By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  “Roger that! We’ll pin him, you chop and cauterize. Use a really hot iron.”

  Claudia Jean Gibson at the controls of the Maven II didn’t speak much, but he could feel her out there agreeing with them.

  Justin winced in imagined pain, as he was sure every man on the comm circuit did. He figured maybe it would be better if he kept his mouth shut. Once the women of the 5D got on a roll, wasn’t no man on God’s green earth who was safe.

  At a dozen kilometers to target, the whole flight of five helos dropped from ten meters above the ground to three. No time to sing now.

  The overlap imaging inside his helmet took serious concentration when flying true nap-of-earth. The NOE software suite fed him programmed satellite terrain models that let him see the big stuff up ahead. Live infrared from the nose camera told him when he was about to eat a tree or the side of a house. And Kara’s feed from the Gray Eagle provided the tactical landscape to overlay on the other two. All of it projected on the inside of his helmet’s visor along with key engine and flight indicators—most of which he left up to Danny to manage as copilot.

  They were doing what no other helicopter pilots anywhere could. Two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour and no higher off the dirt than a horse. They hugged mountainsides and deep valley bottoms like they were birds of prey on the hunt.

  He loved slinging his helo over the low terrain.

  Now they were getting down to it.

  * * *

  Kara was briefly mesmerized by watching the helos fly across her display. The 5D pilots were the best, and everyone knew that, but, damn, they were fun to watch. She could pick out each pilot simply by how they flew across the terrain.

  Trisha was the slick knife, straight slices from point A to point Z, skipping the twenty-four places in between as if they didn’t exist. Claudia so smooth that she blended into the landscape, and Lola Maloney practically bebopped ten tons of gun platform across the sky. Dennis flew his Merchant of Death almost as aggressively as Trisha.

  And then there was the cowboy.

  In his massive Chinook, he should have lumbered; instead he soared. He SOARed. Hyuk! Hyuk! She could practically hear Justin and that deep laugh of his—the man was absolutely convinced he was the funniest thing around.

  He flew as if he were settled back in his saddle loping over the prairie, not dodging through the rough and arid wasteland of central Turkey. That’s assuming he was a real cowboy and didn’t just have the hat and the drawl. Probably tried line dancing once at some Dallas cowboy bar and bought a hat in the gift shop.

  Tago flashed the close-up tactical feed showing the Turkish OKK’s positions onto Kara’s side screen. She forced her attention away from watching the perfect harmony of Justin’s lope over the wilderness.

  The OKK still squatted right where they’d been all along, hunkered down in a valley like sitting ducks. She’d thought they were better than that.

  They were better than that!

  They were…

  Right where they knew they’d be seen!

  The SOAR flight was sixty seconds out.

  Come on, girl. Think! Think! It’s gotta be a trap.

  Assume that it was. Then what did that tell her? It was…

  Like the time the idiot boys had clambered out onto the roof of Keating Hall and decided to flour-bomb some random college girls as they trooped up the front steps. But they’d made a crucial tactical error. For their initial target, they’d bombed the female cadre of the Fordham University Army ROTC program—Cadet Captain Kara Moretti in the lead.

  The flour bombers had left two boys at ground level to engage and flag likely targets, slowing them down. The initial rooftop attack had worked all too well, leaving Kara and her cadre enveloped in a cloud of hot-pink-stained flour and raucous laughter. But not for long.

  Kara had signaled Cadet Master Sergeant Merry to deal with the two lookouts on the ground. When it was Sergeant Merry, one girl versus two civilian boys was plenty.

  Kara had led the rest of her team straight into the hall at a fast trot, leaving a long line of hot-pink dust up the marble stairways. Three hand signals and they’d split up and cut off all angles of escape. Ten minutes later, her entire cadre had headed for the showers, smiling.

  The disorganized attackers were left dangling upside down—wearing very secure impromptu harnesses fabricated from handy fire hoses—off the edge of the roof four stories in the air.

  They’d been rescued soon enough, though it had been hours before they’d thought to track down their two spotters on the ground. Those two were eventually unearthed in the bushes outside Keating Hall trussed with their own shoelaces and gagged with each other’s dirty underwear. Kara had always liked the way Cadet Master Sergeant Merry thought things through.

  That’s what the group of OKK clustered in the Turkish valley was doing; they were the distraction. Slowing SOAR down and drawing their focus. They needed to be spanked, but the real threat would be ranged and ready somewhere nearby. The question was: How close?

  Forty-five seconds out.

  Once she thought it through, it was obvious.

  “Little Birds, split and circle the hills.” She rattled off helicopter names and target coordinates. “They have shooters placed high at these locations. Land on their heads.”

  “Vengeance,” she called to Lola’s gunship. “Climb to three thousand feet. Your primary targets will be…” She listed off more coordinates. “Make some noise and light once you’re up there.” It was against the unspoken rules to ask a stealth helicopter to make noise, but Lola didn’t argue.

  Chief Warrant Lola Maloney might command the 5D when they were on the ground; experience counted more than rank here—another thing to appreciate about the Night Stalkers. But during an operation the Air Mission Commander called the shots.

  Kara could really get into this AMC role. She spoke, and the tactical map reflecting the team’s actions shifted and morphed into seriously bad news for the OKK.

  Not that she was power-trippin’ or any such thing. But she could see it, like one big gestalt, right where the Turkish Special Forces had to have parked their butts if they were good without being truly great like the U.S. Special Ops Forces.

  Key hideout positions would be tromped by the Little Birds coming up over the backs of ridges.

  The DAP Hawk, well able to defend itself, would perch high to attract attention and draw simulated fire.

  Now for the hammer blow.

  “Texas,” she called to Justin. “Come in fast and low. Fast-rope six Rangers down on top of the small hillock at the southwest corner to draw their attention.” She circled the target hill on her screen so that it would transmit to the tactical display shining on the inside of his helmet’s visor.

  “Then fly and land here.” She drew a line that circled behind a low ridge—cutting an arc around the OKK team sitting as bait—where she’d found him a small dip in the landscape that would provide cover while unloading the rest of the Rangers.

  The OKK would be trying to follow his circling, which would draw the ground troops’ attention away from the first Ranger team, who could then start taking potshots at the bad guys’ backs to distract them from the main force.

  “Let the rest of your Rangers loose here. Then climb to a thousand feet directly below the DAP Hawk to offer your gunners prime shooting.”

  Nobody responded.

  They didn’t need to. This was SOAR. All of the training in what could be reliably assumed had been taken care of during the two years of training in the 160th, which was after having a minimum of five years flight experience elsewhere in the armed forces.

  She’d thought herself a real hotshot pilot of her RPA, until the first day of SOAR training. It had been a very humbling moment. She’d kicked ass ever since to make sure it didn’t happened again. The SOAR instructors weren’t just good; t
hey were Night Stalker pilots themselves and knew shit that she’d never even dreamed of back in the 27th Special Operations Wing.

  The SOAR fliers simply reacted to her commands. Once in the inner ring of the engagement, they only used radios for emergency communications like this last-moment change. Otherwise the Night Stalkers flew missions in absolute silence. Though she’d have to find a way to curb Mr. Texas during transit times. She’d just ignore the fact that his song had made her laugh so hard that Tago had offered to thump her back.

  Kara had nosed the RPA over into a dive while handing out instructions. Tosca fell from six miles down to three in that thirty seconds of full-powered dive.

  Fifteen seconds to first contact.

  Tago had picked up on what she was doing and marked two areas of hillside. “Clean!” he said over the intercom just to emphasize that they were unoccupied sites. They wanted to spook the OKK, not kill them.

  Kara targeted two of the simulated Hellfire missiles mounted on the Gray Eagle and let them loose. They went supersonic in seconds. Nine seconds and three miles later, the Hellfires slammed into either side of the valley wall high above the OKK encampment and blew up with a light-show blast from two hundred grams of R321 tracer powder that had replaced the usual warheads.

  There would be a nice bright flash and a resounding Bang! that would echo through the valley.

  At five seconds until the helos’ arrivals, every OKK trooper was now looking at the two flashes and wondering what was going on up on the vacant hillsides.

  More crucially, the blast was going to dazzle their night-vision gear and force them to blink at the wrong moment.

  Kara pulled Tosca back into level flight and circled above Lola’s DAP Hawk to watch the Turks’ downfall.

  Just like Alexander the Great twenty-five hundred years earlier, the 160th SOAR and the U.S. Rangers swept across the land of the Turks with the ease of a Brooklyn gelato vendor selling cones on a scorching July day.

  * * *

  Justin called over the intercom to Lieutenant Clint Barstowe, the leader of the U.S. Rangers, about the change in plans.

  Raymond would be dropping the rear gate and rigging the two thick FRIES fast ropes to dangle off the stern. The forty-millimeter-diameter rope would allow the Rangers to slide down to the ground and deploy in seconds without having to land the helo. Because they’d be passing behind a low hill, the OKK might not even realize the helicopter had paused to let down troops.

  To emphasize that, Justin floated up into the Turks’ view for a moment, moving slow. Then he ducked down fast behind the hill, pausing only long enough to deliver the Rangers, and then raced to the far side and slowed again as he let himself float once more into brief view. It would look as if he’d simply done a slow cruise the whole way.

  Now the trick was to stay completely out of sight.

  Kara had found him a deep notch of dry arroyo just like back home in Amarillo where he’d learned to fly. He’d been dating a cattle rancher’s daughter at the time, Francine of the long legs and not a single brain cell between her cheerleader ears.

  One day her daddy had taken him up in his little R22 helicopter to search for some stray cattle and, more likely, to scare the crap out of Justin. Instead, Justin had earned his rotorcraft license as fast as he could and flown three seasons for Hank Freeman while Francine continued to work her way through the entire football squad.

  Justin had the ball now, and like the All-State tailback he’d been, he was gonna stay fast and low.

  He slid the body of the Chinook right down between the banks of the arroyo. From down here only the sixty-foot sweep of each of his front and rear twin rotors stuck out beyond the edges. He kept a close eye for any growth higher than the stubbly brush or any particularly tall boulders that might be wanting to clip off his rotor blades.

  Danny also rode the controls. There was too much for one person to concentrate on. Per prior training, Justin watched the arroyo and the right-hand bank. Danny kept an eye on the arroyo, but mostly watched the left-hand bank. And they both watched the threat detector like hawks, just in case there were a couple bad buys stationed down in the arroyo.

  Should have been; there weren’t. Missed opportunity, guys!

  They kept the Chinook moving along sharply, which meant the Rangers had better be hanging on as he bobbed and weaved twenty tons of helo like it weighed twenty kilos.

  There was Kara’s hill.

  A good choice. Nice job, sweetheart! If it were up to him, he’d confirm her as the new permanent Air Mission Commander on this basis alone. She’d known exactly what he needed and made sure he’d received it.

  He slewed the Chinook sideways as he bled speed.

  “Unload in ten, nine…” He didn’t have to continue his countdown over the intercom; everyone would have the count now.

  At five he saw by the indicator light that the rear ramp was once again open and lowered.

  At two he came to a stop.

  Raymond began calling distance-to-contact as Justin lowered them into position. He was still in hover, none of his wheels on the ground. Justin’s pilot seat was a dozen meters in the air over the dry arroyo. The middle of his helicopter was above the steep side of the carved riverbed. The Chinook’s only point of contact with the earth was the trailing edge of the rear ramp twenty meters behind him, against a small flat spot he’d picked out as they slewed into place.

  In ten seconds, the remaining twenty-five Rangers and their three heavily armed ATVs were out.

  “Ramp clear,” Raymond called.

  Justin nosed down the face of the slope to gain some speed, rode the ground effect for a moment as momentum built, and then hammered skyward toward the firing position that Kara had identified.

  Lola’s DAP Hawk would have been invisible, except every ten seconds or so the crew was kicking out a decoy flare. It was a perfect solution to Kara’s instruction to be visible. The flare was designed to burn bright and hot as it shot to the side so that any incoming missile would target the flare instead of the helo.

  Rather than firing a large cluster in every direction as would normally be done, Lola Maloney was firing one here and one there. No way to pin down the exact location of the black-painted helo itself.

  He slid in below her—tight, quiet, and dark.

  Then he called to his crew.

  “Remember, simulated rounds only. We don’t want to be hurtin’ their behinds any more than we already are. Weapons free.”

  It was strange not to hear the jarring buzz saw of the miniguns that usually penetrated the roar of the twin turbines mounted at the rear rotor. There was also no stench of cordite that often wound through the cabin when firing from a stable hover.

  For this exercise, their weapons were firing light beams, not lead.

  But that didn’t mean the Turkish Special Forces stood a chance, not with SOAR on the scene.

  * * *

  Kara checked her mission clock. It was all over in ninety-seven seconds.

  Five helos and thirty U.S. Rangers had just taken down a hundred OKK spread across eight locations without breaking a sweat.

  Kara knew that a report to that effect was going to go public, unless the Turkish military got its act together about actually helping in Syria and Iraq. Turkish pride was on the line; Kara didn’t doubt that they’d cooperate.

  “Bring them dogies on home, boys and girls.”

  “Yee-haw!” Justin called out over the radio and whirled down to gather his Rangers back aboard. The DAP Hawk remained on guard station above him even though they were in “friendly” territory.

  Kara jolted at the sound of the cowboy’s call and reviewed her own words. What in the world had she been thinking? Bring them dogies on home?

  Captain Justin Roberts was six-two, built like, well, a cowboy, and had hair the color of wheat. He was also arrogant, as im
pressed with himself as a fresh-inducted benchwarmer parked in the Mets dugout, and from Texas—which all on its own was like eighteen strikes against the guy. That was two full innings worth of outs, just for one guy.

  “Want some flight time, Tago?” Dumb question.

  At his eager nod, she waved for him to take over flying the Gray Eagle Tosca back to the U.S. side of Incirlik Air Base a hundred kilometers south of the exercise area. A ground team awaited her there for a rearm and refuel. She needed twice the length of the warship for a runway, so a ground team made sure that her Tosca was always ready with whatever mission package Kara needed. It was nicer this way, not having the ground team always underfoot.

  She climbed out of the deep armchair to stretch her legs and paced up and down the length of the coffin. She kept an eye on Tago. He had about half the flight hours he’d need before he’d have a chance at his own bird, but he was good and didn’t need much of an eye. Once he was close enough, the software would take over for an automated landing.

  “Don’t just float along, Sergeant. You’ll never get any better that way. Shake her out a bit.”

  He answered with a snap roll and a climb into a full loop that he didn’t quite manage. She considered showing him the trick, but she remembered learning more from her failures than her successes, so she’d let him be for a couple more attempts.

  The rest of her attention? She’d better be using that on herself.

  Bring them dogies on home?

  Damn.

  No way was she going to be getting weak in the head for a handsome hunk of Texas meat.

  Back home, Carlo was much more her style, though she wasn’t stupid enough to fall for his constant pleading. He too was typically arrogant and male. At least he was Italian, from the neighborhood, and had a to-die-for tenor voice that was leading him to opera houses around the world. He’d been trying to get into her pants since they were both twelve, with no success.

  But better him than Captain Justin Roberts.

  Chapter 2

  Justin brought the Calamity Jane back to the stern of their ship, the USS Peleliu. The aging Landing Helicopter Assault ship had been taken over from the Marine Corps when they’d tried to retire her.