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  Claudia tried to straighten her spine after she climbed off the C-2 Greyhound twin-engine cargo plane. It was the workhorse of carrier onboard delivery and from the passenger’s point of view also the loudest plane ever designed. If not, it certainly felt that way. Shaking her head didn’t clear the buzz of the twin Allison T-56 engines from either her ears or the pounding of the two big eight-bladed propellers from her body.

  A deckhand clad in green, which identified him as a helicopter specialist, met her before she was three steps off the rear ramp. He took her duffle without a word and started walking away, the Navy’s way of saying, “Follow me.” She resettled her rucksack across her shoulders and followed like a one-woman jet fighter taxiing along after her own personal ground guidance truck.

  Rather than leading her to quarters, the deckhand took her straight to an MH-6M Little Bird helicopter perched on the edge of the carrier’s vast deck. That absolutely worked for her. As soon as they had her gear stowed in the tiny back compartment, he turned to her and handed her a slip of paper.

  “This is the current location, contact frequency, and today’s code word for landing authorization for your ship. They need this bird returned today and you just arrived, so that works out. It’s fully fueled. They’re expecting you.” He rattled off the tower frequency for the carrier’s air traffic control tower, saluted, and left her to prep her aircraft before she could salute back.

  Thanks for the warm welcome to theater of operations.

  This wasn’t a war zone. But it wasn’t far from one either, she reminded herself. Would saying, “Hi,” have killed him? That almost evoked a laugh, she hadn’t exactly been chatty herself. Word count for the day so far, one, saying thanks to the C-2 crewman who’d rousted her from a bare doze just thirty seconds before landing.

  The first thing she did was get into her full kit. She pulled her flightsuit on over her clothes, tucking her long blond hair down her back inside the suit. Full armor brought the suit to about thirty pounds. She shrugged on a Dragonskin vest that she’d purchased herself giving her double protection over her torso. Over that her SARVSO survival vest and finally her FN-SCAR rifle across her chest and her helmet on her head. Total gear about fifty pounds. As familiar as a second skin, she always felt a little exposed without it.

  Babe in armor.

  Who would have ever thought a girl from nowhere Arizona would be standing on an aircraft carrier off the Arabian Peninsula in full fighter gear.

  If anyone were to ask, she’d tell them it totally rocked. Actually, she’d shrug and acknowledge that she was proud to be here…but she’d be busy thinking that it totally rocked.

  The Little Bird was the smallest helicopter in any division of the U.S. military and that made most people underestimate it. She loved the Little Bird, it was a tough and sassy craft with a surprising amount of power for her small size. She also operated far more independently than any other aircraft in the inventory and, to her way of thinking, that made it near perfect.

  It seated two up front and didn’t have any doors, so the wide opening offered the pilot excellent field of view. The fact that it also offered the enemy a wide field of fire is why she wore the secondary Dragonskin vest. The helicopter could seat two in back, if they were desperate—the space was small enough that her ruck and duffle filled much of it. On the attack version, the rear space would be filled with cans of ammunition.

  In Special Operations Forces, the action teams rode on the outside of Little Birds. This one was rigged with a bench seat along either side that could fold down to transport three combat soldiers on either side.

  Claudia wanted an attack bird, not a transport, but she’d fight that fight once she reached her assigned company. For now she was simply glad to be a pilot who’d been deemed “mission ready” for the 160th SOAR.

  She went through the preflight, found the bird as clean as every other Night Stalker craft, and powered up for the flight. Less than a hundred miles, she’d be there in forty minutes. Maybe then she could sleep.

  # # #

  As the rapid onset of full dark in the desert swept over the Yemeni desert, Michael and Bill moved up behind the main building that was used by the terrorist camp’s training staff. It was a one-story, six-room structure. Concrete slab, cinder block wall, metal roof. Doors front and back. The rear one of heavy metal was locked but they had no intention of using it anyway.

  The intel from the MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone that the Night Stalkers’ intel staff had kept circling twenty thousand feet overhead for the last three nights had indicated that four command-level personnel met here each night. Most likely position was in the southeast corner room. Four of the other rooms were barrack spaces that wouldn’t be used until after the trainers had all eaten together at the chow tent. The sixth room was the armory.

  Dry bread and water had been the fare for the trainees. Over the next months they would be desensitized to physical discomfort much as a Delta operator was. Too little food, too little sleep, and too much exercise especially early on to weed out the weak or uncommitted.

  He and Bill squatted beneath the southeast window which faced away from the center of the camp; only the vast dark desert lay beyond. Shifting the AK-47s over their shoulders, they unslung their preferred weapons—Heckler and Koch HK416 carbine rifles with flash suppressors that made them nearly silent.

  Bill pulled out a small fiber optic camera and slipped it up over the window sill. Squatting out of sight, the small screen gave them a view of the inside of the target building for the first time.

  Not four men but eight were seated on cushions around a low table bearing a large teapot. He recognized five from various briefings and three of them were Alpha Tier targets. They’d only been expecting one Alpha.

  There was a long table sporting a half dozen laptops and a pair of file cabinets standing at one end. They hadn’t counted on that at all. This was supposed to be a training camp, not an operations center.

  They were going to need more help to take advantage of the new situation.

  He got on the radio.

  # # #

  “U.S.S. Peleliu. This is Captain Casperson in Little Bird…” she didn’t know the name of the bird. She read off the tail number from the small plate on the control panel. “Inbound from eighty miles at two-niner-zero.”

  You didn’t want to sneak up on a ship of war that could shoot you down at this distance if they were in a grouchy mood.

  “Roger that, Captain. Status?”

  “Flying solo, full fuel.”

  “In your armor?”

  “Roger that.” Why in the world would they… Training. They’d want to make sure she wasn’t ignoring her training. Kid stuff. She’d flown Cobra attack birds for the U.S. Marines for six years before her transfer and two more years training with the Night Stalkers. She wasn’t an—

  “This is Air Mission Commander Archie Stevens,” a different voice came on the air. “Turn immediate heading three-four-zero. Altitude five-zero feet, all speed. You’ll be joining a flight ten miles ahead of you for an exfil. We can’t afford to slow them down until you make contact, so hustle.”

  She slammed over the cyclic control in her right hand to shift to the new heading.

  Okay, maybe not so much a training test.

  Exfil. Exfiltration. A ground team needed to be pulled out and pulled out now. She’d done it in a hundred drills, so she kept calm and hoped that her voice sounded that way. She expected that it didn’t.

  “Uh, Roger.” Claudia had dozed fitfully for six hours in the last three days and most of that had been in a vibrator seat on the roaring C-2 Greyhound. No rest for the weary.

  Once on the right heading, she dove into the night heading for fifty feet above the ocean waves and opened up the throttles to the edge of the Never Exceed speed of a hundred-and-seventy-five miles an hour.

  The adrenaline had her wide awake before she reached her flight level.

  Available pre-order now

  and ever
ywhere March 2015

  Copyright 2014 Matthew Lieber Buchman

  Published by Buchman Bookworks

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof,

  may not be reproduced in any form

  without permission from the author.

  Discover more by this author at:

  www.mlbuchman.com

  Cover images:

  Two Beautiful Lovers © Valuavitaly | Dreamstime.com

  LCAC © U.S. Navy photo by

  Photographer’s Mate Airman Sarah E. Ard | Wikimedia

  Helicopter over Baghdad © U.S. Army | Flickr

  A young and sexy brunette woman on a foggy background

  © Maksim Shmeljov | Dreamstime.com

  Dog Tags Four © Lightpainter | Dreamstime.com

  Red and Green Candy cane over white

  © Lucie Lang | Dreamstime.com (back cover)

  Other works by this author:

  Romances

  -The Night Stalkers-

  The Night Is Mine

  I Own the Dawn

  Daniel’s Christmas

  Wait Until Dark

  Frank’s Independence Day

  Peter’s Christmas

  Take Over at Midnight

  The Night Stalkers Special Features

  Light Up the Night

  Chistmas at Steel Beach

  -Firehawks-

  Pure Heat

  Wildfire at Dawn

  Full Blaze

  -Angelo’s Hearth-

  Where Dreams Are Born

  Where Dreams Reside

  Maria’s Christmas Table

  Where Dreams Unfold

  Where Dreams Are Written

  Thrillers

  Swap Out!

  One Chef!

  Two Chef!

  SF/F

  Nara

  Monk’s Maze

  -Dieties Anonymous-

  Cookbook from Hell: Reheated

  Saviors 101: the first book of the Reluctant Messiah

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author