Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  “I’ll let Daniel make the rest of the introductions, as he did the last three months of footwork with our other guests. Except to say this. Gentlemen…” He addressed the two outsiders. “This is the very finest the U.S. Special Forces has to offer. I would trust them with my life. Actually, I have a couple of times.”

  Connie looked down the table at the two Majors. For once Emily Beale’s face was completely unreadable, but her husband acknowledged the compliment with an easy smile. She knew Major Beale had saved the President’s life, had done it on national TV. But that Major Henderson had been involved hadn’t made the news. And neither had ever said a word. A prior black-in-black operation?

  The President sat back and Daniel leaned forward.

  “To my left, your mission specialist, Dr. Thomas Williams.”

  The small, round-faced man waved cheerfully across the table.

  A civilian. She didn’t need to see anyone else’s look to know what must already show on her own face. The risks of the unstated mission had just doubled, at a minimum. Towing along a civilian on a military operation simply didn’t work.

  “My name,” the last unidentified man’s accent was deeply Russian, though his English was clear and fast with British overtones, “is Aleksander Rodchenko Fyodorov Stepanov.”

  Connie didn’t need any further introduction to the man. Short dark hair, suit impeccable, he was a fit man in his fifties. He was also one of the power elite in the Ukraine. Not currently in power, but a major player.

  “I am the one in need of your help. My task is twofold, though yours, because your President is a pigheaded politician who underestimates his enemies, is only one.”

  The President nodded politely in answer to the slur, but it was a good thing they weren’t playing poker at the moment. The tension in the hand the President was dealing clenched his jaw too tightly for the polite smile he wore.

  “Before he continues,” Daniel leaned forward, “I must emphasize that Mr. Stepanov was never in this room. You’ve never met him. He’s never been seen with the President of the United States except in the company of many others during the daytime conferences occurring here at the hotel. Right now it is near midnight and Mr. Stepanov is asleep in his suite on the third floor. Are we clear?”

  Mr. Surfer-Boy Daniel was suddenly almost as fierce as Major Beale when she was in a mission briefing. Connie merely nodded her head as others did the same around the table.

  Mr. Stepanov pointed his finger at Dr. Williams beside him and then swung it slowly around the table indicating each of them. His assessing gaze followed his finger until he had completed his circuit.

  “I need you, each of you.” He sat back in his chair for a moment.

  “Only together can we stop the next holocaust.”

  Chapter 60

  “Well,” the Ukrainian stated softly, “did that get their attention, Daniel? I cannot tell.”

  John was doing his best to remain stone-faced. Holocaust, not genocide. The man’s English was good enough that he would not mix up the two. He was talking about a nuclear threat.

  “No pressure? Huh?” John whispered to Connie, but it sounded into the silent room louder than he’d intended.

  “Ha!” the Ukrainian barked out. And laughed aloud. “No. No pressure at all, big man. I like him. What’s your name?”

  “Sergeant John Wallace, sir.”

  Stepanov nodded and shifted his attention to Connie but kept his finger aimed at John.

  “And this one, he is a good fighter? He is good man?”

  “The best.” Her answer was so fast that it sounded spontaneous to John’s ears. “The best.” He liked how that sounded.

  “Are you, how they say, sweet on him?” He switched his finger and attention. “Are you sweet on her?” Then he nodded to himself before John could think of a reply to form in front of his commanding officers and the Commander-in-Chief.

  “Good. You two understand. You remind me of my grandmother and my grandfather whose names I bear as proudly as my heritage. They were an architect and an artist. They always worked for the highest ideal, for the purest form. I remember that with each choice I make.” He pointed again back and forth between them, indicating a connection that John felt but had thought remained hidden.

  Tim looked at John wide-eyed. They’d known each other since Basic, and he could read Tim’s face as easily as in a poker game. Something along the lines of, “No f’ing way. My best buddy can’t fall for the fatal disease of being in love.” Or close enough.

  John considered for a moment and decided that it was true. So he sent Tim the slightest affirmative.

  Tim collapsed back in his chair as if he’d been shot and his palms briefly raised outward. Clearly stating, “Not me. Not ever.”

  “Connection is important,” Mr. Stepanov continued. “Me, I have a love, too. She is my country. But she is not an easy mistress. When that bitch Mother Russia came apart, my poor Ukraine, she did not recover well. Since 1991, we have tried to put ourselves back together. Some parts we do well, some parts,” he shrugged his big shoulders eloquently, “we do not so well.”

  John studied the man. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment and then shared a slow nod. This was a man John wouldn’t want to get in a wrestling match with. One fighter knew another.

  Daniel leaned back in. “Aleksander is the leader of the opposition party. The thing we will not help him do is to take over the Ukrainian government, though he is likely to win the next election even as things now stand.”

  The Ukrainian shook his head slowly. “Only if you do not count the corruption of Gregor and his good buddies and the influence of the army on voting day and—”

  “And,” President Matthews cut him off, “we do think it would be greatly to our advantage to have Alek sitting in the president’s chair. But we can’t interfere in another country’s politics.”

  John very carefully didn’t look down the table. He and Crazy Tim and then Captain Henderson had aided a nasty little coup in Western Africa not all that long ago. Different time, different administration. The dictator’s unexpected fall had also aborted a genocide campaign before it really had a chance to get rolling.

  “You said holocaust, sir.” Leave it to Connie to never lose the thread of the conversation. “That is not a word that I expect you bandy about lightly. And we still don’t know Dr. Williams’s specialty.”

  “Oh,” President Matthews shrugged negligently as if he’d forgotten to mention it by simplest forgetfulness, “he is our number one expert on Russian nuclear weaponry.”

  The temperature in the room must have just dropped ten degrees to explain the collective shiver that went around the table.

  Chapter 61

  “Well, that must be my cue.” Dr. Williams began quickly typing on a keyboard and the table lit back up, displaying a large area map.

  Connie had thought he might be the hidden card in the deck. His innate cheerfulness might be real, but that didn’t get you a seat at this table.

  “A bit of history.” The map illuminated with national borders outlined in bright yellow. He zoomed back and then nodded in satisfaction.

  “It’s 1990 and the USSR is about to disintegrate like a poorly designed shrapnel grenade.” As he spoke, a counter in the corner of the table’s screen started scrolling day, month, year. As it scrolled, the borders shifted, broke, shifted again.

  “In 1991, the Ukraine gains her independence. However, a large portion of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons now suddenly belong to a country that doesn’t have a government or economy of her own. Or a military. On the day she declared her freedom, she became the third largest nuclear power on the planet after the U.S. and what would soon become known once again as Russia.”

  The map was being covered in blue dots the size of a dime, dozens, hundreds. Connie leaned her knee against John’s beneath the table as the dots kept multiplying, each one capable of destroying a major city. He leaned back, hard. The dots finally stop
ped, nearly obliterating the Ukraine behind them. She gasped for a breath she’d forgotten to take.

  “Nearly two thousand warheads for rockets and bombers.”

  Two thousand. Obliterate the two thousand largest cities in the United States and America would cease to exist.

  “Everything bigger than Madison, Wisconsin”—Williams waved nonchalantly over the table as if shooing flies—“wiped off the map. Then the radiation and the nuclear winter that would follow close behind. And next retaliation with much larger American and then Russian arsenals. Not a first choice scenario.”

  The dots started to go away as the days continued to roll by. With each one, Connie came closer to being able to breathe again.

  “A very smart leader.” The Ukrainian took up the tale. “My good friend Leonid Kravchuk proposed for the Ukraine to become a nonnuclear nation and sent the warheads one by one to Russia for disassembly and destruction. Regrettably, he couldn’t manage to hold political power until the job was finished.”

  Several of the dots turned to question marks.

  “Kuchma, who replaced Leonid,” Aleksander said in his deep voice, “he is not so much a smart man. But he is a very dangerous man.”

  “Right.” Williams let the clock continue to roll, and the question marks began to blur and split. “These weapons were ‘lost,’ hidden away during the confusion of those times. Leonid used what little was left of his power to seek them out. As a reward, Kuchma, who had been his prime minister, tried to have him executed. Several times.”

  “But my friend Leonid is a very smart man. He is still alive.” The Ukrainian held up two fingers.

  “There are two weapons left. The woman who should have taken command of the country would have finished Leonid’s work. She was instead caught and tried for a bit of embezzlement. What is embezzlement in the Ukraine? It is just another way of doing business. A little problem we could have fixed later.”

  “Yulia’s opponent has done far worse, but he was not caught. That was not good for us. That was not good for my Ukraine. Yulia tracked the two missing weapons but was unable to locate them precisely, even with Leonid’s help.”

  “And that”—Aleksander leaned forward—“is where I come in.” And he rammed a finger straight down upon the broad map before him.

  The many question marks slowly resolved into two. Then, as the timeline neared the present, they jumped about the country several times, sometimes apart, sometimes together. When the calendar stopped running, they became two sharp dots once again.

  And they were together.

  “Yesterday I received confirmation of this after many long months of work. Today I know where they are. By tomorrow?” His shrug was eloquent. “Who knows where they will go.”

  President Matthews leaned forward. “And that…” He let his gaze drift over all of them. “That is where you come in.”

  Chapter 62

  “You have fourteen hours while this ship steams south. Tonight at dusk we go aloft. Let’s get the choppers geared up and then get some sleep.”

  John, with Connie at his side, hit the Vengeance where the bird was tied down on the rear deck of the Germantown. Crazy Tim and his fellow chief attacked Viper. He and Connie stripped the training lasers, verified three times that none of the hand weapons on board had the blue-painted stock of training equipment. He knew of more than one time a crew had gone into real battle, and some poor idiot came up with a weapon that couldn’t shoot past a hundred meters and wasn’t lethal even if it could.

  They remounted the 20 mm chain gun in place of the training laser on the weapon’s pylon, struggling to make their fingers work in the winter cold augmented by the ship’s twenty-plus knots of induced wind chill. A quick double-check showed the fuel tanks full to the brim. A not so fast series of calculations, with double-check, and they loaded up the limit of ammunition they could fly with.

  “Did you calc for the new rotors?” John asked Connie, tucking a stray hair behind her ear so that he could see her profile more clearly as she pored over her pad. She sat cross-legged in the main bay of the chopper, the wind loud beyond the cargo doors, but a small center of focused calm where she sat.

  She leaned her cheek into his knuckles for a moment, taking away his breath. He’d been so angry at her that it almost didn’t make sense how much he wanted to keep touching her. Perhaps he’d been more angry at the loss of her. Piled on top of his anger at losing Grumps, that was a world of hurt he’d been trying to unload on her.

  “We picked up 153 pounds for the extra blades, the extra fitting weight on the rotor head for the fifth blade, and the radar cross-section reduction hubs on the main and the tail rotors. I got that, but the ADAS has to be added in and the FLIR taken away, but not its cabling. The FLIR’s cabling is still in place. The center of balance shifts a bit as well.”

  That described it. That was it precisely. She’d shifted his center of balance. More than a bit. He no longer stood up straight when he was standing alone. Beside her, then his world made sense. With her at his side, that’s when it felt right side up.

  “I think…” She checked her notes again, tilting her head ever so slightly to the side as she did when thinking intensely. “It’s only about a half-inch forward, so it’s not a real issue. Then I subtracted enough ammunition to compensate for the estimate Dr. Williams provided as the most likely warhead weight adding back in for likely fuel usage. We need to…”

  As an experiment, he ran his hand down her hair and over her back. He could feel her shiver and her voice trailed off into silence.

  He spoke into the silence as she turned to him.

  “I think the chopper’s all set.”

  ***

  At her vague nod, John slid the clipboard from her suddenly nerveless fingers. Connie had kept trying to concentrate, trying to double-check a calculation that they’d already made a half-dozen times in the Stockholm conference room.

  But all she knew was how close John sat beside her. How he’d been there for her. Time after time. While she fought against her past out at their fence. When she’d finally heaved her pain up onto a Stockholm sidewalk. When she’d finally let herself weep for the death of an old man who’d been kind to her.

  She leaned into him and breathed him in. Despite the heavy winter gear, he was John. Her head resting against his chest was the only place the world went quiet. The only place the demons stopped chasing her. The moment of contact was the moment her mind relaxed, let go. Stopped.

  “Now we just have to wait until dark. C’mon, you. Let’s get out of the wind.”

  They closed up the Hawk and headed through the heavy double-doors toward the ship’s decks immediately in front of the hangar deck.

  “Are you hungry?”

  She couldn’t speak, just shook her head. The only thing in her mind was John’s smell. The earth-rich feel of him. Her need, her desperate need to be close to him. Around him. On him.

  “I’m with Tim. You’ve got a single berth?”

  She nodded and pointed down the left-hand ladder.

  The door to her berth wasn’t even shut before she attacked his clothing. Parka, vest, shirt laid open in layers until she could lay her cheek against his bare chest. Until she could place her ear there and hear his heart, feel it, pulsing against her.

  Only as she lay against him did she become aware of his hands cradling her close. Of his lips brushing the top of her head.

  She felt as if she were finally coming alive. His broad chest, a place of such safety, was a miracle. She leaned back enough to look up into his face. It was deeply shadowed by the weak morning light coming in the lone porthole.

  She’d never wanted anyone the way she wanted him. Never.

  And their night on the old submarine was much too far in the past. She ran her hands down across the smooth, powerful belly and down over his pants, rubbing her palm hard against him.

  “Whoa!” The wind knocked out of him.

  Connie stopped his mouth with a kiss.
>
  He went for gentle.

  She wanted rough. She shoved his clothes back off those awesome shoulders. Dragged them down far enough to trap his arms when she pushed him back against the closed door. Digging her fingers into those magnificent muscles, she elicited a deep moan from both of them.

  Shedding her own clothes with yanks and pulls that seemed to take longer than humanly possible, she managed to get her bare chest against his. She tossed her dog tags over her shoulder, out of her way except for the thin chain. She rubbed back and forth against him using anything, everything. Her fingers, tongue, teeth, hair, her own chest.

  He actually whimpered when she suckled him, his massive pec muscles twitching as she did so.

  When he struggled to free his arms from the layers of coat, vest, and shirt, she shoved a palm against the center of his chest to keep him pinned against the door.

  With her free hand, she stripped his pants down to his knees.

  She slid down to rub him between her breasts.

  All he did was groan. She loved having control over such a powerful man.

  His breath slid into a low moan as she took him between her teeth and ever so gently teased him.

  “God damn it, woman.” He pushed off the door again.

  This time she wasn’t fast enough and he slipped an arm free.

  In moments he had his hand on her shoulder and pushed her back to arm’s length.

  “Just hold on a moment.” He hung his head and gasped for breath.

  “Why?” She reached for him, but still he held her off. That heady mix of John’s massive power and how gently he kept her shoulder in his grasp was killing her. She didn’t fall for men, but John was breaking that rule. And she knew an answer to that.

  She nipped the inside of his wrist and slammed back against him the moment his grip loosened. Body to body she ground against him. Letting the heat inside her find a simple channel. It was always best that way. Let her body generate the heat.