First Day, Every Day

by M. L. Buchman

  She tightened all the cuffs on her flightsuit to keep out as much water as possible and slid down into the water. While she was at it, she flipped the Velcro covers off the infrared reflector tabs built into her uniform’s shoulders so that they’d show. They’d reflect back an infrared dot into any night-vision gear, if someone who possessed some went looking for her.

  Holy shit it was cold!

  Saddle up, girl!

  She took a deep breath and let the current carry her away.

  Chapter 5

  Focus, Dusty. Focus! You aren’t any good to her dead.

  SOAR made its living in darkness and so close to the ground that no other pilot would risk the same route, not even in broad daylight. It took immense concentration, a highly trained light touch on the controls, and lightning fast reflexes. He wasn’t having any trouble with the latter two.

  The first was being a real issue.

  CSAR had arrived on the scene behind them. They reported one dead truck, one dead helo burned past recognition, and one dead enemy soldier, still clutching his rifle, bled out in the middle of the road halfway between the two.

  The cockpit of the helo only had one body in it, they thought, but it was impossible to tell for sure. No way at all to tell if it was Bernie or Amy.

  No other sign.

  They collected what scrap they could, had tied the biggest remaining chunks of helo that might be identifiable as American onto a long line, and hauled ass back out to Turkey. The U.S. forces weren’t even supposed to be in this part of Iraq anymore, never mind Iran.

  Iran.

  Focus, Dusty. Focus!

  “There!” he called out a half second ahead of his co-pilot. A trio of vehicles moving fast less than two kilometers from, and closing on, the city’s edge.

  “Get me alongside the lead vehicle,” the Delta Force operator called over the intercom from the rear of Dusty’s Black Hawk.

  “Let me just shoot a rocket into each of their—” but Dusty was already moving into place.

  “Won’t achieve the objective,” and Dusty knew the Delta operator was right.

  The primary objective was to stop these guys at all costs. The secondary was to not let it look like it was done by the Americans. A trio of Hellfire missiles would disintegrate the vehicles in an immensely satisfying cloud of shrapnel. But they would also cut craters several meters deep into the road and probably spark an international incident.

  Dusty positioned his Black Hawk alongside the lead vehicle, a hundred meters upslope into the darkness and hugging the terrain. This is why his bird was on this mission. Lola Maloney flew the DAP Hawk, the massively weaponized version of his transport bird. He carried personnel: Delta and Ranger shooters. For the moment, this operation was his.

  “Steady,” was all the Delta said as Dusty held position on the lead. He chose a line of flight that would not intersect the hillside nor lift him up into Iranian radar and smoothed out on the flight controls.

  The vehicles were racing flat-out toward a sharp hairpin curve high on the hillside above the town. Dusty came in as close as he dared, estimating the volume of their roaring engines versus his pounding rotors.

  Over the intercom he heard the sharp spit of a rifle. Once, twice, three times.

  Each in turn, the vehicles swerved badly, right at the heart of the hairpin. Instead of making the corner, the vehicles launched—one after another—off the end of the curve and out into space. After a long fall, they landed in a single heap, or close enough. One caught on fire and the blaze jumped rapidly from vehicle to vehicle. One of the gas tanks exploded.

  Through his night-vision, Dusty could see no figures on the move. No one had survived the crash in good enough shape to escape the fire.

  “Oh, shooting the drivers in the head is so much more subtle.” He couldn’t help harassing the Delta operator. He’d wanted, he’d needed, the satisfaction of blowing the crap out of them himself.

  “I shot the left front tire as each initiated their hairpin turn,” the operator replied. “It is unlikely that will be noticed in the aftermath.”

  Okay, Dusty had to admit that was pretty slick.

  They watched the blaze for another twenty seconds, but still no sign of any survivors.

  Without waiting for instructions, Dusty spun the Black Hawk and pounded back toward the Iraqi border. And Amy.

  Chapter 6

  Amy rode the icy current, cursed the rocks, especially the ones that kept insisting on hitting her bad leg. With each impact, it felt more and more like ice was invading her blood and soon her frozen bones would shatter.

  A stream joined the river and the speed picked up. When it flattened, she swam. When it sped through quick rapids, she did what she could to protect her bad leg.

  The CSAR craft shot by close overhead and she grabbed her radio: no lights, no action.

  She struggled to the muddy bank and a patch of trees. Pulling out a penlight, she saw they were willow trees. It gave her a moment of vertigo-how were they here but Dustin wasn’t? Hadn’t they courted under a willow? But was it this one? It’s leaves were yellow with autumn. But their tree had been winter bare, hadn’t it? Amy recognized the signs of impending shock and forced herself to inspect the problem.

  The problem was that a second 9mm round—one going for her left breast—Dusty’s favorite—had smithereened the radio instead. It was hard to be angry about it. The armor in her vest should have protected her as well, but it would have left one hell of a bruise. And that was if she was lucky.

  Lucky.

  Two years ago she’d met Dusty in the Portland, Oregon, rose garden. The same week she’d started SOAR training. Best two things that had ever happened to her. Too much luck spent there, perhaps. Not enough left over for now when she really needed it.

  Two years married but spent mostly apart, together only when they could both get leave. And finally, assigned together to the 5th Battalion D Company three days ago—the only outfit she knew of in the U.S. Armed Forces that ever allowed couples to serve together.

  And now she was wounded and alone in a mud bank along an Iraqi river.

  Great honeymoon dear. Just perfect.

  Chapter 7

  Dustin tried not to think about the tactical readout. There should only be two helos on it; himself and Lola Maloney.

  But the readout showed that behind them the Iranians were already up in the air, climbing out of Piranshahr. Thankfully they were too late to see the Black Hawks. Perhaps they would be distracted by the three burning vehicles off the final hairpin turn above the city and not go looking for American phantoms.

  He and Lola had their Hawks across the border before the first Iranian helos had even reached the city limits.

  However, he could see that up ahead the Iraqis were also airborne and inbound from the west. No one, especially the President of the United States, wanted to be explaining a multiple helicopter incursion by U.S. forces so close to the Iranian border.

  “One sweep of the area,” Lola said over the radio. “Then we’re gone.”

  She was right, one sweep was all they had time for.

  Chapter 8

  Lying in the mud, Amy calculated her chances and they didn’t look good. She’d floated too close to a town and didn’t know if she’d survive getting back in the water to float further downstream.

  The batteries in her night-vision gear were dying.

  It was cold and the seals on her flightsuit were never meant to replace scuba gear. Shivers were shaking her badly, making it hard to think and to use her hands.

  She managed to dig out the emergency satellite radio and send off a single squirt. Not knowing who was in the area, she didn’t dare do more.

  The batteries in the NVGs died and she might as well be blind. She had more batteries somewhere. Or it seemed she should. In her vest? Thigh pouch? It was getting hard to concentrate. She pulled off her helmet and set it in the mud beside her.

  Darkness.

  Chapter 9

&n
bsp; Dustin found the last flickers of the burning truck, the dead man in the middle of the road, and the blackened patch surrounded by a wide debris field of tiny bits of Little Bird helicopter.

  He spun down to land nearby and took the risk of calling Amy’s name over the PA mounted on the undercarriage of his machine.

  The two Delta shooters hopped out and scouted the ground, first around the burnout spot then farther afield. They snapped to like a pair of Irish Setters and disappeared out of sight over the river embankment.

  Twenty seconds later they rushed back onto the helicopter.

  Dustin pulled up into the air—parking on an Iraqi highway where two explosions had just occurred with the Iraqi Army on the way was nuts even by SOAR standards.

  “The river,” the Delta operator spoke as soon as he was back on the intercom. “Blood close by the bank—”

  Dustin felt ill and clamped his teeth together.

  “—but probably not arterial. Follow the water.”

  Dustin dropped down into the canyon and eased forward, trusting Lola to watch his back. He wanted to creep slowly so that he could search more carefully, but he was too aware of the impending arrival of the Iraqi forces. His head commanded his heart, so he pushed ahead as fast as he dared. His hand ached on the cyclic as if it knew it would never again hold—

  He slammed the thought aside and watched the river.

  Every branch caught in the current startled him, as did every ripple and bend. A deer who had wandered down to the river for a drink shone like a blazing hot neon sign in his night-vision gear and just about shocked Dustin to death.

  But it wasn’t her.

  He edged as close as he dared to a town, but there was nothing except some old willow trees dropping down over the bank.

  They were going to have to send in a ground SAR team. The chances of them finding…

  Amy had to be alive or he’d be lost.

  Chapter 10

  Amy heard a pair of helicopters approaching.

  The heavy beat of their rotors was almost as deep as the river’s rushing waters.

  She tried to dig out of the brush bower she’d gathered over herself beneath the trees. Somewhere along the way she’d lost even that much capacity.

  It turned out not to matter. Before they reached her, they turned away and were gone.

  Amy curled up half on the brush, half under. Too exhausted to burrow back beneath the protective layer. She used what memories she could of Dustin to keep her warm.

  But all she could recall was the gray Oregon rain on the frigid December day when they first met.

  Chapter 11

  Dustin was just ten kilometers north of the river on the way back to Turkey when the call came in, transmitted from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, via satellite.

  “Nine Vee,” tonight’s code for the mission, “we just received a satellite radio burst from your vicinity. We have an approximate location a couple hundred meters east of Drybnd, but can’t make sense of it.”

  Dustin did his best to keep his hope under control.

  “It was a single word: Willow.”

  Dustin slammed over the cyclic. Laying every bit of five thousand horsepower the twin T700 turboshaft engines could throw into ten tons of helo, he ran his speed right up against the Never Exceed limit.

  He and Amy had met because of one willow tree being cut down and been married in front of the replacement they had planted together.

  Chapter 12

  Amy came to as they rushed her from beneath her tree toward a waiting helicopter.

  “Dusty?”

  “Here, babe,” said the man crushing her hand in his.

  “You found my willow tree, just like that first day when we met.”

  “Always will,” he promised her as she slid back toward sleep. “Every day.”

  It was good. Dusty always kept his promises.

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  Amy’s and Dusty’s courtship in:

  Ghost of Willow’s Past

  (excerpt)

  Master Sergeant Dustin James nudged a clod of dirt back into place with the toe of his boot. The rich black soil of the Portland Oregon Rose Garden simply dissolved and left a blackish patch of mud on the worn leather. Today was the Winter Solstice. It was raining and about three degrees above freezing. Pretty typical. He stared down at the Rosa canina.

  This rose had been propagated from a cutting of the oldest documented rose bush on the planet. The rose now huddled, dormant and pruned back for the winter. In bloom, it was the least assuming rose in the garden, a single layer of five pink petals around a yellow center. Four days before Christmas, it was a cluster of frosty twigs decorated by bright red rose hips.

  Most people passed it by, but not his father, the head gardener of the nearby Japanese Garden. He had visited the rose every day after work on his walk home. Dusty and his mother had often walked up to meet him at the old Briar Rose.

  “I met your mother by this rose. We married right here.” Being a man of few words, his father never embellished the story. It wasn’t the most scenic spot in the garden, but with ten thousand rose bushes in a couple hundred neatly tended beds, not bad either. The fact that they’d married here on the Winter Solstice when nothing bloomed had been a little odd perhaps, but then his parents had been rather eccentric.

  Dusty had come home for this Christmas, even though his parents had been gone for three years. Their small condo now lay empty most of the year due to a crashed tourist helicopter. An old Bell 206 called in an engine failure and then auto-rotated right into an Icelandic volcano, no survivors.

  That Dusty was a crew chief and mechanic on a Sikorsky Black Hawk for the U.S. Army’s 160th SOAR had made the loss beyond ironic. His job was to fly, fight, and keep the Special Operations Aviation Regiment choppers running perfectly despite war conditions. His parents had died, probably from a broken fan belt.

  So, any time that he was home, but especially on the Winter Solstice, he made a point of coming to visit their rose as his parents had done so often for their three decades together.

  “I’m glad you went together, at least you got that much,” he told the sleeping rose. With no ashes to scatter, he’d gathered some ash from the volcano and scattered it onto the rose’s soil. His parents belonged together here. His father, a quiet man who loved visiting the garden’s roses, such a contrast to his artistic Japanese garden, and his wild mother, a true child of the sixties, who had never understood Dusty’s choice to serve. They appeared such an oddly-matched couple, the slight Eurasian and the tall, busty blonde.

  “She brings me to life like the spring warmth.”

  “He keeps me steady with his deep roots.”

  When would Dusty find that? His own dreams had just been pruned back hard. He’d found out, on no notice, that he had a week’s leave. He’d rushed back to Portland only to discover that Nancy had meant to Dear Dusty him, but forgotten, as usual, to follow through. Another woman who hadn’t understood his need to serve his country, his need to protect that which was so precious. She was living with some software geek named Ralph.

  Dusty’s few friends still in the area were busy with pre-holiday family stuff. Some invited him over for a meal, but being a third wheel in some other couple’s holiday wasn’t his first choice, nor his second or third.

  On call, Dusty really didn’t have time to go anywhere els—

  The cry of pain echoing across the garden snapped him out of his damp reverie. His Special Forces training had him sprinting down the garden path before he even fully registered what was happening.

  One hand slapped for his sidearm, and came away empty. The other slapped for the med kit on his SARVSO survival vest, but he wore only a rain slick over his heavy sweater.

  The cry sounded again, a woman in agonizing pain. Halfway across the garden from his parents’ rose, he spotted the source. Not that it was hard. On a rainy, winter Friday morning there was only one other person in the garden.
r />   She knelt in the mud at the edge of a garden bed.

  Dusty rushed up beside her. “Where are you hurt?” Seeing no obvious wounds he started unzipping her parka.

  Her punch came out of nowhere.

  She hit him square in the solar plexus so fast he had no time to block it. He tumbled backward among the pruned roses, the thorns carving painful scratches across his cheek and bare hands.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the woman shouted down at him. Her hands were poised to strike another blow. He recognized a Taekwondo black belt when he met one and held his hands palm out.

  Dusty rolled slowly from the rose bushes onto the wet grass and inspected his hands. “Ow! Shit, that hurts,” he flexed a hand and felt every little scratch.

  “Answer the damned question!”

  He eyed her more carefully. It wasn’t your average woman who issued commands to men half-again their size. He blinked the rain from his eyes. She had well-defined cheek bones, arched eyebrows that indicated brunette hair would be hiding under her hood, and eyes the brown of autumn leaves. He shook his head to clear it.

  “You sounded like you’d been shot.”

  “Soldier?” She watched him closely.

  “Yes.”

  She settled back on her heels in perfect balance, clearly poised so that she could attack easily if she decided it was needed.

  “Okay. Maybe.”

  She puffed out a breath.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look fine, but you didn’t sound it.” She did look fine. Not the white of porcelain, but refinement shone in her features. He considered mentioning how much he’d love to draw those features with the artist pencils his mother had given to him as a young child. He didn’t know if he’d ever seen so much personality in a woman’s features before. It was a face made to laugh and smile, but was now drawn grim and closed.