Bring On the Dusk (11 page)

“Fire in the hole,” Claudia called out and watched as the gathered team of Delta and hostages ducked back into a building. No need for him to ask what she was thinking. No need for her to tell him to clear the street and then wait. They were in perfect sync. She didn't need to know it to feel its truth.

“Do it,” Michael called.

Didn't have to tell her twice. She hammered a Hellfire antitank missile into the truck, aiming for the driver's cab. The Little Bird twitched as three percent of her weight took off in a rocket-propelled flare. The Hellfire did its best to break the sound barrier before it pummeled into the truck.

A pillar of fire erupted and momentarily blanked Claudia's night vision. The cameras compensated and recovered from the change in ambient light fast enough for her to see the engine block embed in the wall of a building across the square. The rear of the truck had been flattened. The cab was nowhere to be seen, probably just tiny shreds in the bottom of the crater.

There was no secondary explosion of a fuel tank. That's why the D-boy couldn't hot-wire it—no gas.

She spotted a rooftop water tank. Ignoring the rifle fire, most of which was missing her blacked-out bird, she slid sideways across the courtyard to change her angle on the tank. A quick burst with the minigun punched a hole in the side facing the square. A couple thousand gallons of carefully hoarded water splashed into the square and killed off the worst of the flames.

Cataclysm
came down fast. Her rotor wash fanned the flames, but there was too little left to matter. She had her rear gangway lowered and aimed toward the doorway where the hostages had taken refuge. The pilot kept her front end flying rather than setting down the front wheels, as there were a crater and some lingering fires where his front end should land. The hostages were aboard in moments and
Cat
clawed back aloft.

The D-boys moved fast out of the northwest corner of the square. That meant that the last four were being held close by, if their information was good. With a lone surviving militant facing a ring of angry Delta Force operators, their information was bound to be as good as it could be.

Claudia punched down a pair of rockets to close the courtyard exit behind them.

A hail of fire from the south side of the square was cut off when Trisha replied with two more rockets right through the front door.

Claudia pulled back up until she was high enough to be invisible in the dark but could shadow the team's movement on the ground.

They fought at a dead run. Despite the suppression on the rifles knocking off most of the visual flash, she could see the small flashes of heat signature with each doubled shot. The two men at the rear ran mostly backward, actively firing as they moved. Even the best of the Marines didn't do that trick. Not if they were hitting their targets.

A pair of technicals figured out how to circle around the destroyed main square. These Toyota pickups each had big machine guns mounted in their beds and a half-dozen other gunman perched along the sides of the truck bed.

“These are mine,” Trisha declared in a voice so harsh that it couldn't be just an effect of the encrypted radio. This sounded personal.

Claudia watched as Trisha zoomed straight up over them, flipped the
May
's tail up, and dove straight down from only a couple hundred feet above. On the descent, she fired a rocket into each and then tore up what remained with her M134 miniguns. She only had a few seconds, which was a couple hundred rounds from each gun. For a solo pilot, it was an incredible maneuver backed up by perfect gunnery.

Claudia added that to her mental list of Trisha-tricks to practice.

The technicals disintegrated as men dove clear, those still capable of doing so. Trisha had already recovered from her radical move and had switched over to clean up on the gun crews who had managed to dive aside.

Claudia turned her attention back to the team. Wherever they were heading, they were sure of themselves. She held back to provide them with air cover but not so close that she'd give away their presence to whoever waited ahead.

* * *

Michael could feel Claudia flying over his right shoulder as they approached the building one of the guards had revealed, after the two rounds in the shoulder that made him drop his rifle and his eyes crossed to stare at the barrel pressed against his forehead.

Fifth house on the left. Four women—the other hostages hadn't seen them in a week. He couldn't think about what might have happened to them; he simply needed to get them aloft and out to the carrier. They would be taken care of there.

His job was to get them out.

The gunfire had died behind them and nothing new had opened up before them. Not yet. The driving rain had muffled the battle in the square. The building ahead was a two-story affair, perhaps eight or ten rooms, a mansion by local standards. He wished he could get up on the roof, but he didn't have time. Or did he?

Michael wound his arm over his head in the signal for a crane lift and then pointed back at the intersection they'd just crossed through. He tapped Bill on the shoulder. With hand signs he told Bill to lead the assault into the building in twenty seconds, then turned and sprinted back just as Claudia touched down in a space that couldn't be more than a yard past her rotor tips.

He jumped on the skid and grabbed the door frame for a handhold.

No instruction needed, she moved over the building. He could see her clearly in his night vision, so integrated into her helicopter that he almost couldn't tell where woman ended and mechanical extension of the woman's will began. And Claudia packed a lot of will.

She didn't take him in close, but crossed over the building at seventy feet up. He wanted to arrive as undetected as possible. She had a fast rope on the copilot's side of the bird.

With a jerk, he pulled the rope loose. Twenty meters of forty-millimeter line uncoiled to dangle from where one end attached just above the door frame.

He wrapped his gloved hands around the rope even as it uncoiled. Sliding down, he was standing on the building's roof three seconds later. Claudia kept moving, releasing the rope into the street below as she continued flying along. Anyone inside who'd heard her would think she'd passed them by.

Despite her beautiful exterior and quiet manner, she was deeply battle experienced and thought very fast. He wasn't sure he'd have come up with hitting the water tank to suppress the truck fire even if he'd been in position to see it.

Michael found a trapdoor and dropped through to the second story, doing a land and roll on the floor. The two guards sleeping there never managed to reach their weapons.

He heard gunfire below as he cleared the hall, and then the next room. It was the third room on the right where he found what he'd been hoping wasn't there. It was against al-Shabaab rules and typical pirate practice, but that hadn't stopped these kidnappers. Four narrow beds with straw-tick mattresses, and the four women naked and tied in place.

The one man in the room died with his pants pulled only halfway up his legs. Michael pulled out a knife and slashed all of the women's bonds, keeping a close eye on the door. The battle below gained volume.

How could he move four women?

“This is a U.S. military rescue operation. Can any of you walk?”

“Walk?” one of the women spat out. “Show us where, and we can run.”

Two of them had to help a third, but the one who'd spoken almost charged out into the hall ahead of him.

“Upper hall, northeast corner, four in tow,” he announced over the radio.

* * *

“Confirm northeast,” Claudia replied.

“Confirm,” Michael told her.

In answer, she shot a gaping hole in the second story of the south face of the building.

“
Cat
,” she called over the radio. “Tailgate on the south face now. Now. Now.” There was no courtyard in the immediate area big enough for the big M-47G to land. There was also still a gun battle on the floor below, not a good place for hostages.

She pulled back out of the way and into the darkness as the Chinook came to hover with her rear ramp against the second-story wall and her rotor swirling mere feet over the roof. The pilot had nailed his position without hesitation, despite sitting sixty feet away in the cockpit with his back turned toward the wall and being wholly dependent on the ramp gunner's directions. Damn, but she loved flying with SOAR.

She and Trisha focused on taking out the shooters who were cropping up to either side.

“Four clear,” Michael announced as the Chinook pulled away.

Claudia closed her eyes for a moment in relief. Wait! “Four clear.” That meant Michael was still… Damn him!

She could see by the flashes from the ground-floor windows of the building that a full-scale firefight was going on inside the lower story. Of course Michael would go back in to help his team. But how could she help him?

She hovered, safely fifty feet into the dark above the roof, and glared down at it. Any action she took against the building would threaten the D-boy team.

He'd be coming down the stairs behind the Somali pirates. These weren't even pirates; these were professional criminals who had crossed the wrong military force.

All she could do was make sure that no one else joined the fight. So she set herself to a circling fire patrol, using a hail of bullets to warn off any who approached the building. Trisha set up to circle directly opposite her. Between them, they kept the main building isolated despite the rapidly escalating interest and gunfire from the surrounding areas.

The firefight didn't last long. Caught between Bill and the other D-boys' hammer and Michael's knife, it was over…in the longest sixty seconds of Claudia's life.

The full team returned to the roof, and the Black Hawk
Vicious
came down and scooped them all aboard. Then the whole flight, as a group, turned for the coast with her and Trisha flying rearguard.

They'd departed to the east, which would make sense for the closest part of the coast, in case anyone was left alive to report where they were heading. Then they curved around to due south. That should make anyone looking for them search the wrong piece of the sky. Still, they stayed low for the thirty minutes it took to reach their final goal.

Right on cue, as they crossed over Barawe and the coast, Sly Stowell reported the successful recovery of the last ten hostages from the heart of that city. They'd timed it so that if there were problems, the SOAR and Delta contingent would be directly overhead to help.

They weren't needed.

Exactly as he had in the attack six months before, Sly had driven his hundred-ton hovercraft over the beach and right up the main street. He'd knocked a few houses down and crushed any vehicles that were in the way. Ramming straight through the security wall, he drove right into the compound where the hostages had been held.

Dropping the forward ramp, he'd disgorged fifty U.S. Rangers backed up by a pair of armored Humvees each carrying twin M2 .50-caliber machine guns. He also had a pair of ten-foot-long GAU-13 30 mm rotary cannons that he'd “been dying to try out.” The Somalis gave him plenty of excuses, but not for long.

The city that had successfully repulsed SEAL Team Six in 2013, when they'd come after these same hostages, gave them up to Operation Sleight of Hand.

Claudia and Trisha, with Lola above them in the DAP Hawk
Vengeance
, flew escort until the massive landing hovercraft was once again skimming over the ocean waves at seventy knots with every person accounted for.

Claudia still had more than twenty minutes of fuel, though very little of her ammunition left by the time they reached the
Peleliu.

She also carried a whole lot more to think about than when she'd started the night.

Back on the
Peleliu
, rocking on the rough seas just beyond the tail end of the storm, Chief Warrant Lola Maloney stalked across the wet deck toward Claudia before she even had a chance to shut down her craft.

“Captain Casperson!”

Claudia snapped to attention and barely resisted saluting at her commander's sharp tone. “Ma'am!”

“You're really pissing me off, Casperson.”

Claudia let herself relax just a little. Last time Maloney had used that tone, it had turned out to be a compliment. She really hoped that was the case this time as well.

“Do you know what that is?” Lola was pointing back toward the
Vengeance
. She didn't give Claudia time to answer, punching her words at her. “
That
is a Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk. It is the most lethal helicopter this planet has ever produced. It is presently the one and only stealth model in existence. Now how am I supposed to explain to
my
commander that an entire operation was successfully completed from which I returned with a hundred percent of my ammunition still in my bird. Between you and Trisha, you didn't leave me one lousy, goddamned shot. Would that have killed you?”

“Uh.” Was her commander crazy? Or did she just have a really twisted sense of humor? Claudia rolled the dice and decided to bank on the latter. “Apparently, ma'am, yes. It would have killed me to leave a shot for you. I would have been deeply shamed and laughed at throughout not just the 5D, but all of SOAR as well. I'm just happy to have a commander willing to bear that burden of becoming a laughingstock for me, ma'am.” She kept her tone serious and remained at attention.

“Shee-it!” Lola drawled out in an expressive sound that could only come from the depths of the Louisiana swamp. The smile that broke out across her features showed that Lola Maloney could also have pursued a career as a highly successful model if she'd so chosen. “Keep that crap up, Casperson, and I just might get to like you. You're supposed to really screw up a couple times so that I can straighten you out.”

“What?” Claudia tried to unravel the last part of that but couldn't make sense of it.

Lola leaned back against the nose of the
Maven
, suddenly as at ease as if they'd been sitting in a diner rather than on the deck of a ship of war.

“There's kind of a SOAR tradition in the Black Adders.”

“Black Adders?” Claudia relaxed into parade rest. Totally adrift, she didn't feel comfortable mirroring Lola's casual attitude. Claudia's years in the Marines had made parade rest a wholly comfortable position anyway, even for casual conversation.

“A holdover from when Major Mark ‘Viper' Henderson formed the 5D. Before my time, but I hear that there was some rather heated debate about what kind of viper he was. We were almost named the Death Adders. Cobras were out for obvious reasons having to do with those piddling little helicopters you used to fly for the jarheads.”

Only a woman who flew a DAP Hawk for a living would call the lethal SuperCobras flown by the Marine Corps “piddling.”

“I guess ‘asp' wasn't considered macho enough because it would connect him to Cleopatra's death and Elizabeth Taylor's breasts. Though you think they'd have chosen the asps for that reason alone. Anyway, they wound up as the Black Adders. My husband actually has a tattoo of a flying snake with Mr. Bean's nose.”

Claudia couldn't stop her snort of laughter. She'd been totally addicted to Rowan Atkinson's British comedies including
Black
Adder
. It had been her one, unforgivably geeky vice as a kid. The show was also on PBS, one of the only television channels to make it through the hills to Bumble Bee.

“I know. Tim is pitiful, but I love him anyway. And what he can do with an M134 minigun is just poetry. He'd be our best shot if it wasn't for Kee. Back to my point. Something about the Black Adders attracts all of the real misfits. Kee, Connie, Trisha, and myself—all unholy messes. Tradition is, Major Emily Beale always straightened us out. When she retired, I kind of took over the role. If you keep flying clean and true, I'm worried that you won't fit in, and I won't have anything to do at all, especially since you won't let me shoot.”

“I'll try to screw up soon. Just for you, ma'am.”

“You do that.” Lola stood and stretched, highlighting her exceptional figure despite her flight suit. Then she looked Claudia square in the eye. “Great job tonight.”

And Claudia felt about ten feet tall and able to leap small buildings with only a little assistance.

* * *

Michael felt a little ashamed at how disappointed he felt the instant that it was clear Claudia had set her lunch tray down with the other women of SOAR for the after-mission meal. It was the first meal they hadn't shared in the three days she'd been aboard. Of course the last two days had included nothing but mission planning.

Oh-two-hundred—close enough to call it lunchtime in their flipped-clock world. They weren't even supposed to be starting the mission until now, but the weather's arrival at Buurhakaba had pushed the timetable forward. Now their birds were already put away and everyone was showered and changed.

He shouldn't feel quite so put out. Trisha was married to Bill, yet she too sat with the other women. That left Michael and Bill to eat alone in their corner. There was a scattering of women in the ship's mess, as there always was. Navy ships had been skewing that way a lot longer than other services. Special Operations? Not so much.

But the five women of SOAR were a real standout group. Not a one of them fit the “classic” military mold any more than a Delta operator fit it. They all wore their hair long and loose, except for Claudia's ponytail, and they were all more casual than any of the other women. Captain Moretti's hair down to her waist was the most impressive, but she struck him as exactly the sort of wildcard who would do something like that given the least excuse.

Special Operations Forces, especially the highly specialized teams like SEALs and Delta, broke the mold partly to blend in while on an undercover mission and partly because they could get away with it. He knew from studies that the ability to thumb their noses at the military establishment was a key element in most Special Operations Forces' psychological profiles.

Some SOAR fliers followed suit to more closely identify with their customers. The men and women of the 5D had taken that opportunity completely to heart.

The fact that every one of them had a minimum eight years in the service and thousands upon thousands of flight hours, in a type of craft where fifteen hundred hours was a common career high-water mark, seemed to shine off them. Special Ops automatically selected for exceptional physical ability and endurance, as well as significantly above-average intelligence. Genetically, this often led to particularly handsome individuals as well. But even with that, these women were incredible.

And each was as distinct as her looks.

Trisha with her nearly ADHD mannerisms that only seemed to quiet around her husband.

Lola Maloney, who was casually everyone's best friend while remaining the unquestioned commander.

Kee Stevenson who, in addition to being a crack shot, was the sharp edge of the knife, softening only around her adoptive daughter, Dilya.

Connie Davis was even more silent than Claudia, but it was a different silence. Even looking at Connie, you could see her watching and processing everything, and storing all of it in her capacious photographic memory for careful consideration.

Even young Dilya was distinct—practically the sixth woman of SOAR at the rate she was growing up—displaying some of Connie's quiet observation mixed with her adoptive father's playfulness. She didn't radiate teenage angst, but she'd had to grow up young and fast just to survive. Still unformed in many ways, she was becoming an interesting young woman in her own right. It would be fun to see how she grew and changed over the years. He'd probably still be friends with Kee and could see Dilya grow, Michael thought.

Friends.

He didn't think about friends much. He'd separated from his original team in Delta to become a permanent liaison to the 5D after Emily Beale had saved him on a cliff high in the Hindu Kush. He'd made sure she was awarded the Silver Star for that particular maneuver; it was the bravest and hairiest piece of flying he'd seen, ever.

When she and Mark retired from SOAR, he'd thought about leaving the 5D and returning to The Unit. But he'd shared a lot of meals with Kee Smith, right through her finding Dilya and falling in love with Archie Stevenson. Connie's father had saved his life years before at the cost of his own. And though he and Connie spoke little, he felt an obligation to watch over Ron Davis's daughter. Trisha was an ex-lover and a good friend. As good as any he had. Then Bill had come aboard—amazing Delta material with the right training—and married Trisha.

For the first time in his career, he'd made friends outside Delta. Pretty much the first time in his life. Like Dilya, he'd been raised around adults. His parents were professors, and the youngest kids he hung around with, even as a little boy, were college students.

By eighteen, he'd sat in on enough classes that he managed to test out for a college degree, graduating with top scores at nineteen with a degree in military history—a first for the university—built almost wholly of independent study. He'd also done ROTC just to keep himself busy and discovered that he liked the structure and the discipline. But to call any of the college kids friends would be a stretch. He'd been too young and too good. He hadn't been popular, but young Michael Gibson had been too tough for any of them to mess with despite his youth.

He returned his attention to Claudia and tried to analyze his feelings about her. It wasn't a familiar exercise.

Women, in his world, simply “were.” If they performed their duties well, gender wasn't an issue for him. If they wanted to share some time together, well, he certainly enjoyed that part of it too, as long as they were outside his command structure. One of the advantages of serving in The Unit was that there were no women in his command structure, none at all.

When the relationships ended after a dinner, a night, or a month, then they were over and it was time to move along.

Claudia wasn't a friend, or didn't feel like one. She'd been here three days, and they barely knew each other. Yet it felt as if they did.

“Kinda smacks you upside the head, doesn't it?”

Michael looked up at Bill, who sat beside him facing the room. “Up” was the operative word. At six-three, Bill was one of the biggest soldiers in The Unit. Hell, at five-ten, Michael was bigger than most operators. The demands of Delta selection and missions trended toward the light and wiry. It had given Michael pause when recruiting Bill from the SEALs, but the man had kept proving himself several times over.

“What smacks you?”

Bill nodded toward the table of SOAR women. “I know the look.”

“What look?” Michael didn't have a look…did he?

“The look like someone just smacked you upside the head. I remember the first time I met Trisha. Goddamn little Irish spitfire who insisted on rescuing my sorry Scottish ass no matter how much I complained about it. The moment she pulled off her helmet and I saw she wasn't another air jock, I knew I was gone. The spark way she looked and the way she moved… Well, I was so gone from that moment that I fought against it way past common sense. You've got that look.”

Michael studied his lunch, a roast beef sandwich au jus with all the trimmings. It sat there mostly uneaten, accusing him of being deeply distracted. The op had been intense. The hyperawareness necessary to rescue three separate hostage groups, two of them in heavy firefights, should have his body screaming for calories.

He took an experimental bite of his sandwich. He could feel his body absorbing the calories greedily, so the problem lay in his brain. He looked back up as he chewed and noted Claudia watching him.

She didn't shy off, look away, or play coy.

“What about her?” He soft-voiced his question to Bill even though no one else sat at their table. No hard consonants and a higher tone kept his voice from carrying more than a few feet.

“What do you mean?”

“Does she have the look?”

Bill studied her without studying her, a practiced Delta skill. After too long a pause, he huffed out a breath.

“Damned if I can tell, Michael. I didn't know that Trisha could even stand me until we kissed the first time. Surprised the shit out of me.”

“Yeah, I know that feeling.”

Bill eyed him over the next bite of his burger, but Michael wasn't about to explain.

* * *

Claudia felt that it was far too adolescent to simply go and sit with him at his corner table and fawn all over Michael.

Besides, the women had invited her to their table. It was…unusual. In the Marine Corps, women mostly avoided one another to avoid being pigeonholed as a “chick squad.” If you said, “Hey,” to another woman as you passed her on the running track, half the guys assumed you were lesbian lovers. And those were the nicest versions.

The next nicest phrase for an all-female crew was a “boob-bird.” A SuperCobra with two women was “grab a two-pack.” A Black Hawk with four women was a “four-bush bird.” Then it got raunchy.

For two years at SOAR, there weren't any women in her training section. Some behind her, none with her.

These women of SOAR either didn't care or were so competent that no one dared say any of that to them. These women didn't have that feel, and the looks they were getting weren't about whether or not they were lovers. It felt like a community, like a potluck in Bumble Bee—just gathered together because they wanted to be.

And those around them?