The Ides of Matt 2017 Read online

  “Love you, gypsy dancer. Since the first day,” Danny slipped in quietly between the words.

  And he was right. “Since the first day,” she echoed back.

  Then, as she helped the Delta operators launch their boat out into the night, she joined in the chorus.

  The hills (skies, Danny stuck in) are alive, with the sound of music.

  “They were right you know,” she whispered between the words. “You do sing like a choking hyena.”

  He only sang louder.

  It took an entire chorus before she could stop laughing with joy and join back in.

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  Love in a Copper Light

  The most dangerous mission of all...CSAR.

  Combat Search and Rescue.

  Pilot Penny “Copper” Penrose flies into every battle with a can-do attitude—even training missions. If only she could find that confidence off the battlefield.

  Medic Barry Goldsmith risks his life to help the wounded while under fire. He blew his chances with Penny once—a risk he won’t take again, seeking Love in a Copper Light.

  Introduction

  Love in a Copper Light served several functions for me.

  It was a chance to check in on Noreen and Xavier who got together in my surprisingly popular novella Guardian of the Heart. Noreen had originated all the way back in 2013 in I Own the Dawn as the hero’s sister. Fans had been begging me for her story and when I wrote it, it seemed there was more to tell. However, when I sat down to tell it, it turned out it was a short story and not another novella.

  I was puzzled by that for a while. As a writer, I’ve learned to let a story (or novel) discover its own length. Too long and it feels thin. Too short and it gets crunched and isn’t satisfying. So, if this wasn’t a novella, what was it?

  I didn’t know until I’d finished it.

  The US military holds massive exercises to maintain combat readiness. Perhaps the most well-known one is Red Flag at the Nellis Air Force Base in the Nevada Test and Training Range. To keep that superlative edge, they are always pushing the limits. And out at that edge is not always safe place to be.

  Yes, this is a love story. But it is also an homage to the incredible things our, and probably most, militaries do. Now all we need to do is to find a way to not need them at all. That is a day that most soldiers I’ve talked to look forward to.

  Chapter One

  The Tonopah Test Range Airport tower gave them clearance and they were gone. Control towers didn’t want any return response; they just wanted you out of their airspace. So their helo lifted into the airspace of the Nevada Test and Training Range—the NTTR—and raced away from Tonopah without a word.

  “This next part always freaks me out.”

  “And you say that every time, Copper.” Vince Jawolski was flying low and fast, piloting their combat search-and-rescue helicopter toward their hold position for tonight’s training exercise.

  It was true, she did always say it, but that didn’t make Penny “Copper” Penrose feel one bit less freaked. Not that she was worried about the battle—real or simulated—but rather that there was one in progress and their job was to wait. CSAR aircraft didn’t risk their precious medics until someone actually needed help.

  In minutes they were circling five miles and ninety seconds outside the primary battlespace deep in the heart of the NTTR—five thousand square miles of blasted-to-hell desert. It was the perfect place to stretch their Black Hawk’s rotor blades a little bit. “Blue Helm” was a massive exercise to keep skills fresh and shake the bugs out of new tactics—without having someone shooting live rounds at them while they were doing it.

  Five helos. That was their concern in tonight’s training scenario, out of the fifty aircraft and fifteen hundred ground troops spread across the Nevada desert.

  The two transport birds had already delivered their 75th Rangers elements, to mess with a tank corps from the 10th Mountain, and slipped away.

  Two heavy gun platforms—one DAP Hawk and one Little Bird—were circling high above on overwatch.

  And one kick-ass CSAR team all set to pull out any injured when the shit—simulated shit—did hit the fan. The six of them had been together for a while and she loved what they could do. But circling out of sight of the battle, there was nothing to see in this ass end of the NTTR except the occasional flight of F-35 jets off to test their mettle in some other section of the exercise. Meanwhile, she was getting tired of having the same night-vision view painted on the inside of her visor as they circled behind a low range of jagged ridges of broken rock.

  While she waited for the call, she wondered what David was up to tonight. Was he—

  Shit!

  She’d been rid of that disaster for two months—splattered across the windscreen like an entire fleet of pulped butterflies—and still her mind went there. Why did she naively keep hoping? Civilian men never understood military women. It was like strong women just didn’t compute in the civvie world; which sucked for her. Strong women didn’t really compute in the military world all that often either. She’d seen too many female soldiers who chose to play the slut role to get attention or the little sister role to avoid it. She wanted to play the herself role—and it wasn’t getting her crap.

  Penny sat in her copilot’s seat and tapped her way across the three status screens she was monitoring in a fast rotation. It wasn’t quite a nervous twitch—at least so she liked to assure herself—even if it would look that way to anyone able to see what was flashing across the inside of her helmet’s visor.

  System status. Engine temperature: stable at 1,950 degrees Fahrenheit. Hydraulic and pressure systems online. Fuel: 87%. Twenty-seven different readings.

  Flight status. Two-zero feet AGL—above ground level. Slow cruise: twenty knots. Running dark: infrared lights only. Heart of the NTTR. Nineteen different facts.

  Battlespace. Still five miles and ninety seconds away. Two gunship helos at three and five thousand feet, and a drone at thirty thousand. The transport birds had returned to base—they had it easy now that they’d survived landing their teams. Easy unless things went badly and they had to extract the inserted Rangers under heavy fire. But the ground elements were holding strong and reporting no casualties.

  The whole situation made for one messy tactical readout with every single identified fighter—good guy or bad—represented on a 3D map of the terrain by a symbology that had taken a months to learn but was now second nature.

  System status. Twenty-seven readings…no changes.

  Flight status…

  Penny had never been able to help herself. She’d flown combat for too many of her years in the service. Every nerve in her body, and most definitely her adrenal glands, knew they were supposed to be in the heart of the battle. In the zone. Riding the edge.

  Just because this battle was simulated didn’t change squat.

  Since she’d gone CSAR, now she was off to the side, waiting while others fought. Her body was here, but her body’s chemistry was deep in the simulated action.

  System status. All nominal.

  Flight status…

  By flicking through them fast enough, she could actually spot anything that changed in real time across all three spaces. All nominal. As if that wasn’t enough to make her crazy.

  She’d done this so many times, she was able to do it automatically and still harass the team. She was a multi-tasking kind of girl.

  And one task was not going to be thinking about a jerkwad civilian named David. Distraction. Definitely needed one.

  “Calling me Copper, that’s another thing!” Penny groused over the intercom to her crewmates. She didn’t know why she even tried, it was one battle she was never going to win. With the name of Penelope Penrose and copper-red hair, the “Copper” nickname had been inevitable. “Why you’re just as bright as a copper penny!” was a pickup line that she usually answered with mere disdain, unless she’d been drinking, then it might be with
her knee—she was tall enough to peg most men easily. Fighting battles is what she did.

  Too bad everybody on their flight had learned not to answer her now, even if they didn’t change their tune. Not her pilot, not the two crew chiefs perched at their miniguns, and not the two medics along for the ride until they got the call.

  “Lame-os!” She teased the lot of them.

  It earned her a chuckle from starboard gunner Xavier Jones who sat at a minigun mounted close behind Vince’s pilot seat.

  Unlike normal CSAR birds that went unarmed into battle, the Night Stalkers flew fully armed helos—without a Red Cross emblem—that just happened to carry a couple of medics. The Night Stalkers flew to places no one else could go, so they often had their own CSAR support.

  “Long as you get me back in time for my wedding, I’ll call you anything you want…Copper!”

  “You’re no help, Jones.” He’d hooked up with Noreen Wallace, one of the crew’s two medics. And like several other of their crews in the 5th Battalion E Company, command was letting them serve together—unique in the whole military as far as she knew. “How is it that no one ever tagged you with a nickname, Noreen?” Everyone else had one, though other than hers they weren’t used all that often.

  “No one dares. I’m a freakin’ force of nature, that’s why. Or so Xavier keeps telling me.”

  “It’s true. Sure won’t catch this boy messing with that.” The six-four super-soldier Xavier would be the serious, hardcore pillar in any relationship that didn’t have Noreen on the other side of it. If Penny was black, shorter, and a medic, she’d want to grow up to be Noreen Wallace. As it was, she had three strikes against that dream.

  System status.

  Flight status.

  Battlespace.

  It felt as if she had nothing to do, even if that wasn’t true. Copilot on a CSAR Black Hawk helicopter was never a dull seat. One of the many things she loved about flying for the US Army’s 160th SOAR Night Stalkers.

  “What would you like to be called?”

  She blinked and lost track of her screens. Barry Goldsmith, Medic Two, never spoke to her directly. He was always pleasant and had a decent sense of humor, but something in her quashed every comment. No one had ever actually asked her that, so she didn’t have a quick answer.

  “I’m guessing that ‘Red’ would be too cliché for you,” Barry continued over the intercom.

  “I might have hospitalized the last dude who tried to call me that—back in tenth grade. He probably could have used your help.”

  “Okay ‘Red’ is out. I probably wouldn’t have been able to stabilize his condition for transport; remember I was in tenth grade at the same time.”

  Actually she hadn’t known that. Barry was definitely the “mature one” on their crew; which wasn’t actually saying much. They were all deeply trained pros, had to be to fly with the Night Stalkers, but that didn’t seem to stop their bird being loaded up with a bunch of goofballs at heart—herself included. She kept her silence until she had the rhythm of her flashing screens rolling again.

  System status.

  Flight status.

  Battlespace.

  System… God the waiting was killing her. David had always—shit!

  “I’ve got to have some worthy trademark besides my name being Penny and my hair color. And no, my ex-boyfriend’s consistent focus with the shape of my chest doesn’t count.”

  Chapter Two

  Ex-boyfriend?

  “When did that happen?” Barry clamped his jaw shut, but it had just slipped out of him. He’d totally missed the “ex-” happening, though he absolutely remembered them getting together. He’d gone on a bender the night he’d heard about it—then had to report himself unfit for duty when a surprise mission cropped up the next day. He hadn’t touched a drink since, not even a beer.

  “Couple months back, the misogynistic prick. He couldn’t cut the grade. Turns out he thought I was sure to quit during our last tour in the Dustbowl because no woman could possibly hack Afghanistan. He’d also been counting on me washing out—‘fired’ he called it—because a woman couldn’t possibly be good enough to fly big, nasty helicopters.”

  “What an ass.” As if Barry could be so proud of his own actions. His bender had been because he was sick of not being able to speak to the most amazing woman he’d ever met. By the stories she’d told at first, it had sounded like David was the one, which meant he’d lost her. He’d completely missed when her David-stories had fallen out of their helo banter.

  Well, if David was dumb enough to mess it up with Penny, Barry wasn’t going to fall into the same trap of silence he had before. “Sounds like he didn’t deserve you. Too stupid to know what he had.”

  That had all of the rear-enders—those who flew in the back of the helicopter—twisting around to look at him. Noreen, and the two crew chiefs: Xavier, and Mason “Jar” Buckley.

  “What?” he mouthed at them.

  He tried not to read too much into Noreen’s smile before she turned back to quadruple checking their med supplies—her pre-battle habit.

  “Thanks, Barry. He was an ass. Next time could someone tell me sooner?” Penny answered after a thoughtful silence. “Final fight was him demanding I quit so he’d know I would live long enough to raise our future children.”

  “You were engaged?” How had he not known any of this about Penny?

  “Not even close. He was just that disconnected from reality.”

  “What did you do?” Women always tongue-tied him, but only the ones he was attracted to. It was a ridiculous curse that thankfully only he knew about. How many stunners had left him an opening in high school, ones who he’d been too awed to speak to, before they’d lost interest and drifted off?

  “I did what any Night Stalker woman would do, I dumped his ass. Then I sugared his Porsche 911 Targa’s gas tank.”

  “No way!” Noreen’s merry laugh blasted from the intercom.

  But it didn’t sound like the Penny he knew.

  “Way! Well, actually… Turns out that sugar doesn’t really do much damage if you dump it into the gas tank, but most people don’t know that. So I sprinkled it on the ground by the gas cap, dumped the empty bag on the ground, then sat back in the shadows to watch the fun. Man did it mess with his head. He actually cried—down on his knees hugging his bumper. It was beautiful! More than the bastard ever did over me.”

  Barry laughed, “You rock it, girl.” Now that sounded exactly like Penny.

  Once again the rear-enders were all looking at him in surprise. He was just glad that Penny was up in her seat facing forward.

  Chapter Three

  Penny was still puzzling over Barry’s sudden chattiness when she spotted it.

  Flight status.

  Battlesp—

  “Vince!” Her call was all that was necessary.

  Vince carved a turn for the heart of the battle before the official call came in. Full up on the collective, Black Hawk’s nose down for maximum speed.

  “Little Bird down. Little Bird down,” sounded over the radio in that perfect flat voice that battle commanders always had. “Sector Alpha. Three. Fiver.”—the “-er” making the number clearer over the radios.

  On the battlespace display, Penny had seen the tiny attack helicopter stumble in midflight. It was like it had tripped on something hard.

  The problem with CSAR holding safely at ninety seconds outside the battlespace was that they were ninety seconds outside the battlespace.

  The pilot of the Little Bird was doing a hell of a simulation as he tumbled out of the sky. End-os, rolls, rolling back the other way.

  Then a truly chilling, “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday.” Nobody called that during a training scenario. She’d had to do it once in the Dustbowl when an RPG had eaten her tail rotor, and the words were almost impossible to speak.

  No one was shooting live ammo, so something critical had broken. And it had broken bad.

  With her nerves amped up, it felt a
s if, for that ninety seconds, they were slogging through molasses. The meters flew by at the Black Hawk’s top speed, but still the seconds crawled by one at a time.

  Sixty seconds…

  On the tactical display, the Little Bird wasn’t going down gracefully, but it wasn’t a dead-stick plummet either. Someone was still fighting to save the bird.

  “Medics alert,” she called over the intercom. “MH-6M attack Little Bird going down. This is not a simulation.”

  “Any other helpful news for us?” Barry Goldsmith, the handsome golden-hair boy from Brooklyn, was always looking at the bright side of everything. The more intense things got, the quirkier he got. One hell of a defense mechanism—something she’d always appreciated about him. One of many things.

  “Sure. Simulated battle is still in full swing,” Penny shot for a light tone, but doubted that she succeeded as she watched the horrifying flight playing out on her display. The thousands of personnel, and billions of dollars of aircraft and hardware in motion for this exercise didn’t stop due to one falling helicopter. They probably assumed it was a simulated loss. “We’re planting you in a hot LZ on the fly.”

  “Excellent. My panic response was out of practice anyway. Medic Two ready. Noreen?”

  “Medic One. Always ready,” Noreen sounded even more ramped up than usual for her. Of course she was marrying their totally studly gunner, starboard-side gunner Xavier Jones in a few days.

  Forty-five seconds…

  Penny had expected the two medics, Noreen and Barry, to get together. They were always so chummy that they even sounded like a couple. She’d done her level best to not be jealous of Noreen for getting him. Then Xavier showed up and kicked Noreen’s feet out from under her—or more likely the other way around.

  Just watching the two of them had shown her everything that was wrong with David, and she’d dumped his sorry ass.