The Ides of Matt 2017

by M. L. Buchman

  No one ever survived bailing out of a crashing helicopter, so the requirement to carry the small raft on long crossings was silly, but it was on the books. Ditching was something you only survived if balanced perfectly with no rotors catching the water—and in dead calm weather. And then only if you were lucky. Actually, there were survivors during storm ditchings, but they were very rare—more statistical anomaly than fact. A Little Bird wasn’t some old-style US Coast Guard HH-3F Pelican designed to float. They were going to sink so fast that hitting the water was barely going to slow them down.

  “I can only reach the raft if I go outside,” he sounded grim. A Little Bird had a cockpit small enough that Debbie had never understood how two men could fly one. At least her shoulders were narrow enough that they only bumped together half the time they were aloft. The back two seats were even smaller. “Outside” meant stepping out onto the skid, shuffling backward in a roaring wind, and yanking the rear door open—all while she was busy pitching and yawing like a drunkard on a bender.

  “Three hundred feet,” was the only answer she had for Silvan.

  Chapter Two

  Silvan? Like Tolkien’s elves? You’re tall enough to be one.” Debbie leaned back against the nose of her Little Bird, warm in the April afternoon. She looked up at the new guy—six-one, maybe six-two, a long way up. The sun caught his blond hair and made it shine. He was also slender like an elf, except for a very nice set of soldier’s shoulders.

  “Mom was a fan. And with our last name being Exeter… Exeter College was Tolkien’s alma mater. I never stood a chance,” new guy shrugged. Very nice shoulders. Good smile too. Debbie liked good smiles.

  “I didn’t know there were elves in the Army. Something’s wrong with your ears though.”

  He fell for it and actually reached up to touch them, before he sighed. “Not pointed. Right. Maybe I’m a deformed elf.”

  “Or a reformed one.” Not one bit deformed from where she was watching. Hide his ears and he’d make a very fair Legolas in the Lord of the Rings movies. His hair was still Army-short, but maybe she could corrupt him. Her own was down to her shoulders. Very un-Army, but very Night Stalkers.

  The Night Stalkers’ customers—Delta Force especially—let their hair go long to help them blend in when infiltrating undercover. And there wasn’t a Delta operator who didn’t also glory in the chance to say “up yours” to the military hierarchy that they’d voluntarily sworn to serve to the death. A lot of the fliers in the 160th SOAR took their close association with Delta and SEAL Team 6 as an excuse to let their own hair get long.

  “Let it grow out. That’ll hide the defect.” Because otherwise he was damn near perfect. Not gorgeous, though not homely by a long stretch, but rather cute, strong, and funny. “Besides, you’d look good in long hair.”

  He squatted down, flexing arms and clenching fists, and grimaced horribly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He looked like he was holding himself back from pummeling something.

  Or maybe trying to give birth right there on the runway in front of her helicopter.

  “Is it working?” His voice little more than a grunt.

  “Is what working?”

  He stopped whatever it was he was doing and patted the top of his head. “Crap!”

  “What?”

  “A beautiful woman tells me to grow my hair long, I wondered if I could hurry up the process. You know, like the Incredible Hulk.” When he resumed the hunched, grimace-riddled stance—she recognized it, right out of the movies.

  “An angry roar and you’ve got it nailed.”

  And he roared! Right there in the middle of Fort Rucker, Alabama airfield. Other crews were turning startled looks in their direction, but Silvan didn’t seem to care.

  When he finished, he stood up normally, as if nothing had happened and half the field wasn’t watching him, and patted the top of his head again.

  Then he whispered a soft, “Damn! No change.”

  Debbie would have burst out laughing at that moment if she could have, he was awfully cute.

  But she couldn’t.

  Because she knew that in that instant, whether or not she was his commander, she was gone on him.

  Chapter Three

  Silvan popped loose his harness then turned to her.

  “Remember, jump into the top of a wave. If you jump into a trough from a height, you’re going to fall that extra thirty feet.”

  They were crossing down through the two-hundred-foot mark and the difference from crest to trough was looking more like five stories than three. These waves were huge.

  “After I get the raft, we jump together, from opposite sides,” he shouted for emphasis.

  “Roger that. Go!”

  And he was gone: yanking free the data-and-communications umbilical cord to his helmet, jamming open the door with a shoulder, then leveraging his way out onto the bucking skid. The wind roared and swirled about her for a moment before the wind slammed it closed.

  She should have said something.

  Something to show that she cared.

  That he was important.

  That even though they’d never had a chance, she wished they had.

  A vicious gust slapped them hard. She managed to lean her side of the Little Bird into it. It cost her some altitude, but it would spare Silvan the worst of it.

  She was way too busy to look to see if he was still there, clinging to the outside of the helo.

  One-fifty.

  The wind’s roar in the cabin returned with double the volume.

  The rear door was open. Silvan was still with her.

  “I’ve got the raft!” Debbie could barely hear his shout.

  “Keep growing your hair!” Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

  That was going to be the last thing she ever said to him?

  Chapter Four

  Keep trying,” Debbie managed past a constricted throat, trying not to make their first meeting too awkward. “Six months tops and it should cover those awkward ears.”

  “Mom would like you.”

  “She doesn’t like the kind of trollops you normally drag home?” Maybe it was the Alabama heat shimmering off the airfield that melted what little manners she normally maintained.

  Silvan had the decency to laugh despite her catty remark. “Not much. Would you believe that some of them haven’t even read The Hobbit?”

  “Horrors!”

  “Indeed,” he agreed.

  And that had set the tone for their entire first meeting. They’d shared stories of trainings and missions, of joining the military and that they were each nearing their first decade of service.

  She’d felt bad about not sharing her past, but Silvan made it easy with stories of his own. His family life wasn’t some picture postcard, but it wasn’t a dysfunctional TV sitcom either. Engineer mom, professor dad, older sister lawyer with one kid and a divorce.

  For eight months they’d flown together, laughed together, and survived every mission thrown at them.

  In eight months he’d never done a single thing to reverse her initial impression.

  Silvan was a seriously decent guy who easily kept up with her quirky sense of humor. Even better, together they forced each other to become better fliers.

  It seemed they’d done everything together—except one.

  Chapter Five

  Well, two things. They’d also never died together but, odds on, they were about to.

  She didn’t dare take a hand off either of the controls, so she couldn’t do anything to prepare for the jump except rehearse the steps in her head: release controls, punch harness release with one hand, then yank out the helmet’s umbilical cord while opening the door with the other. Thankfully, she and Silvan were already wearing inflatable life vests on top of their standard gear.

  With her left thumb she flicked the landing light switch on the end of the collective control. The sudden glare revealed a nightmare landscape of sheeting spray and breaking waves cov
ered with foaming spindrift.

  A wave crested fifty feet below her.

  No time to grab anything, just enough to—

  Down in the trough was what remained of the spy trawler’s hull.

  A flat structure. The lowest deck had survived the blast. Now just barely awash.

  If she could land there, even for a moment, their chances of survival were going to skyrocket.

  Chapter Six

  Why don’t you have a past?”

  Debbie sat slouched beside Silvan after a brutally long mission deep into Libya to take part in wiping out an al-Qaeda camp. They’d made it back to the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier with the first of the predawn light. By unspoken mutual consent, they’d found a corner of the hangar deck with a view out over the ship’s wake. There they’d collapsed and settled in to watch the sunrise over the Mediterranean.

  For a long time—from dark blue to soft pink—Debbie just let the waves hold her attention. She felt their beat in her aching body. Little Birds were meant for two-hour out-and-back operations. Muhammad Ali’s “Sting like a bee”—that was a Little Bird’s sweet spot. Which fit her perfectly, as her full name, Deborah, meant “bee” in Hebrew. Long missions took their toll. Ones long enough to require multiple refueling stops really took the honey right out of her mood.

  Silvan waited her out. He was good at that, sensing her mood and letting her have that space. There was so much to appreciate about him aside from his skills as a flier.

  “You weren’t born the day you joined the Army.” He was also good at calling her on her own bullshit avoidance, even if she didn’t appreciate it.

  “I’m a bad Jewish daughter. I didn’t marry a Jew. I didn’t even go into business or law. Except my family isn’t just Jewish, they’re Orthodox Haredi. It means we aren’t supposed to even mingle with non-Jewish cultures.”

  “So the Army ticked them off. Is that why you joined?”

  Debbie had to smile, “Can’t say that I minded that aspect of it, but no. There was a boy at our yeshiva—think Jewish high school that only reluctantly allows girls—Moshe. He was by far the best of us all. But he was in the wrong place at the wrong time—a mugging that escalated badly. Anyway, he was dead before they got him to the hospital. That was the moment I truly became aware of the outside world. The more I learned…” she couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “The more you felt a need to fix it?”

  She could only nod. She didn’t even mind Silvan’s habit of being able to finish her sentences because he was always right when he did. The waves of her life kept flowing by like the sunlit wake of the aircraft carrier as she watched—no way to ever hold onto them. No way to ever bring them back.

  Chapter Seven

  Hull!” Debbie shouted as loudly as she could.

  By the wind’s roar—now augmented by the breaking waves—she knew the rear door was still open and Silvan was still with her.

  If he responded, she couldn’t hear it. But the roar filled her ears—they’d jump together.

  She flew so close above the next crest that she could have stepped out onto the wavetop. A second later, she was over the yawning chasm of a trough. But the hull had survived or at least a piece of it.

  Forty.

  Thirty.

  At twenty she reefed back on the cyclic hard, a final flare to dump speed and trade it in for a momentary, unsustainable hover.

  A last kick of the rudder pedals.

  Impact!

  More of a crash than a landing onto the trawler, but it had worked.

  Now all her years of training kicked in.

  Not turning to Silvan—not even hesitating to be surprised that she was still alive—she slapped, pulled, opened, and leapt out.

  She dove into the freezing sea and slammed against the two feet of the trawler’s outer wooden hull, then collapsed onto the flat deck. She ate a mouthful of saltwater as she groaned at the abuse. A glance up revealed the Little Bird’s rotors still windmilling at lethal speed.

  The next wave began to lift the hull and the helo fell, tipping toward her. Nowhere to dive. Her life vest—which had auto-inflated on contact with the water—kept her pinned to the surface like a bug about to be squashed.

  Through the driving sleet and icy spray, she saw the blades slash into the water less than an arm’s length past her position. Without the engine driving them, they stopped almost immediately.

  She felt like a lion in a carbon-fiber blade cage: the body of her helo behind her and the blades driven down into the sea in front.

  Then the wave’s face went near enough to vertical for the helicopter to roll off the hull. She actually banged her helmet on some part of the helo as it tumbled by—driving her face once more into the frigid wash of water now two feet deep over the sinking deck. Her helo disappeared beneath the waves.

  Just because the boat’s hull was wallowing so deeply, didn’t abate the wave’s vehemence. In a cloud of slashing spray and biting wind, it flipped the hull over this time. Catapulting her aside with the ease of a rag doll, she landed clear of its tumbling mass.

  Too much for the remains of the trawler, it finally plunged for the depths. Caught in its vortex rush of sinking water, she was dragged deep beneath the surface.

  She swam hard, letting the life vest tell her which way was up and broke the surface just before her lungs burst from holding her breath so hard. She slid down the back of the wave.

  A light blinked in the darkness.

  Silvan.

  Just going over the crest of the next wave over.

  He might as well be a mile away.

  Chapter Eight

  Silvan wiped the water out of his eyes for the hundredth time since he’d plunged into the icy North Sea. Alone, he rode over the wave and down the far side, bobbing as lightly as a cork.

  If ever there was a pilot to fly with, it was Chief Warrant Deborah Rosenthal.

  Which was exactly how he felt every time he got close to her. He’d like to have gotten much closer, but the Army wasn’t the only one against that. Their rank wasn’t an issue, but the fact that she was his superior officer was. He hadn’t wanted to risk not flying with her in the future.

  There was also something within her. Something…torn. It had kept him pushed to a distance and he’d done his best to respect that.

  And now he didn’t know if he’d ever have a chance to see past whatever that was, or even to thank her for saving him.

  Had she died in that final act?

  There was no way he should be alive, but she’d been masterful. Landing for those crucial few seconds on the hull had absolutely saved his life.

  He’d felt the skid hit the boat’s hull through the heels of his boots. The next instant he had kicked backward as hard as he could, flinging himself clear. With the two-foot-long life raft bag clutched hard to his chest, he hadn’t sunk more than a few feet.

  Then he’d watched in horror as first the helicopter and then the entire boat hull flipped over on where she would have jumped clear. If she even survived the landing.

  He wiped his face again and tried to kick himself in a circle, hoping against hope that he’d spot the light from her life vest.

  Night.

  Screaming wind.

  Pitch-black, overcast night.

  Yet, he could see shades of the gale’s madness—the waves as they ripped past him.

  No thought to grab the night-vision goggles that he kept stowed under the console. When attached to the helicopter, everything he needed was projected on the inside of his visor.

  Next time, if there was a next time, he’d remember to grab his goddamn NVGs.

  A glimmer?

  He watched closely over the next wave crest.

  Definitely a brightness beyond the next wave. The only light in the night, he’d take hope from that.

  He hooked the uninflated life raft to his belt on a short tether so that it would trail behind him and began swimming.

  Chapter Nine


  Debbie had lost sight of Silvan. No matter how hard she swam, he seemed to slip farther and farther away.

  She made sure that her emergency radio beacon was blinking, indicating it was crying for help, but how long was rescue going to take to reach her? She was fifty miles from land in every direction in the midst of a brutal winter storm. The first shot had killed the helo’s radios and there’d been no time to try the handhelds.

  Now, to hear her little beacon, it would take a very lucky satellite or someone flying directly over her and listening for her signal. How long before Search and Rescue came looking? Too long.

  It was just her and Silvan.

  No, it was just her.

  That thought slammed in with a punch harder than the icy ocean seeping into her foul-weather flight gear. Next time she flew, she’d wear a goddamn dry suit.

  No Silvan. She hadn’t let him get too close to her because…

  A wave crest slapped and tumbled her. Rather than burying her under, the wind ripping at the water was enough to blow her through the air for a short distance and bury her face-first into the water, again. She resurfaced.

  Because she was an idiot.

  Silvan Exeter was the best man she was never going to meet again. Impossibly, even better than Moshe who had been swept backward by the tide of time as well.

  She’d lost all sense of direction when the wave had tossed her.

  She treaded water, slowly turning in a circle, searching for any sign of hope. Deborah the Prophetess had led the biblical legions against the oppression of King Jabin and his military general Sisera. The latter had fallen to a woman pounding a tent peg through his temple while he rested. Well, Debbie didn’t have a tent peg, a mallet, or the knowledge of a prophetess of the Lord God.

  All she had was—