I Own the Dawn: The Night Stalkers

by M. L. Buchman

  The Lieutenant didn’t even have the decency to sound huffed, just changed the subject.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Know what?”

  The Professor’s blue eyes, the color you could only find in the midst of spring watching new leaves against a blue sky, shifted from looking off into some inner space onto Kee, momentarily robbing her of the ability to speak. They were the kind of blue you could fly into forever, with just that elusive bit of green that came and went. And sharp. There was a real mind behind all that education and now it all focused on her. First time she’d wanted to squirm since hitting the base.

  “The kid. How did you know she’d be sick?”

  “Been there.” She clamped her teeth shut fast enough to click her teeth together.

  No past.

  Her first rule of survival. She had no past before the Army. No starving kid from the streets barfing in the soup line when her stomach rebelled at a second serving. No Dumpster diving. No begging for change to buy one of the hard-boiled eggs the local booze merchant kept in the jar on the counter for the alkies. None of that.

  She looked away until she caught herself, then she met his eyes directly. How in the world had this man done that? Seven years in the Army, no one ever slipped around her guard and into her past.

  There was no way he would get another word out of her, guardian angel or no. Mr. Archibald Jeffrey Stevenson III had probably never been hungry in his life. Ooo. We’ve missed teatime, Mummy. I’m simply famished.

  He opened his mouth, then apparently thought better of it.

  Decent of him, damned decent. Kee almost blushed about the harsh thought she’d had just the moment before. Something else she never did.

  His eyes traveled to Crazy Tim but found no refuge there. Then he spotted the girl, who had finally stopped eating and nursed her apple juice wrapped in both hands. Kee looked over as well.

  Fine fingers, callused from work, from a hard life, but still slender. Whip thin. A narrow face with well-defined lips and those bright, watching eyes. Pretty, even without being cleaned up. Skin about as dark as Kee’s, but with a different cast. Kee’s tone looked like a white woman with a severely awesome tan. The girl’s skin looked like someone had mixed a bit of black into an umber-brown paint.

  The Prof rattled off at her in more of that rough roll that must be Russian.

  Kee glanced at Big John who just shrugged.

  “Don’t have Russian. Vietnamese, my mom taught me, some Vietnamese and some French. She married an Okie farmer who speaks nothing but American. I take after Pops. He was even bigger than me.”

  Kee tried to picture it. It was hard to imagine how John even fit in the helicopter. Then his dad was bigger?

  “I studied Bhasa and Thai, bits and pieces of other Asians, some French.” John dug into his breakfast, but you could see him keeping his ear on the Professor’s conversation with the kid.

  Just like all Special Forces operators, everyone in SOAR was a polyglot. Any team could cover a dozen languages between them, even in a four-seat bird like the DAP Hawk. One of the first things you learned about your companions.

  Tim shrugged when she looked his way. “Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch.”

  “Yeah, and sometimes he even comes out with some English.”

  The kid answered the Professor slowly, searching for words.

  After more back and forth, he turned back to them.

  “I was concerned that perhaps we’d killed her father last night.”

  Kee swallowed hard, felt the eggs stick in her throat. Hadn’t thought of that.

  “But we dodged that particular bullet. She was on her own. I think she was trying to steal food or water from the Jeep while we kept its owners busy. It’s a good thing she didn’t get there before our arrival. The doc ought to check her out anyway.”

  Kee’s gut twisted. He was right, of course. Poor kid.

  “Where’s her village?” She forced out the words as normally as she could.

  He and the kid did another couple rounds of halting communication. He shrugged and turned back to his eggs.

  “She doesn’t appear to know. To her it was just ‘home.’ Her Russian is even worse than mine. Whatever her native tongue may be, it’s unknown to me. Three ‘homes’ have been ‘taken,’ probably bombed out of existence. She might have told me the name of one, I’m not sure. I am not even sure which country she is from. ‘Mountains’ is all I can understand. And walking. She keeps repeating that. I expect she’s walked a long ways.”

  “What’s her name? Never mind.” She waved him off.

  Kee folded her hands on the table and focused on the kid’s eyes. The girl flinched back, an instinct too familiar. Kee held steady and waited for her to relax a notch or two.

  She made as if her first and index fingers were legs and walked them across the table. “Walk.”

  Kee made ready to repeat it, but the kid nodded quickly. “Wak. Wall-ke. Wallkk. Walk.” That fast and the kid had a completely foreign sound. She walked her own fingers across the table and repeated the words several times, nodding as she went. Kid was smart and had a good ear.

  When she stopped, Kee pointed to herself. “Kee.” Then she pointed to the girl.

  None of that stupid back-and-forth. Kee could see in her eyes that she got it right away. But didn’t want to answer.

  Kee refolded her hands and waited. Gave the girl the space to make up her own mind.

  Again the Professor readied himself to speak, but caught himself. Not bad. Clearly he had some feeling for what the kid might be going through. She could definitely get to like this guy.

  A couple more fliers came in. Easy to spot. Those who flew walked differently, taller maybe. One of them slapped Crazy Tim on top of his head as he went by. They both laughed. A good laugh, easy. Must be the crew from Tim’s chopper.

  Big John leaned in. “That’s Master Sergeant Dusty James from The Viper’s bird.”

  She didn’t look away. She waited. The girl’s eyes didn’t stray even as the new crew settled just down the table beyond Tim and Big John.

  When all of the men had turned to talk to their buddies, the girl leaned forward and whispered. “Dilyana.”

  Kee nodded. There was power in names, and the girl had just trusted hers to Kee.

  Chapter 4

  Kee watched the town take shape as they flew in from a long night. A long night of nothing. More exhausting than after the adrenaline letdown of last night’s skirmish. She was just worn and looking forward to ten hours in the rack, and then a good run. Or maybe Big John could point her to some iron. He and Tim clearly did a lot of lifting so there must be a weight set around somewhere even in a camp this size.

  But first, rack time. Wouldn’t even be interested in a quick roll in the sheets. Not even if there was someone as cute as the Professor who wasn’t her commanding officer. Weird that he kept coming to mind. She must be even more exhausted than she’d thought.

  Kee was wrecked, plain and simple. One part of her body remained on Fort Campbell, Kentucky, time. Another part thought it should be awake during the daytime, but Night Stalkers lived in a flipped-clock world, sleeping in the heat of the day, flying at night. Most of her simply whimpered and wanted to stop.

  As they circled down in the predawn darkness, she checked the town that sprawled around three sides of the white oval of the soccer stadium they used as a base. The fourth side nothing but desert scrub. Bati was cubes of mud-brick houses, most of them one-room sized, jumbled together as if someone had dumped a big bag of dice on the ground and then shoved them together until most of them were square with the donkey-wide streets. The town never wandered more than a few hundred yards from the narrow river, but stretched for a mile along its banks, finally turning into a scatter of houses in the distance. A long narrow strip of hand-irrigated green, then nothing but sheep and goat pasture.

  The town was just waking as the dawn light reached across the sky. The food stalls in the central open ma
rket had the slow but purposeful movements of people setting up to start the day. The heat signature of the cow dung fires showed as soft spots of green in her night-vision goggles. Soon, any farmers and merchants who didn’t have a wife at home to cook for them would wander through the market for their breakfast. A couple of goatherds were already opening rough corrals at the edge of town and guiding their flocks out to seek forage. It smelled of cool night, not yet given way to the hot dust of day.

  Part of her training overrode her exhaustion. Friendlies weren’t always friendly. So, she kept her hands on her gun for the first time since they’d taken off, aimed at the sky, but hands on. Eyes scanning the sleeping town for unexpected movement. Not that you ever saw the shooter who nailed you.

  None of the Pakistanis wanted them there, not the ones terrified of the Afghan conflict spilling into their country, nor the ones secretly supplying that war. But when Uzbekistan closed its air bases to U.S. forces in 2005, logistics became an issue. Pakistan and Tajikistan were supplying arms into the area. The Afghan forces, the Taliban, and the insurgents had decided these impossible mountains would be their primary battleground. The war had settled in the Hindu Kush mountains of northeast Afghanistan.

  Since the mountains were too high for helicopters to work well, the Army had cut an aid deal including the soccer stadium to get them in close enough to attack quickly when needed. Also, long flights at altitude burned too much fuel. So here they were, perched on the edge of a village that would just as soon they were dead, in a country that would never admit they were there. Real comfortable feeling.

  The soccer stadium, abandoned when a Taliban raid had killed all of the soccer players as false idols, waited for them like a cupped hand. Any buildings within a hundred feet, clearly there had only been a few, were long since removed. Sentries perched along the top tier of the bleachers and watched the perimeter. They showed up in her night vision as a string of wide-spaced green pearls.

  At one end of the field, a pair of the massive, twin-rotor Chinook helicopters squatted and glowered like street gang leaders. Big and lumpy, and far more dangerous than they looked. The heavy lifters of the team.

  The two-seater Little Birds, the street runners of the gang, clustered around midfield telling each other nasty little stories of quick insertion, quick fire, quick getaway. They were the wasps, they stung and were gone before you could smack ’em.

  The far end of the field was Black Hawk home turf. Four troop movers, one cross-configured as a CSAR—Combat Search and Rescue—Hawk, and Major Muscle’s DAP Hawk with a space for theirs, the two hammers of the outfit.

  The sidelines were owned by the Special Forces operators that SOAR made a living delivering wherever they wanted to go. One sideline was packed the whole way down with Airborne Rangers and the other with Green Berets, about fifty each. Tough, swaggering, and dangerous as could be.

  A small company of D-boys owned a small section of the curving end zone. Not even dawn yet and they were out doing calisthenics. Fifteen guys sprinting up and down the bleachers. Delta Force and their support crew, everyone trained even if they weren’t field qualified. Maybe ten actual operators here, hard to tell with D-boys since none of them ever spoke.

  Even Green Berets went quiet whenever a D-boy walked by. A lot of them had applied, but Delta Force was just as picky as SOAR. Maybe even more so, which was hard to imagine.

  Kee watched them sprint up and down one more time before Major Hoity had circled their chopper into their spot of the lineup, just out-of-bounds beside where the goal had stood.

  She locked down her weapon, shut off her comm, and made sure her harness was draped flight-ready. Setting her helmet on the gunner’s seat, she stepped down, landing flat-footed and raising a small cloud of dust.

  She waved off the red, the crewman in the red vest identifying his role on the ordnance squad. “Didn’t get to fire a single lousy shot.”

  He nodded and went to check for himself anyway.

  Too exhausted to even growl, she headed for her tent. The Professor had it right yesterday. Get out of flight gear into civvies first, then food, then rack time. Maybe skip the food.

  The tent set up for women sported four cots, yet she always slept alone. The three women who shared it with her kicked into action during the day, a mechanic, a clerk, and a who-knew. They sacked out while she flew. And Major Hoity slept with Major Muscle. ’Nuff said there. They’d each found a way to get some regular action. More power to ’em. She even envied them a bit.

  She didn’t bother hitting a light, the predawn filtered through the thick canvas enough to navigate. Second on the right was hers. She dropped down onto it to kick off her boots.

  A high squeal launched her back to her feet. She dove and rolled away, coming up with her M9 in one hand and a flashlight from her thigh pouch in the other.

  The kid. Curled up with both arms over her head and one dark eye peeking out, caught wide in the flashlight beam.

  Kee lowered her pistol and reset the safety. She closed her eyes for a long moment, wishing she could erase the fear, the terror on the girl’s face.

  Once she could breathe normally, she holstered her weapon and hit the switch on the camp light hanging from the central tent pole.

  The girl had lowered her arms from protecting her head to hugging her knees, holding herself tightly as if she were going to blow apart in a cloud of dust if she didn’t clamp down hard enough.

  Kee took one more breath to make sure her voice sounded steady.

  “Dilyana. What are you doing here?”

  The girl watched her.

  “Right. No English. Have you—No. Did they—Crap!” She didn’t need this. Not now.

  The girl’s eyes were still bigger than dinner plates in her thin face.

  Kee sighed.

  “Food?” She rubbed her belly. “Hungry?”

  ***

  All Dilyana could see was the black-circle opening at the front of The Kee’s gun. Even though she’d put it away, it still loomed before her, dark and bottomless. Just as it had looked when her parents were shot and she’d been left to walk away.

  The Kee—it must be a title, she was an elder after all—was making motions that seemed familiar. The nice man eating bacon with his metal tools. Her stomach growled loudly the instant she connected The Kee’s motion to food.

  “Ha!” She nodded her head vigorously, hoping that was the right gesture.

  “Ha?”

  How to tell her such a simple word? Dilyana pretended to eat, though even pretending the metal-tool motion made her feel clumsy. She’d never used them, and she knew she was getting it wrong. But she then patted her stomach, smiled and nodded, and repeated herself, “Ha!”

  “Ha.” The Kee said it simply. “Yes.”

  “Yes?” The sound sat easily on Dilyana’s tongue. It felt right there. “Yes.”

  “Ha.”

  Then The Kee pulled off her shirt. Except for a band of cloth over her breasts, all of her skin was exposed from her pants to the top of her head.

  Dilyana hid her head between her knees. It wasn’t right. She couldn’t look up.

  It sounded like The Kee growled like an angry animal. Then she heard cloth moving.

  She stayed that way until The Kee made a noise, a quieter one.

  Dilyana peeked.

  She now wore a new shirt, but still the same pants.

  The Kee held out a hand for Dilyana to take. She avoided the hand, climbed off the other side of the bed, and sidled past The Kee toward the door of the tent. The last time The Kee had touched her, she’d grabbed and poked and thrown her on the hard metal floor of the helicopter. Better to stay near the nice man.

  ***

  Archie was barely paying even half attention to Big John’s latest tale, told between attacks on his breakfast.

  Archie hadn’t touched his own plate yet. It didn’t feel proper, starting to eat before everyone sat down. He shook his head at that and deliberately picked up his knife and
fork, waiting as if he still sat in his parents’ formal dining room. All the timing of seating, setting napkins, and allowing his mother or the frequent guest to take the first bite.

  In the desert. On an Army base. Who in the world would he be waiting for here?

  He knew exactly who when he spotted Dilya slipping up to the chow line. Three steps behind came Sergeant Kee Smith. She’d hypnotized him, at least that was his current theory. To not stare at her ranked near impossible. To not watch the easy smiles that crossed her lips but so rarely touched those cautious eyes simply couldn’t be done.

  And then the next moment when the wall crashed into place and Kee Smith disappeared behind the shield of U.S. Army Sergeant. All except those dark, dark eyes.

  She fascinated him beyond all reason.

  It was a safe enough fascination, because he knew himself. He’d screw it up long before anything could come of it, even if he wasn’t an officer and she enlisted.

  So he allowed himself to watch the incongruous gentleness that the warrior shared with the child.

  ***

  Kee followed the kid to the chow line. She couldn’t even change her clothes in her own tent because of the kid. This was insane.

  The girl started heaping her plate the instant she hit the line and almost flipped it to the ground when Kee touched her arm.

  “Medlenno.” Great. Her entire vocabulary with the kid had been reduced to a single word. No, two. “Medlenno, ha? Medlenno, Dilyana.”

  “Dilya.” A sharp whisper.

  Kee’d called the girl by her full name in the tent two or three times, but she got the message. In public, Dilya.

  “Not Yani? Or Yana?”

  The girl shook her head sharply, suddenly sad, looking down. Okay, forbidden ground. Parents’ nickname probably, meaning a good chance they’d been decent folks.

  “Medlenno, Dilya.” Then she imitated the girl barfing up her last breakfast, with a smile and laugh to let her know it was okay.

  Kee did it again, holding the back of her hand against her mouth with her fingertips touching and pointing outward. Then bursting apart as she made a ralphing sound.