Bring On the Dusk (10 page)

Eleven hostages recovered, check.

Twenty-seven to go.

The next site would require different tactics.

Claudia was used to thinking in sorties. When the Marines went in somewhere heavy—where the lines were drawn and the troops engaged—helicopters flew sorties. Load up with ammo, fly in to provide close fire support, cycle back to the airbase or the ship when out of ammo or fuel, then repeat as often as necessary.

SOAR thought in strikes and operations. Need a hostage rescued? A bad guy targeted? Intel gathered? The 160th was your team. She knew her role during the first strike of this operation was to deliver and retrieve, assuming everything went according to plan, which it had.

Now the flying would become more interesting.

“We lost starlight. The storm front is moving in as predicted.” Claudia greeted Michael as he climbed aboard. “A night parachute jump, one kilometer sprint, and sanitizing a hostage site; you've had a very busy twenty minutes.”

“Had worse.” Michael began reloading his weapon as she lifted back into the night. As last aloft, her rotor wash erased any final impression of the Little Bird's skids or the now-rescued hostages. She noticed that Michael didn't need many rounds to reload his rifle. Generally, a great deal of lead flew through a battle scene for each person who was injured or killed. With Delta, two shots equaled a life almost every time.

Claudia had thought she was inured to it, to the price of battle. With Delta it was very up close and personal. That's what they were good at and known for. That would take some getting used to on her part.

“Why?” Michael reseated the full magazine into his rifle.

She tried to unravel what question Michael could possibly be asking. The storm front had been part of Michael's plan, so that wouldn't be it. Guessing was what Michael wanted her to be doing. So…not. It was probably about why she'd kissed him, but if that was it, he was going to have to ask. And maybe that would give her a little more time to decide why she had. No matter how right it felt, it had been stupid in many, many ways—one of which included a potential court martial and the ending of one or both of their careers.

“Use your words, Michael. Ask me the whole question.”

He leaned forward to look up at the pitch-black of the moonless and starless night as she turned southeast. This time she remained nap-of-earth—her maximum height fifty feet from the ground to the top of her rotor—and only then to clear a line of trees. Power lines in the deep Somali countryside weren't much of an issue. Mostly she stayed under twenty-five feet, which kept her skids about fifteen off the ground.

Claudia kept a special eye on the
Mayhem
to see what Trisha was doing. She was another five feet lower than Claudia, but they had a thirty-minute flight ahead and there was simply no need to work that hard until they were closer. Flying at that level used up “edge” too quickly. It was why snipers were only allowed to be “on target” for fifteen minutes at a time. After that, their skills decreased if they didn't get a rest break. Of course, Trisha appeared to be nothing but “edge.” Maybe she could sustain it forever.

Michael's protracted silence told her exactly what he was asking. It was about the kiss. Well, she certainly wasn't about to volunteer any more there. She should never have done it in the first place, but she'd been overwhelmed by the simple gift of silence he'd given her. It didn't hurt that he had so much integrity that it poured out of his very fingertips. So damn handsome too.

It wasn't an excuse—there was no sufficient cause for her to have crossed that line—but it was hard to regret that kiss. He hadn't pulled back either, not that she'd given him much chance.

The problem was that it was going to go further, much further. That fact was both beyond stupid and contained not the least little bit of regret. She'd start by…

She really had to stop thinking about it. But if it meant nothing, why could she remember every… Crap! She really was a basket case.
Just
fly
the
damn
machine,
Claudia.

At ten minutes and thirty miles out, Michael still hadn't asked the rest of his question and the feed from the Gray Eagle went dark. That meant the cloud ceiling was below the pre-agreed limit. Kara would keep the drone in the area, but it probably had done its duty for this operation. The first spattering raindrops struck the windscreen, then increased rapidly as he and Claudia flew toward the target area and deeper into the storm.

The night was so dark that Claudia was relying solely on instruments anyway and didn't need to see.

The display from the ADAS made for a very clear grayscale image of exactly what lay ahead. The cameras mounted outside her craft were offering her an exceptionally detailed real-time image of the terrain around her. Terrain-following radar simply couldn't match this, though she did appreciate its warnings when some obstacle cropped up.

She was on course and on mission plan. One of the skills drilled into her during training was how to hit any target within a thirty-second window, whether it was over the ridge or across the country.

At least she was on profile for her flight. Where she herself was going was anybody's guess. SOAR was supposed to help her life make more sense, not less. That was another reason she'd come over from the Marines. The distractions were supposed to be less in SOAR—her mission here would be to fly, not to follow a hundred Marine Corps rules and procedures. That part was off to a good start.

But after just forty-eight hours in theater, her own life was, for the first time since she'd held her own desert ceremony at thirteen, starting to spin out of her control.

* * *

Michael had counted on the rainstorm, now striking the laminate-glass windscreen as loudly as hail. Rainfall was a rare and inconsistent event throughout Somalia. The Mog, with its surrounding area, was the garden spot of the country, receiving almost twenty inches of rain each year—about the same as southern California, only without the major irrigation systems. In Somalia, the rain didn't even come all in one season.

But for tonight, the weather forecasters aboard the
Peleliu
had tracked a decaying cyclone and predicted it would be pushing some rough weather over southern Somalia.

Michael had been squatting in a hut in Buurhakaba last month when rainfall hit. At first, everyone streamed outside to wash themselves in the warm rain and collect water. Once they were clean and the water barrels were filled, they'd retreated inside—every single one. Even the al-Shabaab guards on the hostages he'd located at the outskirts of town.

And this storm was pushing a cold front along in the squall line. It would be sixty degrees, fifteen degrees cooler than the average low of seventy-five, for several hours as the storm passed through. No sane Somali would go out in such weather. He'd probably get frostbitten, or as good as, if he tried. The Somalis' circulation just wasn't up to fending off sixty-degree weather.

That's what he was counting on.

He tried to see ahead. He tried to anticipate each variation of the attack scenario. If the rain hadn't come…but it had, allowing him to shed a whole set of contingencies. He checked the gauge on the dash… Yes, the outside air temperature was also falling as predicted. The rain was heavier than anticipated. He considered flooding problems, visibility, effects of the moisture on firing accuracy.

Michael thought about the woman beside him and how she'd felt in his arms, offering him the best kiss of his life, and also that brief moment when he'd rested his hand on her arm and the powerful connection he'd felt to her.

He'd long since learned to let such thoughts flow over and through him, to acknowledge their existence and move on. Shoving them aside rarely worked; then they simply came back twofold.

Instead, he said thank you for the reminder of his own humanness and moved on.

“Use your words, Michael.” As if she were talking to a child. She knew exactly what he was asking and was making it clear he was going to have to work for it if he wanted to taste her stillness again. That was fine with him. One thing he'd learned when he joined The Unit all those years ago was that he knew how to get what he wanted. At the moment, that was two things: a mission and the woman beside him.

He also knew that Claudia would understand that the mission had to come first, which made him appreciate her all the more.

Three minutes and eight miles out, twenty-seven hostages to go, he double-checked his weapon. The weather was bucking the Little Bird. He stuck an elbow out into the wind through the missing door. The rain pounded against his battle gear with the force of a .22 shell—hard enough to knock his elbow back out of the airstream. Even with them moving at more than a hundred and fifty miles per hour, that was a heavy rainfall.

Two minutes out, he checked the other birds. The
May
, with Bill and Trisha aboard, had the point lead by two rotor diameters. Claudia was mirroring her closely, without all of that twitchy magic that was a part of Trisha's flying. A part of him wondered, just intellectual curiosity, if Claudia made love the way she flew, smooth and steady.

To his left were
Merchant
and
Mad
Max
. They each toted along two more D-boys in their tiny rear seats. There was no way they could have ridden the outside benches at these speeds in this storm. It would delay their exits from the aircraft for several seconds, but that had been accounted for.

One minute out. Claudia dropped another ten feet of altitude. If someone stood up unexpectedly from the occasional scrub brush, he was likely to get a skid in the head.

The rain continued to pound on the windscreen. Tin roofs—all of the huts in the key section of Buurhakaba had tin roofs. The driving rain would make a thunderous racket on the roofs, one far louder than the landing of the stealth helicopters in their courtyard. If the rain hadn't come, the D-boys would have fast-roped down three blocks away, but it had arrived and arrived hard.

Ten seconds out, the outskirts of town came into view. They flashed over the poorest houses with rough-thatched conical roofs over circular huts of stick and mud. Michael dropped his seat harness, raised his weapon to ready position, and stepped one foot out onto the skid as Claudia slowed. He ignored the bug-like stings of the flight-driven rain.

The conical buildings gave way to rectangular adobe ones with peaked tin roofs. The target square in front of the building that had held the hostages a week before appeared below. Thermal scans had confirmed that the main building still had a much higher than standard occupancy rate—which was saying something in Somalia—based on the heat radiation coming off the tin roof just before dawn this morning.

Claudia backed the helicopter from full flight to a standstill so sharply that he was almost thrown into the forward windscreen, would have been if he hadn't been expecting it.

He used that last gift of forward momentum to hit the ground running.

* * *

Claudia slid the cyclic forward and eased up on the collective even as the rear end of her skid brushed the earth. She rolled onto the front tip and climbed aloft again before Michael took three steps away.

Damn the man for not following up on his question. Damn him for having such perfect timing and athletic ability that she simply had to appreciate him anyway.

A big truck had been parked in the middle of the square. It was a large, flatbed cargo truck with wood-slat sides, probably for hauling al-Shabaab's illegal charcoal down to the Kismayu port. A smuggling operation that made a quarter of a billion dollars a year for the extremists, despite UN and Somali governmental sanctions.

One of the D-boys tried to hot-wire the truck, but it apparently wasn't going anywhere. That was going to be a problem.

Trisha was several seconds slower getting off the ground than Claudia had been, which did some nice things for Claudia's ego. Which also meant that she drew first fire. Rounds began pinging off
Maven
's windscreen.

The projection on the inside of her visor traced the rifle to the third window of the hostage building. Hitting it with a missile would be an unreasonable risk. Then in her night vision she saw the figure jerk backward, then collapse over the windowsill. She'd wager that he had a neat double-shot wound in his head.

Even masked by the rain, the shot had been enough to draw attention. A half-dozen buildings erupted with gunfire, most of it in no particular direction.

She needed permission to target them.

“Count is four low,” Michael squawked over the radio.

Crap! That meant that four hostages had been moved. It also meant no firing back at whole-building targets until the other four had been located. Now they had to back off and let the six D-boys do what they did. The streets were only going to heat up.

“Leave northwest route clear,” Michael ordered less than thirty seconds later. So, he'd learned something, and learned it fast. She would never ask how.

There were three other entrances to the square.

Claudia double-checked the compass because the four roads entering the courtyard were at odd angles. Then she launched a pair of FFAR Hydra rockets into the southwest intersection and two more to the south. Trisha gave the southeast approach the same treatment. The combined pairs of rockets delivered ten pounds of high explosive. That cut a deep enough crater to stop most vehicles. It also caught surrounding buildings on fire and would slow down anyone else coming in.

“We have thirteen ready for the square.” There were supposed to be seventeen, damn these militants. Couldn't they cooperate in their own demise any better than that?

Cataclysm
, another big Chinook, was supposed to come in. Justin in the
Calamity
Jane
was running the rescuees from the desert site out to the coast. No point in putting them at risk again. But there was no way that the
Cat
would fit with the big truck there.