Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) (9 page)

John still hadn’t pushed her. The man was decent down to his very core.

Connie cut across the parking lot between the temporary quarters to Grimm Hall for a meeting.

She would have to figure out how to thank him for that some day. And to thank him for coming to sit with her. The first time, when waves of the anger and sorrow and pain threatened to overwhelm her. The solo battle always wrung her dry. John had made it easier to face, or at least easier to ride through.

And the second time, just the easy companionship which was not something she was used to. And none of the pressure to get her in bed. She actually wouldn’t mind that so much with John, but the pressure got old real fast. She was pretty enough and she was Army and she was female. That put her front and center in most Army guys’ gun sights. And even when it was fun, it didn’t stay that way for long. Guys either got serious and she was never going there. Or they stopped caring it was her and just wanted a body shaped like a woman, and she had too much self-esteem for that.

But John didn’t bring the heat. He was just there, which was a gift.

Her only mistake had been trying to thank him with another kiss before they left the fence the second time. The impact hadn’t lessened in the slightest. Her body had roared aloft as her brain had settled into soft and quiet. She’d let the kiss build a bit. Hell, it had blown her away like a blowtorch finding jet fuel. She’d never felt anything like it.

Felt it still.

John’s kiss was a dangerous thing.

A lethal weapon.

A great power that could block her reason between one heartbeat and the next.

Despite doing her best to avoid him and his dangerous kiss since then—her own, personal version of Assessment Week that she wasn’t much enjoying—her body still flashed cold and hot every time she thought about him, which was a true challenge while they worked together each day.

In the narrow hall outside the main briefing room at Grimm Hall, they asked for her ID. That focused Connie’s attention back on the main track. This wasn’t some minor checkpoint, they were actually running her ID through a scanner and studying the on-screen results. Time to push John to a sidetrack. She rarely thought about only one thing at a time, but the primary focus of her mind should not be on a man she wasn’t planning to touch again. He was way too powerful. Way too dangerous.

Something unusual was up. They were already inside the SOAR perimeter inside Fort Campbell, but when they were done with her ID, they went to a finger scanner to confirm her identity.

After a solid week of training on the new ADAS equipment, the two DAP Hawk crews were ready for a serious test. However, the high security implied a mission, not a test. And that didn’t make sense. They weren’t ready for that yet.

Then they let her into the briefing room. In the center of a space that could seat twenty crews, she found a fight going on.

“No, Peter. Not no way. Not no how. This is not a safe flight.”

A man in an elegant suit and with dark hair that fell in a soft wave to his collar faced the shouting Major Beale but stood at perfect ease. This was a feat of daring Connie had trouble imagining. Clearly civilian, he must not know any better.

Major Henderson stood beside his wife, his arms folded across his chest, but incongruously, with a small smile on his lips. Several of the DAP crew members ranged nearby, mostly looking uncomfortable.

John came through the door behind Connie. She could feel him before she could see him. Her awareness of him had been instantaneous ever since their long chat and second kiss by the fence. A kiss that had left her breathless and on the verge of begging for more.

She no longer needed an ADAS helmet to know when he entered a room, shifted positions in the helicopter, looked at her. She’d tried to erase that portion of her brain’s operations, but that hadn’t worked. And with each passing day she became less sure that she wanted to.

“Em,” the suit addressed the Major with a dismissive tone that would have gotten a one-star general castrated. And yet he lived. That in itself was telling.

“You’ve always told me I didn’t have any appreciation for what you do because I never served. It’s a training mission. How dangerous could it be?”

“What’s the name of the hall you’re standing in?”

The suit glanced sideways at another suit, but the second guy was nearly as powerfully built as Big John if on a slightly shorter scale.

And, as the speaker turned, Connie saw one of the most famous profiles on the planet. She snapped to attention. She didn’t think, she simply did. Felt John do the same beside her. The Commander-in-Chief, President Peter Matthews, stood there in elegant profile. She’d seen him on a tiny video monitor at a mission briefing half a year ago. But here? In person? She remembered that he and Major Beale had an ease together, but she’d never known how much of one.

“You’re in Michael Grimm Hall,” the big Secret Service agent answered him. Now that he shifted, Connie could see the gun bulge in the man’s immaculate suit. He looked good in a suit. She did a mental shift. John would look amazing in a suit.

The President turned back to the Major, and her expression shifted even darker as she continued.

“Lieutenant Colonel Michael Grimm was a pioneer of SOAR and a pioneer of the Black Route. And it killed him and almost killed his copilot. People die on this flight.”

Black Route. Rumor said that the two Majors had gotten engaged while flying a Black Route, which made no sense at all. It ranked as the most vicious test of any helicopter team on the planet. Developed by SOAR for SOAR. No one pushed the limits as they did. Nap of Earth, rarely over a hundred feet in elevation. A Black Route covered a thousand miles at night with three landings, each plus or minus thirty seconds.

“Sir…” Everyone turned to look at Connie before she knew she’d spoken. “Nine helicopters have crashed on this route. Seven of those sustained at least one death and all sustained injuries. There have also been numerous mechanical failures from the strain requiring dangerous auto-rotation landings. Sir.”

Beale nodded to her over the President’s shoulder. Over his other shoulder, Major Henderson’s smile grew. It implied a sense of humor he rarely showed, but Connie couldn’t fit it into the situation.

“Out of how many thousands of flights? Is it more dangerous than getting on an airplane?” The President’s question came fast, a quick thinker.

Connie ran some quick estimates in her head. “Less safe than an airplane. Far less safe than Air Force One, which has yet to report a single operational incident in seventy years of operation. But,” she shrugged an apology to Major Beale, “statistically, if you discount the 1980s, the first ten years of skills and equipment development, Black Route is only a little less safe than a car. The numbers change drastically for combat, but Black Route training does bring out the best in a team and no one is firing at us during a training flight.”

“There will be this time,” the Major growled.

Connie couldn’t think of what to say to that. Live fire during training?

The President turned back to face the Majors. “Only simulated rounds. We could order them only to fire at Mark. That would work for me. They could even use live ammo for that.”

Major Henderson laughed. “Still pissed about losing at poker, are we?”

“I’ve been playing more lately, like a chance to win a bit of my own back.” There was some other level going on here that Connie couldn’t follow, but it appeared to be ticking off Major Beale. Never a good choice.

“Only if my crew can play as well.” Henderson winked at Connie over the President’s shoulder.

They’d played twice since the flight. Even without Henderson’s wife behind him, Connie had won neatly, pocketing fifty of his hard-played dollars each time. It didn’t anger him, rather it intrigued him. She didn’t like being thought of as a puzzle to be solved, but it was a way she’d found to fit in with the people around her and she’d not give that up any more easily than the Major gave up his money.

“It’s a date.” The President.

Wait a minute. She was supposed to play poker with the President?

Then the Commander-in-Chief faced Major Beale. “I’m coming, Em. Now can we get this mission under way?”

The Major clenched her jaw for several moments, turned to her husband who merely shrugged.

“The President’s as stubborn as you are, honey. I wonder which one of you learned it from the other.” He took one step farther from her. “He’s nicer about it, though.”

He hadn’t moved far enough. Emily’s four-finger jab caught him in the ribs before he could block. He winced as if it really hurt.

Damn, she was fast.

John checked the last of the weapons. Their armament was all in place. For this exercise they’d dismounted one of the big machine guns. Now they had a rack of four Hellfire tank-killer missiles, a nineteen-rocket pod of Hydra 70s, the Vulcan 30 mm cannon, and a laser where they would normally hang a 20 mm chain gun for cockpit control. It would let them fire harmlessly at friendlies busy playing an unfriendly role.

His and Connie’s miniguns were locked and not loaded, though spare ammo lay close at hand. Instead, a laser had been mounted in tandem with the six barrels for simulated warfare. For the twentieth time he checked the two observer seats now rigged in the center of the Black Hawk’s cargo bay. Standard combat seats. He’d half expected them to put in airliner seats; this was the President after all. But they’d left in the ones used by the vendor’s technicians during testing and calibration.

Connie finished the preflight check of the non-weapons systems and arrived outside the cargo door.

“Here.” She handed him a stack of barf bags.

“Good one.” He slid them into the elastic ceiling mesh where he or Connie could grab them easily for distribution.

She paused there. She had something more to say.

He waited. He’d learned that offering her a bit of silence was pretty much the only way to get her to speak when she was unsure of something.

“ADAS cameras. Stealth rotors. President riding along.”

As she always did, she’d used the minimum number of words to set his thinking on a whole new track. He’d been excited by the new technology. And figured the President was just coming along for the ride.

Not Connie. She’d connected the pieces and just given him the heads-up that a major mission was in the works. One that needed a quieted helicopter, which meant going somewhere they weren’t supposed to be or perhaps had never been before. The new cameras meant they were going somewhere deep where other feeds, like high-circling command platforms, wouldn’t be available. And the President. That meant it was going to be damned serious.

A deep breath and a bit of a shrug, though John felt the pre-mission tension settle on his shoulders. It was what they’d signed up for when they went SOAR, but heavy missions always carried their own pressures.

He didn’t question her conclusion for a second; he knew better than to do that. Always thinking, that girl.

Watching her, he’d learned. At the last poker game, he couldn’t beat the Major, but he could read Connie. At least on occasion. He didn’t yet know how, but his intuition usually warned him when she was way out in the wind on a hand.

He could read her a bit, except when she looked at him. What he’d at first thought was a blank stare, he now knew to be an intensely analytical process of assessment and review. But when faced with the wonder of those eyes, he couldn’t tell what she was thinking at all.

Since their second kiss, she had returned to Sergeant Connie Davis mode. Calm, steady, the safety back in place, all weapons secure. He liked to think there was something more there, something more behind those steadily assessing eyes. Did they see some shortcoming in him? He and Connie hadn’t found a moment alone. But was it because they hadn’t tried or because they were crashing into their racks at night as exhausted from training as they had been from combat just a week before?

Before she could move away, he whispered her name, “Connie?”

Those dark amber eyes turned upon him. And Sergeant Connie Davis was nowhere to be seen despite the flight suit and survival vest. Instead, the woman who’d kissed him twice now stood just two feet away.

“Yes, John.”

Then she turned and was gone.

It took him a moment to realize that she’d made it a statement and thereby answered his question. The one he hadn’t known he was asking.

Yes, she was thinking of him. And with the way he was discovering her mind worked, maybe she was thinking of him even more than he was thinking of her.

That was hard to imagine.

The takeoff still sounded odd to Connie’s ears. The new rotors and blades had made the Black Hawk sound different. Over a hundred yards away, they’d be almost unidentifiable directionally. The noise signature had been changed drastically, and large caps over the rotor hubs would significantly decrease their radar signature.

“Half-stealth,” the Sikorsky techs had called it. There hadn’t been time for a major overhaul—replacement of all the skin panels, radar-deflecting enclosures for the weapons, wheels that folded into the fuselage, and so forth—but the Hawks were now significantly quieter. She liked the feel of that.

That they’d only taken the time to install “half-stealth” said that a real mission wasn’t merely pending, but rather that it was pending soon. A hot one.

“Okay,
Vengeance
.” Major Emily Beale’s voice was clear over the intercom. “We still don’t know what’s coming, but we know it will be over hostile and unfamiliar terrain. It will probably be longer than a typical mission with multiple refuelings. This flight is intended as a shake-out of new equipment against friendly forces before we face the unfriendly. So let’s show them what SOAR is made of.”

A round of “Yes, sir!” echoed back. Connie looked past the back of Clay’s copilot seat next to her shoulder and far enough around to see the Major in quarter profile. Her thinly gloved hands rested lightly on the collective and cyclic controls. Her attention was straight forward, all of the woman hidden by her armor, vest, and helmet. She was the consummate commander and pilot.

Connie twisted far enough to glance at John seated back-to-back to her, his shoulders so broad that one brushed the back of Beale’s seat. Already he was watching out the far side of the chopper, even though they were barely off the Fort Campbell tarmac.

Right. She faced her own window and stared out at the falling night. The place they always attacked was where you felt safest. She flicked on the ADAS feed to her visor and the night was replaced with a thousand shades of gray. A quick glance to the rear showed the Fort Campbell field falling astern. They were moving fast at barely fifty feet up. A narrow road slipped by below. Connie glanced down to see her spot by the fence—hers and John’s.

Even as she considered that she’d like to try a third kiss with John, she spotted the figure. A bright thermal image, nearly white against the colder ground. Just outside the fence line, standing, shifting to follow their flight.

“Sniper low!” she called out.

Beale hammered the chopper to the side as a dazzle of red light from the ground, shown by the loose evening fog, missed her face by mere feet, a dazzling red dot on the ceiling of the cargo bay. Connie zapped the target with the laser alongside her minigun. The sniper held his rifle to the side in defeat. May have even waved before the trees blocked him and her section of fence from view.

Major Beale continued pushing the Hawk hard as they flew west on the mission profile. Slipping the bird one way, then the other. Rise and turn. Working it. Training her body until the different reactions of the modified Hawk were once again second nature.

The next attack came a long time later, so long that complacency would have slipped in before Connie went through SOAR training. A hundred different lessons had beaten all the way down to her subconscious that there was no such thing as “safe” when you were in flight. Right after they passed by Jefferson City, Missouri, bright-green tracer rounds slashed across Connie’s helmet display, intentionally wide misses but close enough for the targeting computer to trace back to their origin and provide her with a moving bull’s-eye on her display. In a second the laser mounted on her gun was hot and she shot off a quick three-round burst to where her helmet identified the most likely source.

She glanced at the upper-right corner of her helmet’s visor to read the information scroll. They were over the Skelton National Guard Training Site. Never heard of it. A report flashed in, briefly lighting the lower-right corner of her vision.

“Kill confirmed.” That meant she’d landed at least one shot within ten meters of the target vehicle that had fired the tracer. With a minigun at full fire, she’d have sheeted the area with flying lead.

She heard a sound, someone clapping.

She turned to it, and all she saw was Major Henderson’s Black Hawk flying tight on their tail and thirty degrees to the side in close formation. Shifting her focus from the ADAS display to the reality beyond her visor, she saw the President’s hands returning to his lap.

Another shot, an out-of-focus blur across her visor, and she was too late to target it.

Thankfully, the Major rolled them down into a gully between two low hills, moving them out of range. The training system didn’t mark them as hit.

Connie turned away, determined not to be distracted again. Civilians were a real problem.

The flight continued with little change.

At Nickell Barracks Training Center in Salina, Kansas, they swooped a dozen feet over a very startled guard shack, pulled up, and slid to an abrupt halt. The two Black Hawks each touched one wheel down on the sloped rooftop of Nickell Hall. Fourteen seconds ahead of schedule, they waited until zero time and left twelve seconds later, long enough for a whole squad to pile aboard each bird.

That close, the rotors were loud enough to draw people outdoors to see what was happening. But the choppers had been too quiet for anyone to think of them as being right on their roof. As the Black Hawks disappeared into the darkness, she could see in the ADAS that the soldiers below were looking in every direction except the right one.

She’d stood on the ground at Fort Campbell as the DAPs had been flown overhead with their new blades, and even though she knew the sound was unusual, she had trouble crediting the poor reactions of trained soldiers.

Three times they rose up for midair refuel. This was a real stretch of a flight. Usual Black Route protocols were a thousand miles, two refuels, and five to six hours of flight time. Tonight, they were profiled to arrive at the Nevada Test and Training Range after sixteen hundred miles of flight and eight hours in the air. In full fighting trim.

As they rose above the Utah-Nevada border for the fourth and last refuel, Connie glanced forward. On the lower edge of her vision, she saw the refueling probe extended forward, reaching out to just past the forward edge of the rotor blades. This was something she’d never seen clearly from the backseat of a helicopter.

A KC-135 Stratotanker trailed a pair of long umbilicals from the tip of either wing with target baskets at the end. Even as she watched, Major Beale drove forward and dead-centered her target with the 454 pounds of force needed to latch into the fueling system. A glance to the right past John, through the hull and past the weapon’s pylons, revealed Major Henderson doing the same; two Hawks, each trailing just behind either wingtip of the Stratotanker. With the valves interlocked, fuel would be roaring down into their tanks.

She turned to check on their passengers. Secret Service Agent Adams’s jaw was locked, perhaps a little too tightly. It was unclear whether he was fighting air sickness or still upset at the President’s “needless exposure to undue hazard” he had voiced before the flight.

The President appeared to be in fine health, though his demeanor was much more serious.

“Sergeant Davis, is this what every day is like?”

“Well, Mr. President, first, I’d point out that it is night.”

A bark of laughter from Major Beale sounded over the intercom.

Connie hadn’t meant to be funny but could see how it could be taken that way, now that she thought about it.

“And second, there’s a difference here. We know this mission. We also know that those targeting us have been instructed not to hit us. Short of a mechanical failure, there are few unknowns and little hazard.”

“Can you describe the difference to a layman?”

She puzzled over that.

John answered for her.

“Imagine, Mr. President, that you are going down the Grand Staircase of the White House. You’ve done it a thousand times, but think back to the first time. I expect it felt foreign or a little peculiar.”

“Are you kidding? Lincoln trod those same stairs. Wilson, Truman… Scared the hell out of me.”

“Good, better. Now, imagine that you’re taking that first-time walk down those stairs and you’re surrounded by the best protection ever designed by man.” John patted the inside of the Black Hawk’s fuselage.

Connie could see the President nod to the agent seated beside him. This was probably the least protection the President had traveled with since the day he was nominated. A single agent, and he’d chosen this man. That was high praise indeed.

“And imagine that maybe, just maybe, someone is waiting to kill you on the first landing and you can’t see them coming.”

Another bark of laughter sounded over the intercom from Major Beale. “He doesn’t need any imagination to picture that, does he, Frank?”

The Secret Service agent merely growled in response as the President laughed.

John paused, but no one was explaining the joke.

“Now, sir,” John continued after a moment in that deep voice of his, “imagine those two feelings combined for hours at a time. That monotony of climbing and descending those steps a thousand times, knowing that despite your training and your protection detail, the next instant may hold death even if you’re good enough, even if you’re fast enough.”

The President was silent for a long moment.

“Is that the way it is, Em?”

“He pretty much nailed it.”

Connie would never have thought to couch it in such terms. Never thought to describe it in the President’s world. Never would have thought about the other person’s point of view.

John did. He always did. For the hundredth time she was taken back to that ridiculous story he’d told her at the fence. When she couldn’t find herself, when the pain was winning, he had reached out and told her that sometimes the world didn’t have to make sense, at least not from one point of view. Those eighty soaked grunts on the ground had their worldview shattered in that moment, safe and dry one moment, just hanging out and resting up while the drill instructors did what drill instructors do. One of the comforting touch-points of Army training, being yelled at by your DI.

Until the blue heavens had opened with a deluge. And the drill instructors, who had “stood up through much worse,” laughed.

“But why?” the President asked. “I’ve asked Em, but I still don’t get it. You, Davis, why do you do it?”

There was a silence on the intercom. She could feel the others turning to her. Of course, they would know this about each other. She wanted to say something flip like Crazy Tim would toss off or funny but heartwarming like Big John. Something wise and thoughtful like Major Beale, with that touch of inner passion and spine of pure steel.

She searched for any answer other than the only one to be found.

“The best man I ever knew, my father, was murd—killed by one of these machines. I need to conquer it to prove that a Davis can’t be beaten by a machine.”

She turned away to face the night outside of the aircraft. Blinked hard against burning eyes. The silence that followed was almost harder to bear than the speaking of it.

She focused on the changing feel of the Black Hawk’s flight as it gulped down a ton of Jet A fuel. Focused on testing her memory of the wiring diagrams for the ADAS and how those systems juxtaposed the underlying networks. And how the data systems aligned with power and control wiring. And that with fuel and hydraulics.

By the time she could see the entire Hawk’s overlapping systems in her mind’s eye, the entire Hawk’s nervous and circulatory systems, her physical eyes no longer stung. Her vision had cleared. Once again she could glance forward and see the Hawks disconnect from the tanker and the refueling probe withdraw and tuck back into its casing, retracting out of the ADAS view.

Once again her field of view was clear.