But what to spend an actual wish on…
She turned to him, “What’s yours?”
“I would think that was obvious from the moment you walked into the ranch kitchen, Ms. McMurphy.”
And when he said it, it was.
She turned from the diamond light of Venus to inspect Raymond Esterling, itinerant horse guide and otherwise unknown. He was what she wasn’t. Melting-pot American versus pure-blood Japanese. Sandy blond and fair skinned. Easygoing to her own hyper tendencies—though those seemed to go quiet around him.
“I didn’t come here looking to be a summer cowboy fling.” Yet he’d grown on her enough over these last days to make it a reasonable consideration.
“Can’t say that I’ve ever been much for flings myself. Every time I try them, I get burned.”
“But you’re willing to try me? I burn men baaaad! Just warning you.”
“I expect, despite my mortal fear of fire, that you are well worth the risk.” He also knew how to slay her with a simple piece of flattery. It might be a line, but it was a good one.
“Let’s find out.”
Chapter Four
Dateline…uh…unknown.
Lying naked in the bed, the cool Montana morning washes in the open window and over my body raising goosebumps. The crickets called through the night, singing a chorus of heat that had indeed scorched between the two highly-compatible humans. Now the siren call of the rising sun drags me back to the present.
For five more fun-filled days, and five enchantingly rigorous nights, Henderson’s Ranch had delivered. She’d fished, learned to cook her trout on a heated rock by a wilderness campfire (though she’d passed on learning how to gut and clean the fish), gone horseback on a wildlife photo safari (she’d bagged a fox, two elk, and a rare bobcat with her camera), and even discovered some skill with a bow and arrow.
She’d also unearthed a bottomless need for how Raymond Esterling could make her feel.
Feel?
Dear gods, it was like she hadn’t known the meaning of the word. Her body had responded to his in ways she’d never imagined. His hand on her calf as he checked her stirrup was enough to wrap her entire body in a warm heat. Even now it burned through her memory despite his having left her bed to start his morning chores.
And what she felt inside was equally foreign.
Demanding that her journalistic objectiveness chronicle what was happening to her resulted in—no answers.
Instead, like the splash of cold water that sent her scrabbling for the covers, she was reminded that her idyll was done. This was Last Day, Departure Day.
By this evening she’d be at SeaTac airport, waiting for her best friend Ruth Ann to pick her up and get her good and drunk. Except she didn’t feel the need to. Ray had somehow purged her soul of her parents far more than the most exotic cocktail. Going trawling for a bedmate at the J&M, after she’d had a taste of what Ray could make her feel, would be beyond pointless.
Yes, he could make her feel. And by his desperate groans and happy sighs, she knew she did the same in return.
They’d started their final night together with another sunset ride. This time he’d brought a blanket and they’d made love together under the stars. Once before, she’d done it outdoors, fast and desperate on Golden Gardens beach at a college bonfire party, the fear of imminent discovery adding to the hurry.
Last night had been a slow, languid adventure under a brilliant canopy of starlight. When the half moon rose, it had turned the prairie pale yellow and was more than bright enough for them to appreciate each other visually as well as physically. She’d come to like the way Ray looked, a great deal. He was lean but strong. And only six inches taller meant that instead of her face being crushed to a man’s chest when they embraced, she could lay her head on his shoulder and nestle against his neck.
She was a journalist because she loved learning new things.
The things Ray had taught her she could place in no article, but they’d been written indelibly upon her skin and emotions.
But now it was time to go. Showered and packed, she was surprised at the hugs she received after breakfast. The women in particular made a point of saying how glad they were to have met her. It felt genuine.
There! That was the hook on her travelogue about this place.
It didn’t feel genuine—it really was genuine.
She might have become closer to the staff than the tourists, but as they all gathered together for departure, there were many warm farewells.
Colleen stood in the midday-flight time group, waiting for the helicopter to return from the morning-flight group. New arrivals were inbound for their own adventures, welcomed, and were escorted to their freshly cleaned cabins.
Then Ray arrived and cut her out of the herd. She went willingly until they were alone with the horses in the barn.
“Kurva Colleen. May I see you again?”
“Gods, please, yes. But I’ll be in Seattle.”
“So you said. I’ll come looking for you there when I’m done being a cowboy.”
“You’d better.”
His kiss made that promise as the distant thrum of the helicopter approached to whisk her away.
Chapter Five
Dateline, done.
Larry loved the piece. For the first time, it passed beneath his evil editor’s pen without a single tick-mark or correction. Her next assignment started tomorrow, learning about building boat sails. There were several premier sail lofts in Seattle and she had a very nice contract to write a multi-page marketing-promo article about them for one of the glossy magazines.
But she didn’t care about any of that.
She cared about the simple text message, “J&M, 8pm. R”
It would be good to just sit with Ruth Ann, drink a Mai Tai or a Mango Daiquiri, and catch up. She’d been back two weeks. Back? As if time was now measured in distance from Montana.
Out of habit and the lingering Seattle summer heat—rather than thinking about attracting men—she wore a clingy tube-top, short shorts, and sandals, and brushed her hair out long. For once it wasn’t about torturing men or even finding one.
She’d already found one, and was discovering that she wasn’t getting over him as she’d expected. Her sometimes-cowboy was persevering in her thoughts—like a good story that was hard to forget. Somehow, she couldn’t quite remember how, she’d let him slip away without any way to contact him. He was always good at using distraction. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to keep in touch.
Colleen had considered calling the ranch, but he would be gone soon. The short Montana summer was ending. With the start of school, their number of guests would plummet and the extra hands wouldn’t be needed. Yet some part of her waited.
She went with the familiar J&M daiquiri for coolness. She also managed to snag her and Ruth Ann’s favorite table. It was small, but close by the door. It offered a good view of the male wildlife down the long bar as well as at the small streetside tables outside the windows. A hundred-and-thirty years of drinking had happened here (with a one-year hiccup in ’09 that had been devastating until a new owner was found), and she could feel the history every time. It was deep and solid.
The band in the back was just getting rolling. Country-rock tonight. In another hour, conversation would approach the impossible and everyone would move onto the dance floor. For now, shouting was only necessary in the deeper sections of the bar, and the dancers still had room to do some moves.
The parade of men and women through the door barely registered on her. She could see that she was registering on them, but that was the point. Dates were having to poke their men in the ribs, some of them sharply, to keep them moving.
Then one man arrived by himself—which wasn’t unusual.
Dressed in typical Seattle: sneakers, jeans, and a UW Huskies t-shirt.
But his gait was odd.
As if he’d just…gotten off a horse.
Ray smiled down at her as he strode up to the tab
le like he was still roaming the prairie.
“You’re not ‘R’.” But he was. Not Ruth Ann. Raymond. She hadn’t even looked at the sender on the message.
“You told me you liked this place.”
“I do,” then she caught herself and patted the seat beside her. “Now I really do.”
“And I thought you were dressed that way for me.” He sat beside her.
“No, just to torment passing strangers.”
“I’m hurt. But it definitely works. You’re absolutely killing me.”
“What are you…?” His t-shirt registered. “Huskies? You’re an alum?”
“Not exactly.”
She knew there were adult students, but he didn’t act like a student.
He cleared his throat as if preparing to lecture.
He worked there!
“UW Professor Raymond Esterling, specializing in advanced robotics, particularly communication protocols with natural language. That means how robots and people speak to each other.”
“You like the way I listen,” she recalled the very first thing he’d ever said to her. Of course he would appreciate that.
His nod was easy as he ordered a beer from a passing waitress, as if it was as natural as could be. Of course, she liked the way he communicated too. Except when he evaded her.
“You knew all that time that I was from Seattle and you didn’t say anything?” A part of her that had been strangely quiescent over the last two weeks stirred to life. Like one of the Front Range’s hibernating bears starting to wake up. She didn’t know yet if she was of the angry variety.
“That’s a separate part of my life. My days in this life are pretty intense. All indoors, a lot of computer code, with some mechanics and theory stirred in. For three months every year I get to ride horses and look at the horizon.”
“And snare willing ranch guests.”
“Tally of one so far. But based on that narrow statistical sample, I’d say it was absolutely worth the risk. Don’t you agree?”
The last, gentle words were so soft they barely cleared the noise level that the J&M was pumping itself up to.
Raymond Esterling. Robots and horses. He took her hand and the warmth ran up her arm and wrapped around her. Not just her limbs, but that strange place inside where no man had ever belonged.
Belonged.
Something she’d never done. Not in Japan, not really in Seattle. Always a barfly never a…she let the next word come after only briefly shying away. Never a bride.
Yet whether enjoying each other’s bodies, riding through the sunset together, or just sitting here knowing they’d be on the dance floor soon, she now knew what the belonging meant.
For outsiders, Henderson’s Ranch was about welcome—maybe having a place for a week, or a summer. But with Ray, he made it easy to imagine so much more. There was an absolute rightness that was undeniable.
She leaned in to kiss him. Just before their lips met, she whispered.
“Now I know what to wish for. And yes, absolutely worth it.”
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Flying Over the Waves
No one gets shot down during a training mission.
Except Chief Warrant Officers Debbie Rosenthal and Silvan Exeter. Their Little Bird helicopter plummets toward the North Sea during a Force 9 severe gale.
With no hope in sight, they must struggle together to survive Flying Over the Waves.
Introduction
This was the first of 2017’s Night Stalker stories.
This story was a combination of a challenge I wanted to try, mixed with a coastal storm.
The Oregon Coast is not a timid one, nor is the mighty Pacific Ocean actually pacific—ever. Storms blast ashore so regularly that we don’t even really pay attention until it reaches sixty miles an hour. Hurricane force winds are not strangers to the coast either.
After these storms, we often go to watch the big waves come in. (Unlike suicidal tourists, we locals know to do this from the headlands rather than the beaches.) Thirty-foot breakers appear and slam into the sand in an endless succession. They come in with such heavy impact, that the sound strikes your chest like a physical blow. It is a powerful, primal, and rather humbling experience.
Driftwood logs forty-feet long and five feet in diameter are tossed across parking lots and rammed into buildings. The power of the sea along the beaches is nothing compared to what it is farther from shore.
I wanted to capture some of this wildness on the page.
The challenge I wanted to try was isolating my Night Stalkers out of their element. Military helicopter pilots travel in teams with an immense amount of support. They fly in pairs at a minimum in some of the most sophisticated and complex vehicles ever designed, short of a spaceship.
That was when I had the idea to strip away their technology, taking them from the vagaries of the air to plunge them into the violence of the sea.
Chapter One
Since when do people get shot down on training missions?”
“At the moment I’m more worried about the North Sea,” her copilot shot back.
Night Stalkers Chief Warrant 3 Debbie Rosenthal decided that he had a point.
Tonight the North Sea was being thrashed by a mid-December Force 9 severe gale—that felt like a Force 12 hurricane the way it shook her helicopter. It slammed them around in all three dimensions with the ease of a beach ball. Command had decided that gale force winds in the fifty mile-an-hour range was a good excuse for training.
Debbie hadn’t argued.
First off, Command wouldn’t care what a mere CW3 said any more than her father had. He’d disowned her the day she’d joined the Army rather than marrying a good Jewish boy.
Second, such an on-the-edge flight fit her own idea of a good skills freshener, well, other than being slammed about the sky. The Night Stalkers of the US Army’s 160th SOAR 5th Battalion E Company were tasked with flying their helicopters through every form of ugly and it was great practice—when they weren’t shooting at you.
When they weren’t supposed to be shooting at you.
From a thousand feet up, flying over the North Sea in the middle of the night had merely been a good ride. From a thousand feet up over freezing waves two-to-three stories tall, breaking in huge sheets of slashing spray—with no engine—it was far less amusing.
The external cameras were good enough to paint the picture across the inside of her visor in horrifying detail despite the darkness.
“Are you sure we were shot?” It was a dumb question, but it came out anyway.
Chief Warrant 2 Silvan Exeter just pointed at the hole in their windshield that was currently shooting a stream of cold rainwater between them. The radio and engine had vanished at the same moment as their engine. The miracle was that neither of them had been hurt.
The other Little Bird in their flight hadn’t been so lucky, but she couldn’t think about Junker and Tank at the moment.
Their two-helicopter flight had passed above a fishing trawler seventy miles off Aberdeen, Scotland. At the time (all of sixty seconds ago) it had seemed like a good idea to do hover practice over a clear reference point. Could they hold position, in formation, directly above the trawler no matter what the wind and waves were doing? The trawler probably wouldn’t even know they were there, testing hover skills in the night.
Thirty seconds ago, the trawler had unveiled a Soviet ZU-23mm anti-aircraft gun.
Not fishing trawler.
Russian spy trawler.
Her aircraft was damaged first. Then the ship had swung fire against the other Little Bird and held it there. The second aircraft had plummeted out of the sky, no attempt at control or recovery. They were swinging back to finish her off as well, but it took too long. By then Silvan had fired a trio of Hydra 70 rockets into the trawler.
Debbie felt the billow of the massive explosion despite the gale-level wind. Everything above sea level was erased—gun, gunner, the entire trawler. In h
er infrared night vision—which was still working by some miracle—she could see the remains of the hull were awash and would sink soon. Even if it was an act of idiocy, it was also an act of war. There was going to be hell to pay if anyone lived to report it.
There were only two of them left out here in the middle of the North Sea and the odds didn’t look good.
Per protocol, Silvan kept calling out the engine restart procedures while going through the emergency checklist…not that anything was likely to work.
Any further disbelief that her subconscious was tossing out upon the waters would have to wait until later. After she didn’t die.
Debbie could feel the heavy weight of the wind shuddering through the controls.
No hydraulic assist in a MH-6M Little Bird.
No crew chiefs in back performing some miracle, like fabricating a new engine out of old bullet casings in the sixty seconds she’d be able to keep them aloft. That was the land of Black Hawks and Chinooks. In the Little Bird, it was just the two of them.
Autorotation was dicey at the best of times. Autorotation with winds gusting past fifty and nowhere to land just wasn’t going to work.
“Can you reach the raft?”
Silvan hesitated in mid-“Ignition-test on, negative indicators, Ignition-start press and hold, negative start.” She’d already lost half her altitude and was descending through five hundred feet. They were at max glide time, minus a factor of extra speed so that the storm didn’t flip them too easily. Better faster with less flight time than upside down with only seconds to go. Head-on into the wind to get maximum lift…it didn’t matter where they went, so she wasn’t worried about distance.
The Ides of Matt 2017 Page 9
