That had only wound the group up even more until everyone that passed them by looked at them as if they were more than a little bit crazy.
The fever had built right up until the ceremony, leaving Cornelia feeling positively giddy.
Or so she’d thought until the arrival of the wedding processional itself. Damien had not managed to escape being co-opted into the ceremony. Actually, he’d seemed positively delighted by the idea, though he’d declined to explain why.
The State Dining Room looked to be the center of the Christmas madness. The four corners of the room were commanded by towering white-flocked trees adorned with silvered balls that captured and reflected every single light. The walls were draped in silver and gold garlands and the ceiling had so many icicle lights that they might have been inside an ice cave. There wasn’t a hint of chill, however. The great carpet of the State Dining Room had been rolled up to reveal the rich warmth of white oak herringbone parquet beneath.
Across its surface, rose petals were scattered by the two-year-old Adele—coaxed along by her tall and comely nanny, herself the daughter of a Hostage Rescue Team sniper.
Then behind the bridesmaids, who’d winked at her as they paced by, came an honor guard made up of White House Marines.
Cornelia supposed it was only fitting. The father of the bride, Marine Corps General Edward Arnson, had just been promoted from a one-star brigadier to a two-star major general for his long service—and unspecified heroism in flight.
Then, lastly before the bride and her two-star escort, came a lone Marine. At first she didn’t even recognize him.
Damien always looked good to her. But in his dress uniform—complete with side-arm and Mameluke sword, and wearing his white cover—he was about the handsomest man she’d ever seen.
The man who wanted to protect her, but who hadn’t shut her out either. Together they had saved the Christmas season, and the words and spirit of their country. Together they had saved her words.
His face was perfectly passive as he did his formal march up the aisle—sword at the ready, unsheathed and held close by his shoulder. No one would be stupid enough to challenge the couple at the altar with Damien standing guard.
And then she noticed the one tiny thing that was out of place.
Captain Damien Feinman didn’t wear a captain’s bars on the shoulder boards of his uniform, but rather a major’s oak leaf. At her gasp, she saw the tiniest smile touch his lips before he passed her by.
And later that evening, when the ceremony was done and the cake had been eaten, after the dancing had wound down and most of the guests had left, Damien came to her. Close by his side stood General Arnson, still in his full dress uniform. And with him Zachary, Daniel, and President Matthews.
“Why doesn’t this look good?” It wasn’t fair that there was some crisis at a wedding on Christmas Day. She needed one day without a disaster.
Damien did one of those immaculate moves that Marines did, handing off his cover to the general who accepted it just as formally.
Damien turned back to her, and then dropped to one knee.
Cornelia forgot how to breathe in that moment.
He took her hand and looked up at her.
“Please say yes, Cornelia Day. I am a man of too many words—”
“You’ve got that right,” the general agreed in a gruff tone that cracked a smile on Damien’s upturned face.
“So I will keep this simple. I said I wouldn’t propose before New Years Day, but I can’t wait that long. There is no future I want without you in it every single day. Please say yes.”
“He did it okay,” Zachary said to Daniel.
“Better than I did.”
“You did great,” Alice came up beside him. “Though I wouldn’t have minded if you’d been wearing a spiffy uniform like that one when you proposed.”
Anne slipped beside Zachary and moved up against him. He tucked her beneath his arm and it was about the best recommendation Cornelia had ever seen for a happy couple.
“Did we miss it?” Sienna rushed up with Roy in tow. “Please tell me we didn’t miss it. This is the good part.”
Roy kissed the top of her head, “The good part is just starting. You’ll see.”
“Shush, all of you. You haven’t given this poor girl a chance to speak.” Nobody appeared ready to argue with the First Lady.
Cornelia tried to speak, she really did. But nothing came out.
All of these people, these wonderful couples, were hovering, waiting for her to be as happy as they were.
And kneeling at her feet, a man she loved for his wit, his wisdom, and his bravery. He wasn’t just handsome, he was also beautiful.
Unable to find the words, she knelt down in front of him and simply nodded.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a ring. A simple diamond in a smoothly elegant band. No deep symbolism. No scribed words. Simple truth.
As he slipped it on her finger, the joy inside was so great that she still couldn’t speak.
But somewhere she found the laugh that had always been locked away deep inside her. So she wrapped her arms around him and they laughed together as their friends joined in.
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Target of the Heart (excerpt)
Major Pete Napier hovered his MH-47G Chinook helicopter ten kilometers outside of Lhasa, Tibet and a mere two inches off the tundra. A mixed action team of Delta Force and The Activity—the slipperiest intel group on the planet—flung themselves aboard.
The additional load sent an infinitesimal shift in the cyclic control in his right hand. The hydraulics to close the rear loading ramp hummed through the entire frame of the massive helicopter. By the time his crew chief could reach forward to slap an “all secure” signal against his shoulder, they were already ten feet up and fifty out. That was enough altitude. He kept the nose down as he clawed for speed in the thin air at eleven thousand feet.
“Totally worth it,” one of the D-boys announced as soon as he was on the Chinook’s internal intercom.
He’d have to remember to tell that to the two Black Hawks flying guard for him…when they were in a friendly country and could risk a radio transmission. This deep inside China—or rather Chinese-held territory as the CIA’s mission-briefing spook had insisted on calling it—radios attracted attention and were only used to avoid imminent death and destruction.
“Great, now I just need to get us out of this alive.”
“Do that, Pete. We’d appreciate it.”
He wished to hell he had a stealth bird like the one that had gone into bin Laden’s compound. But the one that had crashed during that raid had been blown up. Where there was one, there were always two, but the second had gone back into hiding as thoroughly as if it had never existed. He hadn’t heard a word about it since.
The Tibetan terrain was amazing, even if all he could see of it was the monochromatic green of night vision. And blackness. The largest city in Tibet lay a mere ten kilometers away and they were flying over barren wilderness. He could crash out here and no one would know for decades unless some yak herder stumbled upon them. Or were yaks in Mongolia? He was a corn-fed, white boy from Colorado, what did he know about Tibet? Most of the countries he’d flown into on black ops missions he’d only seen at night anyway.
While moving very, very fast.
Like now.
The inside of his visor was painted with overlapping readouts. A pre-defined terrain map, the best that modern satellite imaging could build made the first layer. This wasn’t some crappy, on-line, look-at-a-picture-of-your-house display. Someone had a pile of dung outside their goat pen? He could see it, tell you how high it was, and probably say if they were pygmy goats or full-size LaManchas by the size of their shit-pellets if he zoomed in.
On top of that were projected the forward-looking infrared camera images. The FLIR imaging gave him a real-time overlay, in case someone had put an addition onto their goat shed since the last satell
ite pass, or parked their tractor across his intended flight path.
His nervous system was paying autonomic attention to that combined landscape. He also compensated for the thin air at altitude as he instinctively chose when to start his climb over said goat shed or his swerve around it.
It was the third layer, the tactical display that had most of his attention. At least he and the two Black Hawks flying escort on him were finally on the move.
To insert this deep into Tibet, without passing over Bhutan or Nepal, they’d had to add wingtanks on the Black Hawks’ hardpoints where he’d much rather have a couple banks of Hellfire missiles. Still, they had 20mm chain guns and the crew chiefs had miniguns which was some comfort.
While the action team was busy infiltrating the capital city and gathering intelligence on the particularly brutal Chinese assistant administrator, he and his crews had been squatting out in the wilderness under a camouflage net designed to make his helo look like just another god-forsaken Himalayan lump of granite.
Command had determined that it was better for the helos to wait on site through the day than risk flying out and back in. He and his crew had stood shifts on guard duty, but none of them had slept. They’d been flying together too long to have any new jokes, so they’d played a lot of cribbage. He’d long ago ruled no gambling on a mission, after a fistfight had broken out about a bluff hand that cost a Marine three hundred and forty-seven dollars. Marines hated losing to Army no matter how many times it happened. They’d had to sit on him for a long time before he calmed down.
Tonight’s mission was part of an on-going campaign to discredit the Chinese “presence” in Tibet on the international stage—as if occupying the country the last sixty years didn’t count toward ruling, whether invited or not. As usual, there was a crucial vote coming up at the U.N.—that, as usual, the Chinese could be guaranteed to ignore. However, the ever-hopeful CIA was in a hurry to make sure that any damaging information that they could validate was disseminated as thoroughly as possible prior to the vote.
Not his concern.
His concern was, were they going to pass over some Chinese sentry post at their top speed of a hundred and ninety-six miles an hour? The sentries would then call down a couple Shenyang J-16 jet fighters that could hustle along at Mach 2 to fry his sorry ass. He knew there was a pair of them parked at Lhasa along with some older gear that would be just as effective against his three helos.
“Don’t suppose you could get a move on, Pete?”
“Eat shit, Nicolai!” He was a good man to have as a copilot. Pete knew he was holding on too tight, and Nicolai knew that a joke was the right way to ease the moment.
He, Nicolai, and the four pilots in the two Black Hawks had a long way to go tonight and he’d never make it if he stayed so tight on the controls that he could barely maneuver. Pete eased off and felt his fingers tingle with the rush of returning blood. They dove down into gorges and followed them as long as they dared. They hugged cliff walls at every opportunity to decrease their radar profile. And they climbed.
That was the true danger—they would be up near the helos’ limits when they crossed over the backbone of the Himalayas in their rush for India. The air was so rarefied that they burned fuel at a prodigious rate. Their reserve didn’t allow for any extended battles while crossing the border…not for any battle at all really.
It was pitch dark outside her helicopter when Captain Danielle Delacroix stamped on the left rudder pedal while giving the big Chinook right-directed control on the cyclic. It tipped her most of the way onto her side, but let her continue in a straight line. A Chinook’s rotors were sixty feet across—front to back they overlapped to make the spread a hundred feet long. By cross-controlling her bird to tip it, she managed to execute a straight line between two mock pylons only thirty feet apart. They were made of thin cloth so they wouldn’t down the helo if you sliced one—she was the only trainee to not have cut one yet.
At her current angle of attack, she took up less than a half-rotor of width, just twenty-four feet. That left her nearly three feet to either side, sufficient as she was moving at under a hundred knots.
The training instructor sitting beside her in the copilot’s seat didn’t react as she swooped through the training course at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Only child of a single mother, she was used to providing her own feedback loops, so she didn’t expect anything else. Those who expected outside validation rarely survived the SOAR induction testing, never mind the two years of training that followed.
As a loner kid, Danielle had learned that self-motivated congratulations and fun were much easier to come by than external ones. She’d spent innumerable hours deep in her mind as a pre-teen superheroine. At twenty-nine she was well on her way to becoming a real life one, though Helo-girl had never been a character she’d thought of in her youth.
External validation or not, after two years of training with the U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment she was ready for some action. At least she was convinced that she was. But the trainers of Fort Campbell, Kentucky had not signed off on anyone in her trainee class yet. Nor had they given any hint of when they might.
She ducked ten tons of racing Chinook under a bridge and bounced into a near vertical climb to clear the power line on the far side. Like a ride on the toboggan at Terrassee Dufferin during Le Carnaval de Québec, only with five thousand horsepower at her fingertips. Using her Army signing bonus—the first money in her life that was truly hers—to attend Le Carnaval had been her one trip back after her birthplace since her mother took them to America when she was ten.
To even apply to SOAR required five years of prior military rotorcraft experience. She had applied after seven years because of a chance encounter—or rather what she’d thought was a chance encounter at the time.
Captain Justin Roberts had been a top Chinook pilot, the one who had convinced her to switch from her beloved Black Hawk and try out the massive twin-rotor craft. One flight and she’d been a goner, begging her commander until he gave in and let her cross over to the new platform. Justin had made the jump from the 10th Mountain Division to the 160th SOAR not long after that.
Then one night she’d been having pizza in Watertown, New York a couple miles off the 10th’s base at Fort Drum.
“Danielle?” Justin had greeted her with the surprise of finding a good friend in an unexpected place. Danielle had liked Justin—even if he was a too-tall, too-handsome cowboy and completely knew it. But “good friend” was unusual for Danielle, with anyone, and Justin came close.
“Captain Roberts,” as a dry greeting over the top edge of her Suzanne Brockmann novel didn’t faze him in the slightest.
“Mind if I join ya?” A question he then answered for himself by sliding into the opposite seat and taking a slice of her pizza. She been thinking of taking the leftovers back to base, but that was now an idle thought.
“Are you enjoying life in SOAR?” she did her best to appear a normal, social human, a skill she’d learned by rote. Greeting someone you knew after a time apart? Ask a question about them. “They treating you well?”
“Whoo-ee, you have no idea, Danielle,” his voice was smooth as…well, always…so she wouldn’t think about it also sounding like a pickup line. He was beautiful, but didn’t interest her; the outgoing ones never did.
“Tell me.” Men love to talk about themselves, so let them.
And he did. But she’d soon forgotten about her novel, and would have forgotten the pizza if he hadn’t reminded her to eat.
His stories shifted from intriguing to fascinating. There was a world out there that she’d been only peripherally aware of. The Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR weren’t simply better helicopter pilots, they were the most highly-trained and best-equipped ones on the planet. Their missions were pure razor’s edge and black-op dark.
He’d left her with a hundred questions and enough interest to fill out an application to the 160th. Being a decent guy, Justin even paid f
or the pizza after eating half.
The speed at which she was rushed into testing told her that her meeting with Justin hadn’t been by chance and that she owed him more than half a pizza next time they met. She’d asked after him a couple of times since she’d made it past the qualification exams—and the examiners’ brutal interviews that had left her questioning her sanity, never mind her ability.
“Justin Roberts is presently deployed, ma’am,” was the only response she’d ever gotten.
Now that she was through training—almost, had to be soon, didn’t it?—Danielle realized that was probably less of an evasion and more likely to do with the brutal op tempo the Night Stalkers maintained. The SOAR 1st Battalion had just won the coveted Lt. General Ellis D. Parker awards for Outstanding Combat Aviation Battalion and Aviation Battalion of the Year. They’d been on deployment every single day of the last year, actually of the last decade-plus since 9/11.
The very first Special Forces boots on the ground in Afghanistan were delivered that October by the Night Stalkers and nothing had slacked off since. Justin might be in the 5th battalion D company, but they were just as heavily assigned as the 1st.
Part of their training had included tours in Afghanistan. But unlike their prior deployments, these were brief, intense, and then they’d be back in the States pushing to integrate their new skills.
SOAR needed her training to end and so did she.
Danielle was ready for the job, in her own, inestimable opinion. But she wasn’t going to get there until the trainers signed off that she’d reached fully mission-qualified proficiency.
The Fort Campbell training course was never set up the same from one flight to the next, but it always had a time limit. The time would be short and they didn’t tell you what it was. So she drove the Chinook for all it was worth like Regina Jaquess waterskiing her way to U.S. Ski Team Female Athlete of the Year.
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