Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers) (6 page)

Tonight’s mission started differently.

Lola could feel the old Lola, the one who had been starstruck around Major Emily Beale, start to slide over her during the briefing. That shield of awe that there was so much that could be attained, even if it would never be attained by Lola.

Then she shook it off. Did her best to toss old Lola out of the briefing tent. She’d done near enough a thousand flights, she had skills. Had cracked over five thousand hours not counting simulator time, a huge mark in a chopper pilot’s life. Tonight she’d bring them. Bring them hard. And maybe Major Beale would start learning to trust her new copilot.
Hell
of
a
high
bar
to
live
up
to, girl.

Screw
that, gel. Y’all be bedder dan dat.
Mama Raci’s thick-accented voice sounded clear and grouchy from out of her past. Maybe it was time she listened to the old woman.

The briefing tent held fewer flight crews than usual. Must be a light night. Viper Henderson was up at the front with Captain Archibald Stevenson, Sergeant Kee’s significant other.

Lola wanted to ask Tim what was going on. But he hadn’t shown at breakfast after last night’s flight. No backgammon. No pleasant chat after everyone else drifted off. Probably just hit his rack and passed out.

Now it was evening before a night’s work and he still looked fairly ragged, as if he hadn’t woken up yet. He’d barely acknowledged her cheery “good morning” over dinner. He’d sat down past Connie, invisible beyond the wall of Big John. Others looked at him in surprise. Readjusting for his failure to occupy his usual spot. And he ate quietly, not chatting with Connie or Kee, who sat across from him, even though he’d apparently sought them out.

In Lola’s opinion, it at least had the advantage of distracting Kee from her usual pissed-off-at-the-world-but-especially-Chief-Warrant-LaRue attitude. Instead, she’d spent her energy worrying about Tim while still appearing tough as hell.

The briefing tent tonight held the two DAP Hawk crews and two five-man teams for the monstrous Chinook choppers. The Delta colonel also sat there. Back row. Quiet. Looking impossibly powerful.

A shadow slipped in and perched on a chair beside Kee. A small shadow in a white
hajib
, the native over-smock that covered the girl from shoulder to knees. White pants and incongruous red, blue, and yellow sneakers below that. Without even turning, Kee wrapped an arm around the girl who snuggled in. A gentle side Lola never would have guessed existed.

No one else reacted. No one acknowledged the girl, but neither did they dismiss her. Somehow this kid was just a fixture on the military base.

“Tonight”—Captain Archie Stevenson pulled up a map on the projector—“we’re on the move. Tonight we’re going here.” The Air Mission Commander ran his pointer south over the trackless desert southwest of Lashkar Gah.

That would be fine, if it weren’t in the incredibly lethal Helmand Province. Everyone—French, NATO, British, and U.S.—had lost choppers there. Though there was nothing except dunes and sandstorms that far south.

“Continuing to here. Camped by first light.”

Another place with absolutely nothing.

“We’ll be staging a single mission from a temporary base in Western Afghanistan. That information is, by the way, classified ‘secret.’”

Nothing there except—Lola took a deep breath—the Iranian border.

“Flight in one hour. Minimum duration two days each way, two to seven days in-country. Dilya, you’ll have to stay here with Base Clerk Reynolds. We’ll be gone about a week.” Briefed in the same tone as any soldier.

Kee squeezed the girl tighter, but Dilya nodded her head matter-of-factly. Showed she was a trooper and used to the routine.

“Dismissed.”

An hour later, Lola was finishing the preflight check on the
Vengeance.
Kee and Connie were stowing gear, and the Major was already in her seat making sure the mission route was keyed into the onboard nav displays.

Nearby she could see Tim and Big John prepping their bird. Captain Richardson mirroring her own flight checks. Major Henderson was down the way a bit talking to the Chinook pilot. She could see them loading gear into the back of the monstrous helicopter. Instead of the forty-odd troops the bird could carry, there were a half-dozen guys and a lot of gear.

No. She’d been wrong.

There weren’t a half-dozen guys. The group was working together in absolute silence and perfect synchronicity. Definitely not just guys, they were Delta Force. The Colonel hadn’t been sitting in the back of the room for his health. The Chinook was taking them somewhere very nasty. Somewhere nasty enough to shift some serious assets across two thousand kilometers of hostile territory.

Two Chinooks, two DAP Hawks, six D-boys. Nothing else. This was about the nastiest crew the U.S. military forces could field. If this group couldn’t get it done, no one on the planet stood a chance.

She turned to see Tim watching the Chinook as well. A long, assessing gaze. He saw it too, so it wasn’t just her imagination.

He turned to her, and across the full rotor width that separated their birds, she read his thoughts clearly. They were headed into some shit.

Lola thought of that impulsive kiss and the heat that still rippled through her body from it. He hadn’t done any of the expected grab or fondle. He’d just held her like she was the most precious thing on the planet in that moment. And then he’d proved that all that strength didn’t keep him from busting out some smooth moves.

She shot him a saucy smile.

***

Tim did his best to smile back.

Honestly, he did.

Apparently it worked because Lola spun lightly on her heel and went back to her preflight inspection.

That’s Chief Warrant 2 LaRue to you, flyboy.
Sergeants just didn’t get it on with gorgeous female officers. Though somehow Sergeant Kee Smith and then-Lieutenant, now Captain Archie Stevenson had hooked up. He’d never be comfortable asking an officer how they did it. Maybe he could ask Kee.

Who was he kidding?

First, Kee hated LaRue for some reason. Second, he knew he was just dreaming anyway. The Major had given her some news on their walk that had been something to be ecstatic about, and so Lola had smacked him a good one in celebration. Joy had just radiated out of the woman like a shining sun. That was it. Nothing more.

Big John slapped him hard on the shoulder. Then held on and shook him back and forth like a leaf. At least his marriage made sense, two sergeants. Two people who loved their machines as if they were their own children.

“You set, John?” Tim asked just to have something to say.

“Yep!
Viper
’s ready for flight. You?”

“Stowed and locked down.”

John shook him again, a bit more gently.

“You got it bad, don’t you, buddy boy?”

Tim shook his head in denial, then realized he was still watching LaRue as she climbed into the copilot’s seat and pulled those long legs of hers inside the craft.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” He slapped aside John’s hand and went to check his weapons for a third time, just to have something to do.

Almost out of earshot, but not quite, he heard John’s soft, “Uh-huh.”

Lola was wiped out as she came down upon the agreed coordinates. The dark still lay upon the desert. They’d chosen a lonely spot, flat and free of any sand dunes. She’d thumped the chopper down harder than she’d expected. Lola could taste why in the night air, salt. Rather than soft sand, they were on a hard salt pan. That and she’d been sloppy with fatigue.

As the turbines wound down, she could feel the last tiny bits of energy draining out of her until they both ground to a halt in unison and she couldn’t move. She’d been so full of energy just eight hours, three midair refuelings, and two thousand kilometers ago.

She’d gotten them down, not clean, but she got them down. She tried flexing her fingers from where they’d been curled around the controls, and pain rocketed up her arms. They joined the complaint and finally her shoulders admitted they’d be happier if she just let go and wept.

She’d been first down and the other birds landed around her.
Viper
close to starboard. To her port side, one of the Chinooks settled so smooth and soft that it pissed her off even more. Too much grace in such an ungainly monster.

Another ten seconds and the other big twin-rotor Chinook settled down to the other side of Henderson’s Hawk. Looming above her bird and twice as long, not counting the long blades that looked like an ungainly afterthought. Four birds in a row.

In moments two Delta operators were perched atop the Chinooks, one looking south and west, the other north and east.

She finished the shutdown, pulled off her helmet, and just lay back in her seat, as much as the thing allowed. Too damn tired to move. To breathe.

For the whole flight, Major Beale hadn’t said one damn word. With the fact that Kee wasn’t speaking to her and Connie apparently never spoke, they’d flown dead silent for more than eight hours.

Well, she’d shown she could fly. She’d stayed dead on profile. She’d nailed the midair refuels on her first try, all three times.

Her muscles ached. Not from holding on so tight, just from not having a moment’s break.

She felt the slight motion in the bird as Kee, then Connie, stepped off.

Lola kept her eyes closed, waiting for the Major to step down. To get away before Lola said something really, really inappropriate. It was just plain cruel to leave a pilot at the controls for eight solid hours. It took—

“Next time…” Beale’s voice was quiet beside her.

Lola rolled her head against the seat back and opened one scratchy, aching eye to look at the Major in the dim light of the instrument panel.

“Next time, ask for help when you’re tired. There are two of us here for a reason. You don’t have to do it all yourself.”

Lola closed her one open eye and rolled her head back to center. Just too plain tired.

Of course. It wasn’t Major Beale testing Lola with a brutally long and painful flight. Instead another goddamn lesson. A chopper flew by teamwork. Lola knew that. Should know that. Wouldn’t forget it again, that was for damn sure.

Mama Raci had taught her to trust
no
mon
but
she
self
. Hard to break that despite a half-dozen years in the service. Time to blast that old tape out of her brain with some serious explosives.

Merde
! She had been a total
teet
peeshwank
. Mama Raci had called Lola a “small runt” for all of her teenage life, long after she towered over the old woman. She’d called Lola that right up until the day she joined the Air National Guard. The change had been jarring. The loss of the demeaning nickname a far greater marker of the achievement than the swearing-in ceremony.

Lola climbed down to help rig the camouflage nets over the choppers. She had to bite her tongue near to bleeding to stop the groans from her aching muscles.

When the sun came up, it was as if someone was attacking Lola with a sky-sized hammer. In minutes the chill air of the desert was replaced by air that burnt her lungs to breathe. A parching wind arose and drove the fine dust and sand in billowing waves across their site.

Everyone started shedding vests and flight suits. All facing away from the wind.

Lola didn’t care that she had nothing but a T-shirt and panties on under the flight suit. She stripped first and then dug out loose white slacks and a long-sleeved shirt. Guys were down to their boxers or tighty-whities just as fast. Sunglasses and a bandanna over her face so that she could breathe completed the outfit. She tried dampening it, but the air dried the bandanna faster than she could wet it.

The dawn light had revealed that they were parked in the middle of a salt plain that had probably been a lake in a former life. Low, dry hills stretched into the distance. Not a blot of green anywhere to the horizon.

Tactically good. First, no could slip up on them here. Second, it was the largest district in Afghanistan and the least populated, with 8,000 people in 22,000 square kilometers. Easy to see why, there was nothing here but sand and salt. The nearest track of any kind was over ten klicks away. The nearest thing that could be called a road was more like fifty.

Now, in the full light of day, the sunlight was blinding, even through sunglasses. “Bright enough to burn a black man.” Yeah, well, not quite how her father had said it, but he could make Deep South white trash look good by comparison. Never made sense that he’d married a mixed-breed Creole. She’d been parts French, African slave, Choctaw, and who knew what else. Dead before Lola was five. Knowing her father, the woman had to have been dead inside long before that to survive him as long as she did.

Lola shook it off and headed for some shade. Most of the crew were squatting in the shadow of one of the Chinooks. A filigree net of sand-and-earth tones fluttered above, hopefully hiding them from casual inspection.

Don’t mind us. We’re just a lump of nothing interesting squatting in the middle of a blazing salt pan.
A blazing salt pan about ten miles from the Iranian border.

Lola swung by the chopper’s rear ramp. Dinner had been set out. A box of mixed MREs and a case of water bottles. Meals-Ready-to-Eat were not all that different from one another, no matter what they said. She grabbed whatever came to hand.

A glance forward into the big cargo bay showed that the D-boys had packed in some serious gear. Six guys, packs bigger than should be humanly possible. And a range of armament. They couldn’t be taking all of this with them. They must be ready to make selections at the last minute as needed. That was their problem. Her problem, as the DAP Hawk weapons platform, was to make sure the Chinooks got them there and that they got them back out.

She dropped down near Tim and Big John. “I can feel the salt sucking all the moisture right out of my skin.”

Big John nodded slow and easy. “Long way from a hot shower.”

“Ugh!” Tim ripped the top off his MRE and started pulling out the bits and pieces. “Don’t even say the word ‘hot.’ Just hearing it is killing me.”

“Heat doesn’t bother me none.” Born and raised in New Orleans made heat easy. “Dry. Not used to the dry.” She sliced open her own MRE with her field knife. She’d grabbed Mediterranean Chicken, could have been worse. She pulled out the packets, considered the flameless heater and decided she’d rather eat the meal cold. It left the sauces a little glutinous even in this heat, but that was better than hot.

They all sat in a row, backs to the wind to guard against the dust, as they opened packets, spread cheese on crackers, munched on corn bread. Hers didn’t have any hot sauce. Stupid. The little bottle of Tabasco should be in every one of the twenty-four different meals.

She dumped the carbo-electro powder packet into her water bottle and gave it a shake. Definitely going to be needing that.

“Where you from, Chief Warrant?” Big John worked his way through Meatballs with Marinara and Garlic Mashed Potatoes, then started on a second meal of Sloppy Joe with Peanut Butter (Chunky) and Jelly Sandwich.

“You’re gonna get fat eating all that,” Tim mumbled around a mouthful of Nuggets (Turkey).

John, for all his size, didn’t have an ounce of fat anywhere. He ignored Tim as if he’d never spoken.

“Can’t quite place your accent, Chief.”

“Call me Lola.” She’d done her best to not have an accent at all. “You’re from Oklahoma.”

“John,” he acknowledged in return. “Muskogee bred and buttered.”

Big John was easy to talk to, but not comfortable like Tim. They’d only had their after-breakfast backgammon game a few times, but she already wished she’d thought to bring a board. A little backgammon, a little quiet time to just shoot the breeze after a long damn flight. A single haul that put her at her rated daily limit of eight flight hours. Of course, when the shit was going down, it was less of a rule and more of a really strong suggestion. Only shit going down today was her own stupidity. Not again.

“Didn’t answer the question there, long lady.”

And she didn’t intend to.

“But you wear it on your helmet. Why’s that?”

She glanced toward the
Vengeance
where she’d left it on her seat.

“Hunh. Guess I do. Never thought about it that way.”

“Where?” Tim shuffled a bit forward so that he could see her around John.

“She’s a Cajun lady, our copilot is.”

“No, Sergeant… sorry, John. Creole, yes. Cajun, no.”

“Which means what?” Tim had shuffled further forward and turned sideways to the rising wind to partly face her. A blast of dust and sand washed over his meal. He’d have to get another and start over. She thought about pointing it out to him, but some wicked part of her thought better of it. Let him find out the hard way.

“Cajun is all fashion and style. Also, it implies Acadian heritage. As far as I can find out, my mama was a lot of things, but none of them Acadian.”

“In other words,” John observed, “something nobody cares about who isn’t one of you.”

Lola considered, had always insisted she wasn’t Cajun because… She had no idea and shrugged in response. Time to let that one go except if she was ever dumb enough to be back in New Orleans.

“What about your dad?”

“Dead.”

“Oh, sorry. Didn’t know.” Tim looked chagrined. Like it really pained him.

“He was run over by a beer truck while lying drunk in a tavern parking lot. No loss to the world, trust me.”

They sat in silence while she finished her Fruit (Dried) which she liked way better than the Fruit (Wet Pack).

“Who named these things anyway?” She pointed at Tim’s Cookies (Patriotic). A safe and common enough topic of speculation among those who lived on them from time to time.

“Still must have been pretty awful when he died.”

“Hey, that’s way more than he deserved.” Which was completely true. “New topic. C’mon.”

“How old were you when—”

“Same old topic, Tim. Something new.”

“Okay. Where did you learn to play backgammon?”

“Mama Raci. She took me in when I needed someplace to be. Ran a kitchen in a house in Storyville.” Didn’t know why she said any of that. Could only hope that they didn’t get what that implied.

The blank looks said she’d dodged that bullet.

“Nice old lady. Nice to me, anyway.” When it had really mattered. Actually a nasty old bitch to the girls who worked there earning their keep by the hour. To this day, she still didn’t know why Mama Raci had given her a place to work and sleep. Available only so long as she never missed a day of school or a single homework assignment. Tough old biddy, and Lola did her best not to grimace over the pain of her loss.

Tim was clearly itching to know more about a past she’d left as far behind her as possible.

Lola was busy trying to find an excuse to brush off a man who made her a little crazy in a good way and more than a little hot in ways the temperature couldn’t explain.

“How did you learn backgammon?”

That brought a roar of laughter from Big John. Tim simply smiled as if he were trying to be some sweet and innocent child instead of a gorgeous chunk of U.S. Army warrior.

“This here pipsqueak…” John clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to hurt.

Tim shrugged it off.

“Got his nickname playing backgammon.”

“Circle up,” Mark Henderson shouted out.

“Story for a later time,” Big John offered in a smaller voice, though not much smaller.

“A much later time.” Though Tim didn’t look as chagrined as his tone indicated. Perhaps even a little proud.

Everyone shuffled to their feet, and Lola made sure Big John stayed between her and Tim. When Connie joined John, she didn’t complain about the extra distance.

She was liking Tim far too much.