Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  “We could go.”

  “I think we have something else we’re supposed to be doing right now.”

  Mick didn’t respond.

  Had she just turned down a romantic vacation in Paris with Mick Quinn? Uh…maybe. Well, that was stupid by any woman’s standards.

  Mick had them down close by the shore and Patty guided him toward the southeastern cove on the island. Apparently he wasn’t going to be the one to speak next.

  “That sounds wonderful, Quinn.” Oh man, did it ever.

  “It’s a date,” he said it like he was going to take her out for pizza.

  Something had slipped by her but she was so tired that she was having trouble pinning it down. Making a date to be with Mick in Paris felt…normal. Which it wasn’t. Or was it? Not thinking clearly, she gave it up for the moment.

  She felt battered, even more than she had by the storm on Mount Hayes. A Little Bird was designed for the quick tactical strike, not for a ten-hour long ferrying flight from Anchorage to the westernmost Aleutian Island that was still part of the United States. In fact it was so far west that it was east—on the other side of the International Dateline. Only one other island kept it from being the easternmost point of the United States as well as the westernmost of Alaska.

  Attu was a lumpy rock fifty miles long and twenty wide. Mostly snow-capped peaks cragging up to three thousand feet. Only one valley was any more than a dent in the mountains and it was barely longer than the old Coast Guard runway that filled it from one end to the other.

  Amend that, abandoned Coast Guard runway.

  Not a single tree showed on the whole island. Just valleys of snarled grasses and a whole lot of steep rock and ice. Patty saw no reason to amend her initial assessment that once was two times too many.

  When the four helos got their skids and wheels down, Patty hit the radio transmit switch. She flipped to the low power antenna, so the signal wouldn’t travel much outside their immediate group.

  “Greetings, campers. We have just increased this island’s population by thirteen people and four helicopters. In case you were wondering, that brings the island’s population to…wait for it…a grand freaking total of—”

  “—thirteen people and four helicopters.” Mick echoed her voice. Even his wry tone and accent matched hers.

  “Always been a lucky number for me,” Mick remarked off air.

  “That’s because you’re a loon.”

  “I’m not from Minnesota or Ontario.”

  “Whatever,” she was too sore and weary to argue.

  “Loons are the state bird of one and the provincial bird of the other.”

  Patty laughed and Mick smiled along with her but probably for different reasons. Mick was loosening up, making second-level jokes like that. He was so cute.

  Patty had gone through very mixed feelings on the long flight from Anchorage. Initial frustration that their wake-up sex had been interrupted before it began. She’d really wanted to see if what had occurred between them on the mountain had been strictly environmental, or if Quinn was really that spectacular a lover. Having a king-size bed and no opportunity to test the possible results had wound her up and crashed her down.

  It was only after they were airborne that Napier’s steadfast silence on the topic of Mick and her being in the same bed began to worry her. It was fine. Well, not really, but at least mostly okay that Napier and Danielle were together—they were captain and major after all even if they were in the same damned unit. And Connie Davis and John Wallace were both sergeants. Besides, they’d arrived married. Some prior commander had seen fit to allow it and still let them serve together.

  But she was enlisted and Mick was a Lieutenant. Okay, she was a Chief Warrant 3, a commissioned officer like Mick, but not like Mick. They certainly shouldn’t be fraternizing, even if they were. Had been. Once.

  Maybe the 5th Battalion E Company was extreme in more ways than their equipment and their missions. Were they some kind of command-sanctioned coed experiment? She didn’t like that thought anymore than the rest of them.

  Patty had spent the next part of the flight feeling very grumpy about being a lab rat in any incarnation: past, present, or future. And then she’d decided that the answer might be much simpler. The 5E was so clandestine an outfit, that few people outside the unit knew they existed. Well, other than the 5D whose butts they’d whupped (kinda) during training. Maybe it was just a tolerant commander who wouldn’t bust her ass as long as she performed absolutely perfectly at every instant.

  Having reached that conclusion, her body decided to make another effort to catch up on the physical abuse from the mountain rescue. She’d passed out for the last three hours of the flight, something Patty would have to apologize to Mick for later. She hadn’t even known it was physically possible to sleep in a pilot’s seat in the Little Bird.

  Looking out the windscreen made her wish she was still off in some pleasant dreamland.

  On Attu Island, all color had been washed away. There was white snow, dark rock, brown grass with early snow trapped around its roots. A low gray sky and thin mist darkened everything even further.

  The only thing that broke the wasteland was the concrete structure and radio tower of the old US Coast Guard LORAN station for guiding ships and planes. Nobody needed LORAN anymore to navigate, not with GPS satellites whirling overhead. In the half dozen years since the Coast Guard had declared good riddance and took off, the Bering Sea winters had battered the old station.

  The U-shaped two-story building showed the wear and tear of Arctic storms battering the facade. It too was plain white and added no color to the landscape. The small windows were still intact, but the paint was peeling.

  “What a place we’ve come to.”

  “Beyond here there be dragons,” Mick agreed.

  “Did you just make a joke? Mick Quinn. Really?”

  “Eat shit, O’Donoghue.”

  There was another first. She wasn’t sure that Mick had ever cursed at her before—she had the foul mouth of this team. Patty decided that she’d take it as a compliment that he’d unwound enough to do so.

  Instead, she did what all of the rest of the Night Stalkers were doing, she climbed out of the helo, moving like some billion-year-old biddy.

  “I’m like an Australopithecus after a hard day foraging in the wilderness that would someday be named Africa.”

  “You’re too tall and nowhere near hairy enough. Which I appreciate.”

  “You say the sweetest things, Quinn.”

  “You sure are stooped over like one, though.”

  If she’d had the energy to circle around the helo, she’d have bludgeoned him with a stone. She didn’t.

  Instead she helped him secure the bird, covering the more sensitive equipment, slipping tie-down sleeves on the rotor blades so they wouldn’t whirl with the wind.

  The northerly winds were blockaded from the runway by a ridgeline of tall peaks, but still the bitter fog swirled close about them as she pulled on her cold weather gear.

  They pulled visual tarps over the aircraft, so that if someone happened to fly by, extremely unlikely, they wouldn’t notice the stealth nature of the helos. The secret that the Night Stalkers were actively fielding stealth rotorcraft wouldn’t last forever, but they’d hold off the inevitable as long as possible.

  Even as Patty thought that, a Pave Hawk—the Air Force’s version of the Sikorsky Black Hawk—came roaring down out of the sullen sky. It landed clean and very close beside them.

  She glanced at Mick, but he shook his head. He didn’t know what they were doing here either.

  As soon as the back ramp was down, a refueling team began running hoses from the Pave Hawk’s cargo bay over to the 5E’s helos. Their own crew still hadn’t touched the large fuel bladder lying in the back of the Carrie-Anne Chinook helo. It was clear to see that t
he refueling crews had been ordered to display no curiosity at all. They barely lifted their heads enough to find where to attach their fuel hoses.

  Then two more men came trooping off the Pave Hawk, except one was a woman.

  But there was no mistaking what they were or that it meant the 5E was in for a world of hurt.

  Chapter 7

  SEAL Commander Luke Altman had them assemble in the USCG LORAN station’s rec room as soon as the Pave Hawk was back aloft.

  “Lousy service,” Patty whispered in Mick’s ear.

  He had to agree. The old station was cold and even though the room was oddly intact, it felt truly abandoned. White walls, linoleum floor, four-person Formica tables and rust-pitted-chrome and plastic chairs. Motivational slogans were peeling off one wall, and the bar—with its sign announcing a four-beer limit per person per night—no longer stocked beer, soda, or snacks.

  Somewhere a generator groaned to life and the lights over the bar wavered on. Connie and Big John came wandering in.

  “The fuel is old and thick,” John announced. “But it still fires off. They didn’t leave much in the tanks. We’ll have lights and some heat in this room and we’re pumping heat into the barracks for at least the next few hours. We’ll go to bed warm, but probably wake up cold.”

  Mick and Patty shoved tables together in the still-frozen air, everyone’s breath showed in white vaporous clouds, but he could already feel a wash of warm air from the ceiling vents.

  “Great service,” Mick whispered back to Patty.

  “Still no cold beer.”

  “If there was, it would be frozen and we wouldn’t be allowed to have a drink anyway.”

  “Nitpicker. Besides, that’s not the point.”

  “Then what is the point?” Someday he’d figure out Patty’s sense of humor, but he actually sort of hoped not. He liked that she kept surprising him.

  “That I can’t have a beer even if I wanted to break the rules. Seems awfully stingy. As if the Coast Guard knew we were coming and didn’t leave any behind on purpose.”

  “Do you take everything personally?”

  “Absolutely!”

  They dragged fifteen chairs into place around the square arrangement of tables. Patty dragged over an extra, dropped into a corner seat and then stretched out her legs on the extra chair.

  How could such a simple gesture send his thoughts churning off into such drastically veering directions? Mick remembered the feel of those legs wrapped around him. He remembered how smooth and perfect they’d looked when he’d slipped her into bed last night, a soldier’s legs. A woman’s.

  He headed for a chair across from her and then caught himself. Was he trying to avoid sitting next to her because it would be inappropriate? Or was he wanting to sit far enough away that he could watch her?

  Patty’s scowl warned him that he was on the verge of being drastically rude for not sitting next to her. Duh! So he changed course, but it was too late. Connie and then Big John sat to one side of her. Danielle sat to the other.

  By the time he got his feet in motion, the only spot remaining was between Danielle and the Team 6 Commander. Luke Altman was bigger than everyone except Big John. The SEAL was six-four of warrior who made even Mick feel a little small and humbled.

  His silent fellow SEAL, Specialist Nikita Hayward—though no one was saying specialist in what other than warfare, which was a given if she’d made it into Team 6—had plugged a tiny projector into a tablet computer and aimed it at a white wall. Nikita was almost as daunting as her commander. Just under six feet tall and strong enough to have survived the Team 6 testing, she stood out completely even in this crowd.

  Night Stalkers needed to be both fit and skilled; Nikita was Amazonian. Her dark hair was layer cut and framed an open face. But it was her dark eyes that were that were her knock-out feature. She looked at everyone with a simple frankness that missed absolutely nothing.

  Several of the guys squirmed a little beneath her unblinking gaze. Jason, the Carrie-Anne’s ramp gunner, just stared like he couldn’t help himself.

  “This,” Altman signaled to Nikita for the first slide, “is the Kamchatka Peninsula. The easternmost land of Russia except for a few stray islands even sadder than the one we’re sitting on right here. Almost entirely separated from the mainland by the Sea of Okhotsk, it’s a five-hundred mile ocean crossing from here. The size of California, it includes: almost two hundred volcanoes with thirty active ones, massive populations of salmon and grizzly bears, and already it’s wrapped in snow and ice down to a thousand feet of elevation. The entire area has a population one third the size of San Francisco and most live in the peninsula’s single city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, also known as PK.”

  “That makes for a whole lot of nothing,” Patty observed and received a nod from the Team 6 commander.

  “Uh-huh,” Altman agreed and Specialist Nikita flicked to the next slide.

  The reactions around the table were varied.

  To Mick it looked like another drone.

  Several people, including Patty flinched.

  “Shit!” She scanned the table and then slapped her forehead. “Right, they aren’t here. Sofia would freak if she saw this.”

  “She has seen this photo and your assessment is correct,” Nikita offered a rare comment. “I showed this information to Lieutenant Gracie and Specialist Zoe DeMille, her copilot. Lieutenant Gracie’s reaction was ‘That! It does no exist!’” It was a better than fair imitation of Sofia’s accent when she grew excited. “She then went on at length in Portuguese, which I don’t speak, but she seemed quite upset.”

  One drone looked a lot like the next to Mick. They mostly fell into three categories: cute little ones with tiny propellers, big nasty ones like the Predator and Sofia’s Avenger, and the flying wing things. The last looked like small versions of the F-117 Nighthawk fighter and B-2 Spirit bomber. Like someone mounted a cockpit and a big damn engine onto the middle of a giant black boomerang. Whatever this drone was, it fell into the third category. It was a flying wing thing with a Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jet in formation close alongside. The image looked like an advertising shot—magazine slick.

  He scanned the table. Connie was fascinated, others were perplexed, and Patty, the sneak, was shaking her head at him once more.

  “Uh,” Mick figured he’d take the hit, “can someone explain that thing to me.”

  “Better make it in small words,” Patty teased.

  “Sofia was quite right,” Commander Altman waved a hand at the screen. “It doesn’t exist. According to the best reports we have it shouldn’t have its first flight for three more years, or be operational for five.”

  “Could that be Photoshop?” It was a blue sky photo. The drone looked as if it had been cut right into the photo with its oddly angled lines.

  “I’ve been assured that this is not a staged photo or Photoshop; it’s flying now.”

  Patty collapsed back in her seat as Altman continued his lecture.

  “Lieutenant Gracie’s Avenger is an RPA and she controls it, occasionally allowing its autopilot to control long ferries or the fussy details of a takeoff or landing. Because it can carry armament, it could be better classed as a UCAV, an Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle. But if this Russian UCAV is like our own X-47 tests, it has an extremely low-observable profile and can be programmed to operate autonomously. We’ve had ours land itself on an aircraft carrier multiple times. In theory, you could tell one of these to fly thousands of miles and drop a nuke at a pre-programmed target and the bomb would have a bigger radar signature while falling than the aircraft that’s carrying it.”

  “Holy shit!” Patty’s soft curse was echoed around the table.

  It summed up Mick’s feelings completely.

  “According to everything we’ve heard from the primary drone labs near Moscow, this is barely off the drawin
g boards and not expected to be a threat for another five years. This picture is from a previously unknown development base in Kamchatka. We’ve been asked to fly over and check it out.”

  No one was able to laugh, not when faced with Commander Altman’s deadpan delivery.

  And by the silence, Mick guessed that he wasn’t the only one stunned past swearing.

  # # #

  Patty didn’t care what anyone thought or said, she took her sleeping bag, found Mick’s room by using her flashlight—the shuttered windows kept out the thin, gray daylight—and joined him in the darkness on his narrow bunk.

  They didn’t zip their bags together.

  He simply shuffled back against the wall. She lay her bag down beside him, crawled inside and buried her face against his chest. He stroked her hair and kissed her atop the head.

  “Where does this go, Mick?”

  “Definitely Kamchatka,” he gave her one of his naive answers.

  “No, I…” Then she remembered that no matter what he might show the world to keep them at ease, he was anything but naive. “Sorry, my ‘goofy meter’ isn’t functioning very well at the moment. It’s also not calibrated to you.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Gloucester,” he whispered into her hair. He didn’t even tease her with his usual “Glaow-chester” mispronunciation; giving her the proper “Glaw-stuh” instead.

  “That’s better than ‘Boston’ anyway.”

  “I was going to come find you, but…” he trailed off.

  “It would have besmirched your stoic manliness to be afraid of the dark, especially because it’s the middle of the day.”

  “Something like that.”

  She liked that she could feel his smile where his lips still pressed atop her head. She snuggled in tighter, felt safe for the first time since the briefing. Well, safer.

  “It’s easier if you can believe that we’re the technologically superior force.”

  Patty just kept her face buried against his chest and let the words buzz through his breastbone and the bridge of her nose where it tickled a little.