Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  He whispered in her ear as she quieted.

  “I love you, Connie Davis. Never said that to a woman who wasn’t family before. I’m likely to keep saying it as I like how it feels when I do, so you’d better get used to it.” He debated stopping there, knew he should, but what the hell.

  “And just so you can start thinking about it, I feel that I should give you fair warning. One of these days I’m going to ask you to marry me. And when I do, your answer is going to be yes. Just in case you were wondering.”

  “Not a chance.” She spoke into the curve of his shoulder. But her voice didn’t have quite the conviction that he’d bet she meant it to have.

  Chapter 67

  Emily Beale landed the Vengeance softly beside Viper and dropped the four D-boys barely a mile from the compound. They slid in behind a tall but completely decrepit barn that should mask the noise of their landing from the target.

  The new rotors let them get far closer than she would normally risk. Still she’d rather have landed farther out, but there was too much flying time and too little ground time in the mission profile so they had to keep moving fast. Five hours back and forth across Poland, half an hour refueling time each way. With three hours flying time over the Ukraine, that left them only three hours of darkness to complete the mission. They had only one night to pull this off.

  She settled in to wait for the signal to come forward.

  Aleksander Stepanov’s information and satellite imagery pointed to a very small compound that followed the old rule: if you want to hide something, leave it in plain sight. A small airstrip outside the farming community of Krasyliv boasted a couple of crop dusters, two MiG fighter jets, and, incongruously, a pair of Douglas DC-3s, which Stepanov claimed had been converted for bomb delivery. Fly the DC-3s low and slow to deliver the weapons to target, with fighter jets for cover. Made a certain amount of sense.

  The four Delta operators faded into the night with dart guns that fired a ten-hour dose of knockout juice in their hands and silenced sniper rifles across their backs.

  Viper and Vengeance sat for an hour in absolute silence.

  Emily really wished the ADAS had sound as well as sight.

  At the fueling stop, Emily had felt positively voyeuristic watching her two crew chiefs out on the field. They looked close. He’d held her so long that it made Emily feel all mushy inside and made her wish she and Mark were somewhere safe and quiet.

  But there was still something going on. Whatever had passed between them at the very end had changed everything. John had strolled back toward the fueling truck with a bounce in his step that could only be called smug.

  Connie had remained where she was. As if rooted to the ground. Frozen. It took her a long time, a minute or more, before she started shaking her head. Clearly, something shocking was being denied. Then she stopped, did that sideways crick of the neck they both shared when clearing their thoughts, and stood straight. And Emily would bet a full night of Mark’s winnings at poker that whatever had surprised the unflappable girl enough to root her to the ground was now being rationalized.

  Finally, as if nothing had happened, Connie’s image, outlined so neatly in the dark and projected by the ADAS on Emily’s visor, had walked out of the dark back to the helicopter, but not along the same path as John.

  Emily had spun the control to shift her view past the fueling to the stern of the chopper as Connie crossed well behind the tail.

  Exactly in the six, directly behind, Connie stopped and looked up. Not at the new tail rotor, but at the fixed rear camera.

  Emily had expected the girl to bow her head and scuttle aside as if embarrassed at being watched.

  Instead, Connie nodded her head in acknowledgment of being observed and circled to the cargo door to enter the aircraft.

  Emily had tried to look otherwise occupied when Connie returned to her seat, but she knew she hadn’t pulled it off. When she slid her visor up and looked over her shoulder, Connie was turned in her chair enough to look at Emily.

  Busted.

  Emily nodded in acknowledgment, exactly as Connie had moments before.

  ***

  Emily fiddled with the control of the ADAS for lack of anything else to do while they waited behind the barn. Farmer’s field, bored cows, the side of a barn so long abandoned that she’d half feared the wind blast from the rotors would knock it down.

  She’d never gone into the field feeling so unsure about her crew. She knew that’s what was eating at her. Their performance was without question, but at the moment, the reliability of that performance with them sitting back to back just two feet apart in the main bay was worrisome.

  Clearly Connie and John had solved some issues, they were no longer fighting like angry pit snakes. But they were—

  “Starting,” was the message that broke the hypnotic silence.

  All other questions fell aside.

  Emily started a timer on one of the biggest LCD screens in the console.

  By minute two on the mission clock, she and Clay had completed the warm-start preflight checklist. By minute three, she started the turbines, easing them up to speed slow and soft.

  Dead on minute four, she eased up on the collective and raised one meter up and shifted twenty sideways to clear the barn.

  By four minutes thirty, she was less than ten seconds from the airfield and still hadn’t heard from the D-boys.

  “Steel!” she called to her crew.

  The motto of the DAP Hawks was “We Deal in Steel.” They were the nastiest gunships in helicopter history. Her crew knew what the motto meant.

  Clay tapped his main two screens over to weapons’ targeting, leaving a hundred percent of the actual flying to Emily.

  She could hear the high whine that told her Connie and John had the miniguns hot and spinning, their attention wholly on the tactical information being displayed on their visors.

  Emily slewed hard at the end of the runway, watching to make sure she didn’t bank too hard and bury a rotor in the dirt. Then she ran Vengeance right down the center line.

  Viper would be coming from the far end, but twenty degrees out of her line of fire.

  A line of tracer fire ripped out of the dark of the starboard side. John answered back with a barrage even as the rounds hammered into the side of the Hawk. Not loud enough for antiaircraft. Standard machine gun, so most hits wouldn’t get through the Hawk’s skin.

  One round shattered the side window in Emily’s door, big machine gun. Another round followed that one in and slapped her helmet hard enough to jerk her head to the side and make her ears ring. Still alive, so the remains of the window and the helmet must have done their job, though her neck would be sore for days from the sideways whiplash of the impact.

  “Goddamn it! Someone shoot that bastard.”

  John finished shutting them down before she even finished speaking.

  Five figures moved across her field of vision down near the hangars. She almost fired by reflex before she spotted IR reflectors on their shoulders. Thankfully, Clay spotted them as friendlies as well.

  “Center is clear!” over the radio from the D-boys.

  “Circling wider for other guards,” Mark called out.

  Emily brought her bird in as Viper circled up and down the remote airstrip a few more times, looking for heat signs marking any other gunners.

  Michael hurried over with a slender woman between him and another D-boy. Her hands were zip-tied together at the wrists.

  She was babbling in Russian, clearly upset about something. Not one of Emily’s languages. Archie had always handled that one for her, but he wasn’t here. Clay shook his head when she looked at him. Every SOAR learned a couple languages. A full crew could generally cover most situations.

  “Damn it! Doesn’t anyone here speak—”

  “She wants to come with us.”

  Connie.

  Chapter 68

  They’d gathered round. The D-boys faced outward in a defensive perimeter. Exc
ept for Michael. Major Beale had left the rotor just ticking around, ready to go in an instant. Viper roared by close overhead. A rapid spate of fire indicated another machine gun guard.

  The nasty burr of a minigun firing lasted under two seconds. Apparently enough to kill another target.

  Connie had trouble following the Ukrainian woman’s accent. She did a running translation as well as she could for everyone listening.

  The woman was shouting to be heard. Too loud. Too fast.

  “If they find me, her, with no bombs, I, she will be dead. Please take me with you. No one here. No one here.” Connie pulled enough out of the translation to listen to the woman’s words rather than simply translating them.

  “She’s telling us she has no family, no friends. But she keeps talking about another. Someone else we must take with us.”

  “Who?”

  The woman wouldn’t stop talking, a barrage of words poured from her tight mouth and narrow face. Her short-cropped blond hair and motions spoke of military.

  “Who must we take with us?” Connie shouted it right into her face to get the woman’s attention.

  She stumbled back a half step, all that the D-boy’s grip on her arms allowed.

  “You are here to take the bombs, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are American. You will destroy them, not use them?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman’s shoulders slumped as if the fight had suddenly gone out of her.

  “Good. That is good.”

  Or perhaps it was relief.

  “I can help you take these two. But there is one more you must get.”

  Not a who, a what. A bomb.

  “Where?”

  ***

  “A hundred kilometers from here.” Connie told the whole tale again to Major Henderson after he landed.

  With the help of the still-bound Gerta, the Ukrainian soldier, and two of the D-boys, John and Crazy Tim were extracting the two bombs from the DC-3s. The other D-boys were disabling the fighter jets without destroying them, which would draw too much attention. They slipped lengths of steel pipe into the turbine engines. Any attempt to start them, and the engines would shred themselves. Even the fussiest preflight inspection was unlikely to find them. Connie had to admire the economy of their actions.

  “How much do those bombs weigh?”

  “About fifteen hundred pounds apiece.”

  “No real way to carry two on the same bird.”

  “Any weight we can shed from them?”

  Connie pulled out the satellite phone she’d been given. She rammed down on the Emergency button. Speed dial, uplink through a satellite, specially shifted to give them eight hours of coverage rather than the more usual fifteen to twenty minutes, back down to the help she needed.

  She explained the situation to Dr. Williams. He sat a thousand miles away, seated in the command area that replaced the upstairs First Class lounge on Air Force One.

  “Yes, you can shed all of the weight you want.” He sounded thoroughly cheerful even though he’d been sitting in close quarters parked in a remote corner of the Stockholm airport for a full day already.

  “That is, if you don’t mind being radioactive afterward. The Russians didn’t build these models with finesse. These are older designs, brute force. Thick steel insulation. You could lose the guide fins, but you’d still have to take the bomb apart to save a hundred pounds. If you don’t mind taking six hours to do it and have some good radiation gear on while you’re doing it.”

  He was happily describing what steps would be required to do that when she hung up the phone.

  She looked at the Majors. “That would be ‘no.’”

  Major Beale grabbed her husband’s wrist and looked at his watch.

  “Whatever we do, it needs to be in the next ten minutes.”

  The guys, with Gerta’s direction, had one nuke in a rolling cradle and were already lowering the other out of the second DC-3.

  “We could just take these two and get out of here.” Mark didn’t look happy with the suggestion even as he voiced it.

  “Tomorrow morning, the Ukrainians wake up and find two of their precious nuclear weapons are gone. We’ll never see the third one again.”

  Connie walked away into the night. She’d talked to Aleksander. A man named for two grandparents who had been great artists and great lovers. They had inspired each other to great successes. They had been successful before the Russian Revolution and had become famous in the Communist regime as well.

  Aleksander had said they must get both bombs or destroy the second one. Because if they didn’t, they were likely to see it falling out of the sky all too soon.

  “Kuchma, he is not a man you should trust to be rational.” She could hear Aleksander’s heavy voice.

  How much death would there be then? These were not small devices like the World War II weapons that brought Japan to her knees. These were state-of-the-art weaponry from the height of the Cold War. The devastation of even a single device would be catastrophic.

  Aleksander’s insistence that they retrieve both of the weapons only emphasized that they must steal all three.

  Two artists who had done something.

  She strode back to the Majors, who had lapsed into silence.

  “I have an idea. But you’re going to hate it.”

  Chapter 69

  John had rolled over the two bombs just in time to hear Major Henderson shouting at Connie.

  “That’s goddamn insane. No way! Request denied!”

  John jogged over the last few feet to stand beside Connie. He wanted to check that she was okay but saw she had her unflappable military-grade blast shield in place. Not even the Major was going to get through that.

  Connie kept her silence.

  Mark cursed and stalked away.

  Major Beale, who’d been standing close beside her husband, had her arms crossed over her chest and was nodding slowly.

  “Do it,” Beale said in a soft voice.

  John followed Connie over to the bombs, not wasting her time asking what the plans were.

  She pulled out the card that the geek had given to her back at the hotel. She was actually using it rather than trusting her memory. Not that John blamed her. Apparently she’d have to do something drastically wrong to blow them up, but that was a pair of nuclear bombs she was disarming.

  John hovered close, handing her tools and poised to grab her if something went wrong, as if he could protect her from the mushroom cloud that would consume them all in the first few milliseconds if she screwed up.

  While they worked, John could see the Majors and the rest of the crew shift a half ton of rockets and ammunition from Viper to Vengeance. That’s what Henderson must have hated so much.

  To whisk two bombs to safety, they’d have to lighten Viper by moving excess ammunition to Vengeance. They couldn’t leave the excess weaponry here to be found. Nor could they blow the weapons up because they’d draw too much attention.

  That meant that Beale and her crew would be going alone after the third bomb. Helicopters didn’t fly alone. Not if they wanted to survive. But they would this time.

  Connie reached down inside the panel she’d unscrewed with a pair of wire clippers. Three sharp clicks of the cutters chopping wires. Quickly, without hesitation, working with that perfect surety she brought to all things mechanical.

  It was only as she pulled her hand free of the guts of the second bomb’s control circuitry that John saw her face was bathed in sweat despite the cold night and near-freezing rain.

  “Doing good, Connie. You’re doing good.”

  She offered a weak smile.

  “These are dead now. It’s the next leg I’m worried about. Even refueling here, it will be a real stretch.”

  One of the D-boys drove up in a rusting old truck with fading Russian letters written across the side and the unmistakable picture of flames. They began fueling the Vengeance.

  “What’s worse is tha
t we’ll be burning extra fuel to carry Viper’s weapons, but Mark can’t carry the load and the bombs, and we can’t leave them here.”

  John again considered just blowing them up, but that would alert the Ukraine to their presence. He felt the chill penetrate right through his flight suit.

  The Majors were having a final argument.

  “I need Connie and John.” Emily Beale was standing her ground. “You know your guys aren’t as good if we get into trouble with the third bomb.”

  “Fine, then I’ll fly them.”

  John held his breath while all Major Beale did was stare at her husband in silence. Mixing a crew in mid-mission was never the best bet, and Henderson, by the way he was cursing, knew it.

  Colonel Gibson, the D-boy leader, trotted over. “Let’s go!”

  Henderson swore, hugged Beale for a moment, then headed for Viper.

  Tim came over and grabbed John’s hand in a powerful handshake. “See you soon, Mr. Big Bad.”

  “Deal, crazy man.”

  John had to blink against the emotion. It was the closest he and Tim had ever come to saying good-bye because of a mission. He appreciated the sentiment, Tim was the best friend a man could have, but he didn’t like the feel. He faced northeast. They were flying into a potential world of serious hurt.

  Then everything was moving fast. Viper was aloft. In moments they’d taken up the slack on the two bombs now rigged in a towing sling. They eased aloft, dangling from the chopper’s underbelly by five meters of wire.

  Henderson made the lift clean and turned back to the northwest and the Polish flight corridor.

  They all clambered aboard the Vengeance. Beale and Clay up front. John and Connie in the middle. Colonel Gibson, one of the other D-boys, and the Ukrainian woman in the back. John didn’t like having her along, not one bit. But she was the only one who knew where the other weapon lay.

  As he pulled on his helmet, he heard Major Henderson’s voice soft over the encrypted radio.

  “Emily Beale, you come back in one piece, goddamn it!” Soft, but harsh with feeling.