Bring On the Dusk

by M. L. Buchman

  The next nicest phrase for an all-female crew was a “boob-bird.” A SuperCobra with two women was “grab a two-pack.” A Black Hawk with four women was a “four-bush bird.” Then it got raunchy.

  For two years at SOAR, there weren’t any women in her training section. Some behind her, none with her.

  These women of SOAR either didn’t care or were so competent that no one dared say any of that to them. These women didn’t have that feel, and the looks they were getting weren’t about whether or not they were lovers. It felt like a community, like a potluck in Bumble Bee—just gathered together because they wanted to be.

  And those around them?

  She checked out the room. No one, other than Michael before he left the mess hall, was paying them any particular attention.

  “I know, it’s strange, isn’t it.” Kee Stevenson spoke to her over Dilya’s head, which was bowed down as she read her book. “I actually cursed out Major Henderson on my first day for trying to put me on some ‘goddamn girlie bird.’ Then he tricked me into flying with Emily Beale. The bastard. Best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Claudia had never met the man, but his reputation did not include great tolerance. Yet this little woman had cursed him to his face and survived. That had to be a good story.

  “I could get to like this.”

  Kee nodded an easy acknowledgment, her pitch-black, chin-length hair slicing forward and back as she did so. “Hard flying and hard men. Gotta love it.”

  Connie leaned forward from across the table. “Are you really going after Michael?” Her voice was soft, and those were the first words Claudia had heard her say. But by pure chance they dropped into a gap in the multiple conversations going around the table. The following silence was resounding, and she was abruptly the center of every woman’s attention.

  Even Dilya looked up at her.

  “No.” She wasn’t going after anybody. All she’d done was…kiss him. “No,” she repeated, but it wasn’t carrying quite the confidence she wished to communicate. “What makes you say that?”

  Kee rolled her eyes, and Lola offered her a knowing smile.

  Connie Davis blinked for a moment, glaring briefly at her friends who were clearly waiting for something. “Okay, I won’t make a list. I’ll simply note the inordinate amount of time he spent over this meal watching you.”

  “Your back was to him,” Claudia protested. Now Lola was shaking her head. What had Claudia just stepped in?

  “Your attention throughout the meal has primarily been focused ten degrees off my left shoulder. Of the men you’ve met that I’m aware of, only two were seated in that line of sight. As one of them is Lieutenant Bill Bruce, and I know Trisha’s propensity for pointing out her recent marriage at every opportunity, I can only assume that you were observing Colonel Gibson, with whom you have flown two operational missions in the last sixty-three hours.”

  The others were now smirking at her. Not about Michael, but about Connie. She’d been warned that this woman functioned in a different way, and apparently she had just received a lesson in that. Connie clearly observed everything. The others’ looks indicated that they too had all learned that particular lesson the hard way.

  Except Dilya. Dilya simply inspected Claudia a moment longer, offered a nod to Connie as if agreeing with her conclusion, then returned to her reading.

  Was she interested in Michael? Sure. As a friend. Then why had she kissed him? Twice. And why was she looking for an excuse to go way beyond that?

  “I didn’t think I was going after him,” she amended her earlier response. “Why? Is it a problem? Someone I don’t know about?”

  All of the women at the table sobered.

  “He’s a good man.” “He’s special.” “You walk carefully there.” The last didn’t sound like a warning about him, but rather a warning to her. So, this whole circle of women were suddenly on his side instead of hers.

  Her sense of belonging here was a false one. She was still the outsider. Still suspect.

  Of course they knew him and didn’t know her. But it still didn’t seem fair.

  “I’m not stupid,” she informed them, then rose and took her tray to the cleanup window. She could feel their eyes on her back as she left the room. Not threatening, but suddenly all very interested in her next action.

  Chapter 9

  Claudia wasn’t stupid, and she most certainly wasn’t going to get stupid about some guy, no matter how handsome. No matter how her body and mind reacted to his presence.

  In a way she’d spent her entire career getting to this place, this ship, this company, and she wasn’t about to jeopardize that with some ill-conceived affair with a man who couldn’t even complete a question. Not that a single scorching kiss and a bit of wondering lust counted as anything.

  Which apparently was the case. For the first three days of her service in the 5D, she’d run into Michael at every turn. Now, as her first days turned into her first week, she’d only seen him at a distance. And not even that very often. Yes, he’d spent three days of that on the carrier, but the Peleliu wasn’t that big a ship.

  He was avoiding her. Fine. It had only been a kiss.

  She wished she sounded more convinced inside her own head.

  So she did what she came to do—she flew. They kept her scrambling, and she had no complaints. It’s what she’d been born to do. She’d gone up with Mr. Johns in his tiny Korean War–vintage Bell 47 ’copter when he’d gone looking for stray cattle that had broken out into the vast wilderness west of Bumble Bee.

  By the time she was fifteen, he was letting her do the flying whenever she was with him. Perched side by side on the little bench seat of the tiny helicopter, she had learned to hug the dry arroyos and search the steep hills as if born to it. At seventeen, when Mr. John’s leg was broken by a kicking horse, she had started flying solo. At Annapolis she’d taken a flight test as part of initial qualification assessment, and there had never been another question about her being a flier for the Corps.

  Now the Marine Corps had led to SOAR. There was nowhere higher to go, not in the U.S. military or anywhere else on the planet. But she was far from bored.

  In some ways she’d come full circle. The Little Bird was roughly the same size and weight as the old 47. Faster, far more sophisticated, and incomparably more lethal than the little Angel of Mercy, the Little Bird still felt deeply familiar. Shifting from the SuperCobra to the Little Bird had been like rediscovering who she’d always been.

  But there was no resting on any sort of laurels with this group of women. A highly successful mission didn’t mean they had the next night off, or the one after that. At times she wondered if the women of SOAR were intentionally trying to keep her too busy to find Michael. Either it was working, or Michael wasn’t even interested and she’d imagined the whole thing.

  The more she worked with them, the more she came to like them. That was almost as surprising as her overwhelming attraction to Michael. The women of SOAR welcomed her.

  On the nights they weren’t flying a mission, Trisha would sit her down at a tactical display or take her aloft, and they’d spend hours discussing and testing techniques. Surprisingly, Trisha was as open to learning tactics Claudia had brought over from the SuperCobra as she was intent on imparting knowledge. On the next night’s sweep, they’d test new ideas on the Little Birds.

  Trisha shifted from being an irritant to a friend on those night flights. However flaky she might seem, there was no questioning her skills or commitment to the craft. Or the very sharp mind behind that big pile of attitude.

  They tried talking about their pasts, but they were too different and neither could make sense of the other. This, Claudia discovered, was true of all of the crew.

  Trisha was a rich city girl to the core. Even if she didn’t “buy into any of it,” as she said, it was a natural part of who she was. She ha
dn’t been lying about running with street gangs, but she’d always been able to go home to her comfortable and safe home after doing so.

  Lola and Kee both had grown up on the streets of large cities. Their world was just as foreign to Claudia as Trisha’s had been.

  Connie had grown up in the Army, following her single dad from base to base, assignment to assignment.

  Kara was a big-city girl from a large and close Italian family. Even the legendary Emily Beale had been DC born and bred.

  Claudia had grown up in the Sonoran Desert and been homeschooled. The nearest elementary school had been a dozen miles one way and the high school twenty-five miles the other. The only child in that entire area, she had been left to teach herself.

  Her dad never talked about his government disability. Mom once joked that he’d been a parking-lot attendant who had his back broken by a congressman drunk behind the wheel at a Redskins game. Claudia had never asked if it was true; she didn’t want to know. He’d mostly sat at home and didn’t do much or speak much.

  Her mom hadn’t even finished high school and didn’t know what to do with her daughter. She worked at Mr. Johns’s ranch milking cows, mucking stalls, and riding fence lines and had simply taken Claudia along. Once she’d learned to avoid rattlesnakes and the bull’s pen, there were certainly no need for a babysitter in Bumble Bee, Arizona.

  So, Claudia had run wild, for she was never happier than when she was in the high desert. She’d have stayed that way, except for Mrs. Kaye. A retired third-grade teacher, she had taken on Claudia’s education. Once Mrs. Kaye had tamed Claudia from her near wild-child state, they had explored far past any standard curricula. The teacher was often only a step ahead of the student, and Claudia’s education could best be called eclectic.

  But flying with Mr. Johns had caught Claudia’s passion. Bless those lost cattle. And Mr. Johns, who’d flown the Angels of Mercy and later the Green Hornets in Vietnam, had sponsored her to the state senator and to Annapolis.

  And here with SOAR, she flew as she never had before.

  The Black Adders had started as a mash-up of assets from three separate companies for a specific set of missions. Over time, they’d grown so effective that they’d been formed into their own company, the Fifth Battalion, D Company. Normally each company flew only one type of bird and then they’d select assets as needed from the whole battalion, or even the whole regiment.

  Not the 5D. The Black Hawk and Little Bird mechanics had cross-certified, so there wasn’t any duplication of personnel. They were also working on their Chinook certifications. The 5D had been the first and so far the only company to receive stealth upgrade packages for their helicopters.

  And now, with the arrival of Captain Kara Moretti, they had their own Gray Eagle UAV. Nothing like a thirty-million-dollar drone to lend a hand in gathering intel. Flying with the 5D was an even more complex task because of it. Pilots and crews had to integrate the UAVs technically as well as tactically. The trick was to turn such a vast quantity of data into digestible quality information, and that was Kara Moretti’s genius skill.

  All of the birds had been converted to a standardized CAAS cockpit. The common aviation architecture system provided a consistency of controls, but the solid, twin-turbine, four-member-crew Black Hawks were very different creatures from the AH-6M Little Birds. The Chinook was another animal entirely.

  Chief Warrant Maloney wanted Claudia cross-trained by yesterday. That meant a lot of left-seat Black Hawk and Chinook missions in her first week aboard the Peleliu.

  Michael had backed off.

  Claudia didn’t know whether to be happy or sad about that. But even if he hadn’t, she would have had to.

  The training was hectic. Two years to mission-qualified left her barely ready for the 5D’s own standards. They were stretching her to the limits. When she wasn’t flying with Trisha or Lola, Tim Maloney—Lola’s husband, a very handsome Latino gunner—or Kee had Claudia out on the deck working on her shooting skills with pistol and rifle. Trisha was also a fierce hand-to-hand combat instructor and the whole crew worked out on that together.

  Sometimes Michael would come and watch those sessions. Trisha would tease him, but he never joined in. Which was probably lucky for them. She couldn’t imagine wrestling with a D-boy—well, not in that way.

  Rather than feeling self-conscious or overexposed in her shorts and T-shirt when he was watching her, Claudia found a deeper focus and was better able to fend off whatever Trisha was throwing her way. The woman was fast, but she didn’t think more than a move or two ahead. Several times Claudia was able to set Trisha up for a failure that the petite redhead didn’t see coming.

  But in the end, Claudia always ended up flat on her back. Trisha was just that good despite her small size.

  They also flew ocean sweeps.

  The SOAR helos would go aloft, spread out into a long line, and fly four or five hundred miles of coastline each night like a giant garden rake. Claudia sometimes flew copilot in a bigger bird or solo in the Maven beside Trisha in the May. They always had a few D-boys or Rangers along on one of the birds, but Michael never seemed to end up on hers.

  At first they were spooking up pirate boats every night, which sallied forth in hopes of replacing the lost hostages with fresh fodder. They had a cash flow from ransom money that they wanted to maintain.

  But after a solid week of the SOAR and Delta team turning back boat after boat relieved of their weapons and their big outboard engines, the life seemed to be knocked out of the pirates.

  Somalia was estimated to have fourteen million weapons for its ten million inhabitants, but the supply of fishing boats and men willing to sacrifice themselves on the chance of a successful piracy mission was rapidly dwindling. Especially with so many of the lords having been taken down in the recent attacks.

  It was just before sunset while Claudia was on the patrol, solo in the Maven this flight, when they stumbled upon the last unaccounted-for pirated vessel of significant size. Despite Trisha’s scoffing at that first briefing, they’d actually found her.

  The forty-meter-long North Korean fishing boat Hong 4 had been pirated in 2010. No one had offered to ransom the ship or the crew. The crew had finally been released, but not the ship. The pirates had taken to using it as a mother ship throughout the Indian Ocean, delivering small, agile attack boats deep into international shipping lanes.

  The Hong 4 had eluded EU NAVFOR forces for the last two years. She spent long stretches at anchor off Somali beaches, rusting and looking as if she’d never move again, interrupted by blacked-out late-night departures for deep waters.

  SOAR didn’t need reasonable cause to take down the ship for two reasons. One, the ship had been reported as pirated, and even though decaying from rust, she was still recognizable. The second reason arrived as Claudia and Trisha overflew the ship side by side in the Maven and the May.

  A rocket-propelled grenade shot up out of the bridge of the ship through a missing window. It must have filled the bridge with a choking fog of rocket exhaust fumes. The helicopter’s warning system gave her sufficient time to pop flares and dive to just above the ocean as soon as she cleared the edge of the Hong’s deck. The RPG wasn’t heat-seeking. It simply passed through the flares and arced out over the ocean, creating a small geyser where it impacted the waves. The experience still rattled her nerves, RPGs having taken down more helicopters in war than any other weapon.

  “Rolling in, four o’clock,” Trisha called.

  Claudia recovered from her surprise and banked for the ship’s stern to be well clear and set up her own defense from that position.

  Trisha didn’t even bother being subtle about it. She fired a pair of rockets into the control bridge where the RPG had come from. At the direct hit, the bridge’s roof and windows exploded outward. Moments later, columns of flame shot skyward.

  Claudia kept a sharp eye on the
deck. Sure enough, someone came up from below swinging an RPG to try to target Trisha’s Little Bird. Sitting directly off the stern, Claudia unleashed a burst from her minigun to cut him and two other pirates down.

  The fire that Trisha had started torched the bridge, but it didn’t spread downward. Several pirates dashed out of the lower levels, headed for their small motorboats, but Claudia tore up the boats where they hung in the davits, cutting off any escape.

  By this time, almost twenty men had gathered on the deck, many of them still armed. With a twist applied by using her rudder pedals, Claudia unleashed a long burst from her minigun that swept over the deck mere feet above the men’s heads.

  They began casting their weapons overboard, as if they could then pose as innocent fishermen. Another burst, and they simply dropped the weapons to the deck and clustered together by one of the cargo hatches.

  With no one at the controls, without even any controls remaining, for that matter, the ship continued to steam ahead. She and Trisha set up a circling pattern, jinking high and low in case there was still someone aboard crazy enough to try to target them.

  A call to the Peleliu had a strike team en route in minutes.

  She held her breath as Michael, Bill, and the other D-boys fast-roped down to the deck from the Black Hawk Vicious and took control just as full dark descended. Apparently, no more Somalis had death wishes and Delta soon had the vessel cleared. Sly arrived in his LCAC with a load of Rangers. They boarded, took the Somalis into custody, doused the fire, and turned the ship once they had control of the engine room.

  Just seeing Michael in action did things to Claudia that she couldn’t ignore. She had never been one to continue playing games or lying to herself, once she became aware that she had been. She wasn’t stupid and she did want Michael, no matter what she’d told the women of SOAR.