Your own giveaway about the quality of what you had versus what other might think you have. Hearing about your own tell was rare and priceless.

“No. His hand. He holds it higher when it’s worth less.”

He did?

“No,” Connie shook her head. “Not always. But when his hand is really miserable, he has a tiny bit of a smile. You, Major, are far easier to read.”

He blanched. The inscrutable Viper actually blanched before the fair Connie Davis. John could get to like this woman after all.

“Easier?”

John could see the Major’s lips move, but his voice was a stunned gasp lost in the unending roar of the jet’s engines.

She pointed over his shoulder to where Major Beale sat perched on a crate just behind him.

Mark spun around to look at his wife. Her grin was sheepish.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was giving away your cards. I don’t have much of a poker face, do I?”

“It depends,” Connie answered matter-of-factly, “on which side you’re on.”

Mark burst out laughing and pulled his wife into his lap. The ramrod straight Major Beale curled against him just like any other girl.

John loved watching them. They’d been magnetic together since the first time he saw them, even if it took them a while to figure it out. And there was no woman he’d ever respected more highly.

Connie snapped the rubber band around the box of cards.

Here was another woman he couldn’t help but watch.

“Practice.” Connie sucked hard to get her breath in the freezing air now roaring through the Globemaster’s cargo bay.

“Practice makes perfect.” She whispered it like a mantra. It was how her father had raised her and the Army had trained her. And she agreed. But right now she was cold and tired.

“Excellent conditions for an advanced training opportunity.” She could practically hear her past instructors barking that out.

After a mission, thirteen hours repairing their DAP, and fourteen hours in flight, they were just twenty miles short of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the home of the 160th SOAR. Whatever was so urgent as to drag them across half the world didn’t supplant a training opportunity. Not in Fort Campbell’s mind.

Even with her helmet on, she could barely hear herself think. They were down from thirty-five thousand feet to seven hundred. The crews sat on the side benches, their knees pulled in tight, facing the two Black Hawks awash in the red light that let their eyes adapt for the dark. The helicopters loomed huge inside the Globemaster’s bay.

The sound redoubled as the jet’s crew opened the tail door. One section folded up into the ceiling, revealing the black of a winter’s night in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. No moon, no clouds to reflect back any man-made light. The other section of the rear door folded down until it angled down slightly below horizontal. Where the rear of the cargo bay had been now gaped a great maw of darkness waiting to swallow them whole.

“Drop zone in ten,” the pilot announced over the intercom.

“Parachutes suck!” John leaned in and yelled near the leading edge of Connie’s helmet so that she could just hear him.

A crew member in a harness strolled to the rear of the aircraft and chucked a small package out into the wind stream. The wind caught it, and in moments a little four-foot drogue chute danced beyond the tail at the end of a long line.

“Five.”

“They’re frickin’ awesome! I love free fall!” she shouted back.

The crewman moseyed back to mid-ship.

“Drop! Drop! Drop!” sounded over the intercom.

The C-17 loadmaster popped the release, and the main chute was pulled out by the drogue. One second, the parachute filled to a huge size just past the end of the ramp, larger than the cargo door it had just exited.

The next second, the
Vengeance
Black Hawk MH-60M DAP shot by Connie’s knees with a foot to spare. By the time it reached the door, the ten-thousand-pound bird was moving at the speed of an express train. Actually, the parachute was slowing it down to earthbound speeds while the C-17 continued to roar ahead.

Another long webbing leash tied to Henderson’s Hawk shot out the cargo door. It in turn dragged free the second bird’s big parachute, and in moments the second chute and
Viper
were gone, moving even faster. It left Connie breathless in the sudden vacuum of the abruptly empty cavernous interior of the plane.

“Go! Go! Go!”

Magically the crewman materialized in the center of the cargo hatch. Both Black Hawk crews were scrambling to their feet from opposite sides of the cargo bay.

“Free fall makes me barf!” John shouted at her as they threw off their safety belts and jumped to their feet. Or rather struggled upright. Large survival kits dangled from the fronts of their vests to hang awkwardly between their legs.

They waddled past the jumpmaster as fast as they could. He checked the security of their riplines on the overhead rail before letting them waddle off the plane.

At the tail edge of the ramp, she turned to face John.

Connie yelled out, “Wimp!” and allowed herself to tumble over backward into the night sky.

She started the timer on her watch as she completed the first somersault. A heat blast and the burned-fuel smell of jet exhaust surrounded her for half a moment before she fell into clear air.

Connie normally loved free fall. HALO jumps were her favorite training exercise. High altitude, low opening, you felt as if nothing could hold you back. With the right gear, you could plunge seven miles from jetliner altitudes over thirty-five thousand feet to under a thousand feet in less than two minutes. Two hundred miles per hour without a vehicle or any more protection than a helmet and a high-altitude suit.

But not tonight, so Big John would be okay. Tonight was a LALO jump: low altitude, low opening. The line jerked her drogue parachute free just after she left the aircraft. It yanked out her main chute, and the harness grabbed her hard, jerked her painfully to an abrupt halt. From a hundred-plus knots to twenty in two seconds flat.

She checked the sky about her.

Seven other chutes, John close beside her. Good, the whole team accounted for.

The C-17 disappeared from all visibility even as she watched, the closing rear hatch cutting out the red interior lights. Gone. The jet had flown without lights for such a training run. At the limit of vision, the nav lights blinked on and then they were gone.

Below, the two massive chutes lowering the Black Hawks toward the open field of the drop zone were etched against the white landscape. Snow. It was going to be cold down on the ground reassembling the Hawks for flight. She steered for them. The freezing night air was chapping what little of her face wasn’t protected by the helmet.

At a hundred feet, she dropped the survival bag on a long lead line. Fifty feet. Thirty. The bag hit the ground like an anchor. She stalled the chute and landed soft. A quick pull on the forward shroud lines and the chute spilled air, collapsing to the ground.

She jerked the quick-release toggle and started gathering her chute as Big John dropped in fifty feet to her left. The others ranged beyond him in a tight grouping. John set to work on bundling his chute.

“No barfing. Not even a gag. I’m disappointed.”

All he did was snarl in reply, “Sixty minutes.”

She checked her wrist, fifty-six and counting from when they’d stepped off the tailgate. The exercise hadn’t specified which time to start, so she’d count from the “Go!” not the ground.

She saw John’s nod. The burden was now on them. On that they could agree.

First, they had to check the chopper. Then put her back together. After that, perform the preflight check so that the Major could fly them back to Fort Campbell. Undetected.

And, more importantly, they had to beat
Viper
.

Fifty-five minutes.

***

“Goddamn it!” Sergeant Steve Johnson looked out Fort Campbell’s heli-field control-tower window.

“Hey, Jeff. How many Hawks were on the concrete when we came on shift?”

“I don’t know. A dozen, give or take.”

“How many were DAP Hawks?”

“Two. Why?”

“Well, now there are three.” He had the satisfaction of hearing Jeff’s curse. Jeff moved beside him and looked down at the floodlit field.

“How in the hell did they do that? And when?”

Steve ran the security recordings back. “Four minutes ago.” Low and slow. They’d actually come sliding from inside a hangar he knew to be empty. He rolled back on camera four. There they were, dropping two crew chiefs to the ground. The smaller one did something quick at the edge of the hangar doors. He’d better let maintenance know they’d need to fix the alarm on the hangar’s back door.

The pilot flew straight through, low enough that he’d barely hesitated at the threshold to retrieve the ground team.

“Slick.” He’d seen Navy SEALs who were clumsier.

He rolled the recorder further back. Camera fourteen at the back gate.

Again the two crew chiefs slid out of the night with the grace of combat operators and captured the guard booth and its three inhabitants. They’d actually opened the gate so that the Hawk could fly through with her body well below any radar and her rotors just clear of the wire.

Steve called the booth. He didn’t even have to ask the question.

The guards answered with, “They told us we had a choice—be tied up, face down out in the snow, or keep our mouths shut until you called us. We chose the latter, sue us.”

Steve hung up on them without responding.

He was used to SOAR’s pilots trying to outsmart Fort Campbell’s security, an old game. Strictly against the rules, but most rules didn’t really apply to the highly secretive 160th Air Regiment. One rule did though, always. Never, ever be seen. All else came second. And the tower worked hard to make that first one a real challenge. Very few got by them.

“You know what I’m thinking?” Jeff picked up his night-vision binoculars.

“Helicopters always travel in pairs?” Steve concentrated on the low clutter at the bottom edge of the field’s radar sweep.

“And that just had to be Emily Beale’s team. Had to be. So goddamn smooth.”

The two of them shared a smile. That pretty much identified the other bird.

It took two more minutes, but their vigilance paid off. Not that they could have missed it. The low-sweep, outer-perimeter radar gathered up the second helicopter with ease.

Steve snapped on the infrared searchlight and swept the second DAP Hawk as it hopped over the fence, clearing the razor wire by no more than two feet.

“Greetings,
Viper!”

“Get that damn thing out of my eyes!” Major Mark Henderson snapped over the radio.

Steve doused the light. “Welcome to Fort Campbell. Haven’t seen you in a while. When did you get stateside?” He tried to sound sassy, but he couldn’t figure how the Major had gotten past the first three levels of threat detection that surrounded SOAR’s home base.

And how the Viper’s wife had gotten past all six.

***

Connie spilled out of the Hawk with the rest of the crew to crow a bit over
Viper
being caught. While waiting, from forty-eight minutes to fifty-four minutes into the exercise, they’d scrambled to shut down the bird and strip helmets and vests in the cramped space. John handed around warm hats. They’d all hustled to tie down the blades and cover the key components.

Now, with shouldered duffels, they tried to look unhurried, even bored as
Viper
landed.

The message was clear: “We’ve been here a long while. Where the hell have you been?” They were both under the one-hour limit mandated by the exercise, but it provided a fine chance to rub in the victory.

While they waited in a loose line for
Viper’s
rotors to spin down, Connie edged up to John. “What did you do to the outer fence?”

“My first gig at SOAR was testing flight against the perimeter security. I found the backdoor password. A quick downlink over our new wideband and I hacked the system. I told it to look anywhere except where we were. Then I instructed it to reset after thirty seconds.
Viper
walked right into it.”

She nodded, filing the information away.

“LtCGrimm1981.”

Connie looked at him. Sharing an insider secret like that. He did it without thought, consideration, or negotiated trade. He shared the password because he had it to share and trusted her.

LtCGrimm1981.

Easy to remember, probably one of the more logical passwords in SOAR. Lieutenant Colonel Michael C. Grimm, one of the founders of the Air Regiment and one of the first to be lost, pushing the envelope that night-vision technology hadn’t yet learned how to fill. The Night Stalkers’ passion to develop night-vision gear now in use by the military worldwide could be traced directly to the night Michael ate a power line flying an MH-6 Little Bird at full throttle in a narrow river valley while leading a flight of twenty-two choppers on a nighttime training exercise. His was just the fourth of the hundred names on the Memorial Wall outside Grimm Hall. Lt. C. Grimm. Died 1981.

When Connie was standing quietly shoulder to shoulder with John like now, he didn’t seem so overwhelming. Big and powerful, but with a kindness inside that his exterior did little to reveal. Even when he was exhausted and cold and viewed in profile, you could see his irrepressible merriness. Nothing like her father who had been quiet, thoughtful, guarded. Never speaking without thinking. She’d done her best to emulate him.

But perhaps she was missing something.

John made her feel… Connie wasn’t sure. She’d never been good at placing words on her emotions, when she even allowed herself to consider them. Pain she knew. The pain that wrapped around her heart every time she thought of her father’s death in an unnamed helicopter in an unmentionable place.

Around John, that constant pain eased. The tight squeeze that often made it hard to breathe let go just a tiny bit, and the sensation was quite heady.

A part of her heard John teasing his buddy Crazy Tim. A part of her heard the deep friendship that lay between them. But the words garbled and were washed away by the solid thud of her own heart.

Standing next to John, she felt that weightless moment she’d missed when jumping out of the back of the C-17 Globemaster III.

That incredible sense of flying.