Way of the Warrior

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Lois wouldn’t have minded being dressed this way on post. Looking like a civilian except for the damned peg leg. But here in public, she really hadn’t been ready for the exposure. If only she’d worn slacks, at least the cane alone would be unremarkable. She looked longingly at the exit but didn’t want to let Clark down.

  She could feel every eye in the place follow her still uneven walk to the window table. Not the kind of looks she was used to having follow her across a room. Once seated, the tablecloth was long enough that she felt a little less self-conscious. A little.

  “Hello. Lois. Someone hit your hearing with a dose of Kryptonite?”

  She tried for a dutiful laugh but had trouble dredging one up.

  “I haven’t really been off post since…well. It’s been a while.”

  “That’s kind of what I figured, thought I’d give you a pleasant night out.”

  “Well, this is certainly pleasant.” White tablecloths, candlelight at each table, immaculate waitress, and a one-page menu that looked so good an additional page would have been overwhelming. Then she glanced at the prices. This was definitely outside a soldier’s budget except for something really special. She eyed Kendall suspiciously.

  “What?” He closed his menu and set it aside. She could never decide what to get, and he was already done.

  “What’s going on, Clark? Why are we here?”

  He laughed, “You always speak the same way you fly, straight shooter.”

  “It’s what we women of steel do”—she pointed down toward her foot to make her point—“even if we’re only partly made of steel. Now, answer the question.”

  “Actually, I read up on your foot, and it’s all aluminum and titanium, so I’m not sure it counts.”

  “Modern materials, modern woman of steel. Besides, ‘woman of aluminum and titanium’ doesn’t have quite the ring I was looking for when I did this.”

  He propped his chin on a hand and aimed those dark eyes at her. They caught the candlelight and were warm and friendly.

  She resisted the urge to reach out and brush the hair out of his eyes where it had slipped down. What the hell was he doing to her?

  “Maybe I just like looking at a beautiful woman while I eat.”

  “Asked the wrong girl then.”

  “Says you.”

  “I’m—” then she stopped herself. The WTU psychologist had given her a list of trigger words to avoid. Words that would be “negative reinforcers for her emotional frame of mind.” Damaged was way high on the list. She toyed with her water glass to buy some time. The waitress arrived with a long list of memorized specials, which bought her some more time but not enough. She went with a Dungeness crab-stuffed salmon, Kendall ordered jumbo shrimp and steak.

  Damaged. She had a few other scars besides her leg but nothing hideous. Her foot was far and away the worst of it. Kendall had seen that, inspected it, and still somehow saw her as she’d been before the accident. He made her feel ridiculous for attaching her self-image to something as small as a foot. Well, if he wasn’t going to see her that way, maybe she should stop doing so herself. Or at least try.

  “Well.” She sipped her first glass of wine in a very long time and let the deep red Merlot warm her insides. She circled back to his earlier question as that now seemed to be a much safer topic. “The MEB was about what you’d expect. A lot of paperwork and a lot of sympathy—neither of which I wanted—but because I’m injured past possible recovery to full status, I’m not their problem. Tomorrow, I tackle the Physical Eval Board. That’s going to take a while. I really don’t want to leave the service, but they’re gonna shuffle me out anyway.”

  “Aren’t there plenty of things for you to do?”

  “Yeah, great. Army Wounded Warrior program. Talked to the AW2 advocate, but stay in and do what? Fly a desk? The only thing I love to do is fly choppers. Well, I sure lost my superpowers on that one.”

  Kendall reached across the table and took her hand. She let him because it felt so good and it kept the fears at bay.

  “There’s lots—”

  “Let’s talk about something else. Anything else.”

  He squeezed her hand, then he did. Most guys would push and shove. Kendall Clark had apparently decided it was his duty to fly to her rescue and at the moment she wasn’t complaining. He started with a funny story from a training mission that somehow involved a standard poodle with the name Underdog and a paper chain of cut-out Santas.

  “I swear, I’m not making this up.”

  She didn’t care if he was. As long as he kept holding her hand, she felt as if she somehow belonged.

  • • •

  Kendall escorted her to her front door. It was long past dark by the time they returned to post. Most of the apartments would be empty, any Night Stalkers not on deployment would be night flying. She found it disorienting to be done with her day while the rest of the company was just starting theirs.

  After holding the front door for her and making sure she had her keys, Kendall turned to leave. She was done in, it had been her longest day in a long time, but she still didn’t want it to end.

  “Hey, Clark. Where are your manners?”

  He stopped with one hand on the lobby door and furrowed his brow at her.

  “C’mere.” She waved him over when he hesitated.

  He approached cautiously.

  “It’s rude to hold a woman’s hand half the night, tell her she’s beautiful when she’s feeling like shit, and then you don’t at least try for a good-night kiss. What’s up with that?”

  “You want me to kiss you?”

  “I wouldn’t complain if you at least tried. Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it.” Because she knew she had, and it surprised her no end. And not just human-male contact. She wanted some Kendall Clark contact.

  He stepped until he was so close that she actually backed up the last half-step against her locked apartment door.

  “I…” His voice was soft and deep. They were so close she could feel the vibrations as much from his chest as she could with her ears. “I’ve been thinking about it since that day two years ago when we sat under the cherry tree in my backyard.”

  Then, before she could begin to process her shock, he kissed her. Not some friendly thanks-for-the-nice-date kiss. Not even a testing kiss from a handsome and geeky guy.

  He wrapped his soldier-strong arms around her and pulled her in against his surprisingly hard body. She’d never really quite paid attention to how often he’d joined in when they were doing physical training workouts. Now, she certainly could appreciate that he had. The heat of the kiss built until all she could do was wrap her arms around him and hold on for the ride. And it was a wild one.

  He plundered, and she gave until her entire body heated turbine hot. The adrenal roar so loud it drowned out everything except how Kendall felt in her arms, his lips and tongue offering no hint of gentle in their need, and his hands—those wonderful hands—one dug deep into her hair and the other at the small of her back, pulling their bodies tight together. Somewhere in the distance she heard the clunk and rattle of her cane falling to the tile floor.

  Then, just as abruptly as he’d taken her, he stopped and took a step back. Her hands, so recently clenched in that black wavy hair that was even softer than it looked, now rested on his chest. And his rested comfortably on her waist as if they’d been there a hundred times before.

  “Been wanting to do that for a long time, Captain Lang. Even better than I imagined. Way better.” He offered a very self-satisfied grin, then kissed her on the tip of the nose. “Sleep well, Superwoman.” He retrieved her cane, slid it into her nerveless fingers, and was gone.

  She didn’t manage a good-bye or even a wave. Her body buzzed very happily as she let herself into her apartment.

  Lois lay down in her bed knowing there was no way s
he’d find sleep anytime soon. Eight hours later she startled awake—startled because for the first time since the accident, she’d woken up after she’d extracted the injured but before the crash had begun to unfold.

  • • •

  Lois spent a grinding morning with the Physical Eval Board. All paperwork. “Do you need any help keying this in? No? Okay. Go to computer station B-24 and fill out forms…” and the interminable list had begun. Army thinking, the fact that all the information was on file for the Medical Eval Board didn’t mean it was in the right format for the PEB. Thankfully, she’d been smart enough to bring the paper copy of the MEB stuff, so it was mostly transcription.

  That had left her plenty of time to think about Kendall while typing. A lot of little pieces began to fit into place. She thought all the way back to that party he’d had out at his place. He knew who he was dealing with so he had some beer, a lot of soda, and an impressive amount of meat for the grill. SOAR pilots were on-call 24/7. They also had a rule of twenty-four hours bottle-to-throttle, so having the chance for a drink didn’t happen very often. Some of the ground crew who’d tagged along took a beer, but SOAR was a pretty straight crowd.

  But before the party, Kendall had made a point of finding out her preferred beverage. She’d given him two answers, because she could never decide about food. There’d been a significant stock of both the caffeine-free Diet Coke and a giant pitcher of fresh-made iced tea. He’d served her a double cheeseburger on a toasted bun with only stone-ground mustard, without her having to ask. He’d probably gotten that from watching her at cookouts by the hangar and noting that’s what she always ate.

  With her new perspective of last night’s very pleasant memory, that still raised her pulse each time she thought about it, some of the older memories were painting a picture she’d never seen.

  So, she sat and remembered and keyed down her family status: none—mother deceased and dad bailed when she was six. Medical status: BK—below the knee transtibial amputation. Procedure: amputation by five tons of crashing helicopter. The medics, who had survived the crash mostly intact, had patched her up before she bled out, but it had been a close thing. The hard rattle of gunfire back and forth as Dusty and Hi-Gear guarded their position was a constant backdrop until one of the big DAP Black Hawks had come over and laid down some serious fire from above. Chief Warrant LaRue had really torn up the landscape to protect the downed CSAR craft.

  Lois had learned to roll through these flashbacks, offering little outward sign other than a shake of her head to clear it off. Just part of the “new life.”

  Clara, the one-armed AW2 Advocate, met her for lunch. No, she’d snuck up beside the PEB computer station number B-24 and launched a tactical strike.

  Lois could see the woman’s determination, so she rolled with it. But that didn’t mean she was above complaining over a BLT.

  “I’m getting pretty sick of the ‘new life.’” Lois snagged a potato chip from the bag on her tray. “Where can I put in a requisition for the old one back? Never mind, I know it’s not going to happen, but I don’t want the new life.”

  “If you proceed with medical retirement, what are your plans?”

  “Well, I sure don’t have the patience you’re showing in dealing with a jerk like me.”

  “Then what are your plans?” Clara was tenacious.

  That’s why she hated talking to the advocate. If Lois couldn’t fly, she didn’t have a clue.

  • • •

  “Hey, Superboy.” Lois had tracked Kendall down in neutral territory. It hadn’t been hard. He was usually at the hangars or the simulators, and the simulator building was close enough that she could trust herself to walk there despite the long day at PEB.

  “Hey, woman of steel. Give me a minute. Got one more run to do.”

  She considered going up to the controller’s console and sitting in the observer’s seat, but that felt a little presumptuous, so she found a plastic chair, sat, and propped her cane between her knees.

  This glaring white room and its ugly fluorescent lighting was as close to a second home as she had. First was the hangars and sitting in a Black Hawk, but she’d also spent a lot of time in here with the flight simulators. It was a lot cheaper to crash a simulator than a twenty-million-dollar helicopter. They’d cleaned up the remains of her chopper with a set of destruct charges that left behind nothing bigger than a notepad. Thankfully, she’d been under the drugs by then and hadn’t seen her bird go up in a roar of C4 and flames.

  The simulator building itself was unremarkable. Outside was standard Fort Lewis white with a steel roof. Inside was white-painted concrete. It was the three tall stations that were the whole point. Looking as strange and clunky as two-legged Star Wars Imperial scout walkers, the simulators were boxy affairs atop spindly hydraulic pistons a dozen feet high. They allowed the simulator’s cockpit to pitch, roll, yaw, and buck hard unexpectedly, just like a real chopper.

  Little Bird, Black Hawk, and Chinook—the three choppers of SOAR turned into the three best video games on the planet. She pretended for a moment that everything was normal, and she just sat in the hard plastic chair by the Black Hawk simulator waiting her turn. She tried to recall the casual boredom she must have felt the last time she had sat here, but couldn’t find it.

  Training was a constant in SOAR. Thousands of hours in flight and thousands more in the trainer. Old Master Sergeant Jake Hamlin had a vicious bent, like he had it in for all SOAR pilots. She used to wonder if he especially had it in for her: flameouts, engine fires, hydraulic failures. All in the midst of a turbulent thunderstorm that had replaced the sunny day on her windscreen just moments before.

  Now, all she felt was a loss as some chief warrant she didn’t know clambered up into the “box.” She should just leave. She really should. But she was tired, her leg—her real one—hurt from being on it all day, and she really did want some words with Kendall. So, she just sat and waited, occasionally looking up when the simulator gave a particularly violent wheeze of hydraulic pistons and a hard lurch. Not a comfortable ride. She closed her eyes and settled in to wait.

  “You’re up, missy.”

  “I wish.” Lois smiled even before she opened her eyes to see Jake now standing in front of her. He was as big as Kendall. Despite a couple more decades, he was still Army strong, though his hair was now a gray crew cut.

  “You’re in my chairs, then you’re up next. Move your behind, Captain. Your trainer says he’s waiting for you.”

  More amused than anything else, she climbed up the steep metal stairs to the simulator’s entry level. She could feel Jake close behind her and see that he was carefully gripping the rails on either side. If she stumbled, he’d be braced to catch her. She’d worn slacks today but left the armature exposed. If he had any thoughts about her new foot, he kept them to himself. She made it to the top clean and offered him a nod of thanks.

  Kendall was strapped in left-side copilot. She climbed in as right-side pilot, glad she had gone back to pants. Lois braced for nostalgia, sadness, tears… It had been a long six months since she’d been aboard a Hawk, even a simulated one. Instead, it just felt right. This is where she belonged. Through her thin civilian clothes rather than the normal flightsuit, the seat felt closer, more real, more personal against her body. Not even really thinking about it, she buckled on the harness that lay heavy against her skin through the cotton blouse.

  “You remember the way of it?” She ignored Jake’s sly comment. Kendall had watched her settle in but hadn’t said a word. They traded surreptitious smiles that were just the beginning of a whole conversation they wouldn’t be having in front of Jake. She pulled on a headset and adjusted the microphone. Her helmet was in her closet covered with six months of dust, so this would have to do, though it felt ridiculously light.

  She cycled up the simulator. One more flight. Just one more. She didn’t bother reaching for the ma
nual, even after six months, the steps of the engine start-up procedure were still a part of her nervous system. The turbines lit off with a simulated roar through her headset. Falling into his copilot role, Kendall fed her engine temp data and RPMs as she continued down the list flipping the Blade De-icing switch to auto and all the other twenty steps of engine run-up.

  The Black Hawk cockpit in the simulator was so real that she could almost believe it, if she weren’t in civilian dress. She was the only anomaly in the space. The radio and comm gear ran between her seat and Kendall’s, with all the engine controls and electrical system mounted in the ceiling above them. The main console stretched side to side at chest level. At the center, a few key instruments that needed no electricity. Altitude, attitude, and compass would all keep working even if everything else failed. Above them, a large shared screen that might show terrain or weapons status depending on the mission.

  In front of Kendall and her were two large glass screens each. The screens had a couple dozen modes so that the displays could be customized as needed. She toggled through the settings using the switch on the collective in her left hand and set up for standard flight information.

  Above the console was a wraparound windscreen that showed Fort Lewis airfield, realistically enough to believe she just might be out on the tarmac, sweating in the last heat of the setting sun before a night flight. Down by her feet—foot—was an additional view of the terrain below, just a projection of pavement at the moment. She couldn’t feel the right rudder so had to visually check that her foot was on the pedal…it was. She could even get some feel of how much pressure she was applying through her calf and knee.

  She called the tower for clearance to depart. Jake Hamlin answered from his control console at the back of the simulator. She eased up on the collective with her left hand and nudged the cyclic forward to get a little nosedown attitude and forward motion. She talked her way out of the flight pattern until she was up over Puget Sound.