By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  He dug in a fork, unable to wait till he actually sat down, and the flavor exploded into his mouth. He sat and leaned in to inhale the aroma as he chewed.

  “You planning to wear that or are you gonna eat it?” Sly Stowell, one of the Navy’s chief petty officers, dropped his own tray next to Justin. He drove monstrous hovercraft parked down on the Peleliu’s amphibious deck.

  “Don’t you be joking about this food none, Sly. That’s Texas spaghetti sauce on a Navy ship in the Mediterranean. I’m either dreaming or I’m gonna marry the cook.”

  “Gonna have ta fight me for her, boy.”

  Justin inspected Sly. He was broad of shoulder and looked as tough as any Special Ops soldier despite being Navy.

  “I wouldn’t suggest it,” Bill advised, actually breaking his silence.

  “Why not? Other than I’d get some incredible food if I win.”

  Bill contemplated a piece of his garlic bread at length before responding. “First, Sly beat the shit out of every Ranger aboard in a wrestling match a few months back.”

  Justin had wrestled more than his fair share of bull calves, angry steers, and rowdy cowhands. He and Sly traded friendly grins that said a wrestling match might be in their near future.

  “The main reason…” Bill finished the piece of bread with a crunch and left for another iced tea. When he returned, he continued the conversation right where he’d left it. “His wife is chief steward and almost as scary as the rest of the women she hangs with.” He tipped his glass to acknowledge the empty table in the center of the officers’ mess.

  “Trust me.” Sly started twirling up his pasta covered with shrimp and scallops and other things that had no business being on pasta. “I’m married to her, and I can promise you that she is just as scary. I tried messing with one of her recipes once.” He shuddered. “I’m lucky to be alive here today. A missile can only kill you. A chef with her knives… Look out, son, and keep your legs tight together.”

  * * *

  “So, a soon-to-be inductee in the Married Special Operations Forces Club…” Gail Stowell drawled in a soft Southern accent as she joined them at the stainless steel prep table in the main galley.

  Kara jolted as if someone had just stung her with a cattle prod.

  “I knew it,” Trisha crowed and slapped the chief steward on the back.

  The woman was as slender as one of her knives…and a raving lunatic.

  “It is all over you,” Gail informed her.

  Kara didn’t know whether to pound her head against the steel table or be sick on it.

  She’d arrived in the officers’ mess close enough to the end of the meal that the women were already leaving. They had scooped her up and led her down a deck to the large galley kitchen that was being cleaned up from the last of the service. A few of the crew were finishing the scrubbing, but most were eating and laughing at another prep table on the far end of the kitchen.

  While Kara struggled to recover, Gail ducked into the crew’s neighboring mess hall and returned with a big bowl of spaghetti with meatballs and a sprinkle of parm on top that smelled almost good as Kara’s mom’s recipe. Gail set it down in front of Kara and sat on a stool with a pleased sigh as she surveyed her quieting kitchen.

  Kara looked down at herself to see if she was wearing Justin’s underwear on the outside of her pants or what.

  “She doesn’t know.” Connie made one of her rare pronouncements. She took a piece of garlic bread from the basket that Gail had also supplied.

  “Know what?” Know what? “I’m so not talking about this.” Justin. “You.” She pointed at Trisha. “I am not falling for your tricks.”

  “Have I said a word? For once I’m minding my own business, and look what I get for being right.” Trisha did her best to sound deeply and morally offended. Maybe if she’d left out the “minding my own business” part, she’d have stood a chance.

  “Wait.” Kara tried for a breath, but it wasn’t working. “Right about what?” she asked Trisha. She turned to Connie. “I don’t know what? I—”

  Claudia had sat on the stool next to her and slid an arm around Kara’s shoulders, offering a sideways hug. “Shh, honey. It will be okay. Honestly it will. And if it feels like you’re choking or want to kill him, you’re absolutely on the right track. I almost murdered Michael before I married him.”

  “She’s the one I want to murder.” Kara aimed a finger across the table.

  “Oh, I’m so scared.” Trisha did a lousy job of cowering.

  “I’m—” Kara stopped because something terrifyingly unlike a hiccup had caught in her throat. Deep breath. Drop into the zone. Fly through.

  Her self pep talk wasn’t working.

  Ride it out.

  The fact that Justin’s metaphor helped more than her own completely negated any bit of calm it earned her.

  She grabbed the edges of the table and braced herself. There were way too many assumptions flying around.

  Fine! She’d fix that.

  “I like him.” Though she couldn’t seem to let go of her death grip on the table. “He’s an amazing man.”

  The women nodded, though she’d guess by some of their rather mushy expressions that they were thinking of their own husbands.

  “Really good with his hands.” She’d play that angle.

  Several of the women sighed.

  “But there’s no way I deserve him.”

  They all startled in unison and turned to face her.

  Where in the hell had that come from?

  But she didn’t deserve him.

  She sat in a steel coffin aboard one of the most powerful ships in the Navy. He flew into the heart of Israel and rescued people from the middle of allied Air Force bases. He’d been blown up, lost his crew, and climbed back aboard to fly into SOAR.

  Several of them started to speak, doing one of those group stumbles and stops. After their second attempt, Gail raised a hand to cut them off.

  “Stop it. Just go away. We need to let the woman get some calories.” Spoken like a true chief steward. Then she grinned. “By the size of the smile on your face when you first came in here, I think you have a need for those calories.”

  Kara wanted to cut and run, but didn’t dare under Gail’s commanding gaze.

  Trisha tried to say something, but Lola grabbed her by the ear and dragged her out, going, “Ow! Ow! Ow!” for which Kara would be eternally grateful. Later.

  Claudia gave her shoulders a final squeeze, and Gail sent off the last members of her lingering crew and followed them out.

  Soon it was only Connie at the table, along with Kara and her confusion.

  * * *

  “Quite something when it catches up with you.”

  Justin looked at Michael across the dining table and nodded. No question what the man meant because Justin was feeling it right down to his bones.

  “Was there a moment for you?”

  “Top of a tree,” Michael replied without elaborating.

  “I was chewing her out for rescuing my sorry ass from near certain death,” Bill put in, pointing upward toward the flight deck. “Didn’t even know her name yet. Cutest damn thing I’d ever laid eyes on.”

  “Best damn barbecue anywhere.” Sly got a round of laughter as he pointed down toward the belly of the ship. “What about you?”

  “I can’t really say.” First time he saw her? Not the moment when she’d given herself to him with such perfect trust. Perhaps when she’d reached across the cockpit of the Chinook and traced a finger along his scar that so few were allowed to see.

  The others were waiting for him.

  “Doesn’t make it any less true though. Does it?” Justin already knew the answer to that.

  All three of his dinner companions shook their head in agreement.

  Michael passed him the sa
lt and Sly went for more garlic bread.

  * * *

  “It doesn’t matter, you know.”

  Kara really didn’t need some Connie statistic about the inevitability of Trisha’s prodding. She wanted to be like Kirk to Connie’s Spock: Never tell me the odds.

  “Whatever we say doesn’t matter. You’ll know when it’s time.” Connie stood up to leave.

  Kara grabbed her sleeve to halt her departure. “What if I don’t? Because no matter what you all say”—she barely managed to resist one of Justin’s lazy y’alls—“what we have is great sex. Nothing more.”

  Connie’s smile was slow. It was a rare thing—she was mostly deadpan to the world, even around her husband—which made the expression all the more stunning when she did let it out. Pure brain; she really was part Vulcan.

  “Believe that as long as you can. The it’s just sex concept was a comfort to me while it lasted.” She moved several steps farther away before turning back. Now her grin was suddenly as wicked as one of Trisha’s.

  “What?”

  “Well, I should, being me, point out that you are in a statistically bad grouping. So far, the women who fly for the 5D—going all the way back to Emily Beale, the first woman to make it into the 160th—have each and every one married Special Operations soldiers within or closely tied to the 5th Battalion D Company. I just thought you should know that.”

  Kara considered heaving a meatball at her, but threw her balled-up napkin instead.

  Connie’s grin flashed briefly once more before she departed, leaving Kara to fetch the napkin from where it had fluttered harmlessly to the immaculate floor of the empty kitchen.

  Chapter 14

  “A sailor’s life is a very itinerant one.” Lieutenant Boyd Ramis had called them all into his cabin up on the hangar deck shortly after dinner.

  Justin felt an incredible sense of déjà vu. The first time he’d sat here, he’d been so hopelessly naive. Fresh out of SOAR training, he’d thought that he knew what he was doing. They’d been in the Arabian Sea at the time.

  Then Kara Moretti had walked into the briefing room, and his world had tilted worse than a pinball machine in a typhoon. Twenty-four hours later he’d been flying a raid deep into Somali territory and rescuing hostages during the peak of a tropical storm. Since then he’d flown in a dozen different countries, both friendly and a bit less than.

  He’d also taken a lover who now sat in exactly the same seat she had before, close beside Captain Claudia Casperson. Once again the blond and the brunette sat side by side on the couch in Ramis’s topside office. How Justin’s emotions had traveled such a distance in such a short period of time was beyond him.

  “Once again”—Ramis managed to sound both noble and put-upon—“it is up to the hardworking Navy to travel to a remote destination with no reason given. I have been informed that there will be no operations while en route.”

  Justin glanced around but saw no more clarity on anyone else’s faces than he felt on his own. A herd of longhorns on a cattle drive had more sense of where they were going than anyone here did. He saw Michael’s unending patience and did his best to emulate it. Experience had shown that Ramis would get around to the point only when he was good and ready.

  “We are to transit the Med once again, this time via Sicily, Athens, and Cyprus…”

  In his peripheral vision Justin saw Kara start to look toward him and then stop herself. Only four people in this room knew about the trip into the heart of Israel; even Ramis hadn’t known that’s where they went, though it wouldn’t be a hard guess. That the Peleliu was headed back in that direction only meant more trouble.

  “…which we are told to take at a moderate rate to ‘avoid unnecessary equipment wear and tear.’” Ramis was plenty smart enough to not buy that for a single second. “The transit that we made in four days going west is projected to take eight going east. We already have notified teams to shift all of your aircraft down onto the hangar deck.”

  At least there they’d be out of sight. But that meant a week trapped aboard without a single flight. There was only so much ground training and vehicle maintenance that could be done.

  “All except Captain Roberts’s Calamity Jane.”

  That snapped Justin’s attention around—his thoughts had been on the verge of wandering over to Kara and her easy smile.

  “Captain…” Ramis addressed him directly but was clearly speaking for the rest of the room. “Your crew is presently installing jump seats on your cargo deck. You are hereby cleared for the four-hour flight to Camp Darby, outside Livorno, Italy. You and any SOAR flight crew and officer-level action personnel who would like to are hereby cleared for a one-week leave. Departure in thirty minutes.”

  An image flashed into Justin’s brain so hard that it almost hurt.

  Kara Moretti in a scant bikini on an Italian beach.

  Or riding a horse over Texas grassland in a denim shirt with the tails untucked and tied together, exposing her slender midriff. He’d buy her a proper Stetson, though she’d probably want it in pink or something equally silly. Still, it would look so good on her.

  “Yes.” Kara did a fist pump. With deep familiarity, he could pick out her words through the burst of excited talk. “Brooklyn pizza, here I come.”

  New York? He’d blown through a couple times with Mom when he was a kid, but never liked it much. The city was filled with crowds tighter than an Army barracks and more noise than a battle zone. Because of that, he and the Big Apple had never much taken to each other. If that’s where she wanted to go, he’d go.

  But New York? Really?

  Chapter 15

  Kara felt like a scene from one of those cowboy-comes-to-the-city movies when they landed at JFK airport. The New York girl and six-two of cowboy lover at her side.

  It was clear she wasn’t the only one imagining that. Several of the civilian flight attendants had flirted with Justin though she was right there beside him. Hitting baggage claim had the same dynamic. Kara was used to men’s gazes tracking her across a room—her feeling was let ’em look and dream ’cause they were never going to touch. But it was strange that this time so many of the women were tracking the man beside her.

  She wasn’t quite sure how it had ended up this way. Justin had flown them across the Med to Camp Darby, he and his crew singing off-key Christmas carols for way too much of the four-hour flight. The fact that it was May didn’t seem to factor in even a little bit.

  From there most of the various crews transferred over to the airport in Genoa before scattering to different flights. There she and Justin had simply gotten on the same plane without ever really discussing it. It was early afternoon by that point in the travel, the middle of their “night,” so she’d been too tired to think of protesting.

  Not that she minded.

  Not really.

  Though while she’d taken boyfriends home before, this felt different.

  “You sure about this?” she asked as they boarded the A train out of JFK and toward the city. Justin eyed the jam of evening commuters with caution.

  “A bit less so than when I was back in the airport. Awful lot of folks here, moving fast in a mighty small space. Always took a cab.”

  “That’s like fifty bucks. Subway is way cheaper, trust me.” And he’d followed her aboard. The subway train ride had started out by the airport and was going against the tide of the main evening commute. They’d easily found seats and had their duffels propped on the floor between their feet.

  New York had really fixed up the subway cars since she was a kid. They were clean, with a minimum of graffiti, and a transit cop looking bored as shit stood two-thirds of the way down the car. While they were here, she’d make sure they went at least once into the city proper during commute hours, just to mess with Justin’s head.

  It was an evil thought. Normally she did her best to avoid
that exact situation, but watching Justin’s face in the packed crowds and seeing him learn to ride the surges of the subway along with the shifting masses crammed into every car could be worth the price of admission.

  “Your hat does make you stand out a bit, Justin.”

  “Reminds me of home and family. It also keeps you from losing me in the crowd. I get lost in this herd and I’m not ever gonna be finding my way. I reckon that alone makes it worthwhile.”

  “I don’t have any plans on losing you.” Which was an odd thing for her to say. But nobody looked like him or moved like him, perhaps not in the whole city. The hat was just the icing on the cake.

  “I don’t plan on losing you either, Kara.” His expression was oddly serious.

  She was about to comment on it when they reached her stop. She almost lost Justin right there. He was moving at a leisurely pace, standing and shouldering his duffel. By the time he reached the door, well behind her, the surge of people loading from the platform had him being all polite and holding back. If she hadn’t noticed and rushed back to snag the door as it closed, he’d have been whisked off into Manhattan proper.

  “Gotta be quick on your feet now, Cowboy. You’re in the big city.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I can see that now. Or I could simply change my tactics.” He grabbed her hand and held it as they walked along the mostly empty platform.

  It was an odd sensation. They certainly hadn’t held hands while walking around on board the Peleliu. Except during sex, they’d held hands only that once while sitting aboard his Chinook helicopter.

  Kara had never been big on it. In high school and the neighborhood, guys used hand-holding to stake their claim. Even worse was when they hook their arm around your neck until it felt like you were in a permanent, vicious headlock. Signaling not only “this one is mine,” but also gaining some kind of strange validation among their friends that they had a girl attached to their side, as if they could grab one any time they wanted.

  Yet Justin made it feel like the most natural thing—aside from their heavy packs, the exit gates, and the narrow stairs that climbed the three stories up from the subway. On the sidewalk she was walking along the so-familiar streets holding hands, which made the neighborhood feel completely new and strange. They moved like a walking roadblock to the natural flow of traffic on the sidewalk. She’d always looked down on couples that did that. She’d wondered if she should pay a kid to walk out ahead of them with a “Wide Load” sign to clear their path.