by R. K. Syrus
Then there’s Denbow, still. Sitting, watching. Talking to the pilot.
“Nightjar, this is Denbow. As next ranking officer, I’m taking command.” The SEAL operator looks straight at Bryan. His square-jawed head is topped by a recruiting-ad crew cut. Bryan glares back. When he’s really mad, controlling his cyber-eyes can be a problem. Denbow’s image phases through thermal and infrared.
“Agreed,” Nightjar says flatly. “Whatever you want to do, we gotta do it right now.”
“Colonel McKnight is MIA,” Denbow says. “We are engaged by hostiles and cannot fire back under mission rules of engagement. Bird is damaged, mission may be compromised.”
He holds his hand over his mic to block the wind whistling from the hatch he destroyed. He doesn’t want the noise to spoil the calculated speech he’s making for the in-flight recording log.
“In order to protect the neutrality of our ships at sea and prevent further loss of men and material, I instruct you, Nightjar, to proceed to Doha Base in Qatar at best possible speed.”
But for the restraining hands of Nobu and Whitebread, whose mitts feel like bear paws on his shoulder and bicep, Denbow would have been relieved of his newly assumed command by way of sucker punch. The Navy man ignores Bryan’s grunts and the cold silence from the others.
Denbow, talking like he’s just remembered a small detail, adds, “Nightjar, when you’re not doing anything else, transmit Colonel McKnight’s last known location to Mobile Base Pequod. Over.”
Moments later, it’s not over.
“What kind of balder—Bianchi, is this channel encrypted?” a crotchety voice says over general comms.
This has got to be Captain Stahlback of the Lee, the aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Oman.
“What kind of balderdash are you pulling there? Lieutenant Commander Denbow? I expected more from you.
“Listen, Nightjar, as battle group commander, I’m giving you a direct order: Return to… What’s the code for the ship?
“Return to Pequod immediately. Do not make any other deviations from your assigned course, the one I just had my CAG send you. Is that clear?”
Bryan does not need enhanced vision to see the smug look drain away from Denbow’s features.
“Ah, Snakecharmer actual to Pequod,” Denbow says.
Snakecharmer actual. Bryan’s gut clenches when he hears the SEAL take Sienna’s mission command call sign for himself.
“Rerouting in-flight to CENTCOM land base is my call,” Denbow says. “Request reconfirmation up chain of command.”
The noise that comes in reply from the aircraft carrier sounds halfway between the grunt of a wild hog and the squeak of a rubber duck.
“Did… did you just ask me to verify my own order, son?”
More sputtering and static.
“Well, you reconfirm this: Nightjar, get your butt back here, pronto. Any deviation from course, I will have no choice but to assume you’ve been compromised by hostiles. I will personally give your transponder codes to Khorasani Air Defense.
“And if they can’t shoot you insubordinate, er, turkeys down, I’ll scramble some of my Stymph drones, who sure as heck will. Pequod actual over and out.”
Denbow grinds his jaw, throws off his headset, and looks over at Snakelips. He stares past her and right at the girl, Anis. The former hostage looks scared and tiny strapped into the big flight chair.
For the rest of the trip back to the Lee, Bryan vows not to break anything or beat anyone senseless. He tries taking a page out of T-Rex’s book of sneak. Shielding what he’s doing, he texts Nobu’s forearm display screen. Seconds later, the Asian-Apache patches a back channel to the Lee’s Air Wing Commander, Amman Kanin.
He’s a good guy, Sienna and her boyfriend, Roger, both said so. He’ll do the right thing. He’ll send out Search and Rescue.
The Air Wing Commander does nothing. Kanin replies to Nobu that all his flight authorization codes have been revoked by Stahlback until further notice. There’s no search-and-rescue op. Not even a surveillance drone is going back to where Sienna fell.
Where her body is.
How can she be alive if jumping with the best escape chute the military has would kill anyone?
Still, Nightjar was low, really low, only dozens of meters above the sandy hills. And that glow. The one that seemed to be coming from inside her flight suit.
What happened? Her eyes. They were so blank, like she barely knew what was going on.
Tried to grab her, me, and Petr, but we just ended up pushing her out.
What the heck does that? Some electrical malfunction from the RAPTEK weapons system? A short circuit at the same time the helo hit an air pocket? That could have popped them to zero-G for a second.
Bryan uses the helo’s cabin computer console monitor to scan the topography in the flight records. If they had been at fifty meters altitude, if the static thing slowed her down, if the ground was angling right, maybe she had a chance.
Speculating is above his E-7 paygrade. He wills the hovercopter forward. He wants to burst into the cabin and grab Nightjar by the collar of his flight suit. This time not to demand he go back but to make him push his plasma rotors to their limits to get them to the ship.
If they abandon Sienna McKnight, his thirty years in the military will have been one sorry-assed joke. His adoptive parents, lay-pastors from a town outside Greensboro, had gone on a Christian mission to Africa four decades ago and returned with an albino child. They taught him not to quit, that the good fight could not be walked away from. You could only win or lose. That was the way of the good fight.
Looking out the gaping hatch, Bryan won’t let go of the belief there are more rounds left in this grudge boxing match.
After that terrible night she was born here, after the secret DARPA mission back when she was sixteen, had they tempted this hostile place once too often?
No. No, Khorasan, you old scavenger, I feel it. You haven’t taken her back. Not yet.
14
“There.”
“Sarge, you say something?” Snakelips looks at him over the tangled dark hair of the little girl’s head.
Bryan didn’t realize he’d spoken. With every pixel under control of his optic nerves, he concentrates on the one bit of glowing tinsel out on the dark ocean. The Lee. He zooms in. Night landing lights flare on the port bow.
“Naw. Nothin’, Corporal.”
He waits until he’s sure Whitebread and Nobu are looking somewhere else, until he’s nearly sure the hovercopter is close enough. Then Bryan pushes off from his seat, takes one, two, three, four steps to the jammed-open hatchway, and jumps.
Bryan’s hands scramble at chill air. Plasma rotors above screech at him like a million captive insects. No time for Nightjar to set his bird down.
A few seconds of hang-time zip by, then stern steel foredeck covered by abrasive nonskid meets his feet, knees, and bites outstretched palms. He’s close to the edge, real close to a drop into the water. Fortunately, the launch deck curves up. Bryan half slides and half rolls down its length.
He gets his feet under him and makes for the bridge island. Shouts of surprise from the sailors are the nattering of as many seagulls. He ignores them.
The Lee’s uptight XO is on him right away.
That guy’s everywhere. Bianchi tries to get in his way. He doesn’t. But the security doorway up to the flag bridge does. It’s locked.
“Commander, open it,” Bryan says, breathing heavily into the Navy man’s face. “I got business with the captain.”
“Sergeant, I can see—”
“You don’t see nothin’. I watched her, our CO, fall. We just left her. We came back. Under orders, under threats. Unless you’ve got a copter ready to go and get the colonel, I’m talking to the man. Now.”
After some haggling and totally accidentally hitting a security guy’s jaw with a glancing elbow, Bryan gets in. But only after dropping his weapons belt and being frisked.
He jams it up the t
ight metal stairwell and finally gets face time with Captain Stahlback, but it’s over the Kevlar shoulder pads of three swabbies holding EEL launchers with riot shock prods attached.
Navy hospitality.
Bryan clenches his fists and says the third thing that occurs to him.
“Captain Stahlback, sir, our CO, she—”
“I heard. I saw.”
The relaxed way he’s sitting, the offhand way he’s talking, it burns Bryan. What’s with those stupid bobble dolls all around his office?
Three Marines aren’t gonna be enough.
“Nightjar fed me some footage,” Stahlback says. “I’m going to investigate the CAG’s maintenance procedures. That bird was faulty. Plasma rotors created some kind of short, and your colonel suffered the result of an aeronautic malfunction. You have my condolences. Dismissed.”
If only the defensive linemen didn’t have stun cuffs. He’d make the captain’s head bobble. But they do. Bryan begins to feel small, like the whole aircraft carrier has suddenly become hostile foreign territory.
Sienna’s one of us, can’t you jerks see?
Sarge Bryan tries to think what Sienna would say. What if he had gone through that hatch and she were standing here? She’d use her head, like Annalies taught her, and West Point, too. Nobu will be able to patch him through to someone at home who will give a damn.
“Captain, if that was one of your pilots down, you’d already have a CSAR team in the air. Excuse me, sir, I’ve got to contact SOCOM.”
Stahlback remains calm. He’s flaky as dandruff.
“I’ve already had a chat with the Pentagon. SOCOM says it’s time to leave these troubled waters.”
The news hits him harder than the moments-ago drop off the hovercopter to the steel deck. Special Ops Command in DC was his lifeline, her lifeline. Without their support for a rescue mission…
“They confirmed with Oversight and State,” Stahlback drones on. “That was everyone’s condition of mission approval for this Sidewinder fiasco: deniability. Do you think anyone is eager to own a mission after it has gotten this screwed up? You were way off your assigned flight path.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“After you picked up the detainee, Sidewinder. Our colleague Lieutenant Denbow has informed me all about your change in flight vector.”
Until then, Bryan had been tunnel visioning on Stahlback. Two other guys are in the captain’s ready room. The jack-off SEAL Denbow must have snuck around while they were frisking him. XO Bianchi looks on. That guy is everywhere.
Bryan thinks fast. No point in denying it, even though he has no idea why Sienna took them off course. What a time for her to be so secretive.
“Sir, that was a last-minute target of opportunity. Classified, need-to-know—”
“Don’t give me any more of your covert ops doublespeak. I’m not a fan of these black-bag missions,” Stahlback says. “My Stymphalian-class UAVs out there carry Carnivore bunker busters capable of going through twenty feet of concrete. One of those would have saved me a damaged bird and one heck of a stack of paperwork.”
Bryan’s sweat starts to cool over his skin, the chalk-white skin that marks him as an outsider. His flight suit feels like a straitjacket. It chafes.
He looks around. Is there any angle left he can work? Where’s T-Rex when you need him?
Denbow’s face is grim. He’s still an arrogant slick. He definitely is not upset about Sienna being MIA. He’s pissed he’s on the Lee and not at Doha Base, where he tried to order the pilot to land. Why was the Navy guy so insistent?
The arrogant slick speaks. “As Sidewinder mission commander by default, I have to concur with Captain Stahlback.” He shakes his crew-cut head. “With no tracker and only vague GPS coordinates, there’s nowhere to start a body recovery op. Even if we wanted to.”
Behind the SEAL, Bianchi reaches toward his shirt pocket. It’s full of intel data modules. The XO looks at Stahlback and stops. Bryan says nothing.
He knows something about Sienna!
“She’s out there!”
“Whose fault is that?” Stahlback talks like he’s got all the time in the world. “I don’t know what strings she pulled to redirect my whole battle group to help you in her private little war. But when you go off the reservation with my flight crew and my hardware, yes siree Bob, that’s where I draw the line.
“The Khorasani have asked for an official denial of our involvement in the alleged incursion by an unknown aerial vehicle. We’re giving it through proper channels. Case closed. We’re leaving.”
It takes all of Bryan’s will not to barge in to wrench the data scrolls out of the XO’s hands. Instead he resorts to pleading one last time.
“But the colonel comes from a military family. Her mother was an Army doctor, a trauma surgeon who was killed saving lives. If there’s any chance at all, you’ve got to—”
“Sergeant, I don’t got to do anything. Not on my ship. Yes, I’ve read her file. Do they really both call themselves ‘mother’?” Stahlback shakes his head as if Sienna is some obscure oddity that will never quite fit into the starched and pressed shape he requires of things.
“McKnight is not anyone’s anymore. In my report, she won’t even have the luxury of KIA status. Officially, she no longer exists. Dis-missed.” He turns to his favorite swabbie goon. “Mr. Reynolds, show our Army guest to his quarters. Make sure he stays there until we can arrange transport off the Lee.”
The midshipman takes Bryan away. Their boots make hollow sounds in the cold corridor. The Lee, chock full of sailors, feels empty. Two Marine guards break off and follow them. He has no choice but to get back to his berth bunk.
As they get on the elevator, Bryan replays what he saw just now. He freeze-frames on the scrolls in Bianchi’s vest pocket.
The elevator descends for two decks, then stops. A couple of maintenance crew get on. Bryan only half listens as they gripe about a new memo issued by Stahlback. Something about grooming standards on his ship. While not addressed specifically to Machinist’s Mates, they clearly take the new regulations outlawing grease smudges on pants and sleeves personally.
Bryan’s mind is wracked with should-haves and could-haves. He’s got to remain calm. He can’t do anything to get himself and the other Dogs locked in the brig. Then he’d be no use at all.
He should check on them.
“Mr. Reynolds, did our people get squared away?”
The Navy man checks his PDA.
“Nightjar landed okay. Looks like at least one hundred hours to get the hovercopter ready again,” Reynolds says. He’s a chatty bugger. Not a suspicious bugger. “That used to be our number one standby bird. I guess Bullfinch’ll be on deck. Gotta have one in case a pilot ditches. Or jet backwash puts a deckhand overboard. Or someone gets depressed and jumps off the bow. It’s a jarhead bird. Man, there’s a lot of Marines on board this trip.”
“There was a prisoner. And a… a humanitarian evacuee.”
“Ya, ya, I boarded everyone okay. ’Cept your colonel, of course. They all reported back in their racks. Prisoner’s in holding. The non-com girl, she’s in forward medical getting checked out. Your guy, the big Polack, said her name’s Anis. Ain’t that a beer?”
“Naw, Mr. Reynolds, I don’t believe it is,” Bryan replies.
And if you don’t want to find out what Specialist Whitebread’s specialty is, I wouldn’t let him hear you call him Polack.
“The local rugrat will be the only kid we have on board. All the chicks’ll be playin’ mommy to her. Hey, if she’s still breastfeeding, there’s this one flight officer who can help out.”
The two Marines trailing them snicker.
“I think Anis is kinda old for that,” Bryan says idly. Good. Sienna would—will want to know how the girl is doing.
Bryan goes straight to his own bunk space. He acts sullen, beaten.
“Guess you’re stayin’ in for the night, right?” Reynold’s suggestion has an edge to it. He reads his name
off the LED bunk assignment tag. “Uh, Sarge Shettny Zulu? Is that African?”
“It is. Shetani Zeru, Mr. Reynolds. It’s Swahili, means ‘friendly guy.’”
15
Bryan wants to slam the door of his berth on some squishy parts of Midshipman Reynolds’s head, but he eases it closed, leaving a crack open for air circulation and eavesdropping.
Unfortunately it’s his eyes, not his ears, that have cybernetic augments. He can’t make out the whispering. After a bit, all three Navy guys step off back down the corridor.
Bryan paces the two and a half steps along his bunk. He checks out the lightbulbs. They say General Electric. He cycles his eyes through a bunch of different waves. When he’s in Lux/Net zones, there’s telltale flare, the result of the muons or protons and stuff scattering. This version of his eyes can detect it. Not here.
Didn’t think so.
Not even Stahlback would be dumb enough to install foreign spy systems in a warship that is USA DoD property. There’s no other surveillance he can identify. While he’s still listening at the door, a stylus scroll rolls down the corridor. Camo painted with a miniature eagle feather clipped on. It’s one of theirs.
Nobu, T-Rex, and the others have been confined to separate quarters down the corridor.
Pretty sure there’s no direct surveillance on him at the moment, Sarge still takes no chances. He shields it from view and yanks at the folded screen. From top to bottom it’s filled with really obscene, downright painful, and physically impossible things for their Navy hosts to do. There are even crude diagrams of how they can do these acts to themselves, each other, and various sea mammals. They feature particular emphasis on what Captain Bobblehead can do with his collection of baseball toys.
T-Rex must have the input console.
A few seconds later, the angry, kinky crap gets wiped and is replaced by real-time text.
These are private smoke signals, Custer and cavalry no can see. N.
Bryan links the screen to his keyboard module.
Quit clowning around. Study birdlife on this tub.
