Just Shy of a Dream Read online

  Just Shy of a Dream

  a Night Stalkers CSAR romance story

  M. L. Buchman

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  Five Years Ago

  The events of this story occur immediately after Night Stalkers #3, Wait Until Dark.

  1

  “I can still fly, damn it.”

  “Dream on, lady.” Sara Camron looked down at the pilot’s pale white skin. Even for someone with gold-blonde hair sticking out the edges of her helmet, her skin was far too pale—bloodless white. Sara could always talk to patients easily, too bad they were the only ones.

  As the CSAR—combat search and rescue—Black Hawk helicopter began cranking its engines to lift from this remote corner of the Polish countryside, Sara scrambled.

  The blonde woman lay face down on the stretcher in the helo’s cargo bay—with reason. The small, bright worklight, focused only on the patient to avoid blinding the pilots, shone off the woman’s bright hair, and her bloodied behind—she’d been shot in the butt. The rest of the cabin was suffused with the dull red light of nighttime operations.

  No complaints from the patient about pain though, despite the clenched jaw and sweat streaming off her forehead. Sara wanted to just knock her out, but without any confirmed indication of pain, she had no real excuse. And this major knew that and was trying to pretend she was fine. Well, you didn’t get promoted to wearing oak clusters on your collar points in the 160th Night Stalkers helicopter regiment for being stupid.

  There was a deep bullet crease in the woman’s helmet. Sara removed it gingerly, but saw no signs of bleeding in the pale hair. The bullet was still lodged deep in the Kevlar. Then she sliced open the arms of the flightsuit to access the woman’s arms.

  Unit of whole blood, typed and cross-matched in one arm. Unit of saline in the other—once Sara could find a vein—to get fluids up. That would have the added bonus of making her veins show better now that she’d finally gotten in taps and wouldn’t need to find them again. The patient was so slender, more like a dancer than a pilot.

  And her blood pressure was low with an overfast, but thankfully strong pulse.

  “Your commander’s an asshole. You know that, right?” Seemed like as good a topic as any to keep the woman conscious. Sara wanted to make sure this patient didn’t go dark on her without some warning.

  “Only when it serves him.”

  The response was delayed enough to tell Sara that grim determination was the only thing holding the patient together. One second it looked as if she was out cold, the next she was twisting her head to the side, watching Sara’s every motion.

  “Who’s flying?”

  “The pilots.”

  “Their names,” there was still a command-level snap beneath the slurred words.

  Sara had to glance forward to remember. She’d been yanked off a flight line in Ramstein and rushed north just in time to join this flight. This aircraft’s normal medic was down with a broken leg from an ice skating accident of all stupid-ass things—trying to impress a Danish figure skater on a date was the rumor. Another mud-for-brain from Montana was her own assessment. Out of a whole gender of lame brains, nobody ranked lower than Montana cowboys.

  “Vasquez and LaRue,” the crew chief answered from his seat at the forward end of the cargo bay. He had a good voice, deep enough to carry over the rotor noise as well as being calm, soothing for the patient.

  “Don’t know them,” the major grimaced, but it didn’t appear to be from pain. That’s when Sara realized that the patient wasn’t watching her. She was lying there, twisting her neck in ways that had to hurt, trying to squint forward enough to watch what the pilots were doing.

  “Actually, LaRue is now flying your helo. Donaldson, my fellow crew chief, is sitting as copilot.” Again that nice deep voice designed to wrap around a woman on a cold winter night. She had little impression of the chief though they’d been aboard the bird together for hours. A short-trimmed dark beard, broad shoulders, but any other features shrouded in shadow, darkness, and the confines of his helmet.

  Sara knew that a Black Hawk required two pilots, but didn’t really need them both outside of pitched battle. The crew chiefs were typically flight-licensed for basic test flights after repairs—though they rarely flew beyond the edges of an airfield.

  “Oh, that explains it,” and the patient stopped squinting so hard at the pilots.

  Sara thought about shifting to fully block her line-of-sight to the cockpit, but then decided that was just the kind of asshole move the woman’s asshole commander would do and shifted the other way. That seemed to calm the patient down.

  Sara’d been flying as a medic for the Night Stalkers Combat Search and Rescue for two years now and eight years of National Guard and regular Army before that. She was used to jerk commanders. As if she’d take better care of their people after she’d been yelled at.

  “Your commander sounded pretty upset to me.” He’d been merely pissed when he’d landed and fueled up near them five hours before. Sara’s CSAR helo had been parked in a Polish farmer’s field along with a fuel truck. They’d sat just a kilometer from the Ukrainian border waiting for two Night Stalker birds out on some black ops assignment. Only one had come back across the border on schedule.

  He’d landed nearby, with two ominously large bombs underslung—covered in Russian markings. His crew chiefs had made it clear not to approach too close, which had been fine with her and the rest of the waiting CSAR crew. The pilot had stepped out while they were being refueled to glare southeast back toward the border, unmoving for the entire fifteen minutes it had taken. Then he’d stomped back to his seat and flown away, along with his two bombs.

  “The other pilot, said he was your commander, called me on my personal phone the moment we reported your injury,” Sara wished she’d had an air horn or something to blast into the phone.

  “He’s so sweet when he worries,” the woman mumbled.

  Sara wondered whether or not to shush the woman. If she heard about elicit affairs, she was supposed to report them. This woman and her commander? Shit! It happened all the time, but it was way worse than the old “Don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. It was more the “Court martial their ass” rule.

  But it was unlikely that her sole crew chief had heard, or would report it if he did. He was too busy looking irritated as hell. He was scowling at her as if it was her fault they were under a “Don’t engage” rule that had his M134 minigun sitting safetied and unloaded. He’d been frowning since the moment she’d boarded—not once lightening up enough to talk to her. Of course, she’d been on her way home after six months in Afghan hell, so she’d slept every second she could. And talking to anyone other than a patient had never been one of her strengths. Talking to strange men wearing a whole lot of pissed-off? Them she couldn’t even look at.

  Sara continued working on the patient.

  2

  Stephen Brown hadn’t enjoy sitting still; it wasn’t his forte. Never had been.

  They had flown through the Polish winter’s night, following two DAP Hawks to park here near the Ukrainian border while the DAPs disappeared over it. DAPs were rare—the most heavily armed helicopters in any military. To see two together would be a good bar topic, if the one-star general in command of the entire Night Stalkers regiment hadn’t called in before the flight to say that mentioning this operation anywhere to anyone would earn them lifelong solitary confinement in Leavenworth Military Prison. Sounded extreme, but maybe not. Two DAPs p
airing up and disappearing across the Ukrainian border meant something fierce was going down.

  The first helo had come back unscathed and continued back across Poland after refueling. By now they’d be all snug and warm on the USS Germantown awaiting them on the Baltic Sea three hours to the north. But he and his crew had still sat in the Polish night, fully fueled and no call to order them anywhere.

  The Night Stalkers flew a different CSAR mission from any other combat search and rescue flights in the US military. All other CSARs flew with nothing except their personal weapons and a big red cross on the nose. Hostiles seemed to think it had been placed there for target practice—Geneva Convention? What’s the Geneva Convention? He’d had enough of playing sitting duck in the regular Army.

  Night Stalkers’ primary customers—SEAL Team 6, Delta Force, and the 24th STS—operated on both sides of the front line…but mostly on the wrong side of it. That meant that where the Night Stalkers flew was far beyond where conventional rescue teams were ever sent, or would dare to go if they were. Night Stalkers CSAR flew in fully-armed battle-ready aircraft—ones that just happened to also have a combat medic and enough equipment on board to set up a decent in-flight surgery. Except when they were under a “Don’t Engage” rule like tonight—which made him twitchy with Army flashbacks, just waiting for incoming fire.

  Night Stalkers CSAR aircraft typically held back at the edge of battle, because their primary role was extract and patch their people together long enough to reach a hospital. Even the flight into bin Laden’s compound had a CSAR craft lurking nearby.

  Not this time. This mission was so black that they’d been on a hold line at the border, probably hours back from the action—wherever the hell the action was.

  They’d cooled their asses for five hours since the departure of the first helo, including two hours past their get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge deadline. Cooled literally—the stark Polish countryside had no dusting of snow, but the frost lay thick on the grass, their helo, and his flight suit.

  On ice until the moment that the second DAP Hawk helicopter had finally limped over the border and settled roughly onto the field. Ten feet from safe, it had twisted badly, but the pilot had finally thumped it down in one piece—bouncing it hard enough for the shock absorbers to spring it back into the air before finally settling on the frozen field.

  The call for a medic had been shouted to them even before the rotors had begun winding down.

  Helping Sara unload the pilot had gotten him far too close to the DAP Hawk for his liking. Normally he liked a chance to inspect another aspect of these edgy aircraft each time he got near one. But this time it had let him actually see the markings on the half-disassembled bomb resting close beside the bird. Unlike the Americans, Russians didn’t advertise that a bomb was nuclear with garish radioactive signs, but Stephen recognized the type and it gave him the shivers. He decided that, in retrospect, there were definitely some things it was better not to know about a mission.

  They had the patient settled on a stretcher in the CSAR’s cargo bay, but weren’t even in the air when the medic’s satellite phone had rung loudly. The commander who’d flown through earlier had called within thirty seconds of the report of the second pilot’s injury. Stephen had only been able to hear one side of it, but that was all anyone needed.

  “She needs a hospital,” Sara had protested. “There are several good ones in Kraków and Warsaw that take US soldiers.”

  …

  “The USS Germantown,” which had been their departure point a full three hours flying time away, “is sitting in the Baltic Sea. Sir, she needs—” But clearly Sara was speaking to herself as she’d then hung up the phone.

  “He said if any harm comes to her, I’d better start running—fast.” She told no one in particular, though Stephen had heard her over their shared intercom.

  At least they were in the air now.

  Not that it put him one meter closer to solving the problem that was Sara Camron.

  3

  “Major Asshole,” Sara was still pissed at the wholly undeserved dressing-down.

  “No,” the woman replied with a worrying slur of tongue. “Major Mark Henderson.”

  Sara totally fumbled the blood oxygenation test—which involved slipping a sensor shaped like a fat clothespin onto the patient’s fingertip.

  “You shitting me?”

  The woman just smiled to herself, but kept her eyes closed.

  No way was that jerk the Number One pilot in all of the 160th SOAR, the commander of the 5th Battalion D Company. “Maybe he just nasties his enemies to death.”

  “No…” the patient’s voice was drifting badly and Sara could barely hear it over the rotors’ noise as the helicopter raced north. “He shoots them.”

  Great!

  Not wanting to be his next target, she turned her attention to the patient’s ass. With blood and saline pouring into her, her blood pressure and pulse should be recovering, and they weren’t.

  Female pilots were so rare in the Night Stalkers that she’d only ever met the one who flew the CSAR bird and had now switched to take over the late-arriving helo. Chief Warrant Lola LaRue, who’d been the pilot of this flight, had just recently joined the Night Stalkers.

  The only other one…

  Sara looked down in shock. That meant the woman on her stretcher was Major Emily Beale, the first-ever female Night Stalkers pilot.

  Shit! No pressure. No wonder the woman was a hard-ass. Not that her ass was bulletproof—which had turned out to be too bad.

  Beale lay there with the seat cut out of her pants. Four holes lined up across her two butt cheeks. Truly lined up—the bullet had caught her sideways and passed in-and-out through both cheeks.

  “Was this a single shot?”

  “Pow!” The woman made a shooting motion with her fingers like a handgun—the oxygenation clip foremost like a silencer. Oxygenation was good, but blood pressure said that there just wasn’t enough blood in her body. “One shot through and through. My friend Michael, he took care of it though.”

  “That would be Colonel Michael Gibson,” the crew chief told her.

  Sara glanced at him, receiving back a nod of confirmation. The Number One soldier of Delta Force had been there to patch up Major Beale’s ass. What the hell had been going on?

  Sara had barely spared a glance at the other bird. It had been painted Night Stalkers black. And had another big scary-looking bomb in its sling. Whatever.

  All that mattered was the patient. That was how she managed to survive her days. By focusing strictly on the patients and declining to engage on any other topic, she was usually labeled as dedicated rather than strange and phobically shy.

  So focus!

  That Emily Beale was conscious or even still alive for that matter, with the amount of blood soaked into the thick towel she’d been sitting on, was a miracle. That she’d piloted her helicopter was unbelievable. The Delta Force colonel had done field patches on her—gluing shut the holes in her skin. Holes that were weeping, but not flowing enough to explain the blood loss.

  “How long were you flying after you were shot?” Sara felt an itch that told her if this patient stopped talking, she might never start again—ever.

  “Two hours. Three. Don’t know. Ask Connie.” Barely translatable mumbles.

  Nobody flew that kind of time with a shot-up ass. It must have hurt beyond belief. Still, it wasn’t enough time to account for the blood-soaked towel.

  Sara probed the areas around the wounds, but they didn’t leak any more. There were no other signs of blood, just a broad smear down the butt cheeks. She even tipped Beale up to make sure that no blood was pooling from an unidentified injury on her front.

  “Uh,” the chief perched in his seat was staring right at the major’s bare ass.

  Another asshole male—the major was wounded for crying out loud.

  And her vitals were still dropping.

  4

  “Don’t mean to intrude, Camro
n.”

  Sara’s glare was just as laser-death as it had been in high school. Or perhaps deadpan-death, as if she didn’t even see him. But he’d grown since then. Or at least liked to think he had.

  “But she started leaking blood when you tipped her.”

  Sara lay the woman once more on her front, and spread her butt cheeks. Blood flowed out of an open wound that had been covered and partially sealed by the other buttock. She’d been shot twice, once the through-and-through shot. The second time entering only one of the legs, high in the crease where butt cheek met upper thigh. No exit wound.

  At that moment, several alarms went off.

  Blood pressure crashing. Oxygenation sucked which meant the body was pulling back circulation from the extremities. Her pulse rate jumped thirty beats per minute in a matter of seconds as her heart kicked into panicked overdrive.

  And the major’s eyes fluttered shut—she was no longer watching the pilots.

  “Shit! Put on gloves, Chief. I need you here. Stat!”

  He’d never understood what “Stat” actually meant, but he didn’t have to be a fan of Grey’s Anatomy or hear all the alarms going off to know it was time to hurry. He had a moment’s hesitation as it finally clicked why he liked the show. Dr. Meredith Grey bore far more than a passing resemblance to Sara Camron. Funny that he hadn’t seen that before. Of course he hadn’t seen Sara in over a decade—she’d gone to college and he to the Army a year or so before the show first aired. But he owned every season and streamed new episodes as soon as he could get them overseas. Finally, he knew why. The mystical blue eyes and dark blonde hair that—

  “Now!”

  He peeled off his winter gloves and slid on blue nitrile ones. The first thing Sara had him doing was sliding a piece of gauze between Major Beale’s butt cheeks and applying pressure to the newly uncovered wound—about the least romantic or sexy thing he’d ever done in his life. Blood was dribbling everywhere. But when he had the hole covered and applied pressure, Beale grunted in pain.