Love Behind the Lines

by M. L. Buchman

  Love Behind the Lines

  a Night Stalkers 5E romance story

  by M. L. Buchman

  1

  “Mission recall. Repeat, mission recall.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me.” Lieutenant Manfred “M&M” Malcolm looked down at the radio to make sure that it was on tonight’s frequency and that the message wasn’t for someone else.

  “I’m only three goddamn klicks out!” He shouted at the radio, though he didn’t hit his transmit key to send his least fond regards. There were some places that American military helicopters should never be caught and he was in one of them. His Little Bird MH-6 was stealth rigged and his radio signal was encrypted…but that wouldn’t make him or the point of origin of any electronic transmission invisible.

  “Mission X-ray Tango Alpha is aborted,” the Air Mission Commander repeated. “Return to base.”

  XTA. Extraction of prime target Alpha. That was his mission tonight.

  “Goddamn it!” He hated the alphabet agencies. DIA, NSA, and most particularly the CIA. They never seemed to know what they wanted. In the military, you received a mission, you planned it, and you by god executed it after you were given the “Go!” order. In the CIA he figured they had a mission board and flung darts at it until they hit something and said, “Oh, let’s do that.” He’d bet they wore blindfolds while planning or whatever it was they did back in Langley. After that, because shit flowed downhill, it would be:

  “Hey Manny,” as if pretending they were already on a first-name basis before they’d even talked and he didn’t have a rank after a decade of flying and even facing down Officer Candidate School. “We have a top level asset”—which meant spy—“whose cover is blown. We need an immediate extraction. Tonight.”

  There were only two companies in the entire US military able to fly a route like the one needed, SOAR’s 5D and his own 5E. The helicopters of the Special Operations Aviation Regiment’s 5th Battalion E Company had been in a better position so he’d been sent in.

  Now he was deep behind Russian lines—except the Russians still insisted they weren’t in Crimea—and he had to figure out how to get back without tripping some high-tech booby trap. All that noise about the Russians being so far behind in tech was just that, noise. Their problem was that they couldn’t afford as much of the good shit as America could, but what they had was damned impressive. And those heavy-duty assets were concentrated in places of particular importance to the Russian government…like every square meter within a hundred klicks of his present position just outside of Sevastopol, Crimea. Which had been part of the Ukraine until recently. He wished it still was, because then he’d be welcome instead of being a target.

  Low and fast had been his answer going in; he just hoped that it would work equally well on his passage out. He yanked up on the collective and shoved the cyclic forward to lay the hammer down hard.

  That hope lasted almost thirteen seconds.

  Some Russian soldier with an itchy trigger finger and thirty-year old technology fired a missile at his trace. It was a crazy waste of $100,000 Igla surface-to-air missile, because Manny knew that his craft’s radar signature wasn’t much bigger than a fat seagull’s. It was a stupid move by an undertrained molodoy; an action for which he’d probably be punished above and beyond standard new-recruit hazing. Any soldier with a decent amount of training would have ignored that faint blip on the tracking radar.

  What the goddamn, suffering molodoy would never know was that he’d actually done his job exactly right.

  Once on Manny’s tail, there was only so much that could be done to disguise the thousand degrees of heat exhaust from his turbine engine. The missile had flown close enough to sniff out that heat signature and zeroed in. It moved at almost Mach 2 and he moved at about one-tenth of that.

  A locked-on Igla wasn’t something that was evaded by a quick maneuver. The “needle” as it was aptly named, was about to drill his ass. It ignored the signal-blocking chaff that Manny dispersed. Firing off a round of distracting flares would illuminate and pinpoint his location for much more substantial forces. He saw only one chance and punched for it. Head for the sea.

  The high cliffs south of Sevastopol were just close enough for him to dive over the edge and buy himself a few seconds before the missile reacquired. A half kilometer out from shore, he stalled the helicopter hard, heaving back on the cyclic until the joystick was jammed into his gut. His Little Bird groaned and wept, but it slammed from a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour to under forty in moments.

  He armed the self-destruct charges, unsnapped his belt, and dove out the doorway.

  He was less than halfway to the water when the Igla caught up with his Little Bird. The explosion was blinding in its reflection off the water, the concussive punch of combined missile and destruct charges made the last twenty-five feet of his fall go by very quickly.

  2

  It felt as if Alisa had been undercover her entire life. First from the ruling government of the Prime Minister turned dictator and now from the Russians. Their recent annexation of Crimea had made her job a hundred times more dangerous and she stayed because she didn’t know what else to do. She was trapped between the Russian SVR, their version of the CIA, who would ruin her day if her role was ever discovered, and the CIA itself with their promises of safe passage out…if she could just hold on a while longer and find out about whatever was next on their never-ending list.

  Then Sergey of the SVR had taken a sudden interest in her, more than just trying to bed her. He began dropping by her desk at work, or just happening to run into her when she was out at a club.

  Knowing she’d reached her limit, she’d finally convinced the CIA that it was time to honor their commitment and send in an extraction team as she had no way of escaping on her own.

  For twenty hours she’d cowered in fear, dodging shadows and afraid at each moment that she’d be taken into custody and never see daylight again. Just as she was preparing to leave and work her slow way to the extraction rendezvous—a journey that would take half the night—a knock had sounded on her door.

  Instead a phalanx of guards, there had been only Sergey. He had offered to “protect” her in exchange for certain “services.” She didn’t need to watch where his eyes remained fixed to know what services he was interested in and didn’t care to guess how brief a respite from prison his protection would offer should she consent.

  Then Sergey had made the mistake—fatal as it turned out—of tapping his briefcase and saying he had a report he would turn in if she did not agree.

  She had read the report while Sergey quietly sank to the bottom of Pivdenna Bay. He had gotten only a few facts right, but two of them were completely damning—they also told her who among her informants must be a double agent for the SVR, as that part of the report was too accurate. When she found the thumb drive in his pants pocket, with a copy of the report on it, she decided that Sergey was definitely arrogant enough to have left no form of “Open this file if I do not return” at the office.

  Just in case, Alisa would have to die tonight along with the ever-so-surprised Sergey. Irina (still a top-twenty name among Ukrainian women) would be born tomorrow with fresh papers and a new address. She had deep connections in both the “renegade terrorist” Ukrainian camp and the Russian “our special forces Spetsnaz aren’t really here” camp (to which Sergey had belonged).

  If Sergey had truly kept everything to himself, then there was only one person who still could expose her, Lesia Melnyk. Lesia was General Vlad Kozlov’s mistress and worked in the same department as Alisa. She had been Alisa’s first friend in a long time and the betrayal
cut deep.

  Alisa decided that except for Lesia she was safe enough. Her thinking was that with Sergey’s demise and his report gone, an identity change should be enough to protect her. She could stay and continue running her other contacts, so she called off the extraction.

  The other reason to stay was as unprofessional as hell and she didn’t care. Lesia was her supposed best friend and the first person she’d turned, or thought she had. Alisa wanted revenge—badly.

  Alisa put the thumb drive in her pocket. A glance around the apartment hurt so much. She wanted to take everything and could take nothing. She slipped her parents’ photo in her pocket, tossed the paper copy of Sergey’s report along with a couple recent copies of Pravda on top of her stove, set the burners on high, and left quickly.

  By the time she had walked a block away, her one-bedroom kvartira (rather than kvartyra as Sevastopol was no longer a Ukrainian city but rather a Russian one) was on fire. When she glanced back two blocks later, it was engulfed and flames were streaming out the windows. She wore a dead man’s clothes, which weren’t a bad fit except for being very tight across the chest even without a bra (it would have helped if Sergey had worked out more in life), and had her long blond hair tucked up into a worker’s cap. The May weather was too warm for a ushanka fur hat. She’d liked that hat and hated to leave it behind in the flames.

  For three nameless hours, she slouched her way across the city and back. No longer Alisa and not yet Irina, she watched carefully for a tail.

  After that she sat for an hour in the back of Zeppelin Club. It was Friday night and the work-week crowd was blowing out as desperately as they could. The loud Euro pop was predictably awful though the “exotic” female dancers managed to not look too bored. Her stool at a small table along the far side of the stage allowed her to watch the entrance between the dancers’ bare legs and other body parts as they arched and writhed. It was hard to believe, but perhaps Sergey really had been dumb enough to confront a foreign agent without a backup.

  She spent another hour drinking at a shadowed table in a porn club, the favorite of one of her contacts, but gave up around four a.m. while the party was still rolling hard (pun intended). She staggered her way back past Alisa’s apartment. The fire brigade had been and gone. The burned shell would reveal nothing that would arouse suspicions except for its no-longer-existent renter’s failure to return. No one waited in the shadows looking for a woman with long blond hair and serious curves. And certainly not for a drunken man staggering homeward.

  She hadn’t meant to drink as much as she did, though it was the leading national pastime. That, and griping about the brutal Russians or the lazy Ukrainians—depending on who you were drinking with: the noble Ukrainians or the world-conquering Russians. But the nerves had gotten to her. She’d made it through the Russian invasion of Crimea more calmly than facing exposure by Sergey. Had he been just one tiny bit less interested in her breasts, she’d probably be screaming in an SVR torture cell at the moment.

  And if she’d been one bit less angry at Lesia Melnyk, she’d have climbed on the damned helicopter and been safe by now. But the anger had grown rather than abating. The alcohol buffered none of the emotions ripping at her.

  She leaned her head against the door of the safe house, just three streets over from her burned-out apartment, and struggled to catch her breath. Her hands were shaky as she reached for her keys.

  Purse, where was her purse?

  No, dressed as a man now.

  Pants pocket.

  Key in door, the soft click of the lock.

  And at the same moment a soft sound behind her, then a jabbing pressure in the middle of her back.

  “Medlenno,” a voice commanded in Russian. Slowly indeed.

  3

  Manny eased through the doorway and kept his Glock 19 pressed against the man’s back until they were both inside. He’d been through far too much shit in the last ten hours to trust anyone, safe house or not.

  Impossibly, he hadn’t died despite his helicopter being shot down by a missile. However, the explosion had happened less than a thousand meters from a Russian frigate, so there was no way for Quinn and Patty in the backup helo to fish his ass out of the water without being targeted themselves.

  The Russians had been slow to arrive and inspect the explosion area, which had allowed him time to swim to shore unobserved. Then the CIA had tried stonewalling on the location of their safe house. That had given him his first smile as he hid at the base of a Crimean cliff, carefully covered in sand except for his face despite the nighttime darkness. He wouldn’t want to be one of Langley’s CIA headquarters personnel right now, not with his 5E commanders Pete Napier and Daniella Delacroix after them. They’d coughed up the safe house address eventually.

  Manny had made selections from a couple of clotheslines and then simply walked across the city. Sometimes brash paid off. No one stopped him, except for his nerves which had attempted to asphyxiate him at every step. When he’d arrived, the door was locked. He really hated Crimea.

  The CIA’s passive-aggressive goddamn joke, not telling him where to find the key. If he ever met the bastard who—

  Unproductive thinking!

  The ground floor was totally locked and barred.

  He’d climbed up to a small balcony, that was equally fortified, and squatted down while he tried to figure out what to do. The traffic was light in this neighborhood at oh-four-bumfuck in the morning, just some drunk weaving his lazy ass home.

  Then the drunk had stepped up to the safe house door directly below Manny’s balcony. He waited until the man almost had the door open, then dropped down and crowded him inside.

  Once through the door, he shoved the drunk up against the wall. If this was the caliber of men the CIA could find, it was no wonder the Russians had moved in so easily.

  The house was quiet and dark. The very first light of dawn filtered weakly through a small window set above the door, just enough to see shapes.

  Without moving his weapon, Manny kicked the man’s feet apart and forced him to raise his hands, palm-flat, against the wall. Then he began checking out the man. A vicious flick-blade in his sock. Manny almost missed the thin strap for the hideaway holster inside his thigh—for hidden carry but not quick draw, he’d pants the guy in a moment and take it. Then he reached to check the crotch, but there was nothing there.

  The drunk began cursing in slurred Russian, but he nudged his sidearm hard against his kidney…no, her kidney…and the Russian grunted and began complaining louder.

  “Zatknis!”

  The drunk woman continued to grumble, but she did so more quietly. He reached around to undo her belt and pants enough to recover the hidden weapon. Her jacket gave up nothing except a thumb drive which he pocketed. Then he yanked the jacket off her and tossed it aside just in case he’d missed something. Another blade, this time tucked down between ample breasts, and a shower of long hair when he knocked the cap aside. He couldn’t feel anything inside the cap except a photo that it was too dark to see.

  He eased away until he was well out of reach with his back against the front door so that there would be no surprises. Then he flicked on a light on a small table.

  “Turn. Slowly,” he said in Russian.

  “Your accent. It is terrible,” the woman mumbled in heavily-inflected English as she turned.

  “So sue me.”

  She rolled over, still leaning against the wall for support, until her back was pressed against it. Without the jacket, her men’s clothing didn’t mask a thing about her. Trim, built, long blond hair that cascaded past her shoulders, and piercing blue eyes in a lovely face.

  “Damn. I can see I should have visited Crimea sooner.”

  “Go and take yourself to hells, Yankee. Who are you?”

  “Prince Charming. And it’s ‘to hell’ but you’re too late, I’m already there. Wh
o are you?”

  “I do not know this anymore,” her voice wavered. “Call me the Grand Duchess Anastasia for all I care,” then the woman slid down the wall to sit on her butt. “Nothing left but ashes.” She rubbed at her face then leaned her head back against the plaster. Her hands dropped into her lap.

  Manny felt as exhausted as she looked. He’d been running mostly on adrenalin since they’d woken him at this time yesterday morning, a thousand kilometers away.

  Her head tipped slightly to one side.

  Then she softly began to snore.

  Manny really, really hated Crimea.

  4

  Alisa woke slowly.

  Except she wasn’t Alisa anymore. She was…Irina now. Irina. Had to repeat her new name until it was second nature. Irina Kovalenko. Irina Kovalenko.

  Irina remembered her apartment burning, no, her torching her own apartment. She remembered…

  Chyort voz’mi! She remembered slitting Sergey’s throat. She’d managed to lead him down to an out of the way dock along the waterfront after convincing him that taking her out to dinner was a sure path to success with her—thankfully Sevastopol was mostly waterfront. And while he’d been enjoying himself, groping her breasts with brutal strength, she’d slipped a blade up through the soft underpart of his chin and managed to cut his brainstem just like in training. For a moment he’d squeezed her breasts so convulsively hard that she was the one who almost cried out. Then he let go and slumped to the planking. She’d stripped him, tied an anchor that she stole from one of the boats about his ankles, and quietly disposed of the first person she’d ever killed.

  But she’d held it together, by god. She’d made it back to her apartment, studied his report, made a plan, and executed her escape.

  She made good until…the man at the door. He’d come out of nowhere. She’d had no tail; she was certain of it.

  And then there’d been a gun at her back.