Team Black Sheep Read online

  Team Black Sheep

  a Night Stalker CSAR military romance

  M. L. Buchman

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  About This Book

  The most dangerous mission of all: CSAR—Combat Search and Rescue.

  Sergeant Gerrard “Doc” Carson’s main claim to fame? Being the black sheep of his family. His solution to sign up as an Army grunt? About to cost him and his sharpshooter teammate Smith, and cost them bad. Hunkered down in Niger’s capital city during a coupe, his squad’s future is headed for that seriously permanent kind of Army discharge.

  When Medic Teri Carson and a full flight of the 160th Night Stalkers come to the rescue, he gets a new appreciation for the CSAR mission. But when “Doc” finds out Teri also holds the title of Black Sheep, he knows he’s onto something special.

  Timing

  This title occurs three years prior to the events in Night Stalkers #2, I Own the Dawn.

  1

  February 10th, 2010

  Niamey, Niger, Central Africa

  “Okay, there are probably worse places to die. But please don’t tell me about them.”

  “Deal,” Smith offered one of her typically verbose responses, then glanced at her watch.

  Gerrard Carson tried to resist, but couldn’t, and checked his own watch as he frantically applied another bandage. He wasn’t even looking at whose limb it was anymore.

  Nine of them with their backs against a building. A low adobe-brick wall to their left and their flipped and shattered pickup truck angled across the rest of the opening. Triage was long gone out the window—except their truck no longer had windows.

  Graveyard humor. The God-given right of every Army grunt about to go down hard. Hooah!

  He saw blood and did his best to staunch it. That was all he could do in the short time. A streaming scalp wound through blond hair? Yeah, he knew who that was but didn’t have time to think of their name.

  The prayer call from the minaret of the local mosque had been going on for three minutes and thirty seconds. It was Asr in the capital city of Niger—when the length of his afternoon shadow matched his own height, and everyone in Niamey stopped to pray.

  A strange hiatus in the midst of a pitched battle.

  Max of ninety seconds left before prayer ended and the battle resumed. And that’s only if they were lucky and the attackers took the full five minutes to thank God for the chance to kill their team.

  Officially only a hundred and nine degrees today, the hottest major city in the world felt like one-twenty and rising fast.

  “We’re cookin’ here.” Of course that could also be because the south-facing wall at their backs was the burnt-orange-dulled-under-brown-dust front of the corporate offices for fat-cat-people-he-didn’t-give-a-damn-about. American contractors in the middle of Niamey—not the military type, the money type.

  “Meat,” Smith offered the ultimate insult to an infantryman. Meat. Not worth anything else. Just part of the military machine.

  About right.

  They were being cooked and chewed up. Not that many more minutes until they’d be spit out for good, but he had to try. He unsnapped a rifle sling, and tied it around someone’s thigh. He slid an empty twenty-round magazine through it as a turning stick and spun it tight. At least the leg stopped pumping blood. Grabbing the soldier’s hand, he put it on the jury-rigged tourniquet and shouted in his face, “Do not let go of this.”

  He didn’t wait for any acknowledgement, or let himself focus to see who it was. Just let go of the guy’s hand on the magazine and hoped for the best.

  They’d been in the city doing training with the Presidential guards. Until suddenly Nigerien President Tandja was getting his ass coup d’étated.

  “Coup is probably over,” Smith scanned outside their hide between a low wall and the chassis of their flipped pickup truck. “Not that we’ll ever know.”

  Also right.

  Their staff sergeant had done good. He’d extricated his eight shooters from the situation as it wasn’t an American battle. Once clear of the battle at the Presidential palace, they were tasked to set up protection on a cluster of offices used by US corporations in case the whole city went bad. He’d pulled it off, and they’d fallen all the way back clean.

  Should have been fine. Back street several blocks back from the palace.

  Except some Nigerien yay-hoo had decided that the American team were actually escaping Presidential guards.

  Just as they’d pulled up at what was supposed to be a quiet guard detail, someone had RPG’d their pickup—probably shouldn’t have lifted it from the President’s guards when they’d needed to be gone fast.

  Real useful thought in hindsight.

  Then they’d offered the staff sergeant a bullet to his brainpan before anyone could even blink—which put them down to eight and no leader between one heartbeat and the next.

  Smith had taken out the shooter—just too late for the staff sergeant. She was so damned good that it was like having a real countersniper, which would never happen in an eight-grunt squad. He’d set his M4 carbine to three-rounds burst and counted himself lucky if he got a hit. She fired semi-auto singles and never missed.

  “Thirty seconds, Doc,” Smith saved him checking his watch again.

  That actually gave him a moment’s pause. Usually he was “Low Gear” because apparently Gerrard was too complex a name for most grunts. He’d rather be “High Gear” but a grunt never got any say in his tag. He’d always been the steady one in the squad, so maybe Low Gear fit.

  But “Doc”?

  He was simply the guy who still remembered his dinnertime training. Mom was an operating room nurse and Dad an ER doc. Even his big sister was interning by the time he graduated high school. Dinner conversations were predictably bloody. When he’d gone grunt instead of med school—major parental disappointment—he’d been the one guy wholly unabashed by blood and guts. It was also the best way he’d been able to think of for escaping family peer pressure. Five years on? He was thinking going Army grunt rather than college was a pretty dumb-ass idea.

  He could wrap a bandage with the best of them, but that was all. He was just a gun on a squad, and nowhere near the kind of shooter that Smith was. Not that either skill meant a whole lot at the moment. They weren’t a big enough team to warrant a trained EMT, and Niamey was a peaceful place—until today. They needed a whole team of top shooters even more than the medico.

  The squad was getting pretty light on the ground. Two were past lifting their weapons—ever again. A glance showed that the tourniquet had slid loose from a grip gone lax, and so they were down a third. Three others were still in it only because they weren’t going to the big discharge in the sky without a fight. And the staff sergeant was long past caring about that bullet in the brainpan.

  That left him and Smith as the only fully able shooters.

  Tags never stuck to Smith. She was just…Smith. She’d been knocked back in rank a couple times—no one knew why—but Sergeant Smith was a hell-bitch in a firefight.

  At four minutes-fifty after the call to five minutes of prayer had begun, he grabbed his rifle to protect what was left of his squad.

  The dusty street looked impossibly serene. Ten meters wide and about five blocks long in either direction before it jogged or twisted out of sight among the one- and two-story structures.

  Pale red-brown sand. Buildings in a dozen shades of beige because the dust and sand washed out all colors.

  “I’m go
nna die in beige.”

  “No,” Smith blew the dust off her scope. Kicked up by every muzzle blast, the stuff just hung in the air until it found some optics to blur. “We’re gonna die bright red.”

  Gerrard carefully didn’t look behind him at the seeping bandages he’d managed to put on the remainder of the team.

  2

  Nothing was in the right place.

  On her own bird, Teri knew right where everything was.

  But this wasn’t a Night Stalkers flight, it was a USAF flight—surrounded by US Army Night Stalkers.

  Air Force medics must be part Alaskan king crab with arms twice as long as any normal human. The bandages and the surgical kit were on opposite sides of the Pave Hawk’s bay, at least two meters apart. And the drugs were nowhere near the plasma cooler which wasn’t where she found the IV gear at all. Maybe they were octopi.

  She liked that image. If she thought like an octopod, the layout almost made sense. Or like medics who usually flew in pairs. But that was a much less fun image.

  Once again, her life was all disjointed.

  Typically the Night Stalkers was just the opposite. She’d always liked structure, being able to see everything in a single gestalt. She’d liked it as a little kid, and the Army had offered that in spades. Special Operations times ten. There was a constant striving for the best, the most efficient, the most effective. A honing inward until everything was a perfect rote action.

  Being a medic offered the same. Step One, Step Two, Step Three. In battle medicine, every moment or symptom became a logical decision-branch of choices. Breathing? Blood: spurting, flowing, or trickling…

  The missions themselves, even the ones without a lengthy briefing, were still highly predictable for her life as a combat medic.

  Fly into the zone three minutes behind the warfighters.

  Lurk outside the zone.

  Someone got hit or went down? Head in full tilt no matter what shitstorm was brewing.

  By end of mission no one hit? Fly back just as clean and quiet as they’d arrived.

  But not this time.

  “One minute out,” the pilot announced.

  “Thanks.” It was their longest conversation yet, which fit her down to the bones.

  She peeked out the window. A mud brown river was wide and lazy here, like sluggish blood flowing through the heart of the typical African city. A handful or so of eight- to ten-story buildings scattered through a sprawling city of dusty streets and low adobe and concrete structures.

  Teri preferred to focus inside the helo. This world she knew and understood.

  Except here her gestalt was fractured into fifty pieces, like looking at someone with one eye where their nose should be and the other in their ear. With their lips out the back of their head, and their nose sniffing the sky so that you couldn’t help but see right up the nostrils and…

  It was the same as every time she looked at her brother’s art. He was in what critics had dubbed his “Picasso phase”, not that she could tell it from anything else. It made even less sense to her than when Picasso had done it, but then she’d never understood her brother, never mind his art.

  Or her parents’ art.

  She’d been the odd one, the “scientist” in the artistic family.

  That’s what they always called her: Ms. Science. It had almost followed her into the military. But by keeping her mouth shut and her head down, others generally left her out of their conversations. Just the way she liked it.

  Now, once again, her “odd choices” were leading her to even odder places.

  This mission had been scrambled off their ship, the USS Peleliu in the Gulf of Guinea, at the first news of the coup in Niger. Except the Night Stalkers had already sent their transports on a goodwill training mission to Senegal—so there was no combat search-and-rescue bird for her.

  Without a CSAR flight, she’d grabbed sixty pounds of medical bag and tucked herself into a corner of the DAP Hawk gunship between a SEAL Team 6 commander and a four-thousand-round ammo case for one of the Miniguns.

  Being resourceful, the Night Stalkers had picked up a flight of US Air Force Pave Hawks that had been visiting Ghana—four transports and two medical evac birds—but they’d only had one medic thanks to some awful bug one of the guys had picked up in the night market.

  So, they’d refueled in northern Ghana and switched her over to the strange world of the Pave Hawk Alaskan crab kings. She’d meant to look at the other medic to see if his arms were normal-sized, but missed her chance.

  3

  “Doc! Last full mag!” Someone—Jethro? Yes, by the bloody head bandage over his blond hair—hit the release dropping his rifle magazine into the dirt. Unable to move enough to shoot anymore, he flapped a hand to offer it.

  Looked like “Doc” was going to be his new tag—for the last few minutes of his life. Fine, he’d own that. Time to deal out some 5.56 mm medicine.

  He turned and saw blood streaming down Smith’s waist. She was still kneeling at the edge of their hole and firing.

  Shit! If Smith went down, he was definitely toast.

  A bullet must have skipped off a wall, ducked behind the pickup, and gone through-and-through just below her ribs. While grabbing the mag, it must have missed his head by inches. He’d certainly never heard it go by.

  He yanked off his gear belt, slapped it around her middle, and cinched it tight.

  Not one damn word. Not even a grunt of pain.

  Doc wondered for the hundredth time what drove her. It was a question that no one asked twice. Anyone who asked got the “Look” that said death was coming for them if they were shit-stupid enough to ask again. He counted himself smart because he’d never actually asked even once.

  He rapped the salvaged mag on his helmet to seat all the rounds to the rear of the carrier, and slapped it into his own rifle. He flipped the selector to semi-auto—against his better judgement—to conserve the last of their ammo, and yanked the charging handle to load a round in the chamber.

  Coming up out of the hole ready to fire the moment his scope lined up, he didn’t lack for targets.

  But even as he lined up, he knew he was too late.

  Someone had anticipated where he’d be popping up.

  Time slowed.

  There was a distinctive look to a rifle aimed in your general direction versus one that was dead on. Was that how Smith operated? Every shot finding that perfect alignment where the target was no longer a question but now a certainty.

  No time—he fired.

  Even as he did, he knew it was his usual six- or seven-ring shot, not the ten-point bullseye that he needed.

  For a full point-seven seconds that his round was traveling the fifty meters, he knew he was looking straight into death’s maw. He would never move fast enough to get clear of the return fire.

  Then, through his scope, he saw the target blown backward.

  Shredded.

  The man’s rifle tossed upward in reaction to the hit.

  No way did a NATO 5.56 mm round do that on impact.

  Then Doc heard the buzzsaw.

  Emerging over a low building, a pitch-black Black Hawk helicopter slid into view. Lead was pouring out in three directions. Not only were both of the crew chiefs’ side-mounted Miniguns slicing into the attackers, but the hard-mounted forward gun as well.

  Smith grabbed his collar and jerked him down out of view.

  She grunted as he landed hard against her.

  “Sorry.”

  “Just keep your damn head down. That’s a 160th Night Stalkers DAP Hawk and it cuts a wide swath.”

  The buzzsaw cut off after just another three seconds, leaving only the pounding thud of the blades washing down from the sky and rattling between the buildings.

  There was a moment with no other fire. From anyone.

  “Damn, but that’s precision.” Smith was looking up at the sky. “Night Stalkers rock.”

  He peeked up in time to see four Little Bird helos arrivin
g from the four points of the compass. Simultaneously, they all slid to a halt like goddamned synchronized swimmers.

  Fire resumed from their attackers, now directed at the helos in the sky.

  Spec Ops of some sort started roping down from where they’d been sitting on the side-mounted bench seats—four per bird. Those above providing cover fire to those heading down. As each reached the ground, he knelt, shouldered his rifle, and began taking out additional targets. Semi-auto, single-round shots Doc noted with some chagrin.

  “I want to cry, I’m so happy.” He spotted a rifle slipping out of a window down the block.

  He fired too fast and his round skipped off the lower sill.

  Smith nailed the shooter, and he tumbled back into the darkness.

  “We might just get out of this.”

  “Chickens,” she said as she popped up and fired another round at the window without appearing to even look first.

  He peeked out to see that, sure enough, another shooter had come to the window—probably with the dead man’s weapon. No, definitely with the dead man’s weapon. Smith had simply known how long it would take someone to grab it from the dead man and return to the window.

  “Okay, still eggs.” He wasn’t going to start counting his chickens until he was somewhere hell-and-gone away from here.

  It was his first major firefight. He hoped to God it was going to be his last. He’d somehow avoided the grinder of Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly pulling base duty in one place or another.

  Maybe he’d just stay hunkered down right here.

  “Hey there.” A deep voice sounded from above him. He looked up at the helmeted American looking at him over the shattered engine of the pickup truck. “Y’all want a ride?”

  Okay, maybe it was okay to count to “one”—even while he was still an egg.