Target of the Heart Read online

  Danielle flipped a control to project the overall tactical display from Sophia’s Avenger for a moment. Then she flipped back to the immediate terrain view while her mind analyzed what she’d seen.

  0343.

  Seven minutes.

  “The SEALs are reporting pursuit,” Sophia called.

  “Let me know when it breaks off,” Pete replied calmly.

  Man was so goddamn sure of himself. With reason. He was a master tactician who had just led the 5E to the fastest unit certification in history.

  Well, if he was going to be so sure of himself, she’d do the same.

  The Chinook was too deep in the valleys to talk directly to the SEALs. Radios were either line-of-sight or bounced off satellites, and the Chinook’s present flight path sucked for both.

  Staying in the deep valleys, she had to keep her speed down if she didn’t want to round some corner and fly into a valley’s headwall. But if she slowed down at all, she was going to be too late.

  “Only Chinese fly in China? Fine.”

  She tipped the cyclic forward for speed and reefed up on the collective with her left hand to climb.

  “Come on, Carrie-Anne. You’re a leather-clad lady. Fly!”

  She cleared the valley wall at 0344 at a hundred and ninety-six miles an hour, the very outer limit of what the Chinook could do.

  Once above the ridge line, she stayed high. They’d traveled deep into the mountains south of Hangzhou Harbor to avoid the more populous area. Seventeen miles straight-line flight.

  She should be there within thirty seconds of schedule. Danielle kept the nose down.

  “Stay on your toes, guys,” she called back to the three crew chiefs.

  Sophia’s data was streaming into Pete’s station. He was making adjustments to her course, but there was little he could do now. It was a flat-out race.

  “Pursuit is breaking off, Pete,” Luke’s transmission crackled back to life. “What don’t I know?”

  “You’ll know the signal to move. When you get it, go upriver and go full tilt.”

  At two minutes out she considered getting Pete on the private intercom for just a moment.

  But why should he have all the fun? Sweetest damn woman and all that…she left the intercom wide open.

  “Petey?” she did her best to make her voice a caress as she crossed over the last ridge south of the Hangzhou and plunged earthward back toward the low farmlands—but now far deeper into China.

  “What?” Now Pete’s voice was the one that was strained.

  “I’m not just putting up with you.” She shot over terraced fields, circled wide around the Hangzhou International Airport, and was once again over the water. She was eighty miles farther into China than when she’d left the East China Sea.

  “No?” his voice was strained as he called the next order. “Get west of the bridge and be ready to race inland.”

  “No,” she kept her voice smooth and calm as she aimed the Carrie-Anne for the middle of the river. It was only a couple hundred yards wide here. The sides were lined with concrete, tiers of concrete. For this channel to fill was going to take one hell of a tide.

  Then she saw why they were here at four in the morning and had to swallow hard to keep her voice steady.

  “In addition to putting up with you,” she slid down low over the water. “I also love you.”

  There was a whoop from one of the crew chiefs.

  “But for this,” she glanced once more at the nightmare that the cameras were projecting inside her visor. “For this, I’m going to kill you, Petey!”

  The tide wasn’t flowing in, it was boiling in. She’d read about the Nova Scotia tidal bore. A wave, often as much as a five feet high, washed up the Bay of Fundy on its way to creating the world’s largest tide.

  But the Hangzhou tidal bore was a roiling wall of breaking waves two stories high and rising.

  “Ramp down!” she called back.

  She hopped the Chinook over the Jiubao Bridge just as the tidal bore crashed against its pillars. Spray plumed a dozen stories into the air close behind them.

  And then she settled down into the water just ahead of the on-rushing tidal bore.

  There was a move called a Delta Queen where a Chinook landed in water, preferably calm water, and allowed itself to sink slightly—just until its cargo bay deck was awash in a foot of water. A racing rubber Zodiac, driven by SEALs with a death wish, could shoot aboard at thirty miles an hour and then the Chinook would take back off. As they climbed, it was always a trick to dump the six or seven tons of water back off the ramp without dumping the boat and the SEALs with it.

  Except this water was anything but calm and she didn’t dare slow down—this wave was moving with a serious attitude. She couldn’t sink partway into the river, she didn’t dare. She had to sink partway into the tidal bore wave itself.

  She checked the rear view camera for a moment and saw the unbelievable: on the face of the boiling wave, a tiny rubber boat raced its engine and surfed down the face.

  That’s why pursuit had broken off, no one was stupid enough to mess with a tidal bore a hundred yards wide, two stories tall, and moving like a freight train. On the plus side, it would be assumed that anyone in a small boat would be dead. The river would be dredged and nothing would be found. So sorry.

  Unless she screwed up and they found an entire American Special Operations helicopter at the bottom of the river.

  The river twisted and turned her in sharp bends. The tidal bore crashed into one concrete-tiered bank and threw sheets of water thirty, forty, fifty feet into the air. And before it could slosh back down, another wave was reflecting off the other bank.

  There was no neat standing wave here, there was only turbulent, muddy chaos.

  She managed to plunge the ramp down into the water, but kept the nose of the Carrie-Anne held high so that her bird didn’t drown.

  Danielle was glad she couldn’t afford another moment to look back because she’d wager that she wouldn’t like what she saw.

  “Six inches of water in the bay,” Jason called over the intercom.

  Danielle did her best to level out at that shallow depth. A foot would be better for the boat, but worse for the leading edge of the wave. Two feet would drown the Chinook and kill them all.

  “Ten seconds,” Jason called over the headset. She’d have to—

  Another bridge loomed in her night vision. The support pilings were too close together and the bridge deck too low. She shot the nose up to dump the water load and climb over the bridge.

  In the process, she released a small tidal wave of water out the back of the helo.

  “Crap! Tell me I didn’t sink them.” A Zodiac didn’t run well after a couple tons of water were dumped in it.

  “No…but they won’t need a shower for a long time.”

  Danielle cleared the bridge deck by inches and dove back down on the other side as the concrete river channel twisted left and narrowed.

  “Now!” she shouted over the radio. There was another bridge less than a mile ahead. At this rate of speed, thirty seconds might be too long.

  She got her tail in the water again.

  “Six inches,” Jason called. “A foot.”

  They needed the extra depth to make sure this worked.

  “Five seconds.”

  It was going to be tight. She slowed down just a little bit.

  The roar of the helo’s engines was always loud inside the craft no matter how much sound insulation they installed. But now there was a new sound. A crashing of water, a twenty-foot high wall of surf in full breaking roar battering at her extended rear ramp.

  The crew chief’s curses told her plenty about the view.

  “Two. One. Aboard!”

  Danielle added lift. She wasn’t subtle about it, she hauled up hard.
>
  …and nothing happened.

  The roar increased.

  There were shouts, but there was no time to make sense of them.

  The stern of the Chinook was slapped downward. They were in the wave.

  If she couldn’t shed water by climbing, maybe she could outrun it instead.

  She aimed the nose down into the water to gain forward speed.

  Water from the large cargo bay poured forward, washed about her feet, tried to tug them off the pedals. A small wave broke over the radios mounted on the flat console between the pilots’ seats.

  They shot past a giant golden ball of a building a dozen stories high. The Chinook and the gold ball would make a great photo if anyone was watching at four in the morning to take it. Though even if someone did, it would just look like a bad Photoshop job. A secret U.S. military helicopter—pitch black with no markings—surfing the tidal bore through the heart of a Chinese city. Like a 747 parked on an aircraft carrier, so not believable.

  Danielle kept the nose down despite the cries over her headset. The bridge came closer and closer.

  “Now!” Pete screamed beside her. “Pull up now!”

  She waited another three seconds, gathering every knot of speed she could, and then tugged back hard, like popping a cork.

  The Carrie-Anne stuck her nose in the air, going near vertical in her climb, and dumped water out the stern. She knew that the SEALs and all three of her crew would be desperately gripping the interior straps of the cargo bay so that they and their boat weren’t washed back overboard with the outgoing flow.

  There was a loud scraping sound as the Chinook dragged her belly plates over the bridge rail. Good thing the wheels were folded up or they’d have been ripped off.

  Danielle dead-centered a streetlight which smashed Pete’s side of the windscreen and then she was aloft. Hopefully the Chinese would discount the damage she caused as the result of tidal bore-tossed debris.

  A hard bank to the left and she was once more driving back up into the Chinese hills as the tidal bore continued to spume and thrash its way up the Qiantang River.

  Chapter 17

  Pete had lost at least ten years of his life on that flight.

  River water was still running aft, but now it was rivulets instead of a torrent.

  “We all accounted for?” he called back over the intercom.

  “Except for the shit from crapping my pants, we’re all aboard,” Jason reported from the rear ramp position.

  “Pete,” Luke pulled on a headset. “You’re a dead man.”

  “Hey, it was my wave, but I wasn’t the one flying.”

  “Danielle, you’re a goddess. Pete, you’re a dead man.”

  “No appreciation for—”

  “Hey!” Danielle’s complaint cut him off. “Could we get out of China first?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Pete needed to get his head back in the game. About a third of their electronics were cooked. “What’s that smell?”

  Luke made a foul spitting sound. “One of the most polluted rivers on the planet and the lady just dumped a thousand gallons of it on our heads.”

  They still had an intercom. With a little fooling around, he managed to get a radio feed to Sophia off a military satellite. His direct radios linking him to the other helos and the Avenger were all offline.

  “Have Beatrix wait for us offshore at,” he read off the coordinates. “The Little Birds should turn back to the Ashland.”

  “They can’t do that,” Sophia reported. “Since they left the Ashland a Chinese patrol boat has been to harass her. They don’t have enough fuel to reach Japan.”

  “How about the Germantown?” Pete tried to remember how fast it had been headed south and away from the area, but couldn’t.

  “No. Wait,” he heard Sophia rattling some keys on her computer. “If you can order them to turn the ship and have it go north very fast, it should close the distance enough. I think. Maybe.”

  “Do it.”

  “They no listen to me,” Sophia complained.

  “Drop the Colonel’s name. Drop the goddamn President’s if you need to, but get them turned. And then order us an aerial tanker, we’ll need to refuel both birds if we have to make it back to Japan on our own.”

  There was a brief pause, then Sophia giggled for a moment and was gone.

  “What did that mean?” he asked Danielle.

  “With a woman frohm Braazeel,” she attempted an imitation of Sophia liquid tones, “You never weel nohh.” Came out pretty well actually. “But don’t be surprised if the President calls you about issuing orders in his name.” Her normal light French accent sounded better.

  “Our navs are fried. Beatrix, be ready to lead us out,” but his mind wasn’t really on the last order.

  He opened his mouth to speak, to try and express some of what he was feeling for this woman beside him, when the radios and intercom disappeared in a cloud of sparks and circuit breakers began popping out all over the place.

  Engines were still running, as was the night vision. They could still fly out of here, but the only way to communicate would be by shouting.

  What he had to say would keep well enough until the next time they were alone together. For now, he focused on getting them home alive so that he’d have a chance to say it.

  Chapter 18

  As soon as they were off the C-5 transport jet at Mother Rucker, Alabama, they began reassembling their helos.

  The SEALs did their “fade into the night” thing, but Danielle was sure she hadn’t seen the last of them.

  By midnight the helos were back together. They flew the three miles from Mother Rucker’s main Cairns Airfield over to their hangar at Ech Stagefield in tight formation.

  A small sign had been added above the entry door’s code panel in their absence.

  “The 5E,” Danielle read aloud as the others gathered around her.

  It was all the small brass plate said, but it was enough. It said this was home. She would get some other improvements made here: housing for the crew, convert the old Ech field offices into a training center, and other amenities. But what mattered now was that they had a home base. A place that they belonged.

  The 5E tucked away their helos. The Avenger RPA, also reassembled after its journey in the C-5, was in a secure hangar at Cairns Airfield.

  Not worried about further damage to the interior of the Carrie-Anne, Danielle had taken a fire hose to the interior back in Japan and washed the Hangzhou River out of her Chinook. Hopefully out of her life. She never wanted to try a stunt like that again.

  Inside the hangar, a pallet of new electronics awaited them. Connie and Big John moved toward them as if drawn by irresistible magnets.

  Danielle rested a hand on Connie’s arm, “You just spent six hours reassembling a helicopter after flying all day from Japan. Tomorrow is soon enough.”

  She could feel the woman’s conflict through their contact and then Connie laughed at herself.

  “Yes,” Sophia joined them. “Tomorrow we work, tonight we celebrate. That is good.”

  “Any suggestions?” Pete asked from close by her elbow. It didn’t take a genius to know what kind of celebration he had in mind. But that was a celebration for just two. Danielle was looking forward to that as well, but this was a time for their whole team.

  Everyone was looking to her, waiting for her to speak first. She scanned the faces of the 5E and resisted the alarm that wanted to surge through her. She had moved from being the outsider to becoming the core of the team. Danielle wasn’t quite sure how that had happened. It was an honor beyond anything she deserved, so she’d have to figure out how to go about earning it…starting tomorrow.

  For now, they still waited for her.

  She had no idea of what to do next, and then she spotted the Frisbee in the Dozer’s hand.

 
; Danielle turned to challenge Pete The Rapier Napier but raised her voice to make sure everyone could hear.

  “Everyone who isn’t a complete loser…”

  Pete just grinned.

  “…grab a set of Night-Vision Goggles. It’s time to play.”

  # # #

  Pete stood on the unlit soccer field in the northeast corner of Fort Rucker. It was a typical Alabama early October night: heading from eighties to sixties beneath a sky so clear that it could be an inverted crystal bowl of stars.

  And the NVGs amped that up about ten times, he never got used to the breathtaking splendor of the night sky, even if it was rendered in green and black.

  Then he looked at the sign in front of him which showed the layout of the eighteen-hole disc golf course. Hole one was straight along the side of the soccer field to a steel pole. The upper half was a ring of light steel chains. If a Frisbee hit the chains, it would fall straight down into the waiting basket.

  The goggles were heavy on his head, though far lighter than a helmet. Elastic straps over his head held it in place, the battery pack clipped to his belt. The mask covered half the upper half of his face and the dual lenses stuck out several inches like alien eyestalks.

  They caused the nighttime world to be viewed in a combination of tunnel vision and brilliant apple green. The NVGs registered light and especially heat. Pete saw the crew shining brightly with their body heat, the ground less so, and the steel goals were a cool black in the night air.

  He was getting to know the crew well enough to recognize them despite their faces being hidden behind NVGs.

  Dozer the Mighty Quinn was distinctive for his size alone; he was also the keeper of the discs and was handing them out.

  The DAP Hawks’ pilots Julian and Rafe were a Mutt and Jeff duo even now fighting over who would get first toss.

  Jason was as long and lean as his Chinook ramp gun.

  Patty was by far the shortest one on the team, but could also be easily identified because she was always in the thick of it.

  Sophia had amazing curves even in night-vision green.

  Big John and Connie…they moved like a couple should. Not like his own parents, who got along well enough that he had far more happy memories of childhood than sad ones. Instead they fit together despite their physical disparity.