Bring On the Dusk (7 page)

The girl continued her inspection of Claudia for a moment longer, then moved over to the end of a couch next to AMC Archie Stevenson, plugged in and, after waving hello to Michael, began reading. She might as well have been in a suburban living room as in an amphibious-assault-ship briefing room. The way the two leaned together, they clearly were close. Yet Claudia felt as if she'd just been subjected to the toughest test of a tough day with the verdict still outstanding.

The AMC must have noticed her confusion. “My daughter, Dilya.” There was no sign of the man in the girl. Maybe she favored the mother, about a hundred percent. No explanation of what she was doing here, but no one seemed bothered by her presence.

And Michael was being nice to the kid. He'd actually smiled and waved back. He had an amazing smile, which made her glad that he hadn't tried it on her yet. It had a genuineness that shone right through him.

The final person arrived quietly and slipped into a seat beside Claudia. She required a second look. She had a Mediterranean complexion of dusky olive. Her straight hair, as dark as her eyes, reached to her lower back, accentuating her long frame. Special Operations Forces allowed some leeway in hair style, but Claudia's own hair length, brushing past her shoulders, was the normal limit. This woman really stood out.

The woman offered a nod and a fine-fingered handshake.

“Captain Kara Moretti, SOAR,” the Italian beauty offered with a distinct Brooklyn accent that almost provoked a laugh from Claudia. The woman didn't offer any further explanation or any hint that humor would be welcome.

Claudia hadn't heard the name before, and it made the count wrong. She knew exactly how many women were in the regiment.

By the side glances from the others, no one else knew who Captain Moretti was either. Justin, the Texan pilot, didn't bother to glance; he simply stared as if he'd been struck by lightning. Only Michael didn't react. He simply accepted her presence. Chief Warrant Lola Maloney also knew who the woman was.

Well, if Colonel Michael Gibson was attracted to sheer beauty, he would be a goner on this one. It was ridiculous, but Claudia found herself a little irritated that Captain Moretti had some connection to Michael. More than a little irritated, which was beyond ridiculous.

Boyd Ramis rose and everyone settled. “Michael came to me this afternoon with an interesting idea that I'll leave for him to explain. Before he does, I just want to say I think it's a great idea. I rang up Roger at EU NAVFOR, and he said it sounds ‘top-notch.' But I'll leave it up to you experts to decide.”

Roger at…that would be Dutch Commodore Roger Hamstein, the afloat commander for the entire Operation Atalanta—the operation against Somali piracy that stretched over much of the Indian Ocean. So, the mission hadn't even been explained yet, and now command was expecting it to happen. Michael didn't look pleased, but he managed to hide it from Boyd, if not from her.

Michael rose to speak. “Six months ago we flew Operation Heavy Hand.”

It was Claudia's first chance to notice his voice when it was meant for a group and not just for her. It was low and soft. He was the sort of man who never had to shout because when he went really quiet, he scared the crap out of you. But at least at the moment it was a gentle voice, as if he were whispering to a horse. Or maybe a redwood. Everyone went dead silent to listen.

“We took out over sixty pirates including four pirate lords, recovered five ships and forty-seven hostages, and lost only one person.” All eyes in the room traveled to Trisha, though most shied away before they got there.

Claudia didn't see any accusation; it was all sympathy. So, no one even questioned if it might be Trisha's fault. Good. It made her think a little better of the woman. “Pulled a Roland” on her—that was one hell of a coping mechanism, reenacting the death of her copilot as a test.

But that also matched the way they were using the mission as a teaching tool at SOAR training. Every step of the operation had been dissected and analyzed: on the classroom board, in three-dimensional simulations, and as specific techniques in the field. They'd spent a full week studying something that had been planned in a day and taken barely ten hours to execute. All but forty-seven minutes of that had been transit time.

To this day, SOAR hadn't been mentioned in any news story relating to the operation. Nor Delta, yet clearly Michael had been a part of it as well.

* * *

Michael made a quick assessment of the room. Most of the people here had been involved in that mission. The Texan Chinook pilot and Kara Moretti hadn't been here and clearly didn't know what he was referring to.

Claudia did. He could see her connecting the pieces of her recent training with the people in the room. He actually waited, giving her a moment of silence.

At seven seconds, her attention shot to him, shifted to Billy and Trisha, then back to him. That fast she'd put together exactly who had been deepest in country.

Damn! He really needed a new word for her, but she was impressing the hell out of him in more ways than one.

She made him feel…hopeful. Hopeful of what, he'd analyze later.

He'd thought to keep her in the background for this mission, toward the safer rearguard positions until she had her feet down. He wondered if he'd ever met anyone whose feet were so clearly down solidly.

On the fly, he made a change to the plan's flight assignments. He considered if it might be a personal bias, but he didn't think so.

He forced his attention back to the briefing but felt as if he was presenting to Claudia alone despite his previous conclusion.

* * *

Claudia studied the map of the western half of the Indian Ocean that Michael had put up on the projector.

“Al-Shabaab militants have been driven out of Mogadishu. They are still fighting an active war in the south but losing against the new government with the assistance of AMISOM, the African Union Mission to Somalia. The south only holds one ship at present, one that apparently no one is interested in paying a ransom for. They've been using her as a long-range mother ship to deliver pirate teams up to fifteen hundred miles away in the Maldives and—”

“Give me a break, Michael.” Trisha, of course. “How are we supposed to find one mother ship in two million square miles of ocean?”

“O'Malley.” Lola made it sound like a wounded plea. “Shut up and let the man speak for once.”

But Claudia could see there was no real heat behind the request. Even through her exhaustion-hazed view, she could start to see how tight this team was. Trisha might have ticked off her commander, but they'd chosen to sit side by side on one of the couches.

Over the next two hours, Michael laid out his plan. Thirty-eight hostages from four ships were spread across five locations in southern Somalia. Even though the boats were gone—two accidentally sunk, one more lost in a storm, and one recaptured at sea while being used as a mother ship—the hostages were still ashore.

Unlike the northern territories where professional criminals had replaced the original fisherman-pirates attempting to protect their fishing rights, the southern piracy was run by religious jihadists. Al-Shabaab embarrassed most of the Muslim world with its extreme practices. Even Al-Qaeda had parted ways with the group. Kidnapping seven-year-old boys and arming them as shock troops was but one of many travesties.

“Taking back these hostages will be a very different operation from the one we used in the north. I've spent two of the last six months on the ground and—” A gasp rippled around the room.

Michael let it run, waiting for a silence that didn't quickly return. A white guy walking into the wrong side of the widely acknowledged most dangerous area of the most dangerous country on earth. Somalia's white population, especially out in the desert, was near enough to zero to make him completely stand out. He'd have been better off walking through downtown Tehran wearing an American flag on his back.

Yet she could see him doing it, moving so softly that no one noticed him. Though how could you not notice a man who looked that good? There was nothing extraneous about Michael: not motion, not energy, not focus. He was—well she was just tired enough to be totally crass, at least in the privacy her own thoughts—one amazing man-package.

Only three people in the room didn't react. Billy and Trisha's lack of surprise only confirmed her conclusion that the three of them had been at the heart of Operation Heavy Hand.

The third one in the room who didn't react was the teen, Dilya. No longer lost in her book and music world, she was nodding her head as if this information somehow made sense or was at least familiar. She was a sharp one.

“There were five sites in-country,” Michael resumed once the surprise had settled. “Unlike Bill's fine work in Heavy Hand, I was able to only partially foment a consolidation of the hostages so we will have to recover them in three separate strikes. One of the sites is on the coast. We'll be leaving that to Chief Petty Officer Stowell's amphibious craft, supported by Lieutenant Barstowe's Rangers.”

The grim look Bill shared with Michael was enough to tell her that even if Bill had taken the lead on Heavy Hand, he and Michael had been in it together—and in it deep.

“There is,” Michael continued, “a higher level of prestige among the al-Shabaab factions for those who hold hostages over those who don't, and any attempt to circumvent that posed too high a risk to the hostages themselves. However, a recent takeover of one militia group by another has combined two of those targets, so we only have two in-country. We hope. Our latest intelligence is nearly ten days old.”

A glance around the room revealed that no one was balking at the stakes. This is what they did.

“Captain Kara Moretti”—Michael finally acknowledged the quiet Italian-New Yorker seated beside Claudia—“will be flying a MQ-1C Gray Eagle for us. This unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV, has a duration of forty hours, and its camera offers infrared body recognition of individuals from three kilometers up. Her command-and-control gear will be arriving tomorrow.”

Claudia knew the Gray Eagle UAV also offered four Hellfire missiles, each capable of taking out your average tank or building. SOAR had added the Gray Eagle team in late 2013 so that they'd no longer have to rely on the Air Force for intelligence operations. The UAVs were now being organically embedded into SOAR operations, though she'd never flown with one before.

That's why Claudia hadn't heard of her; she was an NFO, a non-flying officer. The acronym also stood for “no future occupation.” Though the UAVs were finally breaking that. Traditionally, only combat officers advanced to the higher ranks.

They'd need something new to call the drone pilots, who really wanted their craft to be known as remotely piloted aircraft or RPAs. “Fly in a can?” That's what they did. It explained how Kara was able to get away with such amazing hair, which would be too much trouble in a helmet and flight suit. Claudia's was pretty much the manageable limit.

“And if Captain Casperson is cleared for operations”—Michael interrupted her wandering thoughts—“we'll be flying a very nonstandard configuration.”

“When are we planning to have an operational ‘go'?” There was no way she was going to miss her first real mission. Though last night had been real. She was tired enough that her thoughts were muddling, but if she had to get it all done in a week, she would.

No matter what it took.

“The new moon will give us a fully dark night in forty-eight hours. The op is a tentative ‘go' for the day after tomorrow.”

If she hadn't already been awake, that certainly would have snapped her to.

It would take them two days of hustling southward at
Peleliu
's top speed before they'd be in position just over the horizon from Merca, south of Mogadishu. Claudia spent much of the first day asleep, catching up and getting in sync. Michael had again helped her to find her quarters. She'd been too disoriented when Trisha had come to get her to pay attention to where she'd started.

Through the weaving haze of her exhaustion, she wanted to kiss Michael good night, just to… Well, just to do it.

Instead, she behaved and finally repeated the face plant she'd so been looking forward to, this time between the sheets. Too tired to be more than momentarily grumpy at Michael for not taking advantage of her weakened defenses.

A dozen hours of sleep later, she was mostly awake. It was late afternoon, but as she was finally shifted over to the Night Stalkers clock of fight at night, she opted for breakfast. Claudia had eaten alone with the Navy shift, enjoying the comparative peace of not having to interact with anyone. Lola caught up with her as she delivered her tray to the scrub buckets.

“We're passing abreast of the aircraft carrier
Harry
S. Truman
and her attendant group of destroyers and cruisers. Suit up and get aft.” Lola was gone before Claudia could do more than nod her understanding.

The carrier group wasn't part of Operation Atalanta, focused instead on the Arabian Peninsula, probably Yemen and the several terrorist-harboring nations in the region. But apparently her proximity to the
Peleliu
's course wasn't pure chance.

Claudia had dragged on a flight suit and tucked her helmet under her arm before reporting to the
Calamity
Jane
, the Chinook parked at the
Peleliu
's stern. The deck plating had been absorbing heat all afternoon, just dying to find someone to re-radiate it into. Apparently Claudia was the chosen sacrificial victim offered to the blaze. Crossing the hundred yards of steel was a very long trudge.

Justin was just starting the preflight on the monstrous bird and walked her through it. The Chinook was the heavy lifter of SOAR. It was a hundred-foot-long, twin-rotor monster. It could have a Humvee driven right up the rear loading ramp, carry forty troops with full gear, or hoist anything that just happened to be lying about and weighed under fourteen tons.

Once inside she introduced herself to the three crew chiefs: a ramp gunner and the two gunners stationed right behind the pilot and copilot.

“Y'all ready to do a bit o' flying, Captain?” Justin's accent was nearly incomprehensible.

“As soon as your copilot arrives.”

“We-ell, we must be ready then.” He grinned down at her. Not many people could make her feel short, but he certainly succeeded. He still wore his cowboy hat, which made him even taller.

Claudia spotted Captain Moretti coming up the back ramp into the helicopter, her hair a straight fall that floated along behind her. “Oh, I didn't know you flew a Chinook as well as the UAV.”

Kara looked surprised. “I don't.”

“Nope, she don't,” Justin agreed cheerfully enough. “But y'all will today or my name ain't Winnie the Pooh.”

“I thought you were Captain Justin Roberts.”

“Dang! You caught me.” Then he dropped about half of his accent, which had been getting a little thick. “Well, you're flying copilot today anyway. Lola wants you to fly in different types of birds, and your Chinook hours are way too low.”

“As in zero.”

“Ouch, Captain. What have you been flying anyway, them there little pea-patch-hoppers?” The accent returned as he waved a disgusted hand out the open ramp at Trisha's helicopter tied down on the deck.

Claudia shared a grin with Kara and then moved up to the left-side copilot's seat to get them moving out of the heat. It was clear that with two pretty women to entertain, Justin would be glad to go on dishing out the charm all afternoon and right into the evening.

Once Justin was in his seat, Kara sat on a small jump seat just aft of their positions.

The Chinook could lift eight Little Birds, even if each had a full load of fuel, munitions, and personnel. But the big helo handled just as delicately. Other than the engine controls and all of the elbow room, the cockpit didn't feel as foreign as Claudia had expected. The strangest thing was the seats, which were like loungers compared to Trisha's. Of course a Little Bird was intended for short-strike missions while the Chinook could stay up for six hours and a thousand miles, even without midair refueling.

With Justin not making it too obvious that he was worrying about his baby, Claudia lifted it into the sky. The way the mass of the bird behaved, it felt as if she were wearing a suit of medieval armor.

The aircraft carrier
Truman
was only a hundred miles and forty minutes away, hardly enough to get a feel for the Chinook. But with a lot of guidance from Justin, Claudia managed a landing without hammering it down onto the deck of the carrier. She'd never landed on one of the big carriers before, and certainly never a bird of this size.

In the Marine Corps she'd flown a lot of their craft, but never the big Sea Stallion. In the Corps you got good in your craft and they kept you there. In the 5D apparently, you'd better be good at everything or they'd get you there fast.

The
Truman
was only two hundred feet longer than the
Peleliu
, but she was twice as wide, had three times the displacement, and could carry five times the number of aircraft. Her air-wing personnel alone outnumbered the maximum staff of the
Peleliu
, and the total ship's personnel was upward of six thousand.

Bumble Bee had a population of nineteen. Sixteen now that Dad was dead, Mom was in Flagstaff, and she herself was mostly gone.

Crews descended on them in well-coordinated mayhem. In minutes, a shipping container had been rolled into the cargo bay, clearly designed to slip in neatly. Six and a half feet tall, seven and a half wide, and twenty feet long.

To Claudia it was just a big steel box. To Kara Moretti, it was clearly her reason for living. She fussed and hovered as the crew chiefs slipped the container aboard, checked the load points, and locked it down.

That was about the time Claudia picked up on where Justin's attention was focused. His attention to her was merely a strategy to spread some of his Texas charm over to the sultry Kara Moretti. He was clearly smitten.

Claudia felt amused rather than offended.

If Kara noticed, she gave no sign.

Next the carrier's cargo and helicopter handlers—dressed in bright green to distinguish them from all of the other crews aboard a carrier in active operations—trundled over a second container of similar size. It was addressed to her.

Befuddled, she had to sign for it before they would hand her the key to the padlock on the door.

“Do I unwrap it now or later?”

Kara and Justin stood to either side of her and inspected the paperwork. “Captain Claudia Jean Casperson. Personal.” Other than her duffel bag and pack, all of her life's belongings presently resided in a back bedroom in an empty house at one end of an Arizona ghost town and wouldn't fill three cardboard boxes. She didn't even own a car, so what the hell personal belongings could possibly fill this container?

“Uh”—Kara tipped her head—“I dunno, Claudia. I always open personal stuff in private. You know, in case it's a box of my mom's cookies and I don't want to share.” Then she stared up at the container. “Of course, this would hold a hell of a lot of cookies.”

Justin tapped the paper in Claudia's hands. “There's the only number that matters. It weighs under a ton, three with the container. I can pick it up easy. Let's keep it in the box and take it home.”

So they did, dangling the load on a long line attached to one of the undercarriage lifting hooks as they returned to the
Peleliu
.

* * *

“She's brand-new.” Trisha patted the nose of the new helicopter they'd found inside the container. A stealth bird, which explained the “personal” label on the box to keep its arrival quiet.

Claudia stood with Trisha and Chief Warrant Lola Maloney as they all inspected the helicopter. She was beautiful. After their return from the carrier, the SOAR mechanics had whisked it out of her hands before she'd had a proper chance to admire it.

Kara Moretti at least had her command-and-control box, nicknamed “the coffin,” to set up. They'd used the big elevator to take it down to the hangar deck. Kara and her assistant, Santiago, had spent the night wiring the coffin into the
Peleliu
's radar and communications systems.

Every time Claudia had gone near her new bird, the service team had shooed her away. But overnight they'd put her helicopter together and now the bird sat on the
Peleliu
's deck shining in the morning sun. Claudia couldn't stop grinning at it. She'd wanted to fly an AH-6M attack Little Bird and here she was, staring at a stealth one of her own.

“She's yours to name, Claudia,” Lola Maloney told her. “Needs to start with an
M,
but otherwise it's up to you.”

“Why an
M
?”

“Tradition.” Trisha cut off her commanding officer. She made the interruption look like her normal operating procedure, but Claudia would be willing to bet Tricia knew exactly what she was doing—pushing the edge just because it was there. “Henderson and Beale started it with
Viper
and
Vengeance
for their DAP Hawks. We Little Birds went with
M
just to be contrary.
Mad
Max
is flown by Max Engel,
Merchant
—as in
Merchant
of
Death
—is Dennis Hakawa's, and mine is the
May
.”

Claudia could feel the trap in Trisha's smile. Yeah, this woman did nothing by accident. She was just waiting for the question of why a hotshot like her would name her bird
May
. So not the
Merry
Month
of
… Not a compression of
Mockingjay
from the book Dilya was reading. No, it had to be…“
Mayhem
.” It fit Trisha perfectly.

The woman in question offered a pout at how fast Claudia solved the riddle.

Little Bird
Michael
. Now there was a good image. Lean and dangerous.

Trisha began making suggestions, “
Maverick
is too clichéd.
Mabel
like the female version of Abel and Cain. Or how about—”

“
Maven
.”

“Uh…” Trisha had to stop and think about that one.

Longer than Claudia had taken on
Mayhem
, she was pleased to note.

“Like a wise woman dispensing knowledge in the form of ammunition?”

“Like Catwoman's friend and sidekick from the animated series. I always felt she had a secret identity of her own that she never revealed. The woman had serious moxie.”

Trisha's low whistle of appreciation was approval enough. “Now that's seriously obscure. I like it.”

Actually, if Trisha had guessed the Catwoman reference, Claudia would have claimed the other. Someone had to keep that woman on her toes. Besides, she had yet to pay Trisha back for scaring the shit out of her on that first flight.

Apparently not trusting anyone, the SOAR mechanics who'd put her bird together in under an hour had taken another six hours before they'd sign off on the airworthiness certification. Dozens of small parts had been replaced as “not up to specification” despite being factory new. There'd also been a complete recalibration of all of the onboard systems including a series of questions for her on preferred sensitivity settings and even a few adjustments based on measurements of her hands as well as hip-to-foot length.

When at last they were satisfied, Claudia took the bird up. This time she sat in the pilot's right-hand seat and Lola Maloney in the left seat. The Little Bird was so small that their inside shoulders constantly bumped until they synchronized their actions a bit. If it was Michael beside her, maybe she'd—get her head examined. She barely knew the man.

Then, as Claudia lifted off the flight deck, she noticed him. Michael leaned against a wall of an upper level of the communications platform superstructure, his arms folded over his chest, clearly watching her aloft once again. Her skin prickled with the attention. Everywhere she'd turned in these first two days she either ran into Michael or someone else would start talking about him.

As far as she could tell, it wasn't a conspiracy to make her totally insane, because they'd also managed to not exchange a single personal word or even share a meal. They were rushing toward and planning for his mission, which kept him at the center of the storm. Everyone's pulse rate was up and climbing, especially hers. Which was really making her crazy.

No kiss was that good. It had to be an illusion or a devious Delta trick or something.

Fly. Focus on the flight.

The admonishment helped, barely.

In the SuperCobra, the pilot sat behind and above the copilot shooter, both wrapped in as much armor as the bird could carry. In the Little Bird, she was more exposed to the right due to the lack of a door, and the copilot blocked much of her view to the left. In compensation, she had a vastly better forward and down view than in a Snake.

Her new bird also had the new ADAS camera system that projected an all-around view from external cameras onto the inside of her helmet's visor. Whatever direction she turned, she could see as if she were sitting in open space with nothing but a rotor attached. Then merely changing where she focused her eyes allowed her to see the real world beyond her visor when she needed to.