“No, wait! I don’t work for anybody. I work alone and that’s the way I like it.”
“Freelance. Nonexclusive use of your skills and right of first offer on any non-security-related images. You’ll like our pay scale and distribution channels.”
Cal opened his mouth, looked at Jeannie, then closed it. She shrugged. Now he understood something else—how MHA had actually snared people of such quality as the ones now sitting with him under this palm.
In addition to being one of the very best wildfire behavior analysts in the business, Carly was MHA bloodline—her father had been part of their first smokejumper team forty years before.
Steve was a former lead smokejumper turned drone expert after an injury.
Emily and Mark were ex-Night Stalker majors.
And they’d enticed Jeannie away from her homeland of Australia that she loved so much. They’d seen something in her and come up with an offer she couldn’t refuse. Which meant that she was probably better at her job than even he thought she was.
He had to admit, Henderson had just offered him the freelancer’s dream: security without exclusive commitment. What they saw in him, he didn’t know. As he’d told Jeannie, he was a bad bet in anyone’s business. And he knew a trap when he saw one, all the promise of adventure and oh so tempting. He guessed that if they were dumb enough to offer it, he was dumb enough to walk into this one. For now.
***
Jeannie enjoyed the back-and-forth flow with Emily as they flew. Every move Jeannie made was corrected—no, enhanced. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, but Emily’s few words and frequent nudges through their shared controls elevated her thinking to whole new levels.
Flying at night was little different from flying through a cloud, except you never flew out the other side. Just like any other instrument flying, you flew high enough to be above any man-made obstacles, as much as you could, and you trusted to your readouts rather than your instincts. The artificial horizon said you were going straight and level, but your inner ear said “Rolling dive!” You had to trust the stupid little readout.
Jeannie was most used to flying by visual rules—stay out of the smoke and trust your eyes. But she had flown plenty with instruments so that she could get through a smoke column or make a simple nighttime transit.
She’d even used the heads-up display a few times. The HUD projected the most important instruments on the windscreen in front of her so that she could keep an eye out the window and didn’t have to look down very often. She often lost the HUD when she moved her head out of the eyebox, the small area from which the HUD could be viewed. If she leaned over too far to stretch or look out the side window, the display wasn’t visible. Frankly, using the thing gave her a crick in the neck.
The Thales TopOwl helmet was something she really wasn’t ready for. It offered night vision, which was useless once they crossed over Bathurst Island off Darwin and headed out over the open Timor Sea. But it also offered her the essential readouts of the chopper’s attitude in the sky—altitude, speed, and heading. It even drew the artificial horizon as a line across most of her view to help her brain stay oriented despite there being nothing to see.
The clear visor came down to the end of her nose. She could focus on the images that were projected on the inside of it, or she could glance through them to double-check any cockpit controls. She’d done training with the TopOwl in simulators, but this was her first time really playing with it in flight and it was awesome.
“Where have you been all my life, baby?” she crowed after she’d finally gotten used to the helmet’s display.
“Hiding in the back of your helicopter.” Cal laughed over the intercom.
“Feh! You’re just a guy. These are a work of beauty.”
Emily didn’t laugh, but when Jeannie glanced over, she did appear to be smiling.
“They make you both look like bobblehead dolls or maybe psychotic alien robots.”
Jeannie could get down with that if it gave her this kind of control and visibility. MHA spent the money to have the very best toys.
Then Emily hit a circuit breaker and all of the cockpit instrument panel lights went out.
Cal’s curse of “What the hell!” matched her sentiments exactly. The cockpit was now wholly dark except for the readout on the helmet.
She suddenly had about a tenth of the information she was used to having. Trust your instruments! She kept her focus on what data she had. Every few seconds she’d flick the finger switch on the collective to cycle through the various data views: engine conditions, flight instruments, local radar traffic—just the one other chopper flying nearby. As she continued to fly without the main panel, she became more and more aware of what else was going on in her Firehawk.
The engines were still running clean, at exactly the sound levels she’d expect. Lack of stray vibrations told her that the rotors were still intact. The responsiveness of the anti-torque pedals told her there were no problems with the drive train or the rear rotor. There was a sound and a feel to a clean-running machine. Twenty minutes on, Beale gave her back the full cockpit displays and it was almost an affront. She’d just jumped from the dark Outback to the city lights, and it was a dizzying change. But keeping her eye on the horizon marker, she kept her flight smooth and steady.
And she was looking down about a tenth as often as she’d been before. Without a word, Emily had drilled home the lesson to keep your head up and use all your senses. Damn, but the woman was an amazing instructor. Jeannie filed that away as something she’d use when she was the one doing the training.
“Two main hazards of water crossing?” Emily asked.
“Disorientation, boredom, and being stupid enough to do it alone in case you go down.”
“You’re the highest point. You’ve just been hit by lightning.”
“Engines may run out of control. Rebalance RPMs by sound using engine power control levers. Reduce speed to eighty knots. Land real damn soon.”
And so the drill went, mile after mile for the whole flight. Jeannie would be in the middle of reciting some complex procedure, and Emily would be ever so slowly misdirecting the chopper with her controls. Jeannie would get that corrected, but then the flight trim would inexplicably be set wrong.
It was when Emily started in on aircraft-carrier landing protocols that Jeannie kind of freaked out.
“Well, Mark did mention that we’d be landing at an offshore base.”
“But a carrier? There’s no way I’m qualified for that.”
“Actually, you are. Except for the actual number of landings required to make you fully qualified.”
“I am?” No she wasn’t. She’d never been near a helo pad. Except…
“Remember the flight trainer I sent you to when you switched from the MD500 to the Firehawk?”
“Yeah, I do. The bastard had this obsessive thing about me placing all three wheels each in its own two-foot square box every time I landed. He had a real bugaboo about precision even after he’d cut off one of my turbines.”
“Welcome to carrier landing. The flight control officer will guide you down to the deck, and you’d better be exactly where he tells you. If not, your blades could catch in those of a parked chopper on one side or a radio mast on the other. There is no room for error.”
“And when the deck is moving? Come on, Emily. No way I’m ready for this.” Jeannie could feel the sweat forming on the inside of her palms just thinking about it.
“You set down exactly when and where the flight officer says. If he signals you down fast the last ten feet, you plummet and let the shocks take the abuse. He’s timing your rate of descent with the rolling of the deck to give you the flattest landing site he can. The instant you contact the deck, you stand on the brakes and reverse the rotor pitch to pin you in place. Don’t worry. The deck crew on a Navy ship knows to keep low in case a blade suck
s down while you’re doing that.”
“You’re not actually expecting me to do that, are you?”
“I bet you could, Jeannie,” Cal called from the back.
“Thanks, but you wouldn’t be the sucker at the controls.”
“For all his blind confidence,” Emily commented as she tried sneaking the pedals to turn the chopper sideways but Jeannie didn’t let her, “Cal is correct. And, no, we won’t be forcing you down in a storm.”
“Thank God.”
“At least not yet.”
Jeannie groaned.
“In the meantime, you can land us…there.” Emily pointed. “You have command.” Then she removed her hands and feet from the controls.
Jeannie did her best not to panic despite the pulse pounding in her ears.
Down below, looking comically tiny in the middle of a midnight-black sea, was a ship. She could see it in her night vision.
“That’s not an aircraft carrier, Emily. You lied. It’s teeny.”
Emily leaned forward to peer out the windscreen. “How odd. Well, that’s where you’re landing, so you’d better start talking to the comm officer before they decide to shoot you down as an unknown incoming.” Then she read off a frequency.
The next few minutes were a blur. From the moment Jeannie called, “Mount Hood Aviation civilian Firehawk Oh-two requests permission to land,” until the moment her wheels smacked down on the deck couldn’t have been more than five minutes. But about five hours of new experiences, knowledge, intuition, and impressions had occurred in that time span. She would need some quiet time to process it all—and a lot of practice before she’d be comfortable with it.
“You’ll never be comfortable with it.” Emily appeared to be reading her mind as they fully settled onto the deck. “That’s how you know you’re doing it right. Even on the big carriers, it’s that bad.” The deck crew rolled her chopper as far forward as possible to allow Henderson to land behind her. The “teeny” ship had turned out to be four hundred feet long, and almost a third of it was a helipad. Which meant that the deck just barely had room for two of the big Firehawks at the same time without having to fold their rotors.
Henderson set down Steve’s drone launch trailer to one side of his landing zone, then shifted Firehawk Oh-one over and settled down gently.
Jeannie watched him critically, but he made it look so smooth and practiced that she couldn’t see any of the details of what he did. She felt like a beginning pilot all over again, too overwhelmed with not crashing to understand how someone could even fly straight.
***
Cal climbed down to stretch his legs after the long flight. It was still well before midnight and the deck was fairly steady. Of course, it took a good-sized wave to shuffle around a four-hundred-foot-long warship.
He almost stepped on a guy bent down to anchor the chopper to the deck with straps wider than Cal’s palms—thick enough to survive a hurricane. A step later he was almost trampled by a guy and a gal in crash helmets and purple vests dragging a fat hose that smelled ever so slightly of jet fuel.
He finally found a safe spot near the nose of the chopper where he appeared to be out of the immediate damage path but could observe the controlled mayhem of the busy flight deck. Once again his cameras were forbidden. When in hell was he going to get to use them anyway? The deck lights cast sufficient light, but photos of operations were “not allowed.” It was starting to piss him off.
As he watched, he began to see the order behind the chaos. While he appeared to be in everyone’s way, they were never in each other’s. A cargo team pulled the spares kit off Jeannie’s chopper and trundled it forward for storage. Another group was helping Steve set up his drone launcher.
He recognized the service team because they moved the way Denise did. Well, not the way she did, which he had certainly enjoyed watching, but they came up with checklists and began opening covers and making detailed inspections. That was why Henderson hadn’t brought Denise along. The U.S. Navy was providing the service crew for their civilian Firehawks. That elevated the whole situation at least another level or two, maybe ten or twelve.
“Where the hell are we anyway?”
“We”—Henderson strode up beside him, walking as smoothly through the mayhem as Jeannie had across the Outback—“are on the littoral combat ship USS Freedom. It’s one of the Navy’s newest ship designs. This is number one and was deployed to Southeast Asia in 2013. It’s been so useful, they haven’t reassigned her yet.”
“And since when does the Navy support civilian firefighters?”
“That is a different question. Let’s go below.”
Cal observed what he could in the dark, which wasn’t much. Beyond the circle of the landing lights was nothing but dark ocean. The rear of the craft was a big, flat helipad with a giant, white target circle in the center and a number of other lines that made sense to someone, but not him. He looked at where Henderson’s chopper had landed, all three wheels resting on crossed white lines a foot wide. The deck crew didn’t have to move it an inch. They just tied it down right where it was.
Forward from the flight deck, a pair of large doors revealed an empty hangar, just big enough for the two choppers if they had their rotors refolded as they’d been for the C-17. Somewhere ahead of that, visible as no more than a silhouette, rose another level of deck and the radar and radio masts. One glimpse as they circled in to land had told him that the ship had a narrow bow with a lump in the middle of the foredeck that he guessed was a fairly good-sized gun.
Henderson rounded up the others and they headed in through the hangar space. The MHA spares had been shoved to one side and strapped down, clearly not needed in this amazing space. Racks of gear, gleaming chests of service tools—the Navy could obviously deal with anything that came up just as well as Denise could.
They trooped down a narrow flight of steep steel stairs. After a couple of turns along a narrow gray hallway, only wide enough for two people to pass if one put their back to the wall, Cal figured they were now directly beneath the helo deck.
“Our mission module is second on the left as you head aft. Do not, I repeat, not try to open any of the other doors except the one marked toilet.” Henderson opened the door that appeared to have neither key nor lock. Right, no security of that kind needed on this vessel. Most civilians would never step aboard a ship like this, never mind wander around unescorted. Anything really important probably had an armed guard standing there.
Inside the room was a line of three computer workstations with narrow bench seats, three chairs that might almost be called comfortable, and a conference table that dominated the center of the space.
Henderson appeared to be in no hurry to start, and Cal would go berserk if he spent much longer contemplating the steel-gray walls. Jeannie was in some intense whispered conversation with Beale. So Cal wandered over to one of the computer stations. When he tapped the screen awake, he was asked for password and thumbprint. Not so much. He pulled out his tablet. It showed instant connectivity under guest account access, a relief after his disconnection in the Outback. He wasn’t used to being unplugged so long except when he was on a fire. Not even then very often.
The LA Times had front-paged his article about the flying cop car and resold the rights into six additional channels—a nice spot of change in both of their pockets. The cop had been labeled a hero and said some nice things about Cal and MHA that actually made it into the paper. He’d sent Cal an email of thanks as well. Sounded like a decent guy. Cal answered with a promise to look him up for a beer next time he was in town. That was one thing a hotshot never lacked, even one turned photographer—a drinking buddy in every town even close to where wildfires had ruled.
The video about the golfers had indeed gone viral. There were already spin-offs and parodies, most featuring the faces of the four jerks. Very satisfying. Normally he wouldn’t wreak su
ch vengeance on someone’s head for doing something stupid. Lord knew some of his own hotshot pranks hadn’t been all that much more admirable. But he still felt the anger in the pit of his stomach that someone had attacked Jeannie’s helicopter, put her in danger if they’d hit something critical. Making them planetary laughingstocks was too kind, but it was sufficient.
A woman of about Jeannie’s height walked into the room without saying a word. She wore an Army uniform and boots, but had flowing brown hair that scattered down past her shoulders. He didn’t think the Army allowed stuff like that. The only group he knew that could get away with that was Special Ops guys. And she looked like the dream girl from next door, not a dangerous warrior of the highest caliber. Though with the nasty-looking gun in her holster and long knife strapped to her thigh, he’d give her the benefit of the doubt.
When she spotted Beale, she snapped a salute so sharp Cal just knew it was textbook perfect. Beale returned the gesture easily. “Greetings, Sergeant First Class Davis. Congratulations on the promotion.”
“Thank you, Major.” Then she did a turn and offered Henderson an equally sharp salute that he returned just as neatly.
“No longer in the service, Connie.”
“Sir, no, sir.”
They shared a smile over that, just a bit sad on both of them if Cal read it right. She used to fly with them, which meant she too was from the Night Stalkers. So, here was another woman who’d be insanely competent at whatever she did. He looked about the room: Beale, Carly, Connie, and Jeannie…
“We’re outnumbered and outgunned here, guys.” Steve laughed, and Henderson acknowledged that with a nod before clearing his throat.
“Not to sound rude, Connie, but what the hell are you doing here?”
Cal wondered that Henderson didn’t know. That meant something even more unusual than civilian firefighters landing on a military ship was going on.
“I’m your mission specialist, sir.”
Henderson was considering the implications and looking perplexed.
“Specialist, liaison, and sole point of contact.”
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