Circle 'Round Read online

  Circle ‘Round

  M. L. Buchman

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy:

  Target of the Heart (excerpt)

  About the Author

  Also by M. L. Buchman

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  Chapter 1

  Chief Warrant 3 Lola Maloney stared at the tactical display of the DAP Hawk helicopter Vengeance projected on the inside of her helmet visor. Against the pitch dark of night outside the windshield and the soft glow of console instruments, the display revealed the rough terrain of the southern Ukraine and her broken flight formation.

  The commander always knows what to do.

  She tried it again as a mantra, The commander always knows what to do.

  Along with a thousand plus hours of officer training, none of it meant shit at the moment—she didn’t have a goddamned clue what came next.

  “Kara,” she called to the drone operator tucked three hundred miles away on the USS Peleliu helicopter carrier, though her drone was circling somewhere six miles above Vengeance. “You’re my eyes.”

  “Roger. All clear.”

  “Everybody else get down and land now.”

  At her radioed command, the three other birds descended to gather around the pair of already grounded heavy-lift Mil-17 Hind helicopters. One a shattered wreck and the other one was trying to salvage the bodies of the fallen.

  Lola had “borrowed” both of them from the Iraqis for this mission. She hadn’t been intending to return either one, but she hadn’t planned on one being shot down either. Two bodies had been blown out through the fuselage, but there were still three bodies—she’d just think of them as bodies at the moment, not guys she’d handpicked and trained for this mission—trapped in there.

  One thing Lola knew to the core of her being, she’d see the whole flight dead before she’d leave a body behind. Too much history had drilled that lesson into her head.

  She had watched too much “News at 11” as captured pilots were tortured, raped, and even burned alive for “the cause”—whatever the cause of the week was. Had seen the old tapes of the bodies of dead pilots and Delta Force operators being dragged naked through the streets of Mogadishu.

  That was not going to happen to her people.

  If the ground team from the second Hind needed time to extract the casualties from the wreckage, she’d find it for them.

  But on this flight, time was not their ally.

  No one was.

  The U.S. Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment drew the missions no one was supposed to know about, ever. And this one wasn’t only supposed to be top secret, it could never be known that U.S. forces had been involved. The political ramifications would be horrendous. So they hadn’t merely called SOAR, they’d called the edgiest company of all, the 5th Battalion D Company.

  And the secret nature of the mission was why Lola had chosen the mix of craft that she had.

  The Russian Mil-17 Hind transports—from the Iraqis but now sporting Ukrainian markings—and the three Kamov K-52 “Alligator” gunships—that the Georgian Air Force would be missing soon, repainted with Russian markings—had been the mask. The Alligators were supposed to pretend they were escorting the Hinds, or vice versa depending on which force they ran into…if they were unfortunate enough to run into anyone.

  They were the working craft.

  And her stealth-rigged, all black U.S. Army DAP Hawk, by far the most dangerous of them all, was the fist.

  Once they were all parked on the bank alongside the river, she turned to Tim. Her husband—one of the unique features of the 5D that she’d never really understood was that married couples could fly together—had jumped to the front seat—from crew chief to copilot—earlier this year, and proved that he’d absolutely deserved the promotion.

  “Keep the engines warm.”

  He nodded as she slid her helmet’s visor up and disconnected the umbilical that tied her into the DAP Hawk’s systems.

  Her world, which had been a multi-layered tactical display across the inside of her visor, blinked out and left her blind in the total dark of a moonless night. Fumbling a bit, she pulled her night-vision gear out of its pocket on the inside of her door, snapped it into the helmet mount, and flicked it on. The world returned, in a hundred shades of bright green seen through the tunnel vision of infrared night-vision goggles.

  Shedding her harness, she stepped down to the ground, which squelched under her feet. The first thing she checked was that her carbine rifle, with its stock folded neatly into place, still hung across her chest. The second thing was her helo’s wheels. They’d sunk about a foot into the muck, but stopped there. They were parked in the bottomlands of the Kalmius River in the Eastern Ukraine.

  The three Kamovs had landed, each just one rotor away, and appeared stable. Pilots measured small distances in rotor diameters, one rotor away meant they weren’t going to engage each other’s blades by accident. In combat, distances were often down to a half-rotor off some cliff face or power pole.

  Rumor said that Major Emily Beale had once flown down to two feet off her rotor tips—on both sides at once—in combat. Lola still didn’t know whether or not to believe that one, though with Emily…

  The Kamov pilots opened their distinctive flat-paned canopy windows, but remained in their seats with the rotors at a bare idle. The fuel for this mission had been marginal at best, hovering over the delta during the entire recovery operation had not been an option, even if it turned them into sitting ducks.

  She slogged to the downed Hind.

  The sharp screech of battery-powered cutting tools hacking through the helo’s aluminum and steel framework had her cringing, both the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard aspect and the way the sound seemed to echo into the night, as if rushing directly to the nearest enemy listening post.

  A lone Ukrainian with an RPG had taken down the Hind as they’d been returning from their mission. One moment flying along in tight formation, and the next the Rocket-Propelled Grenade had turned the Hind helicopter into a tumbling ball of flame. She’d seen the track on her threat detector, clear as a laser across the inside of her visor.

  She had dived onto that spot and, before they could reload, Big John had punched them down with two hundred rounds from the starboard side minigun. A matter of three seconds.

  Three seconds that still echoed through the valley.

  “Why can’t the superpowers fight at home?” Trisha O’Malley strode up beside her.

  “You’re supposed to stay in your heli—” she shouldn’t bother. Trisha never followed such orders, figuring they applied to the rest of the universe, but not her.

  “But why?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  The superpowers had been duking it out on other people’s terrain since World War II had taught them battles at home were too expensive. America versus China in Korea, then Vietnam. Russia versus China in the Soviet War in Afghanistan.

  And now the Ukraine.

  But the Americans weren’t here.

  They couldn’t be, neither officially nor even by rumor, or it would be the start of America versus Russia, and nobody was ready for that.

  Lola remembered the day
the Majors had told her they were handing over command of the SOAR 5th Battalion D Company to her.

  Chapter 2

  “You’re shitting me!”

  “We’ve told Command that you were the best qualified, and they agreed.” Mark and Emily had taken her out for a lunchtime sail on the Chesapeake Bay that cloudless September day for “the talk.”

  She hated sailing, lunchtime or otherwise. Though she was feeling a sudden antipathy for Major Mark Henderson that threatened to make that feeling trivial by comparison.

  “W’all,” Henderson pulled out that horrid fake Texas accent that he was dumb enough to think was cute and funny. “All y’all have ta do is—”

  “Throw you overboard! Have you lost it, Henderson?”

  He gave her one of those looks, raised eyebrows of mock surprise over his mirrored Ray Ban sunglasses.

  “Sir!” she amended with a snarl.

  His grin was electric, and if Emily hadn’t been seated just to Mark’s other side, Lola would have pushed him overboard. And then? She’d have figured out how to keep the sailboat going, leaving him to sink or swim in her wake.

  “I’m the newest pilot on the team,” her rage was turning into a knot in her stomach. “How the hell am I supposed to know what to do?”

  Mark opened his mouth, and by the set of his smile Lola knew she really was going to dump his ass overboard this time—whether or not Emily was in the way.

  Before she could lash out, Emily rested a hand on Mark’s arm, “Remember that I told you there were times to shut up?” She didn’t wait for his acknowledgement. “This is one of them.”

  And just like that, Major Mark “Viper” Henderson was quelled. Damn, but Lola could use some tactical training on how to do that with her Tim.

  Chapter 3

  “Emily told me to always protect my people,” Lola looked down at Trisha. So close that she was a blinding green in the night vision—so bright it was almost as if she was an angel, which she so wasn’t. “I suppose that means you as well.”

  “I don’t need protecting. I need to not be an American soldier parked in the middle of an eastern Ukraine war zone with a lot of stolen Russian military equipment.”

  “Don’t we all. You also need to be back in your Kamov.”

  Trisha opened her mouth.

  “Now, O’Malley.”

  She snarled, but she went, which was about as pleasant as Trisha’s mood ever was during a mission.

  They pulled Jefferson out of the wreckage and lowered him into one of the body bags.

  Don’t think! she ordered herself. Time for that later.

  They zipped up the bag and moved it to the intact Mil-17.

  Lola edged in closer to assess the situation.

  Ten tons of helicopter made one hell of a mess when it blew up and then crashed. The tail section lay twisted ninety degrees to the side, chunks of rotor blade scattered every which way. The external fuel tanks had done their job and broken free on impact. Though they scented the air with the sharp bite of leaking kerosene, they’d landed far enough aside that it was safe to use cutting tools inside the cockpit and not worry about a stray spark blowing them to kingdom come.

  The fuselage had shredded; the rear cabin exploded from the inside. The RPG had either entered through a window or penetrated the skin before going off. Sections of sheet metal were scattered far and wide.

  The bulkhead between cabin and cockpit had blown forward, driving the pilot and copilot seats up against the forward consoles, pinning them in place.

  They finished extracting the copilot. He too headed for a body bag.

  One of the team recognized her and paused on their way back in to say, “Twenty minutes.”

  “Ten,” was her automatic answer.

  He nodded uncertainly, so she called after him, “Eight would be better.”

  She stepped out into the dark night. Checked that Trisha was back where she belonged. Good, at least one thing was going right.

  Then she looked over at the open cargo bay of the surviving Hind. The three main honchos behind the rebel leadership of the breakaway, Russian-backed, Donetsk People’s Republic were still safely under the watchful eyes of the Delta Force squad that had snatched them.

  These men couldn’t be safely assassinated, not by the CIA, Mossad, or anyone else she didn’t want to know about. The powers-that-be feared that would make them martyrs to the cause. But, if they “apparently” defected, perhaps were occasionally photographed with high-ranking NATO officials, the blow to the rebel government would be significant. Or at least that’s what the CIA analysts had spouted at her during the briefing.

  They hadn’t said a thing about what to do if some idiot rebel farmer with an RPG shot down a helicopter simply because he could—with no way to know if it was friend or foe—and killed five people and a much needed heli-asset.

  She checked her watch. Thirty-four seconds had passed since she’d called eight minutes. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize everyone else flying out of here alive.

  The image wasn’t really coming together very well.

  Chapter 4

  “If you protect your people,” Emily had said that day as the sun shone off her blond hair, “as your number one priority, you will be amazed at what they will do for you.”

  One of the sails cracked almost as sharply as a gunshot as the forty-foot boat crested a wave and dropped off the other side. She flinched in alarm, but Henderson appeared to be in smooth control.

  “I’m not you,” Lola had pointed out. There wasn’t a person in the 5D that wouldn’t take a bullet for Emily Beale. There were only a half-dozen who could even tolerate Lola as far as she could tell...and she was married to one of them. That left five.

  Emily, of course, did one of those answer-without-answering things and simply waited for Lola to put it together herself.

  “Okay, not an idiot. Protect my people at all costs, and they’ll learn to trust me.”

  Emily had nodded in that sage professorial way she had.

  Lola had refused to ask the next question, though it was easy to see Emily waiting for it.

  Chapter 5

  “If they trust me,” she muttered to herself, “then who do I—”

  “Five minutes.”

  For a moment Lola thought it was the recovery crew with good news, but they were both still deep in the bowels of the shattered helicopter working frantically and she was halfway to the other Mil to check on the prisoners.

  Then she connected that it was Kara’s voice on the radio relay from the drone up at thirty-thousand feet.

  “Crap! I need more time.”

  “Tell that to the Russians. You have three choppers and a fast mover out of Donetsk.”

  Lola really did not need to be fighting off a Russian jet with a bunch of stolen helicopters.

  “Make that four minutes. Two more whirlybirds coming up out of Sevastapol in Crimea to the south.”

  “That was supposed to be our escape route. Shit!”

  If Kara replied, Lola didn’t bother listening. She sprinted back to the Mil-17, circling around the nose. The dead pilot’s feet were sticking out where the lower front windshield had been. His head and upper body were out the main windshield. He must be trapped at the thighs by the way his body had been unnaturally folded.

  A quick assessment of the metal still in the way and she knew that the estimate of twenty minutes had been an optimistic one.

  Lola had traded in a career with Combat Search and Rescue to take a shot at SOAR. She’d made it. And you didn’t do things like CSAR without knowing when to get drastic.

  “Give me the saw!” she shouted at one of the ground crew.

  Chapter 6

  “Anyone who’s a decent commander can get someone to trust them, that’s not the issue,” Emily had handed her a crab salad sandwich, and Lola had managed not to throw it back in her face.

  Mark was wisely keeping his mouth shut and paying attention to the boat. But she wondered if
he was purposely using his mirrored lenses to reflect the sun into her eyes so that he looked like a dazzle-eyed star lord, a terribly handsome one, but still. He was on the verge of having his sunglasses smeared with crab salad moving at high velocity when he appeared to think better of it and looked aside.

  “The issue—” Emily very smoothly reached up and dropped an ice cube down the back of Mark’s t-shirt.

  His yelp made Lola feel much better.

  “—is finding someone who can both command and think outside the box. Lola, you don’t even see the box. That is your greatest strength.”

  Chapter 7

  Seventeen seconds later—when she was done with the saw—one of the ground crew had retched out his guts, but the last body bag was on the move. The results of the crash would have necessitated a closed-coffin funeral anyway, so whether he was in one part or—

  Lola raced for her helicopter.

  “Wind ’em up!” she called over the general frequency. She needn’t have bothered, all of the helos were cranking their engines back up to speed as fast as they could once they saw her in motion.

  Lola unharnessed her carbine as she slammed into her seat, reattached the data umbilical, and snapped on her harness. Just as she was about to pull off the night vision gear, she spotted the empty Mil-17 still sitting there, straight ahead. She should have dropped a couple of thermite grenades inside to make sure it was destroyed.

  “Damn it!”

  Tim, like the outstanding mind reader he was, must have noticed where her attention was. Two Hydra 70 rockets roared out of the right-hand pod of the DAP Hawk. Four-point-six pounds of high explosive blew into the Mil-17 at the speed of sound, along with a great deal of unspent propellant because the bird was so close. Then the spilled fuel lit off as well.