Since the First Day Read online

  5

  One year ago, June 13, 2340 Hours (Yemen Local Time)

  Justin was flying right-seat as usual. But a new copilot flew in Danny’s seat—out for an indoctrination run. He was FMQ in the tiny MH-6M Little Bird helicopters. A Little Bird had four seats, but you didn’t want to be one of the folks in the back seat, compared to the fifty-plus troops that his Chinook could carry in addition to her five crew. Weighing in at less than a ton apiece, a Chinook could lift fifteen Little Birds without breaking a sweat. But the company commander wanted every one of their pilots to at least have a feel for the capabilities of each airframe type that SOAR flew. And what Pete Napier ordered, nobody messed with.

  So, while the copilot had stretched his flight legs over the nighttime Gulf of Aden, Danny had been relegated to the back to see what the crew chiefs did for a living.

  “We do all kinds of cool shit back here,” Carmen had set them to Intercom Channel 4 so that they wouldn’t bother anyone else as she gave him the tour.

  “Such as?”

  She pointed to Vinnie and Raymond sacked out on the hard steel deck.

  “You sleep?”

  “You guys up there are just giving us a rocking cradle ride—”

  The trainee was slamming the Chinook through a turn worthy of an F-35 Lightning II fighter jet, forcing both of them to hang on so that they didn’t tumble about the cargo bay like pinballs.

  “No hostiles around,” Carmen didn’t even break her speech as the helo slid to a halt in mid-air and did a full spin—not an easy trick in a Chinook, which he flubbed the first couple times. “No gunnery practice to do. We might as well grab some shuteye back here. I can run this whole sweet bird by myself.”

  “Except for flying it,” Danny tried to carve out some territory for his role.

  “Pilots! Feh!” Carmen wiggled her fingers at him. Then she started guiding him through an in-flight systems check. Every five minutes this, every ten that, and a full tour of the bird’s interior along with a dozen systems checks every half hour. She waved the checklists at him, though it was clear she didn’t need them. They were at least as long as the pilot’s set. “Then when we’re on the ground…” she’d pulled out an even bigger set of checklists.

  Carmen had always humbled him. Now he was discovering that she was more daunting than he’d thought. If he could just somehow—

  “Alert Status One! Alert Status One!” slammed in over the primary intercom channel. Vinnie and Raymond bolted to their feet as if electroshocked.

  “You!” Carmen had jabbed a finger against his arm. “You stay attached to my hip or you’ll get run over.”

  “I should—” he pointed forward, but knew he wasn’t needed. All through Carmen’s tour he’d been aware of the rapidly growing competence of the new pilot as Justin ran him through the paces. A Chinook was no Black Hawk and trading positions in mid-flight was actually possible. But Justin didn’t call him forward and he supposed he agreed. Nothing like being at the helm during action to really learn what it took. And Justin Roberts could handle almost anything solo if he had to.

  Their little training sortie became a crash-priority evac for a mixed team of the 75th Rangers and Delta. By the time they hit the Yemeni shoreline, a heavily-armed DAP Black Hawk and a Combat Search and Rescue Hawk had joined them as well.

  Carmen and Vinnie each shot a few test rounds out of their side-facing miniguns then began checking their personal weapons. He did the same. Raymond went to the rear of the cargo bay and began rigging his ramp gun, even though the ramp was still closed tightly, shutting out the night.

  They came in on the terrorist camp low and fast.

  Danny presently had the crews’ tactical feed on his visor rather than his normal pilot’s version. Far more information about the engines and systems performance—next to nothing about the terrain except in the broadest strokes. The threat monitors were soon piecing together the situation. Small arms fire raking along the ground in a vast, back-and-forth interplay of flying death.

  The DAP Hawk climbed above the camp and answered back hard.

  It was so disorienting when their missile slammed down on one of the compounds—he hadn’t known it was coming like he normally would have.

  The DAP Hawk gun platform was raining down hell. The CSAR bird was hanging back in case it was needed, and their Chinook was head-on into the fray. On the ground, one Black Hawk was burning fiercely and another was being protected by more soldiers than the one bird could carry out. No…soldiers and several rescued hostages.

  Justin—Danny could feel the familiar flight control of the captain taking control—eased the Calamity Jane II toward the men on the ground surrounding the beleaguered Black Hawk.

  More and more of the fire was directed upward at the DAP Hawk dancing and spinning overhead, which eased the burden here on the ground. Justin got them landed close beside the waiting troops.

  The instant the ramp was down, troops stormed aboard. Not all of them were soldiers. Three hostages, two clearly American and the third sounding Japanese, looked battered, confused, and disbelieving at their sudden rescue. There were no hostiles as prisoners. Some operations just didn’t call for that.

  Several soldiers came aboard with a rifle in one hand and an arm over a buddy’s shoulders. Most of those hit the relative safety of the cargo bay and collapsed.

  Carmen’s station was on the side away from the action—whereas Vinnie’s side gun was unleashing a near constant roar of four thousand rounds a minute—so the two of them grabbed med kits and began helping the worst of the wounded.

  The hull rattled with small arms fire. Sometimes a double-smack as a bullet penetrated one side and splatted against the other. Soldiers were hitting the deck as the windows were shot out.

  He’d strapped off two legs with tight bandages and was pressing down on a shoulder wound as they lifted. Less than twenty feet in the air, the helo…flinched. Forty thousand pounds of helo wasn’t supposed to flinch.

  Critical system failure or—

  “Corvo!” Justin’s voice called him forward. But if he let go on this guy’s wound, he’d bleed out before anyone else could get to him.

  “You!” Danny shouted a nearby soldier. “Pressure! Here!”

  The man was injured himself. “Can’t you get the medic?”

  Danny tapped the downed man’s armband—a red cross bathed in blood. “He is your medic.”

  The guy looked positively green, but placed his hands onto the wounded medic’s shoulder.

  “If you’re gonna be sick, turn to the side so that you aren’t sick on him.” Then Danny scrambled forward over the bodies of both the wounded and exhausted. The helo was wavering, making him stagger like a drunk on his way forward.

  There was no question about what the problem was when he got to the front. The forward windscreen was shattered and the trainee copilot hung limply in his harness.

  “Carmen!” Danny shouted out and hoped they still had their private intercom set up.

  “Can’t see shit!” Justin complained.

  Danny saw why. There was blood trickling down his face and it had covered both his eyes. It wasn’t gushing, but it wasn’t good. The captain couldn’t wipe it away because he needed both hands on the controls.

  In moments Carmen was at his shoulder.

  He gave the blinded Justin moment-by-moment directions on the flight controls while Carmen helped him lever the trainee out of the copilot’s seat. He tried not to be too squeamish as he slid in to sit in another man’s blood. Finally buckled into the seat’s harness, he shouted out, “I have control.”

  Justin slumped down—having kept them aloft and steady on sheer nerve—and cursed. “Hell of a way to run a rodeo.”

  Danny flipped to the pilot’s view and the full tactical hell of the situation slammed in. Much of the camp was burning. Men were down everywhere, though he didn’t see any American bodies—no telltale infrared tabs that would have glowed like searchlights in his night-vision dis
play.

  Three soldiers ran from the second Black Hawk—now also burning brightly—toward the back of the Chinook. Danny eased the tail back down. One stumbled and fell—and didn’t get up.

  From the copilot’s raised seat, he spotted the problem. Someone had picked up an AK-47 from a fallen Yemeni and shot the Delta Force operator at least a dozen times from behind, mostly in the leg.

  Danny snapped the position lock on the thrust control to free up his left hand. Yanking out his Glock sidearm, he shot twice. Once to blow out his side window, and once to shoot the Yemeni with the AK-47 in the heart.

  The shooter collapsed.

  Danny slapped the sidearm back in his holster and began easing back down for the wounded Delta.

  “CSAR 1. We’ve got him,” a woman’s voice. Someone jumped out of the medevac bird and rushed over to the fallen soldier crawling along and dragging one leg.

  “Roger. Calamity Jane II aloft.”

  He pulled up and back to clear the CSAR bird and the two grounded and burning Black Hawks. Then got them the hell out of Dodge as soon as the CSAR bird was aloft.

  As he was pulling away, he finally got perspective on the shooter he’d just downed and the man he’d taken the AK-47 from in the first place. The shooter was half the size of the dead man.

  “I just shot a kid.” Probably dropped him on his dad’s body.

  Carmen, who’d been treating Justin now collapsed in his seat, spun to face him.

  He remembered the feel of her comforting hand on his shoulder for a long time after she’d turned back to bandaging the captain.

  No one else had heard. He also left that part out of the after-action debriefing.

  6

  Present Day, June 13, 2350 Hours (Panama Local Time)

  Carmen did a full inspection and systems check as Danny continued to fight them through the storm. A couple of the Deltas were awake. It was a strange team. Three women, four men. She’d never seen a female Delta before and here was a whole clump of them. A gaggle of geese. A flock of ewes. An incoming disaster of Deltas? What would it be like to be a woman who kicked butt at a Delta level? She’d miss her Chinook too much, but the three women looked beyond cool.

  One of the guy Deltas called her over.

  “Oh. My. God!” Carmen slapped a hand to her chest and put her wrist to her forehead. “I’m gonna faint. It only took four hours for one of the silent warriors to acknowledge that they weren’t the only people on this flight.” Then she collapsed onto one of the Zodiac’s pontoons and fell upside down into the bottom of the boat to sprawl at his feet.

  Several of the Deltas startled awake, inspected her strangely for a moment, then went back to sleep.

  “Got a question for you, once you’re done playing the lead role from a Bizet opera.”

  “What are you talking about?” She continued laying upside down, but raised her head to inspect him. He was handsome, but she was feeling oddly self-conscious about teasing him, which wasn’t like her. She teased everybody—except Danny since that night he’d shot the kid.

  “The opera Carmen. The dazzling man killer.”

  “There’s an opera named after me?” As if she didn’t have Carmen the gypsy dancer emblazoned on the side of her helmet. “How cool is that? Dazzling man killer—perfect fit. Are you my next victim? This should be fun.”

  The guy looked at his watch, typical Delta.

  She flipped around until she was upright once again.

  “How would you take down a cruise ship?”

  Delta operators had no sense of humor.

  “Couple-a Hellfire missiles at the waterline?”

  The discussion went on for a few minutes, but her thoughts were on why Danny was acting so strangely. She left the Deltas sitting in their rubber boat in the cargo bay talking about it and drifted back forward.

  She ended up close behind the two pilots’ seats. She didn’t usually ride in the observer’s chair, but the memory of the two storms—the present one and the one in which she’d met Danny—had drawn her back to the front.

  Her last two years aboard the Calamity Jane II stood out so much more clearly than the five prior years in the regular Army or the two years of additional training to become a Night Stalker.

  No, that wasn’t all of it. Each moment with Danny stood out. The good and the bad. The smooth perfection of how he’d flown them out of that battle, despite a windshield so star-cracked that he could only fly by peaking out of the bullet holes marking where unfriendly fire had wounded the captain and killed the last person in that seat, despite the shot-up hydraulics that had forced him to wrestle the massive helo by brute force, all while having just shot a kid. The quiet ease with which he sat back at a hangar barbeque: beer in his hand, smile on his face, just watching the goings on, watching her…

  Watching her.

  With the same look as the moment she’d plowed him ass over teakettle into a mud puddle. A look she’d never forgotten, but couldn’t understand. Unless…

  Her throat was suddenly dry.

  She leaned forward and rested a hand on his shoulder.

  He flipped to Intercom Channel 4. One, she finally realized, that they’d shared often for privacy. Privacy? They were just on the same crew together, why did they need a private channel? Yet they had one. Sometimes back-enders (her and the other two crew chiefs) shared Channel 2 so as not to disturb the pilots, but usually the whole team stayed on Channel 1. Danny was the only one she had a “private” channel with.

  He waited for her in silence as he held tight control of the bucking bronc that was the Chinook in the storm.

  “Danny?”

  “Carmen,” his voice was “normal” Danny. Not substitute Danny Corvo. No joke or humor. Once again her straight man was there.

  “Why…” she couldn’t quite bring herself to confront her question directly. “…why don’t you ever sing?”

  He chuckled with the warmth of a caress, accepting the evasion. “Tone deaf. I’ve been told that I sing like a choking hyena.”

  “You can’t be that bad.”

  “Sadly, sometime when we’re alone, I can prove it. Besides, if I don’t sing it lets me hear you better.”

  And now they were back to the inexplicable attack of nerves she was having. She checked the HUMS again, but the helo’s health was just fine despite the thrashing of the wind and rain. It was hers that was in doubt.

  “You’re still wondering what I did with the real Danny Corvo?”

  “Well…” Carmen took a deep breath and plunged in. “You’ve always been the straight man. Mr. AJ Squared Away.”

  “That’s sailor talk. What would that be in Army-speak? Mr. Shiny Shithook pilot?” A shithook was slang for an Army Chinook helicopter.

  “See! That! That isn’t the Danny I know.”

  “But it is,” he whispered as she watched him slew their Chinook around a particularly dense cloud that blanketed a whole section of the radar screen. It was so strange to be having this conversation while he was busy and Captain Roberts was sitting about a foot away, oblivious to everything.

  “How? The Danny Corvo I know doesn’t joke or tease or—”

  “Okay. No tease. There’s this beach I know, just down from my grandfather’s house, called Praia da Marinha, in southern Portugal on the Atlantic. Just a few hundred kilometers from where the opera about you is set. Warm. Soft sand with tall cliffs, sea arches, caves. It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I would take you there. Maybe you’d wear a red bikini. Same color as your beautiful hair.”

  “Already said, no bikini.” It was lame, but it was the best defense she had against such a beautiful vision.

  “How about a flamenco dancer’s dress?”

  She sat back and glared at the side of his helmet. That didn’t sound like Danny either—no matter how much she liked the sound of it. Her and Danny off somewhere sunny. They’d—

  Her and Danny?

  Her personal HUMS system should be flashing red
lights and alert sirens.

  “Why didn’t you ever say any of this before?” She wanted to grab and shake him. Would have if he wasn’t flying.

  “Tired of waiting.”

  “For me?”

  “No, me. To be brave.”

  She wasn’t sure if she’d ever met a braver man. Heavy gunfire, his captain wounded, rattled because he’d shot an underage terrorist, and then started to re-land his helo to retrieve the wounded Delta. “What in the world do you have trouble being brave about?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What do you mean, not yet?”

  “Two more minutes.”

  She glanced at the mission clock on the helo’s main console.

  2358.

  Too stubborn and maybe too unnerved to ask why, she folded her arms and waited in silence.

  She could feel Danny smiling as he flew. They reached the edge of the storm closest to the cruise ship where the Delta operators would soon be simulating an attack. He banked hard, out of the interminable pounding of the storm and into clear air. The wind calmed and even the sky above began clearing as they raced away from the storm. He slid back down toward the sea.

  They were the two longest minutes of her life.

  It finally flipped to four zeros.

  “A new day. Now give.”

  “Not just any day.”

  “Danny…” she knew she was grinding her teeth.

  “June Fourteenth.” He waited.

  She didn’t get it.

  “Two years ago today…”

  The date was ringing a bell. It was…the day she’d joined the crew of Calamity Jane II. It was the second anniversary of… “Oh shit!”

  “Yep! Two years ago you bowled me over and I’ve never recovered.”

  “Two years,” she could barely breathe.

  “It’s our second collision-anniversary.”

  “What was the first?” And then she knew and was sorry she’d asked.

  “The kid.”

  She’d made a point of tracking Danny down afterward at the carrier. He’d been sitting on an old tire in a back corner of the hangar deck, just staring out at the dark sea. She didn’t remember what they’d talked about, not much of anything. But they’d sat for hours and she remembered his brief hug and his whispered “Thanks” when the sun rose over the Gulf of Aden.