As they flew, she and Dilya began comparing ideas on the various tactics of the contestants in The Hunger Games.
“I like the bow and arrow.” Dilya popped up to her feet and made as if she were about to launch an arrow out one of the helicopter’s square windows.
Claudia corrected the girl’s stance and arm position. She’d hunted rabbit and deer with a bow in the Sonoran hills west of Bumble Bee. She could see Dilya memorizing the corrections and integrating them into her muscle feel very quickly.
Because Annapolis didn’t have an archery team, Claudia had started one on her own. The dozen interested midshipmen never went on to compete against other schools, but they’d become quite proficient. She found a former Olympic medalist in town who came out to coach them on occasion.
Despite being self-taught, she somehow had the best technique; it had simply felt right. The team had consistently turned to her for instruction, and she’d had to break it down so that it was teachable. Her Academy instructors knew nothing of archery but soon promoted her into the advanced leadership courses.
By now, with Dilya, it was automatic: straighten and lock the forward elbow with the arm straight in line with both shoulder blades, turn the wrist out slightly to create straight-line pressure to hold the bow, raise the drawing hand to her chin with the elbow horizontally in line with the arrow’s flight.
The girl held the position, turning only her head to look at Claudia. Claudia pushed a finger against Dilya’s chin until she was back in line.
“Your vision and your chin should be in alignment with the target. Chin stays up, but not so raised that it feels as if you’re pointing it at the target. Try for level with the ground.”
Dilya tested the angles, wiggling her joints up and down until she settled into roughly the right position, as close as she was likely to get without really holding a bow.
“Where’s your weight?” Claudia nudged Dilya’s shoulder, and she almost fell over backward. “You want it the same on both feet, so it feels as if you’re planted solidly. Then lean forward so you’re one-third on your heels, two-thirds on the balls of your feet and the toes. Your stability is in your heels, but your balance lives in your forefoot.”
Dilya found her stance and held it easily through several small air pockets that shifted the helicopter about. A good sense of balance, and with the wiry strength Claudia had felt in Dilya’s thin arms, she’d make a good archer.
Dilya moved to the center of the cargo bay and waited for the next air pocket to try out her balance.
They’d gathered a small audience without Claudia noticing. Michael watched her intently; he always appeared to be studying her. And Kee watched Claudia’s actions with her daughter very closely. The woman didn’t smile much at anyone other than her husband and child, but her sharp nod of acknowledgment was filled with appreciation.
Claudia returned Kee’s nod with a bit of surprise. In the Corps, she’d always thought about her every action—how she fit in and how she could avoid attracting the wrong sort of attention. There was also a constant awareness of the operational pecking order. Who flew more sorties and in what situations was a constant, unspoken point system of prestige.
This was perhaps the first time she’d thought about that in the weeks since joining the Peleliu. And what struck her was that for perhaps the first time in her life, there was only one criterion for approval: competence.
Though the 5D only had five women in the air—Kara Moretti stayed on the deck and watched the flight of her Gray Eagle through a console—the number was more than enough to offset gender bias. Anyone stupid enough to try harassing a female Night Stalker would probably end up living out his days at a VA hospital because of all the little pieces he’d be broken into by both the men and women.
And it wasn’t personality; five more diverse military fliers would be difficult to find. Having proven herself in the Somalia operation, Claudia felt welcome among them. There was still discomfort and a bit of unease, but a cohesive team wasn’t formed, not even among all Night Stalkers, in only a few weeks.
She glanced over at Michael, who was looking a little lost without his weapons about him. Her relationship with Michael was well known to all. How did that affect her acceptance? Tuned as he always was to her, he brushed his fingers along her arm without turning from his discussion with Bill about the viability of his PSG1 upgrade concepts.
The reactions among the group were interesting. The women who saw it weren’t watching him; they were watching her. Again their instant defense of Michael came to mind, as if he was the one who needed protection. It was her heart that was exposed for everyone to see. And she definitely wasn’t comfortable with that exposure or what it said about how she was feeling herself.
Yet another thing to think about among the trees.
Chapter 12
Michael’s parents had been up in Seattle when Michael and Claudia arrived at their home in Corvallis, Oregon. They’d offered to cut short their guest lectures at the University of Washington, but Michael didn’t let them. Instead he’d loaded an old Toyota pickup with enough food to feed an entire action team and enough gear to cripple them, and driven Claudia across the border into northern California.
“Seattle to Corvallis is over six hours,” he explained. “They’re in their seventies now—I was a late child—so it’s a long trip for them, especially with Dad’s bum hip. They usually stop overnight in Portland just to break up the time on the road. We’ll climb first, meet up with them later. Maybe we’ll all go out to the coast and build some sand castles together. Doubt if they’ve done that in years.” It was perhaps the longest speech he’d ever made in her presence. He was positively giddy about returning to the trees.
Now they stood beneath the trees and his use of the word “climb” suddenly came home to roost. They stood at the edge of Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park and looked up at the trees. Except these weren’t trees; these were towers of crenulated red bark tall enough to be called skyscrapers. She simply couldn’t take it all in at once.
They stood in a clearing of sun-dappled ferns that grew as high as her shoulders. With no warning, dozens, perhaps hundreds of tree trunks burst from the earth in a disarray of columns that would have humbled the Greeks with their majesty. Branches and greenery were so far above as to be unimaginable; ten or twenty stories of trunk soared upward.
“Climb?” To her the trees were overwhelming. Far more foreign than she’d ever have guessed. There was more wood in one of these trees than in an entire Sonoran ridgeline. There was more life in this forest than… It was oppressive and squeezed in on her, crowding her aside with its vibrancy. There was no exposed rock here to make her feel anchored to the earth. Any soil was lost beneath layers of pine needle, twig, moss, and who knew what all these plants were.
The air itself was wrong, thick with moisture and moss, redolent with the smell of decaying organic matter. Yet, as she breathed deeply, there was a richness to it as well, every lungful so packed with oxygen that it was like a drug.
A small flock of giant black birds flew by. Ravens. At least they were familiar from her desert, though she’d never seen enough of them at once to be called a flock.
“Yes.” Michael had said he lived in the redwoods. Despite his question about heights aboard the Peleliu, she hadn’t thought he meant that he lived up in the redwoods.
“Like you live in a tree house up there?” Jedediah was the first big redwood park south of the Oregon-California border. A tree house was a dizzying prospect—simply looking up at these trees gave her a touch of vertigo. The biggest tree near Bumble Bee, Arizona, stood perhaps twenty feet high and a foot or two thick. These trees were ten and twenty feet in diameter, and their rough, red-brown bark soared a long way aloft before the first branch even bothered to put in an appearance. The tangle of limbs went much higher. You certainly weren’t going to climb this with a big loop of rope a
round the tree and spiked shoes.
“No. You’ll see what I mean when we get there.”
“These aren’t them?”
“Nope.” Michael was practically bouncing with energy. They stood just a few dozen feet from the parking lot. He patted the closest tree in a friendly fashion.
As if he couldn’t help himself, he jammed his hand deep into a crenellation in the bark that must be close to a foot deep, formed it into a fist, and began walking up the tree. Then he hand-jammed his other fist and in moments was a dozen feet in the air.
Claudia looked up at the vast trunk. There was no way she was hand-jamming her way up a tree. The bark looked as if it was ready to break off in big chunks at the least provocation. Nor was she going to watch Michael do it. One false move and there’d be nothing but a little pile of dead Delta-boy. He’d never struck her as reckless.
He kept talking as he began circling the tree, hand-over-hand, still several yards up in the air. “These are just babies, can’t be more than five hundred years old. Their granddaddies are three or four times older.”
“Just babies.” Someone must have beamed her to an alien planet. Joshua trees in the Sonoran Desert lived hundreds, maybe a thousand years, but they rarely stood higher than Michael presently clambered about.
This was way more foreign than she’d ever have guessed. It wasn’t foreign; it was alien!
Michael let go and did a tuck-and-roll down the sloping trunk to land easily beside her. His landing made no noise on the soft duff of needles that surrounded the tree. He was actually grinning.
Claudia kept her mouth shut for the half-hour drive down to Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park.
Michael chatted away, introducing trees they passed with easy waves to the right and left. “The Monarch stands up a little valley about two miles that way, not that you’d know it. Eärendil and Elwing are about a mile over there, but you could be lost for a week trying to find the right spot.”
She kept her mouth firmly shut. Normally she enjoyed listening to him talk—he had one of those voices that was an invitation to daydream, soft and deep as if he’d be the one to sing bass despite his lean frame. She’d never met a tree that had a name, and now Michael was introducing them as if they were personal friends who came over to dinner each weekend.
Claudia had been a bit nervous about meeting his parents, but apparently meeting his trees was the bigger deal.
Without preamble, Michael slowed, finally turning off to park his parents’ old Toyota in the tangle of vine maple and sword ferns off the road.
“It’ll be fine here. The park rangers will recognize Mom and Pop’s truck and leave it alone. The tree hounds, the ones who don’t understand how to be careful about climbing the biggest trees, might recognize the truck and try to follow us. Better if we can hide it so that they don’t find it in the first place.” He began gathering up loose brush, and the truck disappeared rapidly beneath its shield.
“Tree hounds? You hide trees?”
“Sure.” He began organizing their gear into two large packs. “The real monster redwoods aren’t conveniently in the public parks next to the highway where people can visit them. There are a few big ones along the roads all down the coast, but the true monsters, we call them ‘Titans,’ are known to very few individuals. The knowledge is handed from one tree climber to the next in order to protect them.”
The amount of rope he tied to the outside of the packs was…well, ridiculous. Unless you thought about the height of these trees.
“How is it possible to hide a three-hundred-and-fifty-foot tree, Michael? That can’t be right.”
“You’ll see.”
Michael had practically talked her ear off for the five hours from his parents’ to the state park. At least for him.
Claudia’s brain felt plugged up with the amount of information he dispensed so efficiently. And still she knew nothing at all about what lay ahead of them. She considered going on a sit-down strike. The last time she’d slept had been somewhere over the North Pole on an airliner from Rome to Seattle.
* * *
“I want to sleep among the trees,” Michael answered Claudia’s question of whether or not they could get some sleep first as he finished loading the packs. “We’ve still got about three hours until sunset. We’ll hike in now and then we can climb at first light tomorrow.”
Michael tested the fit of her pack. He’d loaded it as lightly as he could, but it still weighed about fifty pounds. It was a fairly typical weight for a training march, though he still felt bad about how heavy it was.
“It’s going to be a slog,” he warned her, wondering if he could move any more of her gear into his own pack.
“Worse than Green Platoon?”
That stopped him. Claudia had such a way of putting things in perspective. He was used to the climbers who made only a few ascents in a year. For them, their first adventure into the big trees was a physical shock leaving them sore and blistered for weeks, often with pulled muscles and bad sprains. The monsters of the forest, the tallest trees on the planet, were reluctant, shy souls at best. They hid deep in the fog-laced canyons of the Pacific Coast.
Claudia was at a level of fitness few soldiers achieved. Even thinking about that rekindled his desire for this woman. Her body was specifically designed to drive some ancient Italian marble artist into madness as he attempted to carve it into stone. Michael needed to ask her for the name of one of those Greek goddesses. He knew there was one for beauty or strength or something. Venus was just beauty, and Claudia embodied so much more than that. Adonis…or was that one of the male gods? Magnificent, that was her. If he ever found another tree worthy of bearing a name, he’d name it Magnificent in her honor.
“Okay, Magnificent. Then let’s do it.”
“Magnificent?”
Had he really said that out loud? Crap!
“Well, you are.” He turned for the trees before her mere presence confused him further. Claudia Jean Casperson in the redwoods was an adventure into the amazing that he’d never imagined. She shouldered her pack and settled it properly without any corrections of course.
The hip belt only emphasized the trimness of her waist and the chest strap the splendid form of her breasts beneath her T-shirt. The strength that always so impressed him combined with her wood-nymph agility to make her blend into the forest as if she’d always been there. She’d tied a folded-over, forest-green kerchief on her forehead to keep sweat and her hair out of her eyes. The green emphasized her bright hair until she glowed fairy bright when a stray sunbeam found her. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Forcing himself to turn from the spectacle that was Claudia, he led her along the road a few hundred yards to the north until it crossed a small creek. Looking both ways to make sure no cars were in sight, he clambered down into the creek bed and turned upstream, skirting along the edge of a rocky pool. Based on the water flow, there hadn’t been much rain in the last few weeks, and now in mid-May, the snowmelt was tapering off.
He kept checking on her, but she moved over the moss-slick boulders with easy care. In most places they could straddle this little creek, and most of it was shallow enough to not risk wet feet in their boots.
“Low bridge,” he called out and ducked low under a fallen trunk that spanned the stream. The trunk was only a yard thick here, but the ferns sprouting atop it and the moss dangling below would hide their departure in the first few steps.
After that, no sound penetrated from the outside world. Birdcall, the skitter of a hunting squirrel, and the clacking of branches in the gentle winds were the only sounds aside from their own breathing and footsteps. Michael could feel the world dropping away from him. And as it did, he appreciated all the more the one precious piece of it that hiked in with him. It felt right that she was here.
An hour in, they’d only twice had to lie on their
bellies in tree mulch and drag the packs along behind them to clear the blackberry bushes. As they moved farther and farther from the road, the forest grew thicker, though Claudia’s hair still seemed to catch the light even when he thought there was none.
Then the forest brightened ahead, indicating a larger opening in the canopy. They came upon a fallen redwood tree that crossed their path. This hadn’t been here before. It was a big one, though not one of the Titans of the forest.
“By the scars of the detonation zone, it’s been down only a year or two.” Michael hadn’t visited this particular grove in a while.
“Detonation zone?” Claudia was weary, he could see, but hadn’t offered a single word of complaint or shown any sign of slowing. What word was better than “magnificent”?
“See?” He swung his arm in a vertical arc to imitate the line of the fall. Perhaps two hundred and fifty feet long and twenty feet in diameter, the redwood had ripped a slice out of the forest canopy where the sun now shone through. “It dragged about a dozen trees down with it. Stripped the branches off those there and there, and probably buried another dozen or so trees beneath when it finally crashed in. Look at the ground to either side of the trunk.”
The trees all around lay on the ground pointing outward, as if blown over by a bomb.
“Ground shock. First, the sound wave would hit, probably audible a mile or more away. Then the earth would buck and ripple just like an earthquake. She’s probably a quarter million board feet.”
“Board feet?”
“Imagine a board one inch thick, a foot wide, and fifty miles long, but it all landed right here. All three thousand tons of it, thankfully not in a single-point three-kiloton explosion, which would be a quarter of the Hiroshima bomb, but still bad enough.”
Bring On the Dusk Page 16
