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  Kee’s Wedding

  a Night Stalkers Wedding Story

  M. L. Buchman

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  5 Years Ago

  The events in this story occur before the last scene of

  I Own the Dawn

  (The Night Stalkers #2).

  Chapter 1

  “What if I’m not ready?”

  “Since when haven’t you been ready for anything?”

  “This is different!” Kee Smith shouted her protest over the DAP Hawk helicopter’s intercom.

  Major Emily Beale did one of her magic tricks, slewing the helo around in a way that no other pilot possibly could. It gave Kee—perched at the side-gunner crew chief’s position, close behind the copilot’s seat—a clear shot on the lead vehicle in the column racing across the nighttime Afghan desert.

  Kee grabbed the double handles on her M134 minigun, slid it out the window to the limit of the stops, and pulled the trigger. In answer, the electric motor spun the six-barrel Gatling gun up to five hundred rpm. The stream of 7.62mm ammunition raced out of the case, through the delinker, and into each barrel’s chamber at precisely the right moment. She sent three thousand rounds per minute raking down out of the darkness. Every tenth round was an infrared tracer, brilliant green in her own night-vision gear—yet effectively invisible to anyone not so equipped.

  Her first rounds struck less than ten meters in front of the lead vehicle, so she held steady and let the lead vehicle drive right into the hail of bullets. Su-weet! A practiced shake allowed her to destroy the engine. The truck lurched sideways off the road and slammed to a halt in the deep sand.

  The copilot fired a Hydra 70 rocket to take out the anti-aircraft gun mounted on the truck bed as Kee continued to slice up the line of vehicles. Two RPGs were fired upwards, but in no particular direction and were no threat to their flight of four blacked-out helicopters. The Night Stalkers of the US Army’s 160th SOAR ruled the night.

  A Little Bird flying close beneath them took out the beater Toyota Corolla that had been the source of the RPGs as Kee and her fellow gunner Big John kept the convoy trapped on the road and behind the now-burning lead vehicle.

  Big John was wisely staying out of this conversation. But if he so much as laughed, he’d be dead meat the moment they were back on the ground. She’d pulverize him herself, even if he was twice her size.

  “I am so-o-o not ready for this shit!” Kee unleashed another chain of destruction on a captured Humvee. She must have managed to punch into some ammo cache through the turret gunner’s position as the vehicle flared brightly inside, then exploded violently as they flew over it and raced once more into the desert.

  “If I can do it, so can you,” Emily replied with no real hint of sympathy as she rolled the Black Hawk completely over and somehow managed to come out of the maneuver headed back toward the column.

  “But you’re the legendary Major Emily Beale. I’m just Sergeant Kee Smith. I’m not even that—I made up my last name.”

  “Get your act together, Kee,” Major Beale sighed. “Night Stalkers Don’t Quit!”

  Having the motto of the 160th SOAR thrown in her face wasn’t helping one bit. As to getting her shit together…since when was that even a possibility.

  Emily certainly had though. She and Major Henderson had been married six months and still they walked about as if on some freaking honeymoon.

  The MH-60M DAP Hawk banked hard, giving Kee a straight-down view on the militia’s column. She unleashed more mayhem on them with her minigun.

  This she could handle.

  Her own wedding to Archie? In less than seventy-two hours? Not so much.

  Chapter 2

  Captain Archibald Stevenson III, lay on the Italian beach and wondered how this had come to be his world. More accurately, he lay in the beach. His soon-to-be-adopted daughter, Dilya, had spent the last hour steadily covering him with a thick layer of sand until it lay on his chest like a lead blanket. It had been scorching hot at first with the Mediterranean sun beating down on him. Now that he was deeper under the sand there was a pleasant coolness to it.

  Thankfully, pre-burial, he had pulled his hat low against the mid-morning sun. Dilya had made him promise not to peek, but he’d squinted out at her a few times anyway to make sure she was okay.

  The eleven- or twelve-year-old Uzbekistani orphan—even she wasn’t sure—appeared completely content as she worked some artistic magic with a bright blue plastic shovel the size of his palm. Kee had rescued the starving waif from a frigid mountaintop deep in a war zone barely three months ago. Now, in just three more days when he married Kee, the three of them would become the most unlikely family imaginable.

  Despite her constantly prodigious appetite, Dilya was still pencil thin, though no longer gaunt. She’d been little more than a ragged ghost at first—and as flighty as one, disappearing at the least alarm. She’d settled into herself in surprising ways and proven herself highly adaptable. First at Forward Operating Base Bati where he and Kee had been stationed, then back in the States with him and his parents after he’d been shot and had to have his shoulder replaced.

  The two of them had seen Kee only briefly during these last three months, but the transformation between them had been nothing short of miraculous. Archie loved Dilya, with her long, dark hair and mystical green eyes, and had no doubt that she loved him back. But the connection between Dilya and Kee was closer than he’d ever imagined a mother and daughter could be—though one was born of Uzbek refugees and the other on the streets of East L.A.

  Kee.

  Archie resisted the urge to itch at the sand which had now penetrated every single pore. Dilya had been very exasperated at the damage to her artwork when he’d done so earlier. He tried focusing on the soft lapping of the Mediterranean waves, the soft lilt of Italian among other families enjoying the sunny morning, even the laughter of their children—but all he could think about was the itchy sand.

  Kee was an even bigger puzzle than Dilya. How had she slipped into his heart so completely? She was feisty, obnoxious, tough-as-nails, and an amazing soldier. Her permanently dark tan skin, Asian narrow eyes, and exceptionally curved body had made her a fantasy to look at. Even her dark hair with its saucy little blonde-dyed strip had been cute as hell.

  There was a dark side to her as well, that she’d revealed to him in her typical manner—a single, massive emotional blast. One moment she’d been this sexy companion who he couldn’t get enough of, and the next she’d been the miracle proof of what could be done by pure willpower. Everything about her had a deeper meaning, even the little stripe of golden hair.

  There had never been a woman like her!

  Whenever they were apart, he wondered how he could be with someone from such a different world. His parents were upper crust Boston and Mom was a top strategic consultant to the White House on global geopolitics. He himself was a top ten West Point grad. Kee had finished high school by getting her GED before becoming an Army infantry grunt and working her way up to being a Night Stalker.

  There was no way the three of them should work well as a unit.

  Yet whenever they were together, his mismatched family-to-be made absolute perfect sense. Kee was so damned…alive! It made him wonder what she saw in him. Not that he was complaining, but it made him wonder.

  “Soon, Dilya. Soon we will all be back together.”

  The slight girl barely nodded as she focused on her sandy creation. Then she glanced at his face. “I say no peekings. Ha?”
Yes? in Uzbek.

  “No peekings. Ha.” He didn’t bother to correct her peekings and simply closed his eyes once more. Her English was improving fantastically—with the help of nightly doses of Winnie the Pooh or Charlotte’s Web—far faster than he’d ever done with a foreign tongue, but she must be sick of the constant little corrections. Time to give the kid a break.

  Archie wasn’t sure which of them he was reassuring anyway. The doctors had signed off on his recovery. His shoulder was as good as new—almost. He’d never be able to fly to 160th SOAR standards again, but that was the only real limitation.

  But without flying, his future was a complete unknown. Too many options.

  His mother wanted him to return to D.C. and work with her consulting firm. She’d spent much of last night working to convince him she was right, and almost had.

  The Army wanted to slot him into mission planning at the Pentagon.

  Or maybe he needed to break away. Be out on his own, doing who knew what.

  But he wasn’t on his own.

  He’d promised that in three days he’d be saying yes to being a family. A family was meant to be together, not scattered across the planet. For three months he’d sought an answer, but been stumped every time.

  If he couldn’t fly… But no answer lay on the other side of that question.

  Soon they’d be back together, he’d reassured Dilya.

  But would they? He’d met Kee on her first day with the Night Stalkers just four months ago. She’d barely started in this phase of her military career when his future with the Night Stalkers had been taken away by a gunshot wound. There was no future for them. Getting married made no sense whatso—

  “You look now.”

  “You can look now,” then he bit his tongue. So much for giving Dilya a language break.

  “You can look now. You can look now. You can look…” Dilya whispered variations to herself as she integrated the correction into her understanding of English.

  And what would part of being a fractured family would be good for her?

  Maybe he should walk away while he still could.

  Do what was right for them.

  He opened his eyes and squinted against the brightness. His parents, who had picked up the burden of caring for him and Dilya these last months, had flown out for the wedding last night. They’d been sleeping in, so he’d left a note where they could find him and Dilya on the beach. Now they were standing by his feet and looking down at him with slightly confused smiles. They often didn’t understand Dilya’s curiously mashed-up view of her past culture colliding with her new exposure to America, but loved her like a grandchild nonetheless. Kee they were far less sure about.

  Archie tipped his head up to try and see, but the sand covering his body all of the way to his neck stopped him. So much sand that he couldn’t sit up really. He pushed a little harder, but his new shoulder twinged and he dropped back down to rest his head on the beach. Three months to full range of motion, but another six months or more until it would be back up to full strength. Light duty only.

  Dilya looked panicked, turning between him and her sand creation, only now understanding that he was in no position to see what she had spent most of the morning building.

  Taking pity on him, Dad snapped a photo with his phone and then came to hold it where Archie could see it.

  Archie saw what it was right away.

  Laying on her side atop his chest, was a half-size version of Kee. And curled in her arms was a half-Dilya-sized figure. A pair of powerful arms made of sand sprouted from where his shoulders were buried beneath the sand. They cradled both the woman and girl lying upon his chest.

  Archie had always seen Kee as the anchor of their new family because she was such a force of nature.

  But that’s not how Dilya saw it.

  She saw him.

  “Oh, Dilya.”

  Her expression was carefully devoid of emotion. But he could see the sunlight catching the watery brightness in her green eyes. A girl who had lost so much looked at him—at him—with tears of hope. How could he deny that?

  “Ha. Dilya. Very ha.”

  Chapter 3

  “Not gonna be catching this boy doing anything that kind of crazy,” Big John declared as he thumped his dinner tray on the mess tent’s table.

  The place was buzzing after last night’s successful attack. It jazzed up the whole camp, even the people who hadn’t been along for the ride. The small team of Delta Force operators were quiet in their corner, of course, but the 75th Rangers were talking it up as if it had been their own mission.

  Majors Beale and Henderson were doing their usual table-for-two off to one side so as not to impose their command presence on the rest of the team’s celebratory mood.

  “Doing what kind of crazy?” Kee asked because it was expected, but kept an eye on the majors. She’d tried picturing herself in their shoes: she and Archie. Content to simply sit together over a meal. But she could never make it happen in her head. The majors were the perfect couple. The two most decorated Night Stalker pilots in any battalion. Both beautiful, Mark poster-boy handsome and Emily magazine-ad blonde. Both so assured of their place in the world.

  That could never be her.

  Then she spotted that Emily had a single foot forward under the table, the sole of her boot resting on the toe of Henderson’s. It made them human and that she could almost imagine…just not for someone like her.

  “That's some crazy-ass shit you’re gonna be doing,” John was digging into a massive serving of pasta slathered with red sauce, pesto, and a fistful of Parmesan.

  “It’s me,” she turned her attention back to her own meal. “Crazy shit is what I do. What are you talking about this time?” She spun a forkful of spaghetti and stuffed it in her mouth.

  “’Bout you getting married, Smith.”

  Kee almost choked.

  “That’s way the hell outside the mission profile,” Crazy Tim agreed as he dropped into the seat across from her, then reached across and stole a slice of garlic bread even though he had several of his own.

  She casually reached over and took his apple pie before “accidentally” dumping his glass of milk in the tray.

  Tim didn’t even blink as he fished his fork out of the white puddle swirling around the bottom of his plate, licked it off, and began eating. He ignored the milk pool as if it was just a decoration.

  “We like Archie and all, but marriage?” Tim mumbled around a big bite of Kee’s stolen garlic bread. “Seriously, Smith, what’s up with that? Is that how someone gets a woman to say I do? Gets his shoulder shot up and you go all swoony for him?”

  Big John clasped his huge hands together, tucked them under his chin, and fluttered his eyelashes at her. Six-four of towering black man swooning like a little girl was too much and actually earned him a laugh. For a reward she gave him Tim’s slice of apple pie. She desperately needed to laugh.

  When it was someone like Archie, who had kept fighting beside her until the mission was complete after having his shoulder shot up, it definitely did count. When he played so sweetly with Dilya, or called Kee herself “Helen of Troy” for being sexy enough to launch a thousand ships, that counted to.

  The rest of the crew from the majors’ two DAP Hawks landed farther down the table, but they were much more concerned with reliving the mission, so she ignored them. Connie, the quiet new mechanic, veered aside and sat off at a table by herself. She was turning out to be an okay person, but Kee didn’t have time to think about her at the moment. Maybe after Kee was back from her honeymoon.

  Her honeymoon?

  Shit! Since when was she the sort of person that would ever have one of those?

  “Just between two gunners,” Big John leaned down and whispered softly while Tim was busy trying to steal Dusty’s soda to replace his own spilled milk, “I think Archie is one of the luckiest shits anywhere, Kee. You’re hot as they get and you totally kick ass.”

  Kee could only stare at
him in surprise. Four months ago he’d been pissed as hell that Tim, his best friend who he’d flown with for a decade, had been bumped over to Henderson’s helo to make room for her. She’d also been a baby Night Stalker fresh out of training.

  She now had a place aboard a DAP Hawk, the respect of her teammates, and Archie and Dilya waiting for her. Didn’t mean there wasn’t more to prove…

  But John nodded that he meant it. Wild!

  Dusty fended off Tim with enough force to flip his chair over, with Tim still in it.

  Kee and Big John lifted their trays off the table just in time; in Tim’s backward flail, he kicked the bottom of the table. Curses sounded all down the length of it as glasses and sodas toppled.

  The two of them set their trays back down.

  “Uh, thanks,” was all she could think to say.

  “Nothing but the truth,” John nodded as he returned to eating.

  “What’s the truth?” Tim righted his chair and thumped his butt back into it.

  “That you aren’t worth the trouble of even knowing, shithead,” John rumbled out.

  “Hey, somebody’s got to keep things lively,” then, as if nothing had happened, Tim grinned and continued eating Kee’s slice of garlic bread that had started the whole hoopla.

  Chapter 4

  “It will be okay,” though Archie wasn’t sure which of them he was reassuring. He and Dilya stood on the tarmac outside Hangar Four on the military side of Pisa’s Galileo Galilei Airport. She held his hand tightly.

  It had been two months since they’d seen Kee in person. She’d managed a few video calls, but Dilya didn’t seem to understand those. What if they’d grown distant?

  Dilya had built her sand sculpture around some image of Kee the mother figure. Kee was many things, but that wasn’t one of them. She was tender with Dilya, but he wouldn’t describe her as maternal.